Private Berlin Read online

  “Do you know why they use masks and makeup in the theater?” my mother asked.

  I shook my head.

  “A mask changes you. So does makeup. With the right mask you can be anyone you want to be. With a mask you can hide in plain sight. You can do what you want, act the way you want. With a mask, it’s almost like you’re invisible and free to be anyone or anything you desire. Like a prince. Or a tiger.”

  I nodded, feeling possibility swelling inside me. “Or a monster?”

  “Even a monster,” my mother said and kissed me on the head.

  CHAPTER 4

  A NEW VIDEO appeared on the screens to the right of Jack Morgan’s head.

  It showed a woman wearing a shabby black dress over black denim jeans. Mattie’s initial thought was that at one time she must have been attractive.

  But the woman’s hair was dry and mussed. Her skin was sallow. And her eyes were sunken and dark. She looked like she’d lived a very, very hard life.

  “This is from our lobby camera, early morning, two Fridays ago,” Gabriel told them. “Here, Chris comes out to meet her.”

  Mattie frowned, feeling strange and then hollow when Chris went to the woman and embraced her, pressing his cheek to hers and rubbing her back.

  “Who is she?” Mattie managed.

  “I don’t know,” Gabriel replied, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “But I did see her come out of his office about an hour after these images were taken. I also heard him say that he would look into something for her and there would be no charge. They hugged again. She left.”

  Morgan said, “Can you go into Chris’s files, find out who she is?”

  “With your permission, Jack,” Gabriel replied.

  “Granted,” Morgan said.

  Gabriel typed again. He paused, seemed puzzled, and typed again. “That’s odd,” he muttered.

  “What?” Mattie asked, leaning over to see the scientist’s screen.

  The old hippie was typing again. “This should do it.”

  But instead of Schneider’s digital file folders, Gabriel’s screen was filled with bright pink, emerald, and black pixels that seemed to shift and move and crawl over one another, as if they were alive.

  “What the hell is that?” Gabriel said, shocked and staring at the screen.

  “What’s going on, Doc?” Morgan demanded.

  Gabriel mumbled in disbelief, “I think we’ve been hacked.”

  Up on the big screen, Morgan looked perplexed and then angered. “That’s impossible,” he sputtered. “I just spent millions upgrading the security system. Gabriel, you were part of that effort.”

  The computer scientist held up his hands in surrender. “I was, Jack. But I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s like someone dumped thousands of termites into Chris’s work area. They’ve eaten all the data.…”

  Katharina Doruk interrupted, “I thought you once told me that you can always bring back echoes of files, Doc.”

  “Not this time,” he replied. “Whoever did this was good, Kat. Scary good.”

  Morgan looked furious, but said: “We’ll deal with this breach later. Between the hacking and the cases he was working on, I think we’ve got cause enough to activate Chris’s chip. Do it, Doc.”

  Mattie nodded her agreement with Morgan’s decision, but she felt agitated by questions that suddenly shot at her from all sides.

  Who hacked the system? Why? What if it’s a coincidence? What if this is separate and Chris is off on a vacation he decided to extend? What if we find him there with another woman? Should I care?

  I do.

  But should I?

  “Give me a minute, Jack,” Gabriel said, entering a command that stripped his screen of the brilliant termites.

  He typed in a second command and his screen filled with a long list of names. He scrolled down to Chris Schneider’s, and then highlighted a corresponding series of numbers and letters.

  After making a copy of that code, Gabriel called up an application called Sky Eye. He entered the code into a blinking box and hit Enter.

  Half of the amphitheater’s screen jumped to a Google Earth view of Berlin. Mattie was first to spot the blinking orange icon out on the far eastern outskirts of the city, several kilometers south of the neighborhood of…

  “Ahrensfelde?” Mattie said, puzzled. “Can you bring us in, Doc?”

  Gabriel was already ahead of her. He highlighted the blinking icon and hit Enter. The picture zoomed down and in, revealing the blurry image of a building in the shape of an L. It had an arched roof that looked broken in places.

