8Greenwich
WHILE HERMANN WAS WORKING in the lab under a storm cloud of institutional anxiety, Newt was at home on Airedale Street, struggling against an enemy of similar magnitude: boredom.
Really, he was a self-motivated person, he reflected as he sat on the kitchen floor among the pieces of Hermann’s disassembled toaster and clock radio—and thank goodness for that. Even in the face of quarantine-lockdown in a house with no television, no interesting books, and no records with words in English, and even in the face of intermittent vertigo of unknown etiology from a device of unknown purpose in his ear canal of unknown destiny—even here, now, he was resourceful.
Hermann was upset with him. Newt didn’t blame him, though he didn’t regret what he’d done. He thought he’d been a bit reckless by showing his face to the guards instead of sneaking in, but otherwise, he felt all his actions from February to today to be justified.
Newt hummed 'When I’m Gone,' an old folk song Caitlin liked, quietly to himself as he liberated the AM antenna from the radio’s circuit board. What Hermann didn’t understand was his motive. Perhaps Newt himself didn’t either, but he had the mental privilege of never (or, rarely) questioning his own motives. If he wanted to do something, the desire originated in his brain, and he knew of no worthier qualification. The effects of these desires or actions on others was a secondary consideration.
Yet despite these customary rationalizations, he was beginning to suffer from a creeping doubt still too nascent to classify.
So far today, instead of repenting, he had: cleaned up breakfast, searched futilely for Laplace the cat, fixed Hermann’s clock according to his watch, attempted to use the vacuum cleaner, deemed it inefficient and taken it apart to improve it, gotten bored, turned on the BBC newscast and discovered that the clock had actually been right, rewound both his watch and the clock, and practiced piano until he got a headache. He had also done some tests on the transducer’s ongoing effects on his ear.
But he was bored. Newt was under strict house arrest orders, but he wanted someone to talk to. He thought about going downstairs to check on his budgies, which were in the care of Hermann’s 12-year-old neighbor, Jake. Jake was a good kid. He was the youngest of a Black Pentecostal family that lived on the first floor. Jake took good care of the birds whenever Newt was gone, and kept an eye on his apartment from across the courtyard too. But it was Monday—Jake was probably at school.
He wandered out onto the balcony, where it was raining halfheartedly, and gazed longingly at his own distant apartment across the courtyard. “Won't see the golden of the sun when I'm gone,” he sang quietly, holding the slick railing for support, “And the evenings and the mornings will be one when I'm gone...” It wasn’t loneliness, exactly, or restlessness; it was the feeling that the world was going on outside without him.
From experience, he knew the argument with Hermann wasn’t over. This budding sense of guilt was going to make him defensive, and then things would get contentious. Unfortunate, Newt reflected, that he was not after all just a brain in a box. He could argue solipsism with Hermann as many times as he liked, deflect his Wittgenstein-isms with Descartes, but alas, evidence continued to accumulate that he was not alone in the universe, and that there were others outside his consciousness whom his choices did affect.
Newt went back inside, wiping off his glasses. He wanted to call Lightcap, but stopped short of the phone. He was wary of the line, and she was at work anyway.
Lightcap worked as a programmer now, but her area of expertise was everything. Any system—information, electronics, music theory—she would map and master with the energy of a child chess prodigy. Her trouble lay where her mind ended and others’ began. Lightcap was blonde, pretty, and very tall, with a deep, disconcerting voice. That voice, her unbecoming haircut, and her intimidating height were the speedbumps that threw eager men off. And in her chosen field, at the Division, there had been many such men. She had never been well-accepted there, but she had not accepted this non-acceptance. Instead, she’d stalked from department to department, solving complex problems and creating enemies of the men she disturbed.
Newt was one of the only exceptions. He’d met her back when she worked at the Black Chamber, early in Newt’s Hardware career. It had been an auspicious first meeting.
“Knock knock,” Newt had said, opening the door without knocking. He heard a wordless shriek and a metal thunk dangerously close to his head.
