Private Berlin (Private 5)

Certainly not all those I’ve been forced to eliminate in the last two weeks. Not one of them recognized my new face.

But they knew my voice.

Before they died, when I was speaking to them, they looked at me like I was a scary puzzle with pieces missing.

I laugh, feeling buoyed as I smear instant tanning lotion on my face and hands, and then use colored contact lenses to turn my eye color from brown to green. Then I glue on thick, dark eyebrows and a moustache and stuff rolls of cotton in my cheeks.

I pull on a blue workman’s coverall embroidered with the name of a local plumbing company. It’s amazing what you can find in thrift stores if you really know what you’re looking for. I even found the matching cap there too.

When I’m finished and satisfied that no one from my current life would recognize me, I fill a toolbox with wrenches, screwdrivers, and a mini blowtorch, making gentle clicking noises in my throat. It’s so important to have the right tools for the job, isn’t it, my friends? Hmmm?

CHAPTER 53

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON by the time Mattie returned to Private Berlin, requisitioned a car, and drove the one hundred seventy kilometers south to the city of Hal

le.

A gray, bleak city dominated by GDR-era architecture, Halle looked even more grim and somber in the mist that was swirling in advance of another storm.

Mattie parked, wondering again if the body of the computer genius was indeed linked to the hacking at Private, Chris’s death, and now the murder of Agnes Krüger in broad daylight. Was Hermann Krüger behind all of it? Could someone of his stature afford to be so brazen and cold-blooded?

In an effort to answer those questions, Mattie went to city hall and inquired at the clerk’s office about Waisenhaus 44. The tattooed emo girl who waited on her said she’d never heard of the orphanage, much less its records.

But a middle-aged woman working at a desk behind the emo girl told Mattie that Waisenhaus 44 was out on the road from Klepzig to Reussen.

“It’s still there?” Mattie asked.

“Not for long,” she said. “Someone’s tearing it down next month and building a green lightbulb production facility.”

“Records?” Mattie asked.

“I think they were transferred to the Federal Archives after reunification.”

“No other place they could be?”

“Not that I know of.”

Mattie considered throwing in the towel. But then she decided to make the drive out to see the orphanage. She told herself it might help her to understand whatever it was that Chris went through as a kid.

The thought of Chris as a boy made her think about Niklas. The two brought a lump to her throat, and tears to her eyes, and it took every bit of her strength to stay on the wet highway leading east out of Halle.

The wind began to gust and the rain fell harder as Mattie drove north on the pot-holed secondary road from Klepzig to Reussen. The road wound through farmland, by stands of hardwood trees partially stripped of leaves, and past giant white wind turbines, their blades slicing the iron sky.

At last Mattie spotted the roofline of the orphanage through a tangle of brush and woods. It sat next to a field being tilled by a farmer on a tractor.

Between two stout wooden posts, a new steel cable stretched across the orphanage’s overgrown driveway. There were notices of condemnation in plastic sheeting stapled to both posts. A sign dangled from the cable: No Trespassing.

Mattie parked her car on the shoulder, pulled up the hood of her rain jacket, and got out. She trotted across the road, jumped the cable, and moved down the driveway through sopping weeds and thorns that clawed at her slacks.

Vines strangled the off-kilter walls of Waisenhaus 44, a large three-story building with a sagging roof. The windows of the old orphanage were gone, except for teeth-like shards that clung to the frames.

Mattie stepped up on the front porch, which sagged off the building. The orphanage’s front door lay broken on the floor in the mouth of a long, gloomy central hallway.

Something in her stomach told Mattie not to enter and to leave the secrets of Waisenhaus 44 alone.

But then thunder cracked in the distance and the rain fell even harder.

Feeling keenly on edge, wondering if she was crazy, she stepped inside.