  Dense vegetation pressed in around the place, which abutted a large undeveloped space choked with trees and brush.

  “Cross-reference it with the city plan,” Mattie said.

  A moment later, an address popped up on the screen along with a file. Gabriel clicked on the file and it opened, revealing a PDF of the building’s handwritten property records.

  Blown up on the screen that way, the words Mattie read sent an involuntary shudder through her for reasons she could not fully explain.

  “What’s it say?” Morgan demanded.

  Mattie looked at her boss and replied with a slight tremor in her voice: “It says the building is abandoned now. Has been for twenty-five years. But back in the communist era, it was a state-run Schlachthaus. A slaughterhouse.”

  CHAPTER 5

  A FEW MINUTES later, Mattie rode in the passenger seat of an agency BMW while Tom Burkhart drove them across the Spree River and then east through the city toward the neighborhood, or Kiez, of Ahrensfelde.

  Jack Morgan had ordered them out to the slaughterhouse, and demanded that Dr. Gabriel start figuring out how in the hell someone had managed to breach Private’s state-of-the-art firewall. Katharina was supposed to go to Chris’s apartment to see if his personal computer contained any notes on the cases he was working.

  Burkhart said nothing as he drove. Mattie was glad for it. She was in no mood to talk. Apprehension had enveloped her, and she tried to fend off the sense of being trapped by studying the giant television tower with its revolving ball and spire looming high above Berlin, getting closer with every moment.

  The communists built the tower in 1965 as a way of showing the West that they were modern enough to accomplish such a feat. At more than three hundred meters high, it was visible from virtually everywhere in Berlin on a sunny day.

  But it was gray now. The clouds hung low in the sky. Drizzle had begun to fall on the tower and on the S-Bahn, the elevated train station at Alexanderplatz, a bustling part of the city day and night.

  The tower loomed over it all as did the Park Inn Hotel, a communist-era building that had been spruced up. The Park is where Westerners would stay when visiting East Berlin before the wall came down. It was said that there were more electronic bugs in the Park Hotel than anywhere else on earth.

  Mattie tried to imagine Chris at eighteen. In her mind, she saw her ex-fiancé standing out there on the plaza between the tower and the Park Hotel, one of half a million protesters gathered in early November 1989.

  She saw Chris and the others acting and speaking in defiance of the scores of Stasi—the dreaded and oppressive East German secret police—who surrounded Alexanderplatz that night, filming the crowd, trying to intimidate the protesters into disbanding.

  During their two-year romance, Chris had told Mattie very little about his childhood and adolescence. She knew that his parents died in an auto accident when he was eight, and that he’d grown up in an orphanage out in the countryside somewhere southeast of Berlin.

  But Chris also told her that shortly after the uprising began in earnest, he left the orphanage with some friends and went to Berlin, ending up on Alexanderplatz the night of the largest protest, the one that showed the world how much the East Germans wanted freedom.

  Chris said that he’d felt like his life really began that night as the wall began to crack and crumble, falling not five days later.
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br />   “I was free for the first time in my life,” Chris said. “We were all free. Everyone. Do you remember, Mattie? What it felt like?”

  Sitting next to Burkhart as they drove east, hearing Chris’s words echo in her mind, Mattie did remember.

  She saw herself at sixteen on the west side of Checkpoint Charlie, cheering and singing and dancing with her mother when East Berliners broke through the wall there and came freely into the West for the first time in more than twenty-eight years.

  Mattie remembered seeing her mother’s face when her sister came through the wall that night. They had all wept for joy.

  Then, in Mattie’s mind, her mother’s teary face blurred and became Chris’s the morning he’d asked her to marry him.

  She felt a ball in her throat and had to fight not to cry in front of Burkhart.

  Mattie’s cell phone rang. It was Dr. Gabriel. “Good news,” he said. “He’s moving. Not much, a couple of meters this way and that, but he’s moving.”

