Rubicon Read online

  Kramer seemed to relax a little. A glint of nostalgia entered his eyes.

  “We met at various diplomatic gatherings - embassy parties, things like that. I was a cultural attaché - that was the cover we used; everyone knew what it meant. I liked your father; part of it was his name: Maximillian Hart. The moment I heard it, that first time we were introduced, I found myself repeating it out loud. Strange, the things that attract us to people: the name, and the candid look in his eyes. I knew immediately he was someone I could trust.”

  Kramer stretched his hands, opening and closing them several times. His fingers were long and elegant, with a tremendous reach. Hart stared at him, a look of surprised certainty on his face.

  “You’re the piano player! My father never talked about what he did, but once, when he was getting ready for a trip, I asked him where he was going. He told me that he had a good friend, a piano player, he was going to see.”

  “Max always had an eye for the small detail, the thing that distinguishes one person from the next. I might have become a reasonably good concert pianist, but the party thought it had a better use for the skill I had in learning languages. That was something else that drew me to your father: we both spoke Arabic. We could talk together in a crowded room and most of the people there could not understand a thing we said.”

  Kramer bent forward on his elbows.

  “Max discovered that there was this organized effort to develop new lines of contact, new sources of intelligence. Not better sources, not more accurate sources, but sources that would supply intelligence that could be used for their own purposes. People who had been discredited, people notoriously unreliable, people who would invent things to make themselves seem important were suddenly being used again.”

  He shook his head, gesturing with his hands, trying to get it just right so that Hart would understand.

  “If you have one source that says there is no evidence that, say, Syria is trying to develop nuclear weapons, but another source says they are, what is the only reasonable conclusion that you can draw? That Syria may be trying to develop nuclear weapons. You don’t have to prove anything, just have sources that will give you what you want, make a threat that does not exist seem as if it might. Because a threat that is possible is real.”

  “And my father knew this was going on, and that is why you think...?”

  “He knew it, but he could not prove that it was anything more than a few overzealous agents using sources that they should have known better than to trust. He could not prove that they were deliberately cultivating sources that would give them whatever they needed to make the case that the only option for the United States was to get rid of certain regimes they did not like. That was why he came to me.

  “There was an Iraqi scientist, a brilliant man, Cambridge educated. He knew everything about Saddam’s weapons program. He knew that it was all a kind of Potemkin village, a fiction used to prevent other nations, and other groups within Iraq itself, from trying to overthrow Saddam. I knew this man rather well. His wife was German. Max asked me to have him pass on information, a clear statement that the so-called weapons program was all a hoax, to one of the sources, an Iraqi general who had been caught in lies before. That way he could trace who got the information and whether it was accurately reported. That was when your father died; that was when they killed him.”

  “But you can’t be sure of that. You said yourself he did not have any proof. And as for him being murdered....”

  “You doubt they killed your father? They were going to change the world, bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East! What was one life compared to that? His death was a matter of necessity, the means to an end. One life! How many thousands - hundreds of thousands - have died so that these people could bring about their vision of a world that everywhere looks just like America? Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who killed thousands of his own people, but how long do you think he would have stayed in power, how long before he was overthrown, when word got out that all those great, lethal weapons of his did not exist?”

  Kramer took a sip of coffee, but it had turned cold. He signaled the waitress for another.

  “There are things you would rather not believe,” he said with a subtle gaze. “But you know they killed your father, don’t you?”

  “You’re right, I don’t want to believe it. But you don’t have any doubts at all, do you? Why? What makes you so sure?”

  The waitress brought Kramer a second cup. Holding it in both hands, he drank slowly.

  “I have seen before what power in the service of a belief makes men do. My father was a decent man before Hitler came to power; but then he became an officer in the S.S. Who knows how many men - women and children, too - he may have murdered because he believed in Hitler and the Third Reich. And then the Russians came, and we believed that anything that stood in the way of history - history according to the teachings of Marx and Lenin - deserved to be destroyed. Twenty million kulaks - peasant farmers - were killed in Russia so that progress could be made. And anyone who did not like it, who wanted to leave, who tried to escape East Germany for life in the west, we had to kill them, too. Now it is happening again, all the rules of civilized behavior abandoned, all the forms of decency, because we believe the things we worship - whether it be God or democracy - justifies the use of any means. So, yes, I believe my friend Max was murdered for what he knew. This is the reason I have come to warn you, before things get even worse.”

  “Warn me of what?”

  “That there is going to be another attack, not like before, not like 911. It’s going to be an assassination, a political assassination.”

  “Who? Who is going to be assassinated? Who are they? How do they plan to do it?

  “My sources in the Middle East, the people I talk to, all heard the rumor of a planned assassination. They didn’t know exactly when it was going to happen, only that it would be very soon, sometime before the American election. That was unusual, for things to be that vague. At first I thought that it meant that it was either being done in great secrecy or that it was being done by an organization that none of us had heard of before. Then, just by chance, I found out. I did not believe it at first, I couldn’t; but now I know for sure.”

