June 3, 1973
Sunday
The Estate
JUST AT SUNSET on Sunday night, Newt left the boarding house by the back door.
He strode through the wet grass, which was growing quickly, still unmowed. The boarding house faces the stables, but he took the long way round behind the big house. It was a damp spring night, and the air was fertile and cool. Night was coming on quickly and stealthily. There was no moon.
He circled around the big house from the back and gazed up at the lighted windows. In the uncurtained window of the upper parlor, he could see Mme Marsden puttering. He walked on, keeping his distance from house. Flowerbeds of just-blooming peonies glowed with dew.
At the end of the garden plot, he stopped by a hibiscus bush. Through the last first-floor window, he saw a dark back and broad shoulders. Becket turned around, holding papers in one hand and a glass in the other. He was talking to two people—Victor and Rosewater, if the schedule Newt had purloined was correct. He checked his watch. It was 8:37 PM. He’d just set it by the radio clock in the boarding house dining room. If they kept to their schedule, they would be schmoozing until 9:15. He had plenty of time.
Newt circled around the front of the house. The wide front terrace, dotted with deck chairs, was deserted—the night was too cold. At last he reached the gravel driveway. He hurried back in the direction he had come, towards the boarding house and stables.
The stables lay low and long like a bluff in the hill. Newt paused on the edge of the driveway, turning to look back at the big house one more time. It was a blue-white mountain in the mist, rapidly turning gray in the vanishing sun. He saw points of light, but no people.
One light hung over the big front doors. In the fog, its white light made a solid cone over the entrance. It was best to walk in boldly, with no visible qualms. People usually overlooked a confident snoop. So he took off his glasses, put them in his pocket, straightened his coat and, with a last glance around, walked confidently towards the light. Crickets and frogs sang from the tall grass along the path. He ignored their warning song.
The inside of the stable was a cavern of poorly lit brown and gray blobs. The air was heavy with dust and hay, as if animals had actually lived in it some time during the last 50 years, which they had not. As Newt walked forward, some blobs resolved into a metal folding table. Behind it sat two vacant-eyed young corporals in U.S. Army fatigues, with a small radio murmuring on the table between them.
The fatigues seemed, to Newt, a bit extreme. They looked equally unimpressed with him.
“At ease, gentlemen,” Newt said, approaching jauntily.
“Who are you?” said the one on the right.
“Me? I’m the plumber,” he said.
They stared blankly.
“Oy, tough crowd,” Newt said, and clapped his hands together in a businesslike manner. “I need to take a look at the transducer, fellas. Make sure everything’s ready for tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Can we see some authorization, sir?” said the one on the left, putting an intonation of doubt upon the ‘sir.’
“Authorization?” said Newt, playing it amused. “I built the damn thing myself.”
They stared blankly.
Should have just snuck in a back window, Newt thought.
“We haven’t seen you before, sir.”
“What? Me? Of course you haven’t,” said Newt, throwing his back into some blustering. “I just got here. By charter plane! And you ask me for authorization? Like you don’t know who I am? Why don’t you call up Mr. Rosewater and ask him? Ask him about my authorization, and see how he—”
“Sir,” said the one on the right, cutting him off, “We can’t let you in without ID. It’s that simple.”
“Oh,” said Newt, settling down. “ID? That’s what you want?”
They stared.
“Of course. My mistake. I’ve got that.”
Newton produced his wallet and pulled out a card.
He put his CIA building pass onto the table and slid it to them. “Here you go.”
It was his picture, and his number, and it was genuine. It was just that the “TEMPORARY” in large red letters had been covered with circular color-code stickers, the sort that security guards love and that army corporals are unlikely to know. And the name the name under his picture said “Neilson Garrett.”
“Thank you Mr. Garrett,” said the one on the right, sliding it back. “Was that so hard?”
“You’ll need to sign in,” said the one on the left, indicating a log.
“So sorry. Of course.” Newt took his pass back and signed the log with his right hand and his fake name. Squinting to read, he noted Raleigh Becket’s name above. In at 8:20, and out at 8:31.
“It’s 8:47,” the guard on the right said, checking a clock Newt could not see.
Newt filled it in accordingly. He resisted the urge to salute facetiously and instead apologized again before heading down the dark hallway. He’d been issued the temporary ID card on a business trip to Langley two years before, and made some alterations to it afterwards. The trip had been disastrous. At least one useful thing had come of it.
