Felix told Harwood the story of the Great Tunnel as the lift descended beneath Berlin.
“Sometime in ’55, you Brits were studying the town map for Greater Berlin when a bright communications man spotted that the main trunk of cables from East Berlin to Leipzig ran right under a bulge in the American sector. These cables carried traffic from the East German army, even an official Russian teleprinter line. All very hot stuff if you’re a bright communications man in 1955 Germany, I think you’ll agree.
“So you Brits persuade us Yanks to dig a tunnel under the field from a nearby American radar station. Known as Harvey’s Hole, after the CIA’s then–man in Berlin, who’d been chucked out of the FBI by Hoover himself for drinking on duty. A lot to unpack there, but who has the time? For months, hundreds of people deciphered all the juicy gossip whispered down those cables twenty-four hours a day. It was a God damn coup. Except it wasn’t. There was a mole in the British secret service. Can you imagine? George Blake. He’d been taking the minutes when Harvey’s Hole was dreamt up. The Soviets let it go on for months to protect Blake’s cover. Until one day, an Eastern telephone repair gang picked up a fault in the line caused by rainwater, and got to digging in the field.
“The Brits and the Yanks cleared out, but didn’t have enough time to dismantle the farm’s worth of machinery lighting the tunnel up. So along come some Russians with tommy guns and pop their heads down, and what do they find? All the gadgets are labeled GPO, property of the United Kingdom General Post Office. What followed was a brouhaha, an untidy scandal in the spy war, and no one likes those. So we put up a sign in the tunnel that said rather stiffly, beware: you are now entering the american sector, and we beat a humiliating retreat. But real estate is real estate, and the Agency isn’t going to let a perfectly good listening post under the capital of new Europe go unused, now is it? Even in the wake of our most recent untidy scandal. My predecessor intercepted Angela Merkel’s texts down here. I just use it to disappear folks I don’t like. Including Robert Bull.”
The lift doors opened, and Felix made a wide arc with his arm. “After you, real deal.”
Harwood stepped into the kill box—a cell of bulletproof glass with a grille ceiling for gas and the unblinking eye of a camera dead ahead. She imagined there was some device in here for reading her heart rate, too, and breathed steadily as Felix brushed past her and raised his right hand to a black panel. What had been the opaque plastic of his prosthetic, lacking even the five tones a mortician artist would add to bring life to an open casket, now glowed green in the bath of the screen. It read the prosthetic as if it were a barcode.
“Neat trick,” said Harwood.
“Thanks,” said Felix, as a panel of glass slid away. “Cost me an arm and a leg.”
Harwood raised an eyebrow.
“Only I can make that joke. Come on, you’ve got a date.”
“So what else can you do with it?” she asked, following him into a low hall that flashed blue and white. Sensor sweeps for weapons.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
The tunnel could have been any corridor on any army base in the world, but still Harwood felt the pressure of the city stamping above her and the walls curving in, the pressure of closed doors left and right seeming to peer at her, to ask—What exactly are you going to do now, 003, with Sid Bashir in the hands of Rattenfänger, and your mission to complete? How about an untidy scandal in the spy war?
Felix Leiter had persuaded the Berlin police to let him take this headache off their hands after they picked up Robert Bull in hospital following Zofia’s disappearance. When Bull woke up, it was to a sweltering cell with no furniture and no windows and no real air. There was sand on the floor. He shouted at the guards who brought his food to tell him where he was. He seemed to think Egypt was most likely, because he demanded to talk to Reed Jacobs, an Agency recruiter posing as a good-time guy at the embassy in Cairo.
When Leiter looked into the nature of the link between Bull and Jacobs, he found the two had met at a glad-hand party put on by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development at the Nile Ritz-Carlton, where Sir Bertram was wooing some Internet infrastructure folks with satellite talk. This was a pattern of Robert Bull’s working life, making nice with security types wherever Sir Bertram did business, whether they were pure as the driven snow or all shades of gray.
When his guards neither confirmed nor denied he was in Egypt, Robert Bull searched their blank faces for clues. He next pleaded with them to repeat his name to Lucas Wells, the CFO of a limited liability company who, among other things, contracted Filipino workers for six dollars a month to clean out interrogation cells on a US naval base in Diego Garcia, a militarized island in British Indian Ocean Territory. Put Egypt and Diego Garcia together, and it would seem Robert Bull was comfortable with the flight plans of Extraordinary Rendition, and believed he was being detained in some out-of-the-way desert where he would be tortured by the CIA.
He was half-right, Felix told Harwood now, inspecting her face as she watched Robert Bull sweat on the other side of the one-way mirror. “He saw sand and thought CIA. That means Sir Bertram is up to something the CIA would be interested in, wouldn’t you say?”
“Unless he thinks Zofia Nowak’s two dates with Mr. Leiter of the US embassy really meant a lot to you.”
“They did,” said Leiter, throwing a switch. The cell went dark. Robert Bull screamed. He clearly didn’t like what happened here in the dark. It lasted for a full minute. “But he’s more scared of something outside his imaginary desert than he is of me. You say you can get him to squeak about what happened to Zofia and where she might be now. Time to work your magic, real deal.”
