4The Conference
FOR WHAT WAS NOW widely considered a highly productive professional partnership, Newt and Hermann’s acquaintance had begun in a rather quaint manner.
Hermann was born to a Jewish family in 1930 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria. They fled Germany when he and his sister were small, and settled outside London. His father Lars Gottlieb was a doctor, and an unforgiving sort of man. Conforming readily to the spirit of their new nation, he sent his children away to school and rarely saw them. Hermann eventually found his way to mathematics, and then to Cambridge.
It was an old recruiter, a don named Thurston, who spotted Hermann at Cambridge. Thurston was an ageless professor of Old English literature and Germanic philology; Gottlieb, reserved, intelligent, and multinational, caught his eye. He introduced Hermann to Victor, a war hero ten years Hermann’s senior and a rising star in the Division. Victor took a liking to him. He made the right introductions, handled the vetting and interviewing, and saw to it that, upon completion of his mathematics degree, Hermann Gottlieb entered training at GCHQ in Cheltenham. So began his illustrious cryptographic career, under Victor’s convivial eye.
Newt’s recruitment a few years earlier had been, characteristically, less passive. He was born to a large German-Jewish family in New York City, on the Lower East Side, in 1932. An emotional and intellectual terror from a young age, like many child prodigies, his case was taken up by an affectionate science teacher. His parents were happy to hand him off, at the age of 12, into the care of MIT.
Seven years later, he was selected for a yearlong research fellowship at Oxford University. A prodigy of American birth and German breeding, pursuing his doctorate in electrical engineering at the age of 19, he attracted attention on paper. His antics attracted even more attention on campus. He burst in uninvited at parties to give speeches on archaeological history or the Riemann hypothesis, or withdrew abruptly from formal gatherings to tinker in his room, where, if rumors were to be believed, he was inventing a new kind of telescope, a cordless telephone system, a personal-use missile detection radar.
Such rumors, though surely false, attracted the network’s attention. Oxford’s venerable intelligence tradition was rich with both targets and recruits; unfortunately, as a result, barely trained new recruits were the ones to surveille the targets. Newt noticed his watchers. He figured out who they were. Then he marched up to one and demanded, with a hierarchical misunderstanding he would never outgrow, to be taken to their leader. He wanted a job.
Within two years, Newt was the star child of the Division’s Hardware department. Absurdly young, he was a hot poker in the seat of hardware’s pension-age engineers, slow old men with secret medals from the wars. Newt’s mission was to drag the department out of the past and into the future, with no pause at the present, and though the veteran engineers fought him every inch, they were invigorated by this electrifying nuisance. With Newt in the hot seat, hardware churned out advances in surveillance technology, newer, faster, smaller.
Every couple of months, Newt went up to the Estate to train officers and ops on the new gear. It was at one of these workshops, a mild February weekend in 1962, that he was doing a puzzle under the table during a lull. It was the weekly number puzzle in the Sunday Times, which he had pinched from the boarding house breakfast room that morning. He complained to his neighbor, a brightly dressed officer with a crooked jaw, that the Times number puzzle had dropped sharply in quality since the new year.
“I used to spend all afternoon on these,” Newt said. “Now they take me 5 minutes.”
“That bad, is it?” said the officer.
“Awful,” Newt said with American frankness. “Either the puzzle department is under new management, or the old manager had a stroke.”
“Actually, he quit,” said the officer, who ran the German desk in London Headquarters and whose name was Victor. “I know him.”
“You do?” Newt said. “Why’d he quit?”
Victor leaned in confidingly. “His work’s gotten too busy.”
Catching his meaning with surprise, Newt exclaimed, “He works here?”
“As a matter of fact, I hired him myself,” Victor said with an easy smile.
Newt, not one for internal regulation, asked for the puzzlemaster’s workname and posting. He wanted to write him a letter thanking him for a consistent challenge. Victor, genial son of the old boys’ network, heir to mantles passed down simply by virtue of knowing the right people, was happy to share the information.
Hermann received the letter a week later, addressed to his workname and signed with a stranger’s initials. Thus began a confidential correspondence under cover of pseudonyms.