With the door closed behind him, Newt pulled out his glasses and put them back on. The stable corridor that stretched before him was long and unlit. Behind the white bars of every stall was a pocket of pitch black. The only light came from the window at the end of the corridor. As he passed stall after empty stall, the uneven boards beneath his feet became temporary plywood, then concrete. Then he was pushing opening the door at the end of the corridor. It creaked like a rusty spring, making him jump.
Then Newt stepped inside and saw it.
✦
In the summer of 1963, both of them were exiled from London. Newt was put on full-time training and workshop duty in East Anglia. Some mania was possessing the service, and they were dispatching ops almost faster than they could train them. The frenzy came from the top, the untraced spasms of Vice Chief Robert Bowen’s anxiety as the Americans closed their net around him. Nobody would understand until much later.
At the Estate, Newt was being reckless. His technical workshops were disorganized and his trainee lectures were barely comprehensible. He drank late into the night on the roof with Caitlin Lightcap, and on later after she went to bed. But his poor job performance did not get him sent home to London, because Victor had asked for him to be kept out of Headquarters for a while.
Hermann, meanwhile, was on foreign assignment for the first time in his career. By day, he was a university adjunct in East Berlin. By night he conducted the analytical side of a dangerous surveillance operation on Wagner Airbase.
Cover was easy, for a German-born academic. By day, Hermann taught one class while Raleigh Becket, a young but capable op, led the surveillance mission on Wagner Airbase. By night, Hermann was the technical help.
All was overseen by case officer Charles Rennie, crooked old hand and war hero. Robert Bowen had discovered Rennie in occupied Paris, already a con artist of impressive repute, glad-handing German soldiers. He was a natural recruit, and he’d never lost his taste for the grift. He and Bowen looked oddly alike, and they used this passing resemblance to their operational advantage—people called them the Twins. After the war, Victor made three, and together, they went to Istanbul.
Ten years on, his comrades Victor and Bowen climbed floors in headquarters, but Rennie still preferred to stay in the field. Hermann was fairly certain this was because he was turning untaxed profits behind the Iron Curtain, but he had a streak of turn-of-the-century adventurer about him too. So, at home, Victor and Bowen watched his back and made sure he always got the best postings.
Shut up in his miserable little flat, Hermann worked by lamplight into the early hours of the morning. Whatever he had fled in London had followed him here. He shuttled from depressed campus to depressed flat locked in a state of perpetual fight-or-flight. Fearfully, he would recall the distrustful looks of his university colleagues, of strangers on the street. Bitterly, he would recall losing his composure some late night in the lab and scathingly saying, "Newton, you are not at all what I expected," and Newton's reply—defiant but hurt—"Then lower your expectations." He could hardly eat. The strain of fear and the strain of guilt were twin hands on his throat. He crawled into bed late every night, and lay awake exhausted and wired; he woke up late each morning in the oppressive sunlight, which grew hotter with each passing week.
Newt did not know the nature of his former correspondent’s mission. Even years later, he still did not know it. Hermann had never explained it to him.
At the same time Hermann was deciphering signals by lamplight, Newt was drinking with Lightcap on the roof of the big house on the Estate. Sometimes he would hang backwards over the edge of the parapet, Cait holding his ankles, and watch the dark green fields reel backwards into the sky.
The incident for which he had been exiled had occurred in early May. Newt had barged into Section Chief Victor’s office. He demanded to know why Dr. Gottlieb, of all people, was being dispatched to East Berlin. Victor did not understand his concern—to him, this mission was a step up for his protégé. With rising hysteria, Newt begged Victor not to send him. It was too late, Victor said. And anyway, Gottlieb had asked to go. Pleading turned to shouting, then cursing. Then Newt found himself transferred. When Caitlin asked, under the thin July moonlight, what was really wrong, he broke down crying saying that it was nothing, not important at all.
✦
Sunday
June 3rd, 1973
The room appeared to once have been a machine room of some kind. It was populated by mountainous shapes shrouded in canvas, ranging around the dim room like ghosts. There was only one light, which was suspended over a dining table by a string. The table was old and unvarnished, surrounded by six bentwood Windsor chairs. On it sat a glass carafe and six glasses, all clean and empty. The tall carafe gleamed like a beacon in the dull room, and drew attention to the fact that these glasses and this rustic furniture had, unlike the rest of the room, no dust upon them.
