Freedom Bridge: A Cold War Thriller (16 page)

* * *

It had been a few hours since Colonel Emil von Eyssen received a call from his man at the Schnellboot dock. The information was scant. Colonel Aleksei Andreyev had been on Glienicker Bridge and something had occurred—important enough for him to contact the East Berlin KGB station. A few hours later, the Vopos had recovered a cigarette lighter from one of their patrol boats and the lighter was now in Andreyev’s possession.

Under von Eyssen’s impatient questioning, the Vopo who surrendered the lighter to Andreyev confirmed he had been accompanied by a Soviet lieutenant, but, no, he did not get his name. Yes, Vopo personnel had conducted the search; but no, he did not know who had authorized it. Yes, the lighter had some kind of design on its metal case; but, no, he could not remember what it was.

With every answer, von Eyssen had become more frustrated. He was certain of only one thing. What he
did
know was potentially fatal.

Air Force Lieutenant Stepan Brodsky had attempted to defect. He did not succeed because of the chaotic bloodbath on the bridge. But the summit had dissolved just
before
Captain Brodsky had made a run for it—and that’s when Brodsky had been spotted talking to von Eyssen’s brother-in-law, Ernst Roeder. If Ernst
was
somehow complicit in the security leak, Colonel Aleksei Andreyev would find a way to lay it at von Eyssen’s doorstep.

Unless he could buy Andreyev’s silence?

Impossible. The man was impervious to every human feeling, even greed. He thought of the East German guard, killed on Glienicker during Brodsky’s aborted escape and how Andreyev had reacted to the news with callous indifference.

Not that von Eyssen’s superiors weren’t equally indifferent. With the summit looming, word had come down from above. Keep the borders quiet. No incidents during the negotiations. None after they were over. None during the expected new round of talks when bold proposals by the Soviet Union would be tossed on the bargaining table for the first time.

Von Eyssen’s jaw clenched as he relived the criticism that had been heaped on him by his superiors—and worse, by the likes of Aleksei Andreyev. What should he have done, allow some Soviet swine to escape and peddle his espionage wares to the West? The Soviets this, the Soviets that—and to hell with the Germans. Potsdam wasn’t even in his normal jurisdiction!

How carefully, how cautiously, he had nurtured his career. No sacrifice had been too great, not even the humiliation of being patronized by inferiors. Soviet barbarians who raped, not just our women, but our country! That the Soviet Motherland
had
plundered twenty billion dollars’ worth of German industry by calling it “reparations” never ceased to enrage him.

But there would be a day of reckoning. A day when Germany’s leaders, East
and
West, were replaced by men of vision and courage, he brooded. He would be ready for that day, his record spotless, his career intact.

Von Eyssen rose, walked to a floor-length mirror, and stood at rigid attention. The reflection that stared back was, as always, reassuring. White-blond hair and azure-blue eyes. Tall and broad-shouldered. Neat green uniform adorned with medals. A true Aryan . . .

The man of the future.

Colonel Emil von Eyssen clicked his heels, did a smart about-face, and cleansed of fear and anger, returned to his desk.

Where a pile of photographs rested placidly. Von Eyssen forced himself to leaf through them again. A face loomed with each name, like a roll call. This one is in no position to betray me. That one is, but would not dare. This one has no access to classified information. That one used to, but not anymore.

And his brother-in-law?

Damn you, Frieda!

He could hear his sister’s voice as if it were yesterday.

“My husband must have an important position in life, Emil. The kind that allows us to mingle with important people. And besides,” she pouted, “Ernst happens to be very talented. He takes such beautiful photographs.”

And I gave in to her, von Eyssen groaned.

He put through a call to his sergeant, who had just returned from tailing Roeder. “From now on,” von Eyssen told him, “I want my brother-in-law under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”

Chapter 34

E
verything was in readiness for the high point of the Humboldt University medical conference. The amphitheater was standing-room only—physicians, nurses, medical students, staff members, journalists, even some of the idly curious.

The elderly patient, unconscious on the operating table, lay between a sheet and a hypothermia mattress that had lowered his body temperature to the required coolness. Doctors, nurses, and technicians were stationed around the table. Behind them, in customary white smocks and masks, were four honored guests: Dr. Mikhail Yanin, Dr. Kiril Andreyev, nurse Galina Barkova, and Mrs. Adrienne Brenner.

A technician sat placidly at the controls of a heart-lung machine.