He looked down, then up.
“Did you just throw a stapler at me?”
There was a woman sitting behind a desk at the far end of the room.
“Oh. You’re not who I thought you were,” she said.
“Um.”
She stared at him with a surprisingly unrepentant blankness. She had thrown it quite a distance and quite level, for such a heavy object. If he had, in that moment, chosen to compliment her arm, they would never have become friends. But instead, he said, “Hi. I’m new. I wasn’t told there would be ballistics.”
“No one warned you about the Chamber Guard?”
“No, no, not a word. They just said, ‘Bungle down and grab me those files, young feller.’ Nothing about needing a helmet.”
“I thought you were Prick Warren,” she said.
“Isn’t his name Patrick?”
“Is that not what I said?”
“Oh yes. It is. I just wanted to be sure that I heard right. I’m new. As I mentioned.”
“I heard you,” said the woman, folding her hands together, “when you mentioned it.”
“A fellow American?” he said, in reference to her accent.
“Just an accomplished mimic.”
She was actually, as he later learned, the bidialectal child of a vicious British Army officer, raised on various American bases.
“Impressive,” said Newt, taking a step into the office. “Well, pleased to meet you. No hard feelings about the flying stapler, by the way. I should have knocked. Or ducked.”
“You didn’t really need to,” the woman said with an unkind inflection.
Newt shrugged.
“May I?” he said.
She could see that mocking his height had stymied him by how it severed any rejoinder. Feeling a stab of remorse, she jerked her head. “Come in.”
She stood as he approached. He registered no visible reaction to her height and shook her hand, saying, “Newt Geiszler, Hardware,” and she said “Caitlin Lightcap. Research.”
“What are you doing down here, if you’re Research?”
“They move me around a lot,” she said.
“Jack of all trades?”
“‘Difficult to work with,’ actually.”
“I see, I see,” said Newt, grinning.
“Is that funny?”
“It’s all too familiar,” Newt said, too busy laughing at himself to notice her aggression.
He explained what records he needed from the Black Chamber, and the Chamber Guard graciously helped him find them. The Black Chamber was the classified archive, for old files out of circulation. It dated back to the earliest days of British government surveillance, when the crown paid to have foreign envelopes steamed open. And it lived up to its name: the room she led him into was a pitch-black basement. A switch turned on dim, ancient lightbulbs.
“Golly gee,” he said. “Are these Edison originals?”
Newt sneezed from the dust.
“You tell me, Buddy Holly,” she said. “I thought you were the engineer.”
“I’m the engineer, not the electrician,” he said. “But I could probably requisition some more up-to-date bulbs for you. ‘Lightbulbs for Lightcap,’ I’d call it. It would be a covert operation. Because by ‘requisition,’ I did mean ‘steal.’”
“Not the most covert name for your op,” she pointed out.
“Hey, I’m the electrician, not the spymaster.”
“You’re kind of adorable, Geiszler.”
“Please, don’t patronize me.”
They were friends from that day on. They’d worked together at the Estate for a while, until her firing in ‘63. For the past ten years, she had worked at IBM’s London facility as a programmer. She hated it.
Since her firing, Newt had made efforts, probably against protocol, to keep connected. Sometimes he felt he was her only lifeline, but that made him fret, because he was not much of a support to anyone. Sometimes he wondered why she stayed here in England, but he knew she hated her family, and would rent a room in Hell if they were in heaven. Sometimes he romanticized their heady, semi-alcoholic days together at the Estate, but these days, by the end of a night of drinking with her, he was relieved to go home to Hermann’s quiet flat.
Still, he loved her, and wished he could talk to her. He looked away from the phone. They had a gig on Wednesday. If all went well, he’d see her then, and tell her everything. He turned, swaying a little, went back to the kitchen, and resumed trying to install remote controls into Hermann’s toaster.