  Kramer’s eyes darted toward the doorway. He was becoming nervous, agitated. He looked at Hart.

  “I should go, I’ve stayed too long as it is.”

  “You can’t go yet. Tell me what you know. You have plenty of time to get back to Berlin.”

  “I don’t live in Berlin, I live in Damascus. It’s the only place I’m safe,” he explained as his eyes came back around. “I shouldn’t have come, but I had to warn you; I owed that much to your father.”

  Suddenly, Kramer’s head jerked forward and twisted to the side. For just an instant, he looked at Hart with a puzzled expression as if he was not quite sure what had just happened. Then there was a blur of shattered glass and broken china and Kramer was falling to the ground. Hart started to reach for him, to do something to help, when he felt a sharp, searing pain in his shoulder. Then he heard it, the sound, the strident, cracking sound of rifle fire and he knew that he had been shot. He saw it now, the blood oozing from the front of Kramer’s white shirt as he lay on the ground, staring up at him. Hart stood there, looking around, trying to figure out where the shot had come from, as if, instead of in the middle of a shooting, he were just some distant observer. A bullet whizzed past his ear, another one kicked past his foot; he dove for cover. There was screaming all around him, panic everywhere. Hart turned on his side to see if Kramer was still alive.

  “Rubicon,” whispered Kramer as Hart bent closer. “The code name is Rubicon. Remember that. It’s the key to everything.”

  “What does it mean?” asked Hart, signaling desperately for someone to get help. “What does Rubicon mean?”

  Kramer opened his mouth and tried to answer. Nothing came out, only the slow, gasping sound of his last, dying breath.

 
Chapter Three

  Dieter Shoenfeld stood at the railing next to the tidal basin. He looked up at the Jefferson Memorial, glistening in the red light of dawn.

  “I like to come out here early in the morning just to look at that, the clear upright confidence on the face of Thomas Jefferson. Lincoln saved the Union, but it was the Union that Jefferson made. I wonder if there is a more sublime feeling than the knowledge that you have created something that will be the envy of the world. What a rare thing it is to have great men who aspire to something more than power.”

  Shoenfeld clasped his hands behind his back and lowered his shoulder. A sad, wistful smile flickered over his mouth. He took Hart by the arm.

  “Come, let’s walk a little, just around here, close to the Memorial. Tell me about Gunther Kramer: everything he said to you before he died. But tell me first that you’re okay? The bullet passed through your shoulder? There won’t be any permanent damage?”

  “I was lucky; another few inches…. And if I had been sitting on the other side of the table, it would have been me instead of him.”

  Hart had returned late the night before. He had slept a couple of hours on the plane out of sheer exhaustion; but then, at home, he had not been able to sleep at all. Each time he closed his eyes he saw the face of Gunther Kramer, that strange, puzzled look that seemed to know, and yet knowing, not believe, that in the blink of an eyelash he was dead. It was as if, in that single instant, the burden of his existence, had passed to Hart, and that whatever happened now would in some way be linked to Gunther Kramer’s past.

  “Who was he working for? I know that he used to be a double agent, that his control in the west was my father, and that he was going to defect. I know that he disappeared and made everyone think he was dead; I know that he had been in the Middle East, living, at least recently, in Damascus. But who was he working for? And if everyone in Germany thought he was dead all these years, how did you know he was still alive?”

  Shoenfeld stopped walking. He looked at Hart and nodded slowly as he tried to make up his mind how much he should reveal.

  “Gunther Kramer was my brother,” he said finally.

  “Your brother?”

  “Half brother, to be precise. It was the war, or what happened afterward.” With his hand on Hart’s arm, he began to walk again, but very slowly. “My father, as I think I told you once, was killed at Stalingrad. My mother was trapped in what became the Russian zone. My mother remarried and had a second child.”

  “Gunther told me that his father had been in the S.S. Your mother was a Jew.”

  “Everyone lied about who they were. All we knew was that, like my father, he had been a soldier in the war. Gunther only found out after his father was dead; we never told my mother. I never suspected anything. He adored my mother, though I think she never really loved him. Things were difficult after the war, and my mother was quite a beautiful woman. She did what she had to do to survive. It is as simple as that. Things that happened in Germany are inexplicable, unless you lived through it.”

  There was a long silence before Shoenfeld picked up the thread of his narrative.

  “I was lucky; I got out and lived most of my life in the west. But Gunther lived his life the way a lot of Germans did, a prisoner of a war that never ended. The war ended in l945, but if you lived in East Germany all that meant was that instead of living under the Third Reich, you now lived under Soviet Communism.

  “I did not have much contact with Gunther until much later, after the wall came down. He wanted me to know that he was alive so that he could arrange to visit our mother. And now he is dead, and there is no one I can tell without giving away the secret that all these years he was living, an exile, in Damascus. You asked who he was working for. I don’t know, but he had sources better than any intelligence agency in the west. Gunther could not just speak fluent Arabic and Farsi; he could pass for an Arab when he needed to.”