The chief surgeon, an East German of excellent reputation, leaned over the patient. Making an incision from collarbone to diaphragm, he sawed through breastbone, spread open the rib cage to expose a gleaming fibrous membrane laced with blood vessels—the pericardial sac.

As if on cue, at that precise moment Dr. Kurt Brenner entered the operating room from a side door. He walked to the table, held out a gloved hand for an instrument, and with a quick deft movement in what seemed a split second, cut open the pericardial sac to reveal the patient’s heart. There were murmurs of approval from many in the audience, a scattered clapping of hands. A woman in a green operating smock high in the amphitheater murmured, “Bravo, Maestro.”

With quiet authority, Dr. Kurt Brenner began issuing orders in German that would stop the heart and delegate its indispensable functions to the heart-lung machine.

Brenner glanced at a balloon-like device hanging above the machine—and frowned.

Kiril Andreyev wondered how many other doctors had noticed, let alone figured out why Dr. Brenner was forced to work with a bubble oxygenator rather than the more efficient disc version he probably was accustomed to.

But there was something else. If it troubled Kiril, it
had
to bother the hell out of Dr. Brenner. The technician’s responses to Brenner’s orders were a touch too lethargic.

Still, Kiril reassured himself, the machine
had
taken over the patient’s breathing. Everything seemed to be normal.

As the operation progressed, the only sounds in the room were those of the operating team, Brenner’s occasional commands, the gentle whir of an electric motor as the patient’s blood and oxygen were rerouted, and the repetitive blips of an electro-cardiac monitoring machine.

Adrienne, struck by the grace and economy of her husband’s movements, glanced up at the mesmerized students—and was transported back to the balcony of another operating theater the first time she had watched Kurt assume responsibility for someone’s life even as he was in full command
of his own. She wished his parents could have been here, especially his father. Max would have been bursting with pride.

The hypothermia mattress signaled the gradual warming of the patient’s body. He was injected with a drug to neutralize the effects of the anti-coagulant in his bloodstream. An electric shock jolted the patient’s heart. The lifeline between human heart and heart-lung machine was about to be severed.

There seemed to be a collective holding of breath as everyone waited for normal contractions to begin. For the patient’s heart to start beating on its own.

Nothing happened.

The eyes of every doctor in the room leaped to the technician in front of the control panel.

The man looked stunned—unable to react to Brenner’s urgent commands.

Someone shouldered the technician aside. One hand whipped off dark glasses. The other shot out for the backup oxygenator, then reached for a bottle of fresh fluid to wash the lines of tubing free of blood and avoid fatal clots to the brain. Kiril Andreyev went to work, pausing only once—to exchange a glance, like a firm handshake, with Dr. Kurt Brenner.

The famous American surgeon could do nothing but massage the patient’s heart . . . and wait.

In less than five minutes the waiting was over, the malfunctioning heart-lung machine once again ready to take the place of the patient’s heart.

But too many valuable minutes had been lost. The operating team bent over the form on the table, going through motions everyone knew were as futile as they were routine. The patient was dead.

The amphitheater began to empty as one visiting doctor after another silently left the room. Dr. Kurt Brenner stood immobile at an operating table ringed with solemn faces, the operating team’s masks now lowered.

Galya made her way toward Kiril to console him on his valiant but unsuccessful race with the clock. He had retrieved his dark glasses and was about to put them on again.

But not before she saw that there was no redness, no trace of an infection in his left eye.

There never had been
!

Her glance moved back and forth between two faces in the room—Kiril’s and Dr. Yanin’s—as she recalled Dr. Yanin’s little joke that morning at breakfast.

“So, Kiril! What are you—a modern
version of the Prisoner of Zenda? Don’t try to bring literature to life by playing the King of American
surgery just because you look like the man. I would hate to part with you.”

I would too, Galya thought, realizing for the first time why Kiril had looked at her in Moscow as if he’d never expected to see her again.

* * *

Kurt Brenner stared at the ceiling. He had locked himself in the bedroom of his hotel suite, not even bothering to make his excuses about missing lunch. He knew his East European colleagues understood and sympathized, having been told in advance that he invariably shut himself away on the rare occasion when a patient died while under his knife even though, like today, it wasn’t his fault.

So why this acute anxiety?

He wasn’t quite sure, but he could make an educated guess.