Century Central File Registry was open daily until 6 PM. Most of Century’s daytime employees went home at 5, so when Hermann entered the registry at 4:50 PM, most visitors were leaving or already gone. Century Central was the internal file library: all general access files were available here. Smaller, more specialized file libraries existed for particular sections, with ‘reading rooms’ for those with special clearances. Hermann’s only special clearance was for the crypto library. He had checked the crypto registry index during lunch, while their clerk Aalvar took a nap at his desk, but as he’d expected, they had no file named Greenwich.
The registry took up the entire third floor of Century. White concrete pillars braced a tile floor and a tile ceiling. The reading area had dignified wooden library tables like a university, complete with green-hooded lamps, but the actual stacks were all dull metal shelves and file cabinets. The distant walls were lined with tall glass block windows, distorting the light passing in and out. As always after a day in the sealed basement lab, Hermann was disoriented by the natural light.
He approached the desk, behind which loomed the vast card catalog. The clerk on duty was Sykes. He had been a cipher clerk in the field, once, but like many cipher clerks, the stress had gotten to him. He was happier here, viciously cross-checking and guarding his files. Hermann had hoped Sykes would not be on duty, for he was by far the most uptight clerk.
“Afternoon, Sykes.”
Sykes looked up. “A bit late to sign in, isn’t it, Gottlieb?”
“Registry hours have changed, have they?” said Hermann. “I must have missed the memo.”
This retort amused Sykes for some reason. “I don’t know that they circulate to the basement,” he said, lifting the chained clipboard from his desk and handing it to Hermann. He didn't offer a pen. “Request tickets are there. Be quick about it, would you? I want to get home for the match.”
“Shouldn’t be long,” said Hermann, signing in, but when he handed Sykes five request tickets for five different files, the clerk was not impressed.
He turned to the card catalog behind his desk and opened five tiny drawers. He copied the file numbers onto the tickets and tore off carbon copies while giving Hermann the shpiel: “Take them out yourself but don’t put them back. Stay in this area to read them, keep everything on the table at all times; no ink, notes in ballpoint only, absolutely no writing on the files. Mack will be gone, so just bring your files up to me, with tickets, when you’re finished. No skulking around the aisles. And I’ll need your bag.” He gave Hermann his file tickets and took his bag.
The last few stragglers were getting up from the reading tables. A young assistant clerk with a hunted look, who could only be Mack, was collecting abandoned files and tickets in a cart. He hurried over to demand where Hermann thought he was going, but when Hermann showed him his tickets, Mack docilely showed him where to go.
The stacks were deserted. Hermann was acutely aware of the sound of his cane on the tile. He collected the first four files, which were a range of colors and sizes and came from different sections. Most were projects he had personally worked on, either completed or scrapped, of no importance. Finally, he made his way to the section that contained the Greenwich file.
He closed his eyes and collected himself. The section ID, shelf code, and file number flashed by, recited by Newton and stored by Hermann in his color-coded memory. He opened his eyes and found the shelf. He could hear the squeaky wheel of Mack’s cart, a few rows over. He took a deep breath, then knelt down before the shelf. There was Greenwich: a blue file, thin. He took the blue file in his arms (Atlas, a 1968 radio surveillance op on the Turkish embassy, scrapped), opened it, and removed its contents. He slid Greenwich off the shelf, removed its contents, and swapped them. He put the Greenwich file back, Atlas contents inside. Then he stood up and made his way back to a desk. He sat as far from Sykes as he could, and began to read.
In March, 1972, Passport Officer at the British Embassy in Vienna Raleigh Becket (unofficially, the Head of the Austrian Station for the Division) received an offer from a defector. The man was a Razvedka scientist. He was working on a very important, very secret project in East Germany, and that was all he would say. His codename was Greenwich.
So said Becket’s first report, submitted to London last March. London’s first reply, a day later, requested more information. This offer was irregular in many ways. Foremost: why was it coming to Becket, in Vienna, and not to Fischer, the East Berlin Head of Station?
