TWENTY-FOUR

Rudolf Spangler, by any measure of justice, karma, or providence, should have been dead or in prison. He’d killed people, he’d had people killed, and he’d ripped untold numbers of lives apart with his actions. But here he was, sitting in a booth at the rear of Charlotte & Fritz, a restaurant in the five-star Regent Berlin hotel, sipping a glass of orange juice and reading a newspaper alone.

Not completely alone, actually, as his four-man security detail occupied the next table.

It was just before eight a.m., and Spangler looked ready for the day. His suit had been hand tailored in London, his eyeglasses crafted by masters in Milan and fitted to him perfectly. His mostly dark hair and his boyish face belied his sixty-six years on earth, and his urbane, almost effete mannerisms belied a heart so cold he could witness every man, woman, and child in sight die without losing his place in the article he was reading in Die Zeit on immigration policy.

East German by birth, he wasn’t recognized by any of the twenty-five or so Berliners and foreigners seated around him outside his phalanx of unobtrusive-looking bodyguards, but he’d once been quite well-known, if only for a short time, and if only several years ago.

Spangler had begun his life in obscurity, a child of a midlevel government bureaucrat who managed collective potato farms around the village of Oehna, halfway between Leipzig and Berlin. Young Rudolf’s brother and sister both went into agriculture, but he himself aspired to see the world. He went to university in the USSR, then took a job with state security, secured for him with the help of his father’s middling connections.

He didn’t see much of the world. He did, however, see anodyne border crossing stations all along the 850 miles of fence between East and West Germany, as well as prisons, interrogation facilities, and so many bland administration buildings he’d lost count by the age of twenty-five.

His fortunes changed a year later when he was promoted to Stasi headquarters in Berlin, where he began his meteoric ascension via a combination of sycophancy, intelligence, ruthlessness, and a strict adherence to the party doctrines of both his home nation and the masters of his home nation, the Soviet Union.

By twenty-eight he was conducting covert operations in West Germany and beyond, and by thirty-one he was second-in-command at the Main Directorate of Reconnaissance, the foreign intelligence apparatus of the agency. He carried the rank of colonel and was well regarded, respected, and always relied on by the few people in the building with higher rank than he.

There was no one in the vast Stasi HQ in Lichtenberg who would have bet against Rudolf Spangler taking over MDR, running the entire spy apparatus for East Germany, before his thirty-fifth birthday.

But then the wall came down, and it all went to hell for Rudy.

Almost overnight Spangler, young, powerful, and untouchable, became a recluse hiding out in a cheap apartment building in Dresden, waiting for the inevitable fallout when East German intelligence archives were cracked open and all the secrets of the Stasi were laid bare. And, just as he feared, it happened, and, just as he feared, he was forced to go on the run.

He made it to Poland, to Belarus, and then into Russia, but by then the Russians had their own problems, so he was carted back to Germany, where he spent four years in Landsberg Prison in Bavaria, before being released through a combination of old contacts and connections still in the reunified German government, and some luck that a few of the more incriminating files with his name on them had somehow disappeared.

Rudolf Spangler was still in his thirties when he moved to the Caribbean island of St. Maarten for a fresh start. He lived on the Dutch side and imported liquor for high-end resorts and restaurants. It was an eye-spinning fall from his former life, but he was, at least, alive, and after nearly a decade lying low, he again put the talents that made him a senior Stasi administrator to use.

As the world’s problems shifted from the scourge of communism to the scourge of organized crime and Islamic terrorism, Spangler slowly renewed contacts with former colleagues, many of whom had done prison time themselves for their crimes against their countrymen. When he felt the coast to be reasonably clear, he flew to Berlin. A man returning, not triumphant, but seemingly cleansed of the fallout of his past.

There he fostered new relationships with those in corporate intelligence all over the world, and by the beginning of the new millennium he’d opened his own small shop, doing risk assessments and consulting for midsized companies all over Germany. Grocery store chains, freight hauling concerns, telecom start-ups. His client list grew and grew, and within a few years he was being paid by Daimler-Benz, Siemens, and even the governments of Moldova, Slovenia, and Hungary for his services. He recruited case officers and analysts to keep up with the demand, location experts and subject matter experts and criminal intelligence experts and lots and lots of technical support personnel.