  “Oh, thank God!” Mattie cried. Then she looked at Burkhart. “He’s alive!”

  “Well, all right then,” the counterterrorism expert said, downshifting and accelerating east on Karl-Marx-Allee.

  Mattie’s mind spun as the prefabricated, Soviet-style architecture that surrounded them became a blur out the window.

  Was Chris injured? What was he doing in an old slaughterhouse?

  Was I wrong to have ended it? Was I? Do I still love him?

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Burkhart said, breaking her from her thoughts.

  Mattie looked over at him. “About what?”

  “Ending your engagement with him,” Burkhart said.

  “Easier said than done given the circumstances,” Mattie shot back, annoyed that she was evidently so transparent.

  “You break it off?” Burkhart pressed. “Or did he?”

  “That’s none of your business,” she said hotly.

  “I take it you did, then. Mind telling me why?”

  “I do mind. Just get me there, okay?”

  Burkhart shrugged. “Helps to talk about stuff with an impartial observer.”

  “Not always,” she said, and turned to look out the window again.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE SKIES HAD taken on a coal and ash color by the time they reached that wooded area they’d seen on the satellite imagery. They circled the woods, seeing only bike trails before finding the vine-choked drive that led to the old slaughterhouse.

  The rain was squalling now, blown by gusts from the east.

  Burkhart parked just as Mattie’s cell phone rang. It was Katharina.

  “We’re just getting here, Kat,” Mattie said.

  “The super at Chris’s building won’t let me in,” she complained. “He says he’ll let you in but not me.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be necessary,” Mattie replied. “Gabriel said he’s moving around inside.”

  “Oh,” Katharina said, sighing. “Oh, thank God, Mattie.”

  “I’ll let you know when we’ve got him,” Mattie said, and hung up.

  She tugged up her hood and got out, heading straight into the vines, which she pushed and hacked through until she’d reached a clearing of sorts.

  The walls of the slaughterhouse were cement block and rose to a line of blown-out windows below the eaves of an arched roof. The place was covered in old graffiti, including a skull stamped with a dripping bloodred X.

  Mattie felt unnerved, which was completely unlike her. She’d been a full-fledged Kripo investigator for the Berlin criminal police for ten years, five of them in homicide, and had another two years working high-profile cases for Private.

  She’d seen the worst one man could do to another, and Mattie always handled these incidents like the professional she was.

  But now, seeing that graffiti, she felt like ignoring years of training and yelling out to him.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Burkhart drawing his Glock. She drew her own pistol, whispering, “Bluetooth. I’m going to call Doc.”

  Burkhart fished in his pocket and came up with an earpiece. Then he donned latex gloves. Mattie did the same. The wind gusted, amplifying the drumming of the rain on the leaves and causing a chain to clank somewhere.

  “I think that door’s open,” Burkhart muttered.

  Mattie moved toward it through the sopping-wet grass and weeds, redialing Dr. Gabriel’s number. He answered immediately.

  “Give us a patch, Doc.”

  She saw Burkhart pause, then touch his Bluetooth and nod.

  “You reading our position?” Mattie murmured.

  “Great signal,” Gabriel replied. “You’re a hundred meters from him.”

  “Guide us,” Burkhart said. “We’re going in an open door on the southeast face of the longer, thinner section of the building.”

  “You’re looking to go down through that long arm to the north,” Gabriel said. “He’s in the wider part. Looks like he’s up against the east wall.”

  Mattie followed Burkhart’s lead when he got out a penlight that he held tight to his Glock. He pushed at the barn door with his foot. It creaked open, revealing a cement-floored hallway with drains set at intervals down its center and partitions every four meters or so.

  Mattie peered closer at the floor. It was covered in old trash and dust.

  “No footprints,” she muttered to Burkhart, who’d stepped inside.

  “Probably came in from the other end.”