We need more information, Becket told Greenwich. Meanwhile, he contacted Fischer in East Berlin. Fischer told him they had rejected Greenwich already, not believing him to be genuine. They thought he was only looking for money.
When Greenwich answered Becket, he told a different story. He said that the project in (location redacted) had placed him in danger. Once it was completed, he feared he would be recalled to Moscow and silenced—imprisoned, or worse. But, worse, the project itself was hounding his conscience. He believed the device they'd built was dangerous, and wished he had never helped to build it.
Becket wrote this up in his second report to London. He was already starting to buy into it, Hermann could tell. He couldn’t see why. But then, he didn’t have the interpersonal instincts of a case officer.
Here Becket accepted Greenwich’s first offering: his real name. He sent this to London in his second report. (The name was redacted in the file.) They looked it up, and found him in Century. Greenwich was educated at (redacted), graduated with a degree in (redacted) in the year (redacted). He had worked on the (redacted) RTD project during WWII for the Red Army.
His personnel file reference number was included, but it had been crossed out, and a new number had been stamped in red beside it. Hermann recognized the formatting: the original file would have been accessible to him, but the new file was not. Sometime between last year and today, Greenwich’s clearance had been raised.
Now Becket gambled where the East German resident had not. He sent his third report to London: he wanted to negotiate terms with Greenwich. With clearance, he would issue a visa under a fake name. He requested permission, and a passport.
What convinced him?
London replied a few days later. They did not approve the immediate request for resettlement. They would authorize an info-first trade. If Greenwich shared his information, and they could verify it, then they would issue a visa.
While Becket was arguing with London, Greenwich sent him another plea. The testing stages of the project were almost complete. He was personally holding back on the final stages, he said, but he could only drag his feet for so long.
He reached out, he said, not for his own self-preservation, but for the damage he feared this device could cause. Please, he begged Becket personally. Please make me a deal.
Becket, reporting this in his fourth missive, expressed doubts about Greenwich’s sincerity. The cipher clerk, encrypting this report, made an addendum to assert his belief.
Hermann frowned at this. Becket’s coding clerk had inserted his opinion into a report? That was bizarre, and very much against protocol.
Indeed, the reply dispatch from London agreed. They issued a warning, and a threat of formal reprimand, to cipher clerk “B.B.”
“Riveting stuff?”
Hermann jumped and shut the file. Sykes was right behind him. Apparently he was not reading over Hermann’s shoulder, because he just chuckled and said, “30 minutes 'til closing time. Last call.”
“Thank you,” Hermann replied curtly.
Sykes left, and he resumed reading.
A week later, Greenwich sent Becket an ultimatum. His last day of work on the base had been set. He was being sent home to Moscow.
He said he would destroy all his files and prototypes on his final day in the airbase. He knew that this was a suicide mission. But the project had to be destroyed. It would die with him, he said, unless Becket sent someone. He would tell all he knew. He had no price.
Hermann found that his heart was beating somewhere in his stomach. No price? He glanced at the clock behind Sykes’s desk. It was 5:36.
One sentence of Greenwich’s message was blacked out. Perhaps this contained the convincing detail; or perhaps the desperation compelled him. Whatever the reason, this message sold Becket. He did not send anybody. He went to Greenwich himself.
Hermann could picture it: Becket taking his jacket off the back of his desk chair and walking right out of the Vienna embassy, into a cab, and onto an airplane. He submitted no travel request to London, and no warning to the East Berlin residents. As the former East Berlin resident himself, he knew the territory.
In the city, he got in touch with Greenwich somehow. There were no details on how. The next pages in the file were a transcription of their conversation, from a tape made on Becket’s pocket recorder in a safehouse flat over the long night of May 15th, 1972.
The transcript was many pages long, highly redacted. The curious reader was referred again to Greenwich’s classified personnel file. Hermann glanced at the clock again. He had not given himself enough time. He started scanning the transcript quickly.