Newt, walking slowly over the uneven floor, absorbed little of this. He approached the table, pulled like a moth to a flame by the two glass document cases, one at each end of the table.
He reached the table, the light sloughed off the angled glass, and he saw the blueprint inside the case. He almost touched the glass in excitement, but stopped himself. It was the transmitter blueprint, as familiar to him now as all the blueprints of his own design.
Newt spent a moment reveling in vindication. He’d known it. He was right. This was what they were offering to the Americans.
And what were the Americans offering in return?
With a last loving glance, he rounded the table and examined the other case. The Transducer, read a helpful label. The case contained more specs, which looked much more complicated at first glance, but his attention was arrested by the other thing in the case: a rubber ear, containing a tiny black insert.
Newt pulled his sleeves down over his fingers and carefully lifted the glass, using his sleeves as gloves so as to leave no fingerprints. He picked up the ear and lifted the tiny black thing out.
The Transducer. He squinted at it. It was shiny and cylindrical, like a tiny beetle, no larger than his pinky fingernail. It had little legs at one end and a small wire at the other—an antenna?—making it look like a microscopic satellite. He glanced at the diagram, but was too impatient to read it. It had been inside the rubber ear antenna-end first, so he put it into his left ear antenna-end first.
He did it without thinking. At no point did he stop and wonder whether this was safe or smart. He didn’t know what it was; he just knew that it was for ears, and that he had ears.
It fit. It was so minuscule that it was hard to manipulate, so he poked at it until it felt settled. He wiggled his ear a little, then waited.
Nothing happened.
Was it on? Oh, shit, he had forgotten to turn it on. He tipped his head like a swimmer and tugged his ear by the lobe.
It didn’t move.
Frowning, Newt leaned further. He poked his pinky finger into his ear and jiggled it. The transducer did not budge. He scratched it with his pinky fingernail, and caught a shallow ridge. Then he yelped in pain.
Four needle points of pain burst in his ear canal, right inside his tragus. He jerked his finger away, breathing through his teeth. He looked at his finger—there was a tiny drop of blood on it.
He exhaled, but his breath was coming fast. The pain was mostly gone, but the thing was definitely stuck. The little legs, he thought. They must spring outwards. Fucking Americans and their fucking torture fetish, he thought.
It occurred to him then and for the first time that perhaps this was not surveillance tech at all. It was American made. It was not impossible that it was a torture device.
But why would the Brits want it? he thought, panicking. It couldn’t be. What could his transmitter have to do with a tiny torture device?
He looked quickly down at his watch. 9:01.
Oh, you’re going to be in so much trouble, he thought in a voice not unlike his partner’s, shoving the rubber ear into his pocket and looking around the room for something long, thin and metal. Wire. wire. Fuck. How hard could it be to find a bit of wire in a barn?
Are you going to rupture your ear canal by ripping this thing out? he thought to himself as he made for a canvas shape and yanked its cover up. It was a tool bench, thank the lord. He started opening drawers.
I’ve got two ears for a reason, he thought frantically, panting, opening another drawer full of mouse nests and slamming it shut. It was then that he heard footsteps.
Newt gasped and dove under the tool bench, pulling the canvas cover down behind him. The footsteps reached the door and pushed it open with a creak.
There was a pause. Then footsteps walked, slowly, across the wooden floor. They were coming from the left—Newt, disoriented by his muffled ear, realized they had not come in through the main door, by which he’d entered. Whoever this was, they had come in the back door.
The visitor approached the table, then stopped again. Newt was holding his breath. You’re dead. You’re fired. You’re dead and fired. Hermann will kill you. You’re dead.
Then the visitor resumes walking, businesslike, to the table. He heard a chair move, then an inhale across teeth. Whoever it was whispered something. Newt couldn’t hear what.
Then there was a wordless, vicious noise of frustration, followed by a horrible smash of glass breaking. Newt clapped a hand over his own mouth.
A sliver of glass skidded under the edge of the canvas, and glinted up at Newt.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
Something indistinct happened, but he didn’t really track it because his hearing was not at its best, and he was trying not to hyperventilate. Then the footsteps walked swiftly across the room, back the way they’d come, and shut the door.