✦
Saturday
June 2nd, 1973
The Estate
The Estate was west of Norwich, a half an hour’s drive from the Broads. It was by all appearances a country manor, with a sizeable collection of outbuildings and acres of fields and forests. An officer named Marsden had left it in trust to the Division sometime between wars. His much younger wife, imperious Frenchwoman Mme Marsden, became the caretaker. For the next 30-odd years, it had served as the Division’s training center, where new operatives learned and old officers refreshed their skills. Since the Bowen affair in 1963, its security clearance had been severely downgraded. These days, it was primarily a temporary residence—a safe house, a place to debrief, and occasionally, a venue for diplomatic functions.
The conference with the Americans was Friday through Sunday. If all went well, it would be followed by a high-level treaty meeting the next weekend. It was top-tier only. The terms and stakes of the meeting were top secret, and so, widely known around the grounds.
Newt spent the first two days of the conference collecting intelligence. By Saturday, he knew several things. He knew the CIA gadget was extremely valuable. He knew the Brits were trading something of equal importance for it. And he knew where both gadgets were being kept: inside the conspicuously guarded stables.
Luckily for Newt, he was quartered in the boarding house, which was spitting distance from the stables. From this position, he had occasion to learn something else: Case Officer Raleigh Becket was in attendance.
He was not on the roster for any of Newt’s CO workshops. So what was he doing here? And why was he going in and out of the stables?
Becket was the head of the Austria station, if Newt’s memory was correct, which it always was. He was young, handsome, ex-Marines. Hermann had worked with him on his first and last away mission. Becket never seemed like a spy to Newt, except in the most vulgar, Fleming sense. He was too conspicuous, too shiny.
Becket also had the distinction of being the only named officer in the top secret file Newt had received in February. Over the last few months, Newt had given that file quite a bit of thought.
On Saturday, Newt finished his workshops and considered his options for the afternoon recess. Entering the dining room, he was accosted by the hovering Mme Marsden. She was a small, energetic elderly woman; age had not dimmed the vividness of her wardrobe. She still wore the same pearls Newt remembered.
“Newton, dear, how are you?” she asked. “I have been so busy, I have hardly talked to you—we have not been so busy here in years! Your room is comfortable? Newton, you bad young man, you never visit me anymore. It gets so lonely out here, you know, without the trainings. You should ride up your motorcycle more. Bring that girlfriend, how is she?”
“Cait’s not my girlfriend,” Newt patiently reminded her. “Mme Marsden, don’t you know that I’m married?”
She gasped. “Married?”
“Yes! Married to my work!”
“Bah!” She slapped his arm with her ring-studded hand. “One of these days you must settle, Newton. You are getting old. You will not have this hair forever. You must use it to attract a wife before you lose it.”
Newt laughed.
Mme Marsden squeezed his arm. “This is why I miss your visits, Newton. You smile and laugh, not like these Englishmen—they never do. We French only laugh, we do not smile. Still, one misses it.”
Newt smiled fondly. “Mme Marsden, you’re such a flirt. Caitlin is doing well, though, thank you for asking. We play music together. We have a show in London on Wednesday. You should come see us play.”
“London! London is not good for my lungs,” Mme Marsden said. “Or my headaches. Or my heart. Does Caitlin still work in the Black Chamber?”
Newt raised his eyebrows. Is she losing her memory?
“No, Mme M. She worked there before she worked here. But she was fired. She was here during the...”
“Ah, of course, of course.” Her face closed off abruptly, like blinds had fallen. “Terrible business,” she murmured, eyes roaming away from him.
“Yeah,” was all Newt came up with. She was a proud woman, after all, and the Bowen affair had taken place on her watch. Even to say his name to her felt like a vile insult.
“He was always good to me, you know,” she finally said, lifting her eyes to Newt’s. “Those boys, they always were. The twins and the tagalong. There were so many summers they spent here, training their recruits. I miss them all, the trainees. I miss seeing them grow. Most of all, do you know who I miss, Newton? That Charles. His ‘twin.’ And you know, I miss Victor too. It is like they are all gone.”
“Victor's still here,” Newt said.
“He is not,” Mme Marsden said. “Victor is gone.”
Newt looked away.
“Newton, mon cher, your room. It is comfortable? I am sorry to put you up in the attic with all the spiders, but the beds are more soft there.”
“It’s great,” Newt said, putting his hand on her arm. “Very cozy. I don’t think my neighbor much cares for me though.”
“Your neighbor? Mr. Rosewater? He was rude to you?”
Mme Marsden turned, squinting across the crowded dining room. She spotted him.
“Ah. There he is. By the French doors.”
“Is he American?” asked Newt.