Greenwich was a Russian military intelligence scientist. He worked in radio surveillance RTD—the elder Newton Geiszler of the Razvedka. He summarized his career, giving the highlights. In 1971, he had been sent to the G.D.R. for a special project.
The thump of his glass on the coffee table was noted. Stolichnaya, Hermann wondered? Or had Becket scrounged up some German liquor?
Becket began to ask ordered questions about the project, but Greenwich was unwilling to give up the monologue. He interrupted Becket, finally, and said he wished to clarify his reasons for doing this. They spoke in German, which was their only language in common, but not the native tongue of either: They say this project is for the good of our country, and for the good of mankind. I believe the opposite is true. I believe this technology brings about the demise of our way of life.
Of course, Becket said. It’s a matter of principle, Greenwich insisted. Becket recognized this, from a career dealing in Soviet defectors: the self-made moral structure built as a bulwark against the violent unpredictability of the system they lived in. But Hermann recognized something else too, as Greenwich pressed on with his story: the proud, desperate, final transmission of a scientist. Whatever it was he had invented or perfected, he did fear it—but a part of him was proud of it. And he did not want his work to go unremembered.
The project started, Greenwich said, in 1971.
The Razvedka picked up a new source in East Berlin—a British agent. He knew the location of a piece of technology that had been stolen from Wagner Airbase.
Wagner Airbase.
Hermann stared, his eye caught in the crease of the file. The thumping in his stomach was getting louder. He needed to check the clock. The clock. If he looked, would Sykes notice that all his color had just drained?
His hands were shaking. He set the file on the table and exhaled. He looked up at the clock. 12 minutes. He put his hands on his knees, straightened his back against the chair. There was not time to panic. He needed to finish. Sykes was wheeling his full cart into the stacks.
So it was Wagner. In a way, it was a relief to have confirmation. He realized now that he’d already known, because he had already been so frightened.
This connection explained, too, Becket’s reaction to Greenwich’s offer. It explained why he had gone to Berlin himself to hear the story. Closing his eyes, Hermann recalled the last time he’d seen Becket—December 1963, on the canal bridge that had been their fallback rendezvous. The frown in his blue eyes when Hermann had told him no, it was gone.
After ten years sunk on the ocean floor, the memories of that mission were rising to the surface. Now Hermann was going to have to look at them.
He returned to the Greenwich file. The Abetilung had picked the agent up in the summer of 1971. (The file referenced a transmission; Hermann saw with a mix of relief and trepidation that it was a 2TP transmission, dated 19 August, 1971, processed by the Blueberry on 25 August. That meant he had automatic access. In fact, two years before, he had processed it himself.) The British agent had important technical information on the (redacted). Hermann knew the redacted word without a doubt: the transmitter.
Becket asked, did Greenwich know who this British source was? He said he did not. Becket pushed, but it seemed Greenwich knew nothing.
Now, Greenwich's real testimony began: the ins and outs of the technology. But the pages were almost entirely blacked out. Hermann checked the clock again. Seven minutes. He had no time.
He flipped quickly, past entire pages of Greenwich’s uninterrupted speech. The whole story was spilling out of him—his life’s work, all of it censored.
There were not many pages left. The transcript ended with Becket asking whether Greenwich had destroyed his work yet, like he’d planned. He said, Tomorrow.
Becket promised to get Greenwich out of East Germany. He said the information he’d shared was was more than enough to buy him a visa. But Greenwich seemed to know the demand implicit to his defection: reconstruct the device, for our side. And so Greenwich refused. To Hermann’s utter shock, he said he would not come. He would not rebuild it for England, or for anyone.
Hermann didn’t believe it. Was this principled refusal—or just hopelessness? Greenwich was due to leave for Moscow in two days. Maybe he believed Becket could not carry off the extraction, maybe he had accepted his fate. Or maybe he believed he still had a chance in Moscow. Or maybe he had a martyr complex.