  Shoenfeld spun around, a look of urgency in his eyes.

  “Now, listen - what I asked you earlier, about what he said to you. When I talked to him the last time, he told me he had discovered something. There was something in his voice. I can’t quite describe it; but when he told me that he knew who was behind this, it was as if he still could not quite believe it. He knew he was being followed, that he was under some kind of surveillance. It was the way he cut off the conversation, the way he said he would have to call back later. That’s what has me worried

  “Worried?”

  “If they were following Gunther, we can’t be sure that they have not started following you.”

  Hart started to object, but Shoenfeld gripped his arm.

  “Listen to me - You haven’t heard what I said. Gunther is dead. You have to assume that whoever did this knows everything. If they don’t know exactly what he told you, they can guess. And remember, they weren’t just shooting at Gunther, they shot at you. Now, tell me: what did he tell you?”

  “He told me that someone was going to be assassinated and that it was going to happen before the election. He said he didn’t know who the target was, but that the code name for this was Rubicon.”

  “Rubicon - That’s what he told you, nothing more?” Shoenfeld nodded quickly and then remarked, “I said that they followed Gunther to Germany, but I wonder if that’s possible. I wonder if they didn’t follow you.”

  “Followed me? I don’t understand.”

  “Do you have any idea the skill that was involved - the deception - that allowed Gunther to do what he did all those years? He was a double agent when he worked for your father, and then he disappears, makes everyone believe he’s dead. A man like that could sense the danger; he would have known immediately if he were being followed. But you would not know: you’re famous; people are always watching you. But that would mean that they weren’t there to murder him; they were there to murder you.”

  “But why? - Who would want to murder me? And how could anyone have followed me to Hamburg?”

  Shoenfeld glanced back at the statue of Jefferson.

  “There are cameras everywhere now; countless images passed through computers that are running all the time, looking for something out of the ordinary: a face that does not belong there, anything that might tell these people in authority something about what might happen next. If there is a group of the sort that Gunther described, people who had your father murdered, do you think it would be difficult for them to keep track of you?”

  “You’re telling me that I may be being followed all the time?”

  “It’s possible. It’s also possible that you weren’t followed to Germany and that what happened to Gunther had nothing to do with you. All we know is that he’s dead. Rubicon - that’s what he told you? Strange.”

  “Strange? Why do you say that?”

  “Strange that a plot to assassinate someone in the United States, a plot planned in the Middle East, would take a name from Roman history.”

  “Strange or not, I know some people at Langley. I’ll try to find out whether the CIA has come across that name in anything they’ve intercepted.” He paused, thinking over what he had been told. “You say he also knew who was behind it, and that he seemed astonished?”

  “Yes, astonished, which itself is astonishing, given all the things Gunther had gone through.”

  “When are you going back to Berlin, Dieter?”

  “I have a flight this afternoon. I have a few other sources in the Middle East – none of them as good as Gunther – but I’ll see if they know anything.”

  Shoenfeld put his hand on Hart’s arm.

  “It was wise of you not to tell the police Dieter’s real name.”

  “I assumed he must have been using false identification. I told them that I didn’t know who he was; that we were just sharing a table.”

  “The German papers reported it as the murder of a Syrian national traveling on business. We were able to keep your name out of it. It’s better this way. There would be too many questions.”
br />   Shoenfeld had been right when he said that Hart had grown used to people watching him. But now, as Hart got to his car, he looked first one way, then the other, as he opened the door. Then, as he started the engine, he looked for anything suspicious, anything out of the ordinary, in the rearview mirror. He accused himself of paranoia and the next moment wondered whether, if he had been more careful, Gunther Kramer might still be alive.

  He was still thinking about Gunther Kramer and what he had told him when he walked into a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee that afternoon.

  The meeting had not yet started. Hart’s closest friend in the senate, Charles Thomas Ryan, the junior senator from Michigan, pulled him off to the side. Both in their mid-forties, they were by training and temperament intolerant of liars, pretenders and fools; which meant that in Washington they had very few allies and, except for each other, no real friends. They did not belong to the same political party, which made it easier to tell the truth about some of the better known people in the country.

  “There’s a rumor that Alworth wants you on the ticket, that he’s going to ask you to run for vice-president.” Ryan ran his hand through a thick clump of reddish-brown hair as he tried to suppress a grin. “Some of the people who backed what’s his name’s wife said you’d be a great candidate, that you could help carry a number of important states, that…Well, you know – the usual lies.”

  Ryan’s grin became an impish, eager glow. It had become a kind of game between them, how quickly Ryan could make Hart swear, utter some passing mild obscenity at the latest double-dealing by their fellow politicians. But Hart only laughed.

  “They’re probably saying that about everyone they know won’t be asked. People always feel more indebted to those they think tried to help them when they lost.”