“He’s the American, mon cher. He is the liaison,” she said. “This is why I give him the nice rooms. But was he rude to you, Newton?”
“Oh—it was nothing,” Newt said, craning his neck to look at the liaison. He was thin and smooth, with the youthful vitality of American military bureaucrats. When he replied to someone’s greeting, Newt could see his gold fillings flash across the room. “...Pounding on my door this morning asking if I had used up all the hot water. Calling me a nancy-boy. That’s all.”
“Hot water!” she said, scoffing. “He probably used it all up himself. These Americans. So decadent.”
“No wonder they hate the reds so much,” Newt said. “Do you know what his title is?”
“He is the R&D Director for the CIA,” Mme Marsden replied promptly.
“The whole CIA?” Newt was impressed.
“Yes,” Mme Marsden said. She shook her head. “I should have given him a room in the basement with his colleagues.”
✦
What Victor had told Newt in 1962 was entirely true. Hermann had been forced to resign his enjoyable side job as puzzle editor because he was being fast-tracked for promotion in his top secret posting in a top secret lab at Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire. There, GCHQ shared a surveillance base with the Americans, and their cryptography partnership was being championed by none other than Washington liaison Robert Bowen.
When he received Newt’s first letter, Hermann was close to drowning in this institutional riptide. He was paddling out in the waves without a map or star or white whale to keep him company, and so he did something peculiar and unadvisable with the letter: he answered it.
Within a month they were writing twice a week. They were careful to avoid work topics, particularly Hermann. His little North Yorkshire flat was government-owned, so their letters could be read at any time. His correspondent never asked about the particulars of his work, nor detailed his own, and Hermann appreciated his tacit respect of this boundary. From this unspoken understanding he extrapolated swaths more. Hermann roamed the slopes and swamps of his lonely psyche, plucking material for his letters; he mistook his sparse clippings for meaningful confessions, and he mistook his own footprints for his correspondent’s.
Back in London, Newt was invigorated by his challenging and clever correspondent. Finally, he thought, he had found a peer in his field; not some arthritic engineer and not some hungry young ladder-climber. The puzzlemaster seemed equal to every topic Newt threw at him, except for modern music—he appreciated Newt’s speculations on paleontology, his inflammatory opinions on classical composers, his bizarre application of subjective idealism to the Space Race. The puzzlemaster returned with some fascinating ideas on the philosophical implications of transfinite math and the first compelling case for opera that Newt had ever heard. They also shared a passion for the Riemann hypothesis, and Newt divulged the truth of his personal project at Oxford: he had been trying to build a calculating machine to find Riemann Zeros.
Sitting on his small wrought iron balcony above the courtyard in North Yorkshire, Hermann spent whole evenings drafting his replies. Newt devoured each on his crowded commute, drafted his reply in his head all day at work, and typed it out in a single draft when he got home. For Newt, their correspondence was the natural extension of the Sunday puzzle. Hermann did not view it with the same pragmatism.
✦
Hermann was one of the specialists on the Division team being prepared for the new American cryptographic partnership. It was all part of Bowen’s project to bring the American and British networks into closer alliance. London smiled on Robert Bowen like a proud father, and as he drew up the charters in Washington, glasses were clinking in Moscow. But abruptly, in January of 1963, the Americans backed out of the partnership. A discreet emissary flew in from Washington and met with the deputy head of the Foreign Office in a soundproof room in Whitehall; when they emerged, the charter was scrapped and Bowen recalled to London.
His program terminated, Dr. Gottlieb was recalled from North Yorkshire. After ten months, Newt’s correspondent fell abruptly silent; his letters went unanswered for one week, then two, then returned, roughed up and stamped: “No Forwarding Address.”
✦
Saturday
June 2nd, 1973
The Estate
Newt returned to the attic for the late afternoon recess. Was his neighbor really the American liaison? That would be a stroke of luck. He walked by Mr. Rosewater’s door on his way to his room, and paused.
It was ajar, which meant he was inside. Or was he? Newt stood still, but heard nothing within. He couldn’t see anything interesting through the crack. If he just poked his head in…
Footsteps sounded on the stairs and Newt hastily resumed forward motion. He went into his room and shut the door.
He collapsed on his twin bed under the eaves and read Fellowship for a while. Then he slid off the edge of the mattress into the narrow space between the bed and the wall. Lying on the scratchy carpet, he investigated the crossbeam under the headboard. A handful of initials were carved into the wood, some of them forty years old. He gazed at C.R., wondering if it was Charles Rennie, Hermann’s old CO.