The transcript ended there, with Becket’s reassurances that he would contact Greenwich the next morning with an escape route. But Hermann, trembling furiously, flipped to the next page—he couldn’t refuse, he couldn’t possibly refuse, there was no principle strong enough—but that was it. The next page was a report from Becket to London, a week later. He had not heard from Greenwich again. He was returning to Vienna alone.
The last item was a memo from Vienna, dated June 1972. It reported the disappearance of embassy employee Bernard Birch, cipher clerk.
The final page of the file was an index of cross-referenced files. There was a file on the technical specs Greenwich had recreated—the file Newton had seen all those months ago. There was the personnel file on Greenwich again. There was the Bernard Birch case file. There was Raleigh Becket’s personnel file, and Fisher’s, the East Berlin Head of Station. And there was the case file on the Wagner Airbase surveillance operation of 1963. Hermann nodded silently to no one. That file, too, was classed outside of the central registry, but he had no need to see it. He knew what was inside, because he'd been there.
Hermann closed the blue file slowly. Sitting still, he listened for where Sykes was, among the stacks. His cart squeaked a few aisles down.
He gathered his things quickly and entered the stacks. In front of the shelf where Greenwich belonged, he loudly dropped everything, sending his cane clattering and his files scattering. He cursed a bit.
“All right, Gottlieb? I’m in the 1-B90s. Just bring the files to me.”
Hermann cursed under his breath. “Be right there.”
He gathered up the files. He had a moment of terror when he couldn’t locate Atlas in Greenwich’s place, then he found it. He pulled it, switched Atlas back out, and replaced Greenwich. Then he loudly stood and hurried a few rows over to Sykes.
“Can I have my bag back, please? I’d like to catch the 6:10,” he said, rudely dumping his files on top of Sykes’s others. Sykes, looking very put-upon, brought him back to the desk and made a production of retrieving Hermann’s bag. Hermann took it, blood roaring in his ears, and escaped to the lift.
He was standing on the wide stone Century steps. So it was Wagner. So it was the stolen technology, stolen from Wagner, stolen back, and stolen again. He didn’t know what it was, but he did know where it came from. There was no longer any doubt.
The sun had come out, the sky was blue, and the wind was cold and higher than ever. It was going to be a beautiful spring night. He had to tell Newton—finally, he had to tell him everything about the Wagner mission. And it was all so impossible, absolutely absurd; and Newton would believe it. He would be upset that Hermann had hidden it from him for all this time, but he would believe it.
He had started walking with the intention of collecting himself and then calling home, but as time and city blocks passed, Hermann became more agitated. He turned corners without intent and crossed streets without looking. A church bell chimed and he realized he had been walking for an hour, and that he didn’t know where he was.
A strange sort of trance had overtaken him; he felt like he was playing the role of someone else. Hermann took another turn and found himself in a stone arcade around the periphery of a market. On the other side of the arches, farmers were closing up their stands for the evening. He turned on impulse into the market, and walked until he found a flower stand.
He bought two bouquets: one large bouquet of lilies and one small handful of irises, which he tucked into his pocket. He paid in coins, and as he accepted his change, he felt a disorienting sense of anachronism—he wasn’t where—when—he belonged. Then he hurried back down the arcade and turned out an alley, onto a crowded shopping street. Only then did he realize, belatedly: he was in Berlin mode—op mode. He was in enemy territory again. Training, unbidden, had taken over.
He ducked into a chemist’s and stalled a few minutes, seeing if anyone else came in. Then he left again, and let the crowd carry him until he could orient himself. He was on the Strand. He walked with the bouquet in front of his chest, taking a tourist’s pace. He paused at a crowded bus stop, then when the bus arrived, stepped into the department store next to it instead. There, he bought a rolled-up poster and asked for a bag. In the vestibule, he set the large bouquet of flowers down on a window ledge. He took off his shoulder bag, removed his coat, folded it, put it in the shopping bag, then walked out the double doors with his shopping bag, his shoulder bag, and without his bouquet.