Harwood paused at the door to the cell. She was carrying a folding chair, and checked the ease of the hinges, focusing on the mechanism. At the heart of every agent is a hurricane room. You were never imprisoned in this cell. No man ever tied you to a chair here. No man rasped your skin with needles. No man laughed while things happened that you will not name. Your hurricane room is empty of anything that might hurt you. You are safe in your hurricane room. You can turn gently in circles, enjoying the freedom of no histories and no obligations, while 003 does her job. Mora wanted Zofia’s location, and Bull dead.
At the click of the door, Robert Bull attempted to spring from the floor, but he was yanked back by shackles.
“It’s OK,” said Harwood. She raised her voice. “Switch the lights on, for heaven’s sake.” The room washed white. “Aren’t the restraints a bit much . . .” She set a bottle of water on the floor between them, casting a noon shadow. “I’m Ms. Goodmaiden. I’ve heard any joke you can come up with so don’t bother. I’m a UN observer and I’m here to vouch that your human rights aren’t being contravened. I can see I’m a little late.” As she finished saying this she unfolded the chair and set it down so that her back was to the mirror, all the while watching Bull unfurl like a fern dazed by sudden spring. Then he tore the lid off the bottle and poured most of the water down his shirt because his hand was shaking. She added, “I suppose you know they’re planning to hold you responsible?”
His relief switched bitterly. He spluttered: “Responsible for what? You bitch, I’ve been suffocating in this fucking hole for months.”
“Not that long, Mr. Bull. I’m afraid they’ve played some tricks on you.”
“I’m head of security for Bertram Paradise! I don’t belong here!”
“If not you, who does belong here? Sir Bertram?”
Bull opened his mouth wide enough to spit the answer at her, and then stopped. His eyes were suddenly fearful. They swept to the mirror. He said, quietly now: “I don’t belong here. I shouldn’t be here.”
Harwood sighed. She crossed her legs. Dusted sand from her boot. “Have they given you regular meals and water?”
“No.”
“They say different.”
Bull exploded to his feet, but made it no further. “Whose side are you on?”
“Would you say you’re experiencing weight loss or dehydration? Or any deterioration in your mental health?” Harwood closed her eyes as Bull screamed himself hoarse and empty of obscenities. His spit landed on her cheek. She wiped it away. “Are you quite done?” She played her next gamble coolly: “It says here you raped Dr. Zofia Nowak.”
He twisted, stumbling on the chains. “That’s a lie!”
“Because she stopped you?”
Bull wavered. “What kind of observer are you?”
Harwood leaned forward. Lowered her voice. Imagined Felix Leiter’s narrowing eyes behind the mirror. “I’m the observer Rattenfänger sends when its employees fuck up, Mr. Bull.”
Bull clutched his stomach as if she’d winded him.
Felix whistled and relaxed into the corner of the listening booth, crossing his arms. If this was an interrogation gamble, it was a damn bold one. If it was something else . . . Felix dug his phone from his jacket and swiped to Control. The crackle that always reminded him of old-fashioned walkie-talkies answered. He said: “Keep an eye on the locks on interrogation room one. That door opens on my word only.”
Harwood watched fresh sweat map from Bull’s armpits. She continued softly: “You were given a very simple task, Mr. Bull. Eliminate Zofia Nowak. We didn’t tell you to harass her. We didn’t tell you to assault her. We told you to shut her up. Now you’re here, and she’s free. Do you see the problem?”
“They told me to make it look real! Most murdered girls, it’s the boyfriend that did it. I thought if it seemed like she’d been harassed by a boyfriend, it would be open-and-shut. I had it all planned. But she fought back, she got away . . .”
“The police found a great deal of blood in her apartment.”
“They told me to make it look real . . .” The words drifted from him, as if he were leaving his body.
“Quite the imagination you have.”
“Get me out of here, and I’ll give you Paradise. He’s run out of patience being your whipping boy. Gone into business for himself. Cooking up a way to send you his final regards. Zofia told me everything. Get me out of here.”
Harwood remained still. “If Zofia worked it out, what do I need you for?”
“I know the details!”
“Are you a scientist, Mr. Bull? I didn’t realize. The only thing you have going for you right now is that Dr. Nowak’s value has gone up in the world. Rattenfänger no longer want her dead. They’d like her ideas instead. Sir Bertram has become too much of a liability. Do you know where she is?”
“I know where she’d hide! Her grandmother!”
“Zofia Nowak has no living relatives.”
“She found her birth family,” said Bull hungrily. “She’s adopted! I can find her grandmother!”
“That won’t be necessary,” said Harwood, standing up. “What were you going to do with her body, once you’d raped and killed her?”
“Fuck’s sake, what does it matter now? I did my best!”
Harwood raised her eyebrows. She gripped the top rung of the chair. “I’m afraid you’ve outlived your usefulness, Mr. Bull.”
He lunged forward. The chain snapped him back. “No! Paradise will pay you double whatever Rattenfänger are paying you for my release!”
“Why would he do that, when you just sold his chief science officer to me for nothing?”
Harwood’s phone vibrated. She pulled it from her pocket. Signal from Moneypenny. The code took a moment to untangle itself in Harwood’s mind. 004 was MIA. Paradise’s yacht had disappeared from all satellites. And the sensor in Bashir’s glasses said 009’s heart was failing.
She released a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “They told me to make it look real, too, Mr. Bull.”
Behind the mirror, Felix was striding to the door, but it was too late. He glanced over his shoulder as Harwood slammed the chair into Bull’s larynx so hard she broke his neck.