Newt settled on his side and watched a spider at work between the beams. Lying there in the stuffy attic air, he spun thoughts of Becket and the blueprints, the treaty, the stable, Mr. Rosewater’s gold teeth. He drifted into a doze.
Newt woke to the sound of footsteps in the creaky hallway. “Check the other rooms, will you?” said an American voice, and he heard someone open the door next to his. Mr. Rosewater was home.
It was still light, but Newt, dazed, could not see the clock from behind the bed. His mouth was very dry. He was about to stand when his door opened. Under the bed, he saw shiny patent leather shoes, and then the door closed again. “Empty,” said Raleigh Becket’s voice.
Newt heard Becket’s feet walk next door, then Mr. Rosewater’s door closing and locking.
Awake now, he climbed as quietly as possible onto his bed. The foot of his bed was against Rosewater’s wall. He knelt at the end and pressed his ear to the wall. Too muffled.
As carefully as he could, he climbed off the bed and crept across the room to the dresser. Fortunately, it was a small room; unfortunately, it was a creaky attic. Teeth gritted, he unbuckled his surveillance demo kit and rooted around until he found what he was looking for: his mechanic’s stethoscope.
Newt crept back to the bed and put the stethoscope into his ears. In a pinch, the analog tricks still worked best. He put the other end to the wall and listened.
“...the transmitter blueprints.”
“Of course. But I gotta say, I’m much less interested in the blueprints than in the Greenwich file.”
“Yes, sir?”
“He was your guy, wasn’t he, Becket?”
“Birch?”
“Who? No—Greenwich.”
“Oh. Oh, yes, sir. I was his contact.”
“Will I get a look at that file? Maybe even the unredacted version?”
“Yes, sir,” said another voice. “The courier is bringing it up along with the blueprints tonight.”
“Good. I want to see it before the recess. And I’ll make sure you gentlemen get a look at the transducer before tomorrow night.”
There was a pause, or something was happening that Newt couldn’t make out.
“Right. Great. I’ll see you fellas tomorrow evening.”
“Sir.”
Fellas? Who was the other speaker?
There was a sound of someone standing up, and then footsteps to Rosewater’s door. It unlocked and Becket walked by his bedroom door and down the stairs.
Newt took the stethoscope out of his ears. He slid off the bed and into the gap again. He wedged himself in between the bed and the wall, legs folded, chin on knees, thinking.
The conversation all but confirmed his suspicions: this CIA-Division tech exchange involved the transmitter he had glimpsed in February. Becket’s presence was the first definite clue, but the mention of Greenwich made it certain.
The transducer...
Newt needed to take some precautions first. He checked on the spider (web complete, spider MIA), then unfolded himself and climbed out over his bed. He grabbed his jacket and wallet and barreled out the door—and nearly ran right into someone.
“Excuse me,” snapped Preston. He was coming out of Mr. Rosewater’s room.
“Oh!—Preston?”
“Dr. Geiszler,” said Vice Chief Victor’s assistant. “Do you have some business up here?”
“Sleeping?” said Newt. “This is my room.”
Preston threw a glance at the room behind him, and Newt became aware of a quiet conversation going on inside. He followed Preston’s glance through the half-open door.
Victor was in there.
Newt paled slightly. Had he been in there, the whole time, without saying a word?
He looked back at Preston, who was giving him a warning look.
“This is Mr. Rosewater’s room, isn’t it?” said Newt.
“Chatting with the guests, are we?”
“Not as such,” said Newt, putting his hands in his pockets. “We had some words about the hot water this morning.”
There was the sound of a chair from inside the room, and Preston flashed Newt another warning look.
“I suggest you keep from bothering the American liaison, Geiszler. We don’t need to remind you how important this conference is.”
“Right,” said Newt. For a second, he’d felt curious to see the Vice Chief outside his office for once—but self-preservation won out. “I’ll be going then.” He started walking backwards.
“Where?”
Footsteps sounded from behind the door.
“Into town,” said Newt. “To call H—ome. Call home. And do some errands. Do you need anything? Stamps? Smokes?”
“Thank you, no,” said Preston coldly.
“Right then,” said Newt, and turned tail down the stairs just as he heard the door open.
He hastened off the Estate and into town. It was a short ride on the Bonneville, and the cool spring air calmed his nerves.
