A Spy in Berlin: The Professional Friend Preview Read online

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 Washington. The papers the National Security Agency forced her to sign during her firing ruled out computer programming, cryptography and most fields involving higher mathematics anywhere in the English-speaking world.

  She decided to go back to graduate school, but when she applied, she realized how huge her mistake had been. No university receiving American government research funds would hire her. Not after they called that number on her NSA performance evaluation. Michael Usher had made sure of that.

  So she took a closer look at Germany and saw that most papers, including dissertations, could be written in English. Tuition and fees were one-tenth of those in the US and fellowships were generous. She chose Humboldt University in Berlin where the History Department was thrilled to have a graduate student who understood the mathematics invented by the men and women whose lives she intended to research.

  Berlin made forgetting what happened in DC easier. It wasn’t quite the same thing as being happy, but she held out little hope for that. Not with higher mathematics, her one true passion denied to her by NSA’s non-compete clause.

  She had however found a new friend.

  She sat watching her friend, Professor Dr. Dr. Robert Schultz scribble on the whiteboard in a classroom that had once been the bedroom of Prince Heinrich, King Frederick the Great of Prussia’s younger brother.

  No high-tech here. The room had probably looked the same when Albert Einstein had taught here. No overhead projectors, no beamers nor Power Point Presentations. Nothing to remind her of her past life in Maryland and suburban DC.

  German students usually didn’t say more than ‘good morning’ to their professors, but old Professor Schultzi was from the east, he had told her, when they bumped each other on the commuter train after class one night. East German professors prided themselves on being accessible, and so he became her friend, her only friend, and to quote Berlin’s gay mayor Wowereit on his own alternative lifestyle, “und das ist gut so”… It’s good like that.

  During their long S-Bahn commutes home she would explain the mathematics behind the neoclassical Schinkel churches and museums. ‘Divide the front of that building in half and you’ve got the height of the roof, Schultzi. That’s why the stairs work off to the side like that. It’s the Pythagoreans’ Golden Mean. The 1:62 ratio is the basis of good design in architecture, photography, even in film.’

  In return old Schultzi would dust off his repertoire of legends about the famous mathematicians, the Kroneckers and Kummers, the Einsteins and the Eulers, who had taught at Humboldt, when it had been called plain old University of Berlin.

  Karl Weierstrass had lectured in this very classroom. Back in the 1860’s the world’s eager young men of mathematics had struggled for standing room behind Fritzi’s bench. Women hadn’t been allowed in at all; not even Weierstrass’ greatest student, the Russian mathematician Sonja Kowa-lewskaya. He had scandalized the university and all of Berlin by tutoring the woman he considered the most brilliant mathematician of her generation during long walks along the city’s tree-lined streets, or over a slice of torte in Gendarmenmarkt cafés.

  Schultzi’s marker squealed on the whiteboard as he wrote.

  Fritzi wondered if old Schultzi could even imagine a twinkle attack-prone encryption algorithm, or a qubit, or an ion trap, or a nuclear spin memory, or any other part of the fabled Blue Widow, the quantum computer that could crack almost any encryption code.

  She had been warned to keep the knowledge of how deep her mathematics went to herself. But Schultzi had become her refuge, her rock, and as her faculty advisor, or Doktor-Vater, he needed to know her first degrees were in mathematics. Later, he had been kind enough to call her German good, and after trying out her French and Russian, he had asked the usual questions. Why history? Why not a doctorate in mathematics? Or in linguistics, since she seemed to have a knack for seeing patterns, rules… Had he actually said codes, or had she imagined it? Old NSA paranoias still haunted.

  Schultzi held up three slim books by famous theorists. “You must think about the uses of history, meine Damen und Herren,” he told the students. “Why do we write history? Why do governments subsidize its teaching in schools? Why do we have state archives? How do museums decide what to collect? Why do people pay huge amounts at auction for a piece of history; the letter signed by Shakespeare, when a paperback contains the same words, or an authentic impressionist painting, when a color print is as beautiful?” Fritzi had heard it before on long walks home through the Botanical Garden.

