Private Berlin (Private 5)

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.

“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.