Division 13 (Chapter 1)

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

www.murphyseyes.com

E-mail: [email protected]

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Content

Chapter 1        ICE 1017

Chapter 2        Kiosk am Ecke

Chapter 3        JenTower

Chapter 4        CTB

Chapter 5        Bremen Airport

Chapter 6        Berlin

Chapter 7        Reception Island

Chapter 8        Copenhagen

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Chapter 1: ICE 1017

The ICE 1017 vibrated with a low, consistent hum that usually lulled passengers into a stupor. Felix Kiefer sat three rows behind the target, angled toward the window to keep a reflection of the man in the double-pane glass.

The target, codenamed Blume, looked like a man who spent his life filing reports in a windowless office in Omsk. He was thin, with a narrow chest and a posture that suggested a lifetime of avoiding notice. He wore a charcoal jacket that was slightly too large in the shoulders and read a folded newspaper with a methodical, slow precision. He didn’t look like an SVR operative; he looked like a retired actuary. That was the point.

The stop at Wittenberge had been routine. Three minutes of idling, a few passengers boarding, then the surge of acceleration back toward Berlin. Kiefer checked his watch. Twenty-nine minutes to Berlin HBF. He pulled out his phone and sent a brief, encrypted text to the ground team.

Target on ICE1017. Seat 85. Wagon 13. Position for apprehension.

He locked the screen and leaned back, watching the flat landscape of Brandenburg blur into a smear of grey and green. Then the brakes hissed. The deceleration was abrupt, jarring the passengers forward.

The train slowed to a crawl and stopped. Kiefer looked out the window. The station sign read Bad Wilsnack.

Kiefer frowned. The ICE didn’t stop at Bad Wilsnack. It was a regional halt, a platform for commuters and locals, not for the high-speed Intercity-Express. He watched the other passengers. A few people looked up from their laptops, confused. Blume didn’t move. He simply turned a page of his newspaper.

A crackle came over the intercom. The voice of the train captain was polite, detached, and devoid of urgency.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have come to a halt due to a technical problem. We ask for your understanding and patience. We will provide further information as soon as possible.”

Kiefer waited. Fifteen minutes passed. The heating in the carriage shifted, the air growing stale and heavy. Blume remained motionless, a statue in charcoal wool.

Thirty minutes passed. The silence in the carriage was punctuated only by the occasional sigh or the rhythmic tapping of a foot. Kiefer didn’t move. He couldn’t ask the conductor for details without drawing attention to himself, and he couldn’t risk stepping into the corridor and appearing too interested in the delay. He stayed in the reflection, watching Blume. The Russian hadn’t looked at his phone once. He hadn’t looked at the clock.

At the forty-five-minute mark, the intercom crackled again.

“Attention passengers. Due to ongoing technical difficulties, service on ICE 1017 is cancelled. Please disembark the train. We recommend utilizing regional transport or long-distance buses for your continued journey. The captain wishes you a pleasant connecting trip.”

The announcement triggered a collective groan. The carriage erupted into a flurry of motion—zippers closing, bags being hoisted, the frantic rustle of people checking travel apps.

Blume stood up. He folded his newspaper with a precise, geometric crease and stepped into the aisle.

Kiefer followed at a distance of five meters. As they stepped off the train, the reality of Bad Wilsnack hit. The station was a relic, a narrow concrete platform never designed to hold the contents of a full ICE train. Hundreds of passengers were now crammed into a space meant for twenty. It was a bottleneck of damp coats and shouting people.

Kiefer kept his head down, his eyes scanning the crowd, focusing on the crown of Blume’s thinning hair. He maintained the gap, sliding through the press of bodies, careful not to touch anyone. He was too far to hear the target, but close enough to track the charcoal jacket.

The station’s own loudspeaker, a distorted, tinny system, began to drone.

“Attention. All German General Railway and regional services to and from Bad Wilsnack are cancelled until further notice. Passengers are advised to seek regional bus alternatives in the station hall.”

The crowd surged toward the exit, a slow-motion stampede of frustrated commuters. Kiefer felt the pressure of the throng pushing him, limiting his lateral movement. He watched Blume navigate the crowd with an effortless, sliding motion, moving through the gaps as if he knew exactly where the pressure points were.

Blume turned toward the station hall, heading for a small kiosk tucked against the far wall. It was a cramped space selling overpriced water, nicotine pouches, and stale sandwiches. A queue had already formed, a chaotic knot of people trying to buy supplies or asking the clerk about bus schedules.

Kiefer slowed his pace, stepping behind a pillar to maintain a line of sight. He watched Blume enter the fray of the kiosk. To his left, a family with three screaming children blocked the path. To his right