Empire Games Series, Book 1(112)

RITA IN DHS STOP URGENTLY NEED SUPPORT STOP CAN ORCHESTRA CONTACT BIRTH MOTHER ENDS

Kurt grunted painfully. For a moment he felt despair. He’d been afraid of this, or something like this, for many years. It was not just the very specific fear that something might reach out from the dark heart of the security state and snatch away his granddaughter (who, for all that she bore none of his genes, thought more like him than his own son). It was the broader, agoraphobic fear that the unquiet dead were stirring in their graves, a third of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was impossible to outrun memory, or to outlive one’s sins. As long as the Wolf Orchestra remained hidden, abandoned in place by the state it served when the cold war ended and the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, the temptation to awaken the musicians was there. He could summon them to their instruments and play a last devilish ditty—tempting and taunting those who knew.

Kurt had remembered, and silently practiced the necessary rituals for all the years of their exile. For more than three decades he’d let them lie, trusting that save for the annual ritual of the greeting cards—to keep track of his players—he could allow his conductor’s baton to gather dust. But now another hand had reached out: this Angie, Rita’s friend. Angie Hagen. Alex Hagen’s granddaughter, another of the third-generation children, born and raised on American soil. Children trained by their parents and grandparents to serve the fatherland, whether they knew it or not.

I could try to do this on my own, he thought dubiously. Why disturb his musicians’ beauty sleep? Many of the first generation were dead of old age. Some of them were senile, disturbing their fellow nursing home inmates with the black comedy of their memories, dismissed as demented confabulators by children and carers alike as they randomly blabbed state secrets over the dinner table. Most of the active ones today were children or grandchildren, born and educated here like the descendants of conversos, Jews living under suspicion as Catholic converts after the reconquest of Spain. They kept to the rituals of their parents out of habit, living in constant fear of the Inquisition’s knock on the door.

Few of them were truly aware of what they had once been expected to do, and fewer still were ideologically committed. The inner citadel of belief in the workers’ duty to build a paradise on Earth had been betrayed by history. They’d been misled by their own leaders and teachers, then abandoned in the dark abyss of late-stage capitalism. Nobody really believed anymore. But it was still too dangerous to contemplate reconciliation with the nation in which they were embedded like a fragment of shrapnel from an unremembered cold-war explosion.

The bastards have Rita, Kurt reminded himself. They had stolen her and they would use her until she broke, for they knew her to be of enemy breeding—even if she herself did not. His resolve hardened. I will visit this Angel, he decided. She cared enough for Rita that she’d written a coded plea to the orchestra conductor. Philadelphia? It’s been a long time. He’d visited the City of Brotherly Love once before: it would be interesting to see how it had changed. He would talk to Rita’s Angel, and then he would commence the search for Rita’s birth mother.

But he would not do so unaided. First there were notes to be written and sent. Anonymous letters to the neighbors of his sleeping agents, letters containing signs and code words to remind them of the faith they once held, before the great betrayal and the Wiedervereinigung of 1990. Words to awaken them and call them to the flag. Words of action, saying: stand by.

They—or their parents, or grandparents—had been loyal members of the Hauptverwaltung Aufkl?rung, the foreign intelligence service of the Stasi, once upon a time. They’d been sent to these alien American shores to await an unspecified future mission. They were the members of the Wolf Orchestra, the last and greatest Communist sleeper ring, injected into the United States between the 1960s and the 1980s by order of the chief spymaster of the GDR, Markus Wolf himself. Comrade Wolf was long dead of old age, and the nation he had served was itself liquidated almost a third of a century ago, its ideology bankrupt and its walls smashed. The Stasi’s foreign files had burned before the capitalists, flush from their triumph over the Democratic Republic, could retrieve them. The members of the orchestra were stranded on foreign soil as aimless illegals, unable to return home despite (or because of) the end of their mission. But if they and their descendants held the faith—faith in each other, never mind the failed dream of a workers’ state—they would surely come to his aid when he called.

And so Kurt Douglas allowed himself to be goaded into action by Rita’s guardian Angel—unreasonably angered at the bumbling conscription of his granddaughter by the amateurs and clowns who passed for spies in today’s America—and raised his baton to summon the Wolf Orchestra back to life, to play the cold war blues one last time.





AFTERWORD

Extract from “Beyond the Labyrinth: The Department of Homeland Security’s Secret War on the Multiverse, 2004–2020,” by Bruce Schneier—the Definitive Unauthorized History of the DHS

The Office of Special Programs (OSP) was not, strictly speaking, part of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) chain of command. For the first two years of its existence it was an independent agency; where it relied on DHS assets, it maintained an arm’s-reach relationship just as it did with the FBI, NSA, and the other agencies from which it drew its personnel. It was only in the wake of the panicked dash to regroup after the attacks on the White House that the OSP was actually integrated into its parent agency. While everyone knew what the DHS was, what it stood for, and what it did, the Office of Special Programs stayed resolutely in the shadows.