  Schultzi seemed to sense that she had secrets, but he never pried. His friendship was making her strong enough to look at where she had taken her wrong turn. Her doubts had begun long before she met Michael Usher. She should have listened to her parents’ warning; or asked herself, why she was earning so much more than any of her friends on that first internship at NSA’s Utah Data Center. The supervisors’ weaselly demands that she anesthetize her conscience should have had her running… Never mind what the data are being used for, Ms. Jordan. Leave the ethical concerns with your NSA sup-eriors. Only they have the big picture to keep the world safe in the Age of Global Terror.

  She became a perfectly greased cog deep in the twisted bowels of the NSA, working on a software program that analyzed banking transactions for probable terrorist activity until that day when she opened that drawer and found that untagged flash drive.

  How could she have been so naïve?

  She never dreamed NSA could be collecting private sector data.

  That changed everything.

  If she had never found that flash drive, she’d still be in Maryland helping the good guys.

  But she had found it
. Worse, she had examined its contents. Most awful of all, when a man named Michael Usher asked if she had looked at the data, she had lied and said, no.

  She tried to forget, but her mathematical mind had refused to let it rest. Data floated through her brain and clicked into place.

  She tried rationalizing it away. The world’s Gazproms and Rupert Murdochs didn’t always play nice. Why shouldn’t NSA collect information on the world’s multinationals? They were often richer and more powerful than entire nations. Perfectly normal to keep tabs on the foreign competition, especially in strategic industries vital to US interests. Aviation. Defense. Oil. In the War on Terror, combat wasn’t only on the battlefield. What if Airbus acquired Boeing, and America had to buy its fighter planes from France? NSA had to consider the strategic needs of the United States wherever they overlapped into the global private sector.

  In a world divided into good guys and bad guys, we are the good guys, she reminded herself.

  The slamming of a book on a desk in a Berlin lecture hall startled her out of her daydream.

  She watched Professor Schultz pick up another book, one with his name on the cover. “The history I write, meine Damen und Herren, is not the history you will write.” He dropped the book and picked up a third. “But before you become world-famous authors, please make time to read this short book by E. H. Carr on the uses of history.

  “You will write amazing things, meine Damen und Herren. Things your old professor can’t even imagine.”

  Like she had never imagined that an NSA director could be collecting confidential corporate communications. Once she saw it though, the puzzle pieces fell into place; the Washington Post feature on Michael Usher, the Bloomberg bio. Usher was a millionaire who called his three government stints “giving back” to the country he loved. He’d gone from a job at Lehman Brothers to Commerce, then back to Wall Street, this time to AIG, and followed that with two years at State.

  While serving as NSA’s Acting Assistant Director for Public Affairs, Michael Usher had culled confidential corporate communications intercepted by NSA spy satellites to grow his own portfolio. He bought shares in a company just before plans for a private equity takeover were announced, then sold them after the news drove up share prices. Even when he played hold ‘em, and waited for workforce reductions, wage freezes, and the elimination of legacy liabilities like employee pensions and health care to bring up share prices, he made money.

  No one wondered how one man could be so incredibly lucky, and no one did anything to stop him.

  By the time Fritzi understood how Usher had become a “Master of the Universe,” he had his flash drive back, and she was left holding only her own suspicions.

  Googling the words ‘NSA’ + ‘whistleblower’ told her that no one would believe anything a lowly number cruncher had to say about an NSA Director, even a Temporary Assistant Director for Public Affairs. In spite of the so-called ‘whistleblower protection laws’ enacted by Congress, NSA managers still made whistleblowers take a battery of psychological tests at NSA’s Office of Security, where they were routinely labeled as delusional, paranoid, or psychotic. If she doubted Google, she had only to read the UK Guardian’s account of Edward Snowden, stranded in the Moscow after his US passport was confiscated by his own country.

  She had chickened out. She had been a coward, without the backbone to take on NSA’s security apparatus. She couldn’t. Not without that flash drive.