The German government harassed him some at first; there was no hiding that he was a high-level ex-Stasi man, and though he’d served his time for his crimes against the nation, there were those in power who felt he got off too light. But nothing stuck, and eventually his firm, Shrike International Group, named after the predatory bird, grabbed a coveted contract with the German government itself. Spangler consulted with the Federal Republic of Germany’s economic ministry, helping them gauge continued unrest in markets in the Middle East and Africa.

Shrike was growing and growing, and soon German intelligence operatives began leaving the BND, German foreign intelligence, as well as the BfV, German domestic intelligence, and joining the private firm.

And then the story broke.

The German magazine Der Spiegel found some papers, hidden by a Stasi functionary who stole evidence from HQ in those fast-moving dying days of the DDR in hopes of using them as a bargaining chip if ever captured. The man died alone and forgotten in a run-down flat outside Cologne, and among his things, incriminating official documents revealed fresh secrets of a foul past.

And one of the documents was a glowing performance review of Rudolf Spangler.

Colonel Spangler has exceeded every measure of the agency and the party. His operations in West Berlin in May of 1988 led to the unmasking of four senior agents of the Federal Republic of Germany on DDR soil, three of whom were expatriated, where they were executed in East Berlin by the KGB, and one of whom Spangler himself killed in a shoot-out in West Berlin.

It went on from there, and though no charges were ever filed for these particular crimes from back in the Cold War, he made the news, and he lost every single client in Germany, and all but a few others around the world.

And then, for the second time in Spangler’s life, he received a fresh start. He was asked to come to Dubai for a meeting, and there he was told a wealthy benefactor wanted to hire his European-based firm to keep tabs on the espionage activity of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The client, it was intimated, was the Israeli government, although there would be no official confirmation of this, ever. He was given what he assumed to be a cover story: a billionaire Israeli was worried that the world was too fixated on Sunni terror—Al Qaeda, the Palestinians, ISIS, and the like—and insufficient attention was being paid to the expansion of Shia influence around the world.

Spangler agreed to publicly resign from his own company, though in truth he would retain control of everything. For two years, the agreement went, Shrike would have only one client, and Spangler would recruit a special team to fulfill the client’s demands.

The work came with an incredible payout for Shrike International, enough for Spangler to not only get back on his feet but hire the best of the best throughout the world.

And the client was as good as his word. Over the next two years Spangler built a network all over Western and Central Europe to monitor known and presumed Iranian spies and to track Iranian nationals, no matter if they worked in a pizzeria in Belgium, a kindergarten in Germany, or an auto parts manufacturer in Italy.

Over time it became clear to Spangler that his mission was more than he’d been told. Many of the names his client gave him to surveil were actually anti-Iranian regime activists, groups of expatriates who wanted to overthrow the nation of Iran. He assumed the Israeli government was looking to recruit these Iranians as spies, but he also knew this skirted the law that private intelligence organizations were sworn to follow, that they could not themselves be involved in recruiting agents for a foreign power.

Spangler hid the aims of his clients, even from his employees. He kept senior Shrike Group operations officers apart, gave each one just a tiny soda-straw view of the overall mission, and endeavored to hire more employees from intelligence agencies around the world, specifically those who he felt would work on operations that were, to put it mildly, morally ambiguous.

This worked for a while, until his client upped the ante again and ordered Shrike to run operations against Western nations, not solely Iran itself. The rationale was not without merit, as far as Spangler was concerned. The EU had recently lifted many sanctions on Iran, giving the regime in Tehran the cash it needed to buy and build weapons, and that, in effect, made the EU Israel’s enemy.

But still, it was dirty work, a German spying on Germany, on Belgium, on France. But by now Spangler was in too deep to question the wishes of the one entity that had rebuilt him from the ground up for the second time in his life. He hired denied assets, kept them hidden from Shrike itself, and used them around Europe to do the dirtiest work.

He told himself he would do whatever his client wanted. Spangler was a former operative in the Stasi, responsible for death and misery to many; he had no personal qualms about being a spy against his own nation, against his own people.

He’d done it before, after all.

He only had to find employees who would do the same.