In recent years he’d begun to cultivate his reputation on a broader scale, making round after round of media appearances coast to coast and abroad. Being interviewed, feted, lionized—

Unbidden, the thought of a renowned publicity-loving pianist of his acquaintance came to mind. The man had admitted approaching the stage with trepidation whenever he had neglected his practicing . . . fearful, he’d admitted, of blowing the performance.

So when Adrienne tapped gently on the bedroom door—closed even to her—and in a voice thick with genuine sympathy told him she was going for a walk, it wasn’t her voice he clung to, but the awe in heart surgeon Dr. Mikhail Yanin’s voice earlier in the day as he turned to his colleagues and announced: “Dr. Kurt Brenner can accomplish in forty-five minutes what it takes most surgeons two hours to attempt!”

Chapter 35

K
iril chose a grouping of chairs near the hotel lobby’s only row of telephone booths to the left of the bank of elevators. As he took the end chair, Luka Rogov sank heavily into the next one. Kiril had deliberately skipped lunch because of the cafeteria just off the lobby. If Rogov got hungry enough . . .

He eyed the telephone booth almost wistfully. One call and he would know where he stood.

What if Stepan’s contact had moved away? What if he’d been caught?

The number Stepan had made him memorize was less than a year old, he told himself. Surely nothing could have changed in so short a time.

He leaned forward in sudden anticipation. Adrienne Brenner had just emerged from an elevator and was heading in his general direction.

But as she walked past without noticing him—intent, like everyone else in the lobby, on some urgent errand of her own—Kiril sat back again, eyes lowered in disappointment.

* * *

“Yes, Colonel.” Galya hung up the receiver, reached for her purse, and rushed down the corridor, propelled by a gust of nervousness. Keep in mind what this means for your future, she told herself.

Not that I have any choice—not anymore
.

She stepped quickly into an express elevator. As soon as the door slid open, she spotted Kiril. Her first inclination was to tear across the lobby and tell him what she suspected—desperate to hear him tell her that it wasn’t true. But all she had time for was a smile and a wave as she hurried through the lobby and into the street. And not a moment too soon. Adrienne Brenner had just crossed the plaza and was about to enter a ground-floor shopping arcade.

Adrienne checked her watch. Three o’clock sharp. Sauntering past a refreshment booth, she paused to watch a woman as she arranged thick meat patties on a large iron grill.

“Would you care to sample one, Mrs. Brenner?”

She turned. “Herr Roeder! How nice to see you again.” She gestured at the tray. “I’m really not hungry.”

“Perhaps I can tempt you with a drink?” He tilted his mug so she could see the pink liquid inside. “Weisse mit schuss. Beer and raspberry juice. It’s especially popular with Berliners in the summer.”

She smiled. “I’m game—even if it
is
the color of bubble gum.”

They sat down at a small table. As he signaled a waitress, she saw that his hands really were enormous. Maneuvering a miniature camera had to be child’s play compared to what she’d been going through.

“How do you like it?” he asked.

“Refreshing,” she said. It really was.

“Do you have children, Mrs. Brenner? If so, might I suggest a souvenir of some kind?”

“No children. Just a couple of nephews. What did you have in mind?”

“Wooden toys from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.” He led her to a toy counter and picked up a wooden figure. “Look at the labor that has gone into this. See how easily you can move the tiny limbs about?”

“Looks very flexible. How is it done, with elastic?”

But he was no longer examining the toy. His eyes scanned the arcade’s long, uncrowded aisles.

“So once again, Paul Houston is poised to expose the dark side of your country’s State Department,” he said, his voice low.

Not just the State Department, Herr Roeder, she thought. Our mutual friend, Paul Houston, may be CIA.

Aloud, she said, “I gather Paul Houston has more in mind than just avenging Stepan Brodsky’s death.”

Roeder nodded. “Soviet-American negotiations are in the making as we speak. New concessions to the Soviet Union head the agenda. Paul Houston’s revelations about the sham summit in Potsdam last year will shatter them,” he said with a guarded look around. “It was Stepan Brodsky who fed him the information.”

“Is that what the microfilm in Brodsky’s lighter was all about?”

“It was a trade—or so Stepan hoped. But after the State Department balked, he made a last-ditch attempt to escape—an impossible gamble. Even so, he came close to beating the odds. Did Paul mention how he spent his last seconds on earth?”

“No,” she said gently, remembering that Ernst Roeder had been a friend of Brodsky’s.

Roeder’s eyes were moist even as his hands were clenched in anger.

“Stepan dragged himself forward, inch by excruciating inch, until with one outstretched hand, he pushed his lighter over the side of Glienicker Bridge.”