  From then on, everything she did at NSA was tainted. She only wanted out. But it was too late. Though she never openly challenged him, the flash drive had put her on Michael Usher’s radar. She hadn’t understood how vicious he was until she applied to graduate school in Boston. Usher had altered her NSA Performance Evaluation and used her friendship with a Polish national to spread rumors that she was unpatriotic; that she couldn’t be trusted. That hurt. Her family understood patriotism in a way few families did. Her father was an Army veteran, and though his wife, Fritzi’s mother, had been born in Germany, she put their extended American family to shame with her elaborate 4th of July and Memorial Day celebrations.

  Fritzi resigned from NSA without a fight. No one in her family, especially not her father, could ever learn that she had left in disgrace.

  She had never lied to her NSA supervisors about Jan Pawlowski. She had mentioned him at every FBI vetting. Jan had even applied for American citizenship. For a few weeks, even after she found that flash drive, it had looked like she could have it all…her mathematics, Jan, and an NSA career.

  Then along came a spider who twisted the facts and spun a web of lies around her. It still galled how Michael Usher had personally inserted himself into her life by listing all of Jan’s crooked schemes in that meeting. Without that flash drive she had had to shut up and listen while he spun his awful web.

  She truly hadn’t known. Once she heard, she ended the relationship.

  Jan denied nothing when she confronted him, not even fixing the Swedish boxer’s championship fight. He hadn’t become bitter or tried to hurt her. He just left, his quiet dignity still intact.

  The spider, on the other hand, kept spinning lies so that Fritzi Jordan would never again work as a mathematician anywhere in the English-speaking world.

  If only she had been brave enough to break the law by making a copy of that flash drive.

  If only she had fought back like Edward Snowden had.

  Instead she had run away to Berlin.

  And she had found Schultzi, who refused to divide the world into good guys and bad guys. Not in the job description for a historian, he had told her.

  The Humboldt University classroom was quiet.

  Schultzi had stopped talking and writing. He was staring at her.

  So were the other students, Fritzi realized in horror.

  She had seen his lips move, but hadn’t processed the words. What had he asked?

  A bit of torn paper floated onto her notebook. It read, Napoléon.

  She looked up at the whiteboard. Idiot, she thought at the note writer. Of course, Napoléon. The dates told her Napoléon.

  Could the note writer provide a better clue? She didn’t dare look.

  Schultzi waited unflinchingly for the confirmation that his lecture had bored her.

  Better to be thought stupid, than to hurt her only friend’s feelings. She stayed silent.

  More seconds passed, endless seconds, then Schultzi himself came to her rescue. “Was halten Sie von unserem alten Freund Napoléon, Frau Jordan?” What do you think of our old friend Napoléon? An open-ended question. She could say almost anything without admitting her daydreaming. ‘Almost’ being the operative word.

  The lecture hall grew quieter.

  Words slipped out. “A scientific education might have kept him out of trouble and saved Europe a lot of hardship.”

  Had she missed the mark? She snuck a look at the note-sender. It was her stalker. He was her age, perhaps a year or two older, black hair combed straight back, razor stubble shading a perfect jaw line, striking blue eyes that lit up with amusement, and he was drop-dead gorgeous when he grinned like that.

  The other students laughed, but there was a smile on the old professor’s lips.

  Schultzi mattered most.

  He waved his hands for the laughter to stop. “Weiter…” True to the form they had developed on their long walks, he invited her to say more.

  Fritzi stood up and spoke. “Gaspard Monge, the mathematician used to tell a story… After Napoléon abandoned his men at Waterloo and ran away back to Paris, he told Monge about plans for a second conquest. This time of the sciences. ‘To leave behind works and discoveries worthy of a Napoléon.’ He planned to use his war booty to build an Institute of the Sciences in America; and needed the old man, Monge, to ‘put him abreast of the present state of the sciences,’ after which he would explore both North and South America, then build his institute in Québec, or in St. Louis, or Rio de Janeiro.”

  “Napoléon harbored
a secret love for the sciences?” the old professor asked.

  “Yes. Our ancestors would have avoided a lot of turmoil if his parents had been wealthy enough to forego the free education the army offered.”

