A Spy in Berlin: The Professional Friend Preview

A Spy in Berlin

Astrid Julian

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Astrid Julian 2014

Published by Northland Publishing at Smashwords

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Except in the case of historical fact any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Washington, DC

Know Who Your Friends Are

1 Berlin

2 Berlin

3 Prague

4 Berlin

5 Lakewood, Ohio

6 Berlin

7 Prague

8 Prague

9 Prague

10 Berlin

11 Berlin

12 Berlin

13 Berlin

14 On the Run

15 Berlin

16 Berlin

17 Berlin

18 Kaliningrad

19 Berlin

20 Kaliningrad

21 Kaliningrad

About the Author

Also by Astrid Julian

Connect with Astrid Julian

Dedication

Dedicated to Edward R. Ingram Ellis, Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Dr. Ingram taught that history is found not just in books written by professional historians, but all around, even in the unorthodox alternative histories told by father, as he dragged his little German immigrant family across Canada. Papa showed us the histories of ordinary people, the ones we never had time to learn about in school. He showed us where the passengers of the underground railway disembarked and built their houses in Chatham, bought us the German-Mohawk grammar books written by missionaries to preserve First Nations languages, made us walk along the Ontario trails first travelled by French voyageurs, and much, much more.

Dr. Ingram’s History 100 assignment, a ten-page history of the 3rd Partition of Poland using only the ten facts he wrote on the blackboard was challenging. Even more challenging is living an ordinary life aware of the historical events, the economics, the politics, languages and cultures, past and present that make us who we are. Because of Ted I began listening to Udo and found my way in life.

As for my fiction, there I accept full responsibility. Dr. Ingram and Papa are entirely blameless.

Washington, DC

Prologue

Belonging… That was all Fritzi Jordan had ever wanted.

At the American Department of Defense school in Ramstein, Germany, Fritzi Jordan had been the German kid because of her mother. And on the playground behind her German grandmother’s house, she had been the American, the Ami. A US Armed Forces dad and a foreign national mom had left her forever the outsider, and she hated it.

Things changed when her dad began a new life as a farm machine mechanic with a small military pension. He repatriated his little family to Cody, Wyoming and during her first two years of high school Jordan succeeded in blending in. She hid her fluency in German and French and never spoke about the places her family had travelled. For a while, she was like everybody else. She belonged.

Then came that stupid math test and the after-school programs and the summer camps for the mathematically-talented. School hallways filled with whispers from small-minded classmates as she walked by. She became known as the geekiest of all the math geeks at Buffalo Bill Cody High School. An outsider. Once again, not belonging.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. How could she have been so dumb?

College, where liking math and being good at it was less strange, seemed to offer her a second chance. But really, who was she kidding? Most of her fellow students studied math because a math major made a teaching job a sure bet. Jordan studied math because she was genuinely interested. It gave her new thoughts to think and puzzles to solve. The more she learned and studied, the more intense her passion for mathematics became. And the less she belonged.

Then she attended a tour for new summer interns at the National Security Agency’s biggest data repository, the NSA Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. She found herself surrounded by people as multilingual and mathematically-gifted as herself, and for the first time in her life, she truly and honestly felt she belonged.

Her parents weren’t enthusiastic about her career choice. Not even when she showed them the generous offer NSA had made her. Nor how the Agency would pay for her graduate degrees. But they told her the decision was hers, and didn’t stand in her way.

All in all, she was happy at NSA. She had what all young American college graduates said they wanted…a job that earned enough so she wouldn’t be a burden to her parents…interesting work assignments…a friend or two with whom to while away an occasional evening or weekend…and best of all…a speedy promotion to NSA Headquarters in suburban Washington, DC.

It was the best of times. She was happy, and she belonged.

She had no idea, when she opened that desk drawer in her new office that it would cause her to lose everything… Ordinary desk litter…half a ream of paper, assorted rubber bands, paper clips, forgotten pens, and an abandoned flash drive took away everything she cared about…her career, her friends, her family, her country, and worst of all, her mathematics. She was truly alone, abandoned and belonging nowhere.

She shouldn’t have opened that flash drive. She shouldn’t have looked into the files. She should have just thrown it away. But after all those early morning lectures about saving the taxpayers’ money, reusing the drive had seemed the responsible thing. It hadn’t been tagged classified or top-secret. She had assumed it was empty, or that it contained blank forms from Human Resources, or the Pdf instruction manuals for the office cappuccino machine or the laser printer.