✦
In January 1963, Hermann returned to London. Victor seized the chance to have his protégé transferred into his section. Bowen, too, was back in London for the first time in a few years. Following the unknown unpleasantness with the Americans, the Division cleared Bowen and petulantly promoted him—thanks in no small part to Victor’s lobbying—to Vice Chief.
In London, Dr. Gottlieb’s focus shifted from the advancement of Division encoding methods to the unraveling of the Razvedka’s. Victor had an exciting new project to put him on.
A year before, a Soviet cipher clerk had defected, codenamed Raspberry. In his lengthy debrief in a Canadian hotel room, Source Raspberry revealed that there had been a manufacturing error with the Russians’ onetime cipher pads. They had accidentally manufactured duplicates of a set. 10,000 formerly unique encryption keys were now circulating in duplicate. On their own, messages from a onetime pad were unbreakable. But two messages from the same encryption key could, if matched, be deciphered.
Source Raspberry said most of them were in use in Eastern Europe. Victor was chief of the German desk, so Bowen handed him the reins of the so-called “twotime pads.” The project: construct a system to detect reused encryption keys. What they needed was not just a quick-calculating computer, but a computer with memory. At the time, no such machine existed in Britain.
Victor christened the operation Project Blueberry and assigned it to the Hardware lab. He was still in need of a mathematician when Hermann transferred back to London. Victor was quick to add his protégé to his pet project. At their semi-weekly status meeting, Victor introduced Dr. Gottlieb to Project Blueberry’s lead engineer, Dr. Newton Geiszler.
It had been two months since their correspondence was interrupted. Newt was confident that the puzzlemaster would write him back eventually. Given their work, Newt reasoned, he had probably been deployed to somewhere unreachable. For Newt, the mystery was on the back burner. And Hermann had no idea where in their vast organization to look for his anonymous correspondent.
That day, they shook hands as strangers.
They took an instant dislike to each other.
A week of intense friction followed. Then, in their third status meeting, Hermann spat out what Newt recognized, with a terrible sinking heart, as a turn of phrase from one of his letters. Hermann snapped at him, in front of everyone, to “cease his American palavering,” and Newt saw in his mind’s eye the longhand script criticizing a colleague at Menwith Hill base using the exact same terms. This man too was a cryptographer recently returned from a top secret posting in North Yorkshire. This was him, Newt realized. This was his correspondent—and he hated Newt.
✦
Hermann reacted poorly to the news.
It is a hard climb up out of the gulf between reality and fiction; Hermann refused to make it. He stayed at the bottom, subsuming his disproportionately crushing disappointment. Newt received, but could not parse, the distress signals he was broadcasting. Why was he so upset? Hermann himself did not know why. The real Newton had barged in and obliterated his own vague, idealized shadow. Before Hermann’s eyes that imaginary person vanished into the realm of forgotten fiction.
Newt had no idea how to deal with Hermann’s silent but intense reaction. With equal but noisier intensity, he focused everything on their work.
In circuit diagrams and failed prototypes, reams of data, algorithm after algorithm, they circled each other. Failure was followed by minor success, which was followed by major setback and days of arguing. Over two months, Newt designed a skull for the brain Hermann was writing. In March, Newt and his team began to build it. By the end of March, the Blueberry was complete. Its memory storage unit took up an entire room. Hermann installed his painstakingly constructed code, and it went online.
The Blueberry was designed to detect an OTP match, not to decipher it. Copious amounts of data—thousands upon thousands of undeciphered enemy messages—had to be fed in before a duplicate could be discovered. When one was found, the computer’s output would be the transmission IDs of the two messages which matched. These two enciphered messages were to be located in the records, and then taken upstairs to the busy coding bay, where a clerk would decipher both by hand.
For weeks, under the anxious eyes of its creators, the Blueberry swallowed and digested every OTP-encoded message since WWII. After a week, it had processed and stored every message up to 1950. By the end of week two it had reached 1959, and Hermann’s anxiety had nearly reached the breaking point. But it was here that they got their first match. An OTP from 1942, reused in 1959. The operation was a success. Their machine worked.
Up until then, Newt had harbored hope of reconciliation. This hope was fused to the success of the project: if he could build the Blueberry for Hermann, that would make it up to him.
What “it” was, Newt didn’t quite know.
Nor did Hermann. But he didn’t stay to find out.
