ON THE long drive, Martin filled a lot of hours complaining about Benjamin, whom he had saved from a life of petty crime and penitentiaries of increasing levels of security. “I taught him every word he used in that manifesto,” Martin said, gradually leaning toward self-recrimination. “I should have seen it, back at the party. When my friend called to warn us that the cops were on their way, I told Ben that we had to split. That it was time for everyone to disappear. You know what he said? ‘Already done, boss.’ I took that as a figure of speech, but later I talked to people, found out when they’d gotten the word to leave. He wasn’t lying—people had been leaving from early that morning.”
“How did he know so early?” Ingrid asked.
Martin glared at the road ahead of them. “Because he set the whole fucking thing up. He put the missile launcher there. He called in the anonymous tip.”
“Jesus.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
By the time they were halfway across Missouri, heading to Kansas, his murderous impulse had faded. He’d regained the composure that had attracted her and four hundred others. But they both knew the situation was dire.
He said, “I need to tell you about Berlin.”
“Why?”
“Because someone other than me should know about it.”
Berlin, he told her, was supposed to be an education. He was a young man who’d soaked up progressive thought in America but was increasingly drawn to European movements. “In America, we’re already co-opted by capitalism. Private property, the authority of the employer, the profit motive—these are American progressives’ starting points. But Europe has been through horrors, and nothing is taken for granted. Everything is up for debate.”
He made contacts at rallies and left-wing watering holes, trying to learn in the field about the ways in which citizens could influence the path of government. At BAIZ, a Marxist bar in Berlin-Mitte, he became involved with a group of bookish Berliners who were so well versed in radical history that they named themselves after Rosa Luxemburg, the fiery revolutionary socialist who was killed by government-sponsored paramilitaries during the Spartacist Uprising after World War I, her body tossed into the Landwehr Canal. The KRL had come together as a political study group at the Free University, and after graduation they simply kept meeting, growing slowly, though they never had more than twenty-five members at a time.
What separated the KRL from other discussion groups was the fact that, a year before, a hacker had sliced his way into a government email server and released the entire trove online. The emails dominated the news for months, and three of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats were forced to step down due to impolitic messages that had come to light. A month after that, the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, arrested a twenty-two-year-old who had been one of the KRL’s founding members. “But he acted independently,” Martin told Ingrid. “They could never pin it on the group as a whole, and it frustrated them. Their efforts only succeeded in giving the Kommando fifteen minutes of fame—in Germany, at least. By the time I arrived, that was all part of their history. Some of them had talked to the press, and one had gotten a book deal, but they were essentially back to what they had been—a study group focused on political theory. Though I was trying to learn German, they usually switched to English for me. It was wonderful. Back home, my friends would only get so far in a debate before stopping themselves. They self-censored. These people didn’t. They let the conversation go as far as it possibly could, the assumption being that even the impossible could inspire something possible. So no one blinked an eye when we talked about mass suicides or murder, mandatory gender reassignments, or shipping city dwellers, Mao style, into the countryside to rediscover their connection to the land.”
“Mandatory gender reassignments?” she asked as Missouri unfolded around them.
“That’s what you do in a study group. You brainstorm and spitball, and sometimes you stumble upon wonderful ideas. Personally, I found it exhilarating. And then, a few weeks after I started going to their meetings, an American struck up a conversation with me in a bar. Eventually he admitted he was FBI. He told me that the Bureau, and the German government, were worried about the Kommando Rosa Luxemburg. I told him they were wrong. The KRL were talkers. No one needed to be scared of them. Maybe one of them had hacked some government servers, but that had been more embarrassing than threatening. They weren’t terrorists. Our most pressing real-world concern, I told him, was that the television in the apartment we used for meetings had died.”
The story Martin told Ingrid, which Ingrid related eight months later, matched the version Owen Jakes had told to Rachel. Up to a point. Where Jakes had skipped from Martin “keeping me in the loop” to “they blew themselves up,” Martin filled in that space.
“He and I met twice a week—not at the bar, though. We used a safe house in the center, a crummy little apartment where he would mix instant coffee and I’d give him a rundown of the latest conversations. I did this—I cooperated—in order to prove to him that the KRL wasn’t a threat to anyone. To show him that, if anything, they were guilty of wasting time they could have spent helping out in community centers—that, by then, was a critique I’d started to bring up. But he told me that the Germans were picking up information that I wasn’t privy to. He told me to keep digging. When I asked what kind of information the Germans had, he said I didn’t have clearance for it, but he could vouch that they were planning something serious.”
As he drove, Martin checked the rearview, tracking cars and trucks. She noticed how he occasionally pulled into the right lane and slowed down, letting cars pass them, before climbing again to sixty. “Did you ever find anything?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “Nothing. Then one day, as I was getting ready to go to Friedrichshain for another meeting, I got a message from this guy. He wanted to meet me at the safe house. By then I was sick of his paranoia, and I was sick of trying to convince him. I was even thinking about telling everyone about him. Certainly Anika, who I’d been dating a month by then. I was in a bind, though—by telling them about the FBI, I’d be admitting my own collusion. But that didn’t mean I had to make life easy for him. I told him we could meet the next day. He said it was important, that he had new information. But I’d had enough. I told him to fuck off.”
“Was this the night?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, just watched the road. “Anika—she had put together contributions and ordered a new television for the apartment. It had been delivered a couple of hours before I arrived, and we set it up in the living room, where we usually talked. Ulrich—it was his apartment—turned it on, but the reception was messed up. The only channel that worked was playing these cartoons—sixties, faded color, Italian. The others had grown up watching them, so we left it on with the sound off, opened some bottles of wine, and got to talking.”
He paused again, looking off into the fields. “I remember the subject—nationalizing health industries. It wasn’t a particularly lively discussion; sometimes we were just there to drink. Anika sat with me, and eventually she got bored and told me that we should go back to her place. I told her, ‘Let’s give it a half hour,’ because I was hoping for something fresh to come up.” He grinned, but there was no happiness in the expression. “My phone rang. I took it out and realized it was Mr. FBI. I was worried someone would hear, so I gave Anika a kiss and hurried downstairs to the street. I told him that I wasn’t going to meet him, and he asked where I was. I told him, and he said, ‘Outside or inside?’ I said, ‘Outside.’ He said something I couldn’t understand because music was playing loudly through some window—‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’ Velvet Underground. So I said, ‘What?’ And then, right in front of me, Ulrich’s apartment exploded.”