“Do you know why?” she asked.

“Only from what Paul told me afterward. Stepan wanted to keep the identity of a close friend from falling into the wrong hands.”

Wincing at the image in her mind, she asked him about the lighter.

“An ordinary American lighter—Zippos, you call them—with an emblem on one side. Black wings of some kind.”

“What happened to the friend, I wonder?”

“I have also wondered. I never knew his name. Just that he would try to buy his way out of the Soviet Union.”

“How?” she asked, intrigued.

“With the microfilm in a cigarette lighter identical to Stepan’s.”

Microfilm as good as buried in Moscow, Paul Houston had told her in a burst of frustration
. . .

Roeder’s eyes made one last sweep of the arcade. “And now I think it the better part of wisdom to conclude our business.”

He signaled a saleswoman at the far end of the toy counter. “You will find what you expect wedged behind the left leg of one of the figures. I cannot vouch for its quality, mind you. Even with high-speed film, there were floodlights instead of a flash. I had to shoot quickly—and with a miniature camera. Come,” he said, “I will walk you out.”

He handed her the wrapped package as if it were nitroglycerine.

As if, at any moment, it might explode in his face.

Adrienne took hold of his arm protectively.

Standing at the far end of the arcade, Galya saw the prominent East German photographer hand a package to Adrienne Brenner—the signal she’d been waiting for.

If Mrs. Brenner meets with the photographer, Ernst Roeder, and if anything passes between them—anything at all—get word to me immediately.

Stepping into a phone booth, careful to avert her face as Adrienne Brenner and Ernst Roeder left the arcade together, Galya pulled the booth shut, inserted a coin, and dialed.

Adrienne was talking animatedly, half-turned in Ernst Roeder’s direction as they walked down the aisle of the arcade, when Roeder froze.

Luka Rogov stood in the doorway of the arcade, blocking their exit.

“Get the hell out of my way,” she told Rogov. “My husband and I are honored guests. You, on the other hand, are a poor excuse for a bodyguard. The man you’re
supposed
to be watching isn’t even here.”

Hopeless
,
she thought. Dr. Andreyev spoke only Russian to his “shadow.” On the few occasions she’d heard Rogov expand on his vocabulary, it was delivered in cave-man English.

“Give me toys,” Rogov demanded, reaching for the package.

“Go to hell, she hissed.”

“Give it to him, Mrs. Brenner,” Roeder urged.

Adrienne tossed the package on the floor so the goon would have to stoop to pick it up.

“You come with me.” Rogov gripped Ernst Roeder’s arm.

“Let go of him, damn you!”

“Please, Mrs. Brenner. It’s all right, I will be all right,” Roeder said.

Despite the unmistakable terror in his eyes, Adrienne knew she had no choice. She stepped aside. “I’ll see you later, Herr Roeder,” she promised, knowing damn well she might never see him again.

From the other side of the plaza, Galya watched Adrienne Brenner leave the arcade and head for the hotel while Luka Rogov hustled Ernst Roeder toward a waiting limousine.

So it was the prominent photographer they wanted, not Adrienne Brenner . . .

I don’t care, she told herself. If this Roeder has nothing to hide, he has nothing to worry about.

But who doesn’t have something to hide—especially from Colonel Aleksei Andreyev?

I don’t care, she repeated with uneasy defiance in a fruitless effort to convince herself.

Kiril would be alone now, she realized. For once, he was pried loose from his revolting bodyguard. She made a bee-line for the hotel.

As she stepped into the lobby, she relaxed. Kiril was right where she’d spotted him earlier—standing next to the row of telephone booths, although she couldn’t tell if he was still waiting to enter the booth or if he’d just stepped out.

“Kiril,” she called out with relief. “I
must
speak with you!”

“Not now, Galya, please. I have to—”

“But it’s important. It can’t wait.”

“It will have to.”

He walked out of the hotel.

She stared after him, thinking that she was nothing to him anymore. Not even someone to be courteous to.

It’s not like him to be rude or insensitive
, an inner voice reminded her.

Because he has other things on his mind, she shot back. How foolish of him, how short-sighted. She had no choice now but to make a full report. For his own good, she added quickly, taking her cue from what Colonel Andreyev had told her at the outset. Men like Kiril needed to be protected from themselves.

But as usual, her inner voice had the last word.

Protected
how, Galina
Barkova
—
and
from
whom
?