After a time, Newt could only hear crickets and frogs, muffled and in mono. He slowly opened his eyes.
He crawled out from under the canvas, dizzy in the light. He checked his watch—9:12. He stumbled across the room in the direction the visitor had left from. If there was a back exit, he was taking it.
✦
1963
In August 1963, after nearly four months abroad, Hermann returned to London for a short bureaucratic visit. He pleaded family business to the university, took a Friday off, and boarded a plane to Sweden with his East German passport; in the Stockholm airport he sealed it in an envelope and posted it express to his P.O. box in London, then went into a bathroom and unstitched his English passport from the lining of his suitcase, pinned the lining back in place, presented the passport to the ticket agent, and flew to London.
He was on-edge in London. The whole weekend was an August downpour. He turned every corner at headquarters with apprehension, expecting to meet Newton at each turn. But he did not see him. He felt relieved, then, when unresolved, reckless.
He looked up his address and went to his flat.
But Newt did not answer his door, because he was not there. So Hermann went down his slick stone steps in the pouring rain, and into the phone booth in front of Newt’s building. Hermann dialed the Division directory, and was put through to the Training Estate.
✦
Rain hammered on the roof. Droplets drove down the panes, bright pin lights against the black night. They talked on the phone for nearly an hour. Hermann ran out of change, and they said goodbye. He hung up and stood in silence for a few moments in the booth, listening to the rain and the cars going by. It struck him that he did not know what to do with this reconciliation. He considered going home to his flat and writing a letter, but then thought he had better wait a day or two.
Hermann returned to East Berlin on Monday. He received a letter from Newt, and canceled an appointment he had made before his trip to London. He wrote Newt a reply. Summer turned to fall and they rekindled their epistolary relationship. Their letters were less fervent, and less constructed, because they were now, more or less, on the same page. And Hermann was vindicated in his long-held but long-unacknowledged conviction that Newton, by his letters, was impossible not to fall in love with.
✦
Fall drifted into winter, and then suddenly in December, the Bowen crisis struck. Newton was back in London, being excess personnel on the semi-seasonal Estate campus. But Hermann was out in the cold in East Berlin. Every network Bowen knew of was rolled up within a week of his escape—and Bowen knew Rennie’s networks intimately.
Newt had no idea, still, how Hermann had gotten out. He didn’t know what had happened in East Berlin. He knew it was bad. Charles Rennie had been killed in the chaos; Becket had gone underground for several months. But Hermann had, somehow, made it out safely.
On the Sunday morning after Bowen's escape, Hermann had called Newt long-distance continental collect and asked him, in a blank voice, to pick him up at Reading Station at 7:30 PM. Newt, who had been in a state since the news broke, said “Yes,” hung up, and briefly sobbed with relief. Eight hours later he was at the station.
Newt took Hermann’s bag under feeble protestation (his only bag was his briefcase) and led him outside to the street. He furiously crumpled the ticket on the windshield of his illegally parked car and pitched it into the gutter, then drove them both home, to Newt’s flat.
He lived in Kenton then, though not on Wheaten Street. Hermann said nothing about any destination, because they both knew it wasn’t safe. Nowhere was. But Newt’s was safer than his and anyway, in a matter of days maybe none of it would matter. The crisis was absolute. For all they knew, they’d be unemployed by tomorrow; maybe arrested; maybe killed by Razvedka agents who had learned their names from Bowen’s very lips.
On the steps outside his door Newt fumbled with the keys while Hermann stood painfully still, ostensibly keeping watch but looking, Newt knew, at nothing outside his mind. Glancing down at his keys, Newt saw Hermann’s white-knuckled hand clutching the handle of his briefcase. It was subtly shaking. Newt looked up quickly at Hermann, who met his gaze with a look of open fear. Newt just shook his head. “It’s okay,” he said, “Almost there.” He opened the door and held it open for Hermann to step inside.
When he turned around from bolting his many locks, Hermann was still just standing there in the narrow hall, coat on, shoes on, briefcase in one hand, cane in the other. Newt stepped in closer because the walls were pushing them in, caught his gaze and drew it up. “What is it?” he said, and Hermann said, “I thought we had more time.” He looked down and said again, “I thought I had more time,” the words trailing away to nothing as Newt put his hand on Hermann’s, telling him to put the briefcase down. Up this close, he could see that Hermann had lost weight in Germany.