Newt returned to the lab from their final debrief meeting to find Hermann emptying his temporary desk. The sight hit him in the gut. With no idea what to say, he aimed at something unimportant—something from the meeting—and began throwing darts at it wildly. Hermann in turn called him unprofessional, like always, and Newt told him he was impossible to work with, like always, even though it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all—the opposite was true. Working with him had been better than anyone, better than he had imagined from his mythical correspondent, and he could not say so, he could not say it. And Hermann, by all evidence, did not feel the same.
Three weeks later, Hermann was in East Berlin. Vice Chief Bowen was sending Charles Rennie on a surveillance mission, and Rennie needed a technician with coding expertise who spoke German. Hermann had volunteered. An unidentified object had crashed in the countryside, east of Berlin.
✦
Saturday
June 2nd, 1973
London
In Hermann’s flat on Saturday night, the phone rang. He let it ring once. There was no second ring. He waited, and after a 30-second pause it rang again. He picked up and listened: three clicks, a two-second pause, then four taps. The line went dead.
“Typical,” he muttered irritably, almost before hanging up.
Outside the air was cool and foggy, with a humid tang of rain. He was still buttoning his coat as he hurried out his front door and limped around the corner. The phone in the booth was already ringing.
“Four minutes is not enough time for me to walk to this one, you nitwit,” he said angrily into the mouthpiece, shutting the glass door behind him. “I barely made it.”
“Oy, you’re old,” replied Newton’s tinny voice. “Who even says ‘nitwit’ anymore? Old on two counts.”
“Need I remind you—”
“Focus, Hermann, I don’t have very much change. I need a favor.”
Hermann sighed in a put-upon manner that said, Go ahead.
“I need you to hide something for me.”
“Oh, excellent. Of course, Newton, please help me jeopardize my career. And yours as well. My pleasure. Do go on.”
“Yeesh, relax,” said Newton. “It’s a personal thing, not a work thing.”
“As if there is any real division between the two,” Hermann snapped.
If only you knew, Newt thought. “Bad day huh?” he said instead. “Did one of our colleagues do something untoward? Like ask about your weekend plans?”
“Please get on with it.”
“It’s in my apartment,” Newton said, sounding like he was looking around. “In the spot. Green box.”
“What spot?” Hermann said impatiently.
“You know where I mean!”
“I do not make a habit of visiting your nightmare of a flat, as you well know.”
“Hermann, I’m not saying over the phone, okay? Fortress of solitude. You’ll figure out where it is. Green box. Don’t touch anything else. Especially not in the workshop. And don’t forget about the lights.”
“I won’t,” Hermann said, remembering the time he did forget about them.
“And once you’ve got it, can you—”
“Yes, yes, I’ll take care of it.”
“And one more thing?”
“Yes?” said Hermann shortly.
“...Would you check on my birds?” said Newt.
“Jake has them?”
“Yes. Just make sure he has enough food and everything.”
“Yes—fine,” said Hermann. “Are you going to tell me what all this is about?”
“Not over the phone,” Newton said again.
“Then will you—”
“Not via post either. Just wait til I get back. I’ll explain.”
“On Monday night?” said Hermann, aiming for a put-upon delivery but delivering something more like gloom.
“Aw,” said Newt, with an air of realization. “You’re cranky ‘cause you miss me.”
“Is that all, Newton?”
“Yes, th—”
Hermann hung up.
Hermann stood in the booth a moment longer, nervously running his thumbnail up and down the ribbed metal phone cord.
The street outside was empty. Hermann took a detour to return to their block via Wheaten Street. Personal, he had said, a personal thing. Hermann did not believe him.
It had been ten years since he was trained as an operative, and almost as long since he had put those skills to use. The tricks, the vigilance came back to him now like it had been no time at all.
He saw no watchers outside Newton’s building, but walked past it without stopping and went home.
Then, instead of going upstairs to his flat, he descended into the basement. He exited the building's back door and hurried around the periphery of the courtyard. He made a quick check in the alley, found it empty, and crossed. He hurried around the other courtyard to the back door of Newton’s building, and with his copied key and a last look around, he let himself in.
Hermann climbed to the third floor. He did not like going to Newton’s flat, his "Fortress of solitude." The disorder of his laboratory-office in the Century basement was one thing (and what a thing it was). But the chaos of his flat had an... undefinable menace. Newton calls me paranoid, thought Hermann (trying one lock, failing, cursing the man under his breath, trying the second, wishing for a world where his partner did not have three separate locks with three separate keys on his one front door), yet it was Newton who had turned his flat into a bugged and bear-trapped labyrinth.