  Mattie stepped into the hallway after Burkhart, who moved forward like a cat while flashing his light into the side rooms. Trash. Rat shit. Graffiti. Grime. And bolts sticking out of the wall about knee high and again about shoulder height.

  Seeing the bolts, Mattie felt a distinct sense of menace around her.

  “What did they do in here?” she whispered to Burkhart.

  He twisted his head quickly. His neck made a cracking sound. “Look like animal stalls to me. They probably kept the livestock in here awaiting slaughter.”

  It made sense. But Mattie could not shake that sense of threat. Indeed, the closer they got to the barn doors at the end of the hallway, the more pronounced the feeling became.

  She could barely breathe when Burkhart slid back one of the double doors.

  Pigeons spooked and flapped toward the empty windows.

  “East wall,” Mattie said.

  She and Burkhart both swung their beams in that direction, hearing Gabriel say: “He should be right there at thirty meters.”

  Mattie felt her heart sink as their beams played over garbage, rusted bolts jutting from the floor, and old pipes sticking out of the wall. “No one here, Doc.”

  “What? That’s impossi—” Gabriel paused. “There, he’s moving.”

  “Moving?” Burkhart said. “He’s not moving. He’s not here.”

  “I’m telling you he’s moving north along that east wall.”

  But they saw nothing but cobwebs, dirt, and old bottles and trash.

  Then Mattie caught a flicker of movement and heard glass rolling on cement. She swung her light, the powerful beam finding an enormous rat that froze, blinded, sitting up on its haunches, staring into the light, eyes blinking, and nose twitching.

  There was something shiny between its teeth.

  Boom!

  The gunshot surprised Mattie so much she jumped hard left, landing and then tripping on one of the bolts on the floor. She sprawled in the dirt.

  She glared up at Burkhart. “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “It had something in its mouth,” Burkhart said, crossing to the east wall, light trained on the dead rat. As Mattie struggled to her feet, he crouched over the rodent a moment, then stood and turned to face her. “We need to call in Kripo now.”

  She felt her heart break. “Why?”

  Burkhart held up what looked like a thin hearing aid battery partially wrapped in a chunk of gnawed and livid flesh.

  CHAPTER 7

  HAVE YOU EVER se
en that old movie The Invisible Man?

  Claude Rains, the same guy who played the enigmatic French captain in Casablanca, stars as a mad scientist who turns homicidal after he figures out how to erase his visible body.

  Not surprisingly, it’s one of my absolute favorite films of all time.

  One scene in particular never fails to leave me howling with laughter. In it, Rains is covered in bandages and has taken refuge at an inn run by the Irish actress Una O’Connor. She happens to enter Rains’s room when he’s removed the bandages on his head.

  He looks decapitated, but alive.

  O’Connor’s eyes bulge. She goes over-the-top insane. She starts to shriek bloody murder.

  It’s my special moment. One I wish I could re-create in my own life.

  But alas, attaining invisibility is an art more than a science.

  For instance, I have found over the past twenty-five years that the best thing you can do to remain unseen is to relax and inhabit your mask so thoroughly that people come to think nothing of you, especially in Berlin, my beautiful city of scars.

  I’m not being poetic here. I’m telling you the truth. Pay attention now.

  My friends, let me state unequivocally that if you are relaxed in Berlin, comfortable in your own scarred skin, and not causing outward trouble, the millions of scarred Berliners around you will just go on about their silly days, unaware of beings like me.

  Or at least not believing in their wildest nightmares that someone like me could still live among them.

  Unexposed.

  Unrecorded.

  Still hunting.

  With all that in mind, I am very, very cool as I drive an unmarked white panel van—one of a small fleet of vehicles I’ve collected over the years—through the rainy Berlin streets, past the scars of Hitler, and the Russians, and the Wall, way out to a forest north of Ahrensfelde, and down a wet wooded lane to a children’s camp on Liepnitz Lake not far from the sleepy village of Ützdorf.

  Do you know Ützdorf?

  It doesn’t matter.