Hermann did not move. Newt remembered it now as odd, that moment of self-doubt—rare for the Hermann he knew today, the Hermann who had since grown into someone much more sincere.
This Hermann had lived alone in his head for a long, long time.
And in that moment they both knew that if he had his way, he would go on stalling forever.
So it was Newt who stepped in close, into the silent space that surrounded Hermann, unbuttoned his coat, slid it off his shoulders, and hung it up on the hook beside his own. And then he put his hands on Hermann’s arms, steadying him or himself or both, and kissed him. After a year and a half of waiting it felt like something newer and stranger than he’d ever imagined. Hermann kissed slow, like he was just trying to catch his breath.
He stayed until the all-call on Thursday night. They returned to a deserted headquarters to find Victor at the collapsing center, lighting a match to cleanse it with fire.
✦
The inquest was conducted by Military Intelligence, their sister service and rival; there was nobody else to do it. The upper management of the Division was almost completely annihilated, save for Victor and the Chief. Three-quarters of the employees were corrupted, and purged. Either they were turned, or blown and useless. Many were arrested. The Estate inquest was the most merciless. Every employee present that weekend was interrogated and then fired—including Caitlin Lightcap—not for full-on treason, but for unforgivable incompetence. Mme Marsden alone remained. Meanwhile in Germany, Becket had gone underground, like many quick-thinking ops posted abroad. He resurfaced a few months later, was shaken down, and found clean.
The Chief held on because of his Whitehall connections, but he was deeply damaged by the scandal. Most of the Eastern European networks were completely razed. The American espionage partnership was on the brink of death.
The Division’s internal structure had been completely exposed, and had to be redesigned and rebuilt from scratch. Victor was chosen for that job, and promoted to the office of the man who had betrayed and destroyed him. Hermann, too, had failed him in some way; once his affable mentor, Victor would now no longer look at him. Hardware and crypto research were merged into one signals lab. Newt and Hermann, because of their success with the Blueberry, were appointed lead researchers: the specialists.
The next nine years passed. Lightcap got a miserable programming job at IBM’s London facility. Newt decided he did not like computers and shifted his focus to radio. Hermann stayed the same externally and changed dramatically inside. The Chief’s rebuilding strategy turned out to rest mostly on riding the Americans’ coattails. Victor appeared not to sleep. Newt invented the radio delay jammer and received a commendation for it. He and Hermann moved into flats on either side of the same block in Kenton. On one memorable occasion in 1971, Newt went on a consulting trip to Langley and then skipped the return flight to London. After two days of radio silence he phoned Hermann, drunk, from Coney Island, New York, apologized profusely, and promised to be home soon. He returned to Britain a week later with a brand-new motorcycle and was formally reprimanded by upper management.
Lightcap and Newt had coffee every weekend, and soon started a rock band. Hermann bought an upright piano for his flat so that Newton would come over to play it. Newt became secretly increasingly paranoid and began constructing his fortress of solitude. Hermann allowed himself to be convinced to watch Star Trek.
✦
June 4th, 1973
Monday
London
Hermann woke in the dead of night to the sound of someone pounding on his front door. It was pitch black in the apartment. He got up blearily and felt around for his cane in the dark, but he could not find it. The pounding continued. The buzzer sounded. Then again. Bent at the waist, drawn by the urgency of the sound, Hermann felt his way to his bedroom door and, leaning against the walls and doorways, made his way through the darkness to his front door.
The hall was dim with diffuse streetlamp light. He was awake now. He knew the layout of his flat, he knew the number of paces between each of the eight doors and which way each one opened. When he reached the front door, which was still being beaten, he dragged the umbrella stand in front of the space where it would open. Then he said, “Just a moment,” loudly, and unbolted his door. He drew back the chain, turned the handle, and lurched backwards away from the door, bracing himself for attack.
But no blow came. No assailant surged in and stumbled over the umbrella stand. The door drifted open, and revealed Newton, barely supporting himself on the wall, looking as nauseous and lost as a sailor about to be shipwrecked.
“Newton!” whispered Hermann in shock.
“Evening,” he managed, and then collapsed into Hermann’s unprepared arms.