  More student titters.

  “But science is a thing of the mind, Frau Jordan. Why did Napoléon think he needed to travel to America to do science?”

  “Europe was a disappointment to him, full of treacherous, small-minded people. That, he told Monge, was the real cause of his defeat at Waterloo. The reforms and the revolutionary new governments he had organized in central Europe were being overthrown and the same old governmental messes reestablished.” She slyly added a stray quote. “Napoléon said he would become a second Alexander von Humboldt, infinitely greater than the first.”

  Schultzi fought a chuckle. “How fortunate then, for us at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, that the English thought to confiscate his money and lock him up in the South Atlantic. If they hadn’t, perhaps no one would recognize our namesake today.”

  The students laughed again.

  “There you have your assignment, boys and girls. One thousand words on what Europe would be like if Napoléon hadn’t marched along Unter den Linden, right past our own university. To be posted on your history blogs by eight am Monday morning. “Would Italians, Germans and Poles still have formed states according to nationality? Or would central Euro-peans have found something greater to unite them? Ideals perhaps? Or economic alliances like the Hanseatic League of Cities, or the WTO? Don’t forget your links. See if you can send your dinosaur professor to a source he hasn’t seen before.

  “For Frau Jordan, an additional 1,000 words on how the vocabulary of the nation-state affected the development of scientific thought in central Europe. Perhaps, Frau Jordan, you will report to us on Monday that Napoléon left his mark on the sciences after all.”

  Great. There went her weekend.

  Schultzi resumed his lecture.

  Another strip of paper appeared on Fritzi’s notebook. ‘You owe me a Cappuccino.’

  She turned to the note writer and shook her head. She didn’t owe anyone anything. The dates had told her Napoléon, and she was finished with gorgeous-looking central European men, be they German or Polish.

  His smile said, he wasn’t taking no for an answer.

  Where had he come from? Until two days ago she had never seen him in any lecture, nor in the mensa at lunch, nor in the bookstore. What kind of a student missed so many lectures?

  She returned to her notes and jotted down ideas for her assignment.

  Napoléon would have decided what was ‘good’ science in the same way that he redrew new, ‘more logical’ political boundaries across Europe; and when political leaders decided what constituted good science, it rarely coincided with what scientists thought. Doubtless Napoléon would have found ‘French’ science more worthy than ‘German’ science.

  She would make her point with the imprisonment of Carl Friedrich Gauss whose crime was having France’s best minds publicly call him their ‘master in all things mathematical.’ Despite Napoléon’s supposed admiration of the sciences, he hadn’t been at all troubled that the young German was too poor to pay the war reparations that would have released him from his imprisonment in the oubliette. French scientists had been appalled. French mathematician Laplace even paid Gauss’s war tax, not once, but three times, before realizing that an anonymous fourth gift was the only way to keep the young professor from returning the money to Paris.

  Schultzi’s lecture ended, and Fritzi found her path blocked. Her stalker held out his hand. “Bliss. Ray Bliss. But everybody calls me, Bliss,” he said, adding in German, “Es freut mich.”

  American, Fritz realized, though the accent was barely perceptible. A wave of homesickness hit, keeping her from walking away. She shook his hand. “Friederike Jordan.”

  “Who likes to be called Fritzi.”

  Old NSA paranoias resurfaced.

  “I’ve sat behind you and Professor Schultz on the train,” Bliss explained, in English now.

  “Have you?” How could she not have noticed? ‘Walk away!’ she warned herself. ‘Now! You’re lousy with people.’

  Then he smiled a most amazingly American smile, as warm and welcoming as his accent, and her suspicions faded.

  “Coffee?”

  “Actually we, that is, Schultzi and I, usually head home now.”

  Bliss nodded in the old professor’s direction. “I don’t think he’ll mind.”

  Schultzi winked at her and packed his briefcase.

  “He thinks, I don’t have enough friends my own age. But I have reading to catch up on.”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Okay,” she said, and wondered how she could be agreeing.

  2 Berlin