Hermann turned the doorknob and slid his thumb over the bolt so it would not pop back out (if it did, an alarm would sound), stepped inside, and carefully closed the door. He picked up the little wooden slivers that had fallen from the lock bolts and pocketed them—another security signal, to replace before he left. If the slivers were missing, the owner would know the locks had been opened and re-closed in his absence.
Newton’s combination of espionage tradecraft and near-farcical mad scientist tactics unnerved Hermann. It unnerved him, too, he thought, removing his shoes and stepping, socked, over the tripwire just past the welcome mat, that he had so much security for no discernible reason. If, God forbid, some inquiry did ever give the Division reason to search his home, their suspicions would immediately rise to red alert, simply from the outrageous apparatus of the place—all of it to hide, as far as Hermann knew, absolutely nothing.
Hermann flipped the switch outside the living-room-turned-bedroom to stop the sensor-activated floodlights from blaring. In typical Geiszlerian style, the rooms had been shuffled and repurposed. Newt’s unmade bed and half-open dresser lived in the front room. The wide street-facing windows were half-blocked by an overflowing personal bookshelf full of records and pulp science fiction. Music leaked from a radio in another room. Hermann turned on his flashlight.
It was very annoying of Newton not to tell him where to find this mysterious green box, though in a way Hermann desired the challenge. The box was probably in a sentimental or somehow personally significant place, because unlike Hermann, Newton had never properly trained as an operative. So, stepping over dirty discarded clothes, he looked inside of Newton’s upright piano, the bench, his empty guitar case. He felt behind all the books. He removed What’s Going On from the turntable and checked for secret compartments in the record player. He opened the back of the television set and found a short-range signal delay jammer—of Newton’s own design, but stolen from work. The delay was set to two hours, he noted. Newton had probably installed it so as to watch television shows after their broadcast hour.
Next Hermann shone his light on the door of the original bedroom, now Newton's workshop. Locked. The music was coming from inside—Newton’s preferred pirate radio station, he guessed from the sound of 'Won't Get Fooled Again' by The Who.
The workshop was the core of the bizarre little apartment. Hermann had never been inside it. When he looked at its lock, an apprehension of untraced origin tugged him away. Had Newton given him the key? Was it on his overcrowded keyring?
Hermann chose not to find out.
Instead he entered the kitchen, wondering how different the growth rate of communications technology in the British intelligence service would have been if it received the full brunt of Newton’s interest. Fortunately for communists everywhere, his laser strength interest remained laser-pointed at his personal tinkering.
The kitchen was primarily a greenhouse and a storage space. Hermann’s flashlight passed over a large telescope and a dissected motorcycle engine. Over the counter and sink hung a truly impressive wall of foliage. His light revealed a hose hooked up to the faucet. Probably hooked up to a timer. One mystery—Who waters Newton’s plants while he’s gone?—closed. Another mystery—How, if at all, does he drink water?—opened.
And does he eat? Then I'll get on my knees and pray... sang Roger Daltrey from the other side of the wall... We don't get fooled again... Otherwise, all was silence. No furnace or pipes hummed. Nor did the refrigerator.
The refrigerator.
Hermann threw open its door. No light turned on. Unplugged and empty. He stifled a snort at this—Freeloader, he thought, not without fondness—and opened the drawers. Empty.
He felt around the floor of the refrigerator. There—a clasp.
From below a dummy panel in the base of Newton’s unused refrigerator, he drew a small slim box. It was green. Triumphant, he replaced the panel, shut the fridge door, and examined the box by flashlight.
The green box weighed a couple ounces and rattled enticingly. It had a combination lock, four digits, which Hermann opened easily. He overturned it into his hand.
A small aluminum object fell out. Hermann could not immediately identify it. It was gunmetal gray, curved like an ear or a waning moon. He settled it in the center of his palm. It fit like it was meant to be there. He thought he could recognize Newton’s handiwork, but it was... neater than his usual designs. It was entirely closed up in its metal shell—the only visible part was a button on the inner curve and two collapsed antennas. If it was a radio, it was probably a transmitter, AM, with a minuscule range.
If it wasn't a radio, well, then he had no idea what it was.
Hermann put it back in the box, snapped it shut, and left the apartment, resetting all the alarms and signals as he went.