Private Berlin (Private 5)

“You’re welcome.”

He smiled and said, “I’ll see you at the meeting, Engel?”

“Call me Mattie. And I’ll be there,” she promised and shut the door.

Burkhart was a good guy. But she didn’t think of him as she went to bed. All she could see as she plunged toward sleep were images of Chris and Greta Amsel walking into Waisenhaus 44.

Her cell phone rang at 6:20 a.m., less than six hours after she’d gone to sleep. Dr. Gabriel had found another orphan. His real name was Artur Becker. He’d changed it to Artur Jaeger. He was a design engineer for BMW in Munich.

Mattie called BMW security, looking for a phone number for Jaeger, but was told that he had gone to the IAA Motor Show in Frankfurt am Main, and the company had a policy against disclosing personal cell phone numbers. But Mattie insisted that Jaeger could be in danger, and the security person on duty relented.

Mattie called the number immediately. Jaeger answered groggily. She identified herself and asked if his real name was Artur Becker.

A pause. “I don’t know who you’re talking about. My name is Jaeger.”

“Please, sir, I’m trying to warn you about—”

Jaeger almost screamed at her, “I don’t know anyone named Artur Becker!”

“I think you do, and other orphans,” she said. “You’re all in—”

“This is a sick, sick joke,” he said, and hung up.

She tried him back several times but got his voice mail. She left a detailed message, describing what had happened to Greta Amsel and to please call her back. Then in frustration she called Morgan, who told her to take the jet to Frankfurt.

Finally she had called Burkhart, and he’d met her at the corporate terminal.

She reached over and tapped him on the forearm. He startled and jerked awake.

“We’re landing,” she said.

Burkhart yawned. “Thanks. How far to the auto show?”

“Fifteen-minute drive, tops,” Mattie said as the jet touched down.

He sat up straighter, all business, and checked his watch, and his face turned grim. “Let’s hope we get there in time.”

CHAPTER 71

FOLLOWING SIX OLD men who carried the colonel’s ashes, Hauptkommissar Hans Dietrich trudged through wet grass toward an open grave in Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, the central cemetery in the Lichtenberg district of East Berlin. The high commissar’s head pounded from the vodka he’d consumed so copiously the night before, trying to deaden his mind so he would not drown in the dark, twisted quagmire that was his father.

It had not worked.

Dietrich’s drunken thoughts had not been where they should have been—on the slaughterhouse, say, or on Christoph Schneider, Agnes Krüger, and now this Amsel woman. Instead, he’d wallowed in memories of the colonel and the ruthless manner in which his father raised him.

Indeed, brutally hungover, moving unsteadily toward the grave, the high commissar’s mind was still recalling the cold and often inexplicably cruel acts to which his father had treated him growing up.

Dietrich was fifty-two. He’d been trying to understand the colonel since he was a child. But as he watched the old men observing his father’s urn being lowered into the grave, he realized once again that he could neither explain his father nor come to terms with him.

The colonel was dead and about to be buried, yet the high commissar had the shuddering realization that the threat of the man might never die.

Dietrich gazed blearily at the men gathered around his father’s final resting place. They were in their seventies and eighties, and they wore somber gray suits, dark raincoats, and fedoras.

There was no minister present. The colonel might have risen from the grave in fury had there been.

But one of the men, stout with rheumy eyes and gin blossoms on his nose, stepped forward at last, and said: “Conrad was one of the last of his kind, and to me it is fitting that he be given a final resting place close to the greats.”

Dietrich looked off toward a circular brick wall strangled in vine. He knew there were many burial urns sealed in the wall. A tall upright stone slab cut like an ancient tombstone stood dead center of the yard inside the brick wall. Surrounding the tombstone were the graves of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Wilhelm Pieck, and seven other titans of the German communist movement.