She’d been more concerned with accidentally formatting photos someone had brought in to share with his or her coworkers. Missing photos were a sore point in her family. Fritzi’s mother’s baby photos had all been destroyed, and her grandmother had never stopped complaining about it. So, on the off-chance that the drive contained personal material someone might not want to lose, she popped it into her computer and opened a few files.

What she found was a collection of corporate emails and phone logs sorted by types of business…nuclear power generation, petroleum and mining companies, waste management and solar energy equipment suppliers. Nothing personal, but still something someone might eventually miss. She dropped it back into the drawer and thought no more about it. She actually forgot she had the drive until a man flashing a National Security Agency ID knocked on her door and asked for it.

Jordan had never been good at reading people. Number-crunching was her forte, but something in the way the man asked her if she had looked into the files had frightened her. And so she had lied.

Too nervous to look up into the friendly smiling face a second time, she had stared at his expensive tie. That had been a mistake. She forced her eyes up only seconds later, but glimmers of doubt were already flickering in his eyes.

He probed, asked more questions.

She was careful to tell the same story each time, panicking inside, sure now the man was up to no good. Why hadn’t she thrown that damned drive out or given it to her supervisor?

The man had pocketed the drive and left.

She took a deep breath and tried to forget him, but her number-crunching, fact-glomming mind couldn’t help absorbing the details… online…in the media…at the water cooler. The man’s name was Usher, Michael Usher. His current title was Temporary Assistant Director for Media Relations at the National Security Agency. This was his third NSA stint. Every two years or so, he shuttled back and forth between Wall Street consulting jobs and GS-12 or higher positions at government agencies in Washington. With each new assignment, his personal wealth grew by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

She tried to forget him, but every time she turned around at work, there he was. Almost as if he were stalking her.

She should have turned whistleblower while she had had the evidence in hand. She should have turned that flash drive over to her supervisor. Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps had it become legal for NSA to collect private-sector corporate communications. But she thought not, and her doubts grew. Glenn Greenwald’s Guardian account of NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden’s odyssey from Hawaii to Hong Kong to Moscow had left her wary. She used a public computer at the DC Public Library to look up NSA’s whistleblower policies and concluded that it was too late.

Snowden had had hard drives and thumb drives full of information.

She had nothing.

Even if she could recall names and facts and figures, Usher had his drive back. Who would believe what a lowly number cruncher had to say about an NSA managing director?

Six weeks later she was being read out of the NSA, fired in disgrace, and Michael Usher was standing there, overseeing the process.

Know Who

Your Friends Are

1 Berlin

Fritzi Jordan left Washington knowing that she would never be as good with people as she was with numbers. Maybe understanding human feelings and intentions would come to her in time. Maybe it would come by going someplace far, far away from Washington. She hoped so. Maybe that was why she fled to Berlin, to graduate school.

Berlin was safe. Here she was surrounded by young people. They made it easy to forget Ft. Meade and Washington, and people in power suits. Interesting painters and performance artists huddled in the city’s cafés. Oddballs like herself. One third of Berliners were non-German. Museums filled with French and Italian tourists during the days; and in the evenings, three opera houses, seven professional symphony orchestras, and fifty theaters meant someone was always on the way to someplace. At night techno clubs pounded beats and laser lights out into the streets until early morning. Fritzi liked watching the city’s people. Sitting in a Berlin café made it easy to pretend she was one of the crowd.

If the hustle and bustle of living in the de-facto capital city of the EU got to her, well then, with nine times the area of Paris, Berlin offered uncounted numbers of parks and gardens only a short walk or subway ride away. Forty percent of the city was green space.

Berlin’s vibrant activist hacker scene had tempted her, but she remembered the lessons of Edward Snowden. And of Michael Usher.

Sitting on the fringes, watching…pretending… It was okay… really… she told herself, as she watched the students at Humboldt University smile and joke with each other, and even with strangers, like herself. Berliners were upbeat. More importantly, after the shame of her firing, they respected her privacy.

All except for that guy sitting two rows behind her.

For the past two days whenever she turned around, there he was, almost as if he were stalking her. Like Michael Usher had at the NSA so many lifetimes ago.

Her stalker seemed to be just a bit overly friendly, but she couldn’t be sure. After what happened in Washington, she would never be sure.

By keeping to herself, she thought she was making it clear that she wanted to be left alone, but the man was arrogant enough to imagine he was the exception to the rule. She wished he would say something, so she could decline and refocus her energy on her studies.

Things were starting to come together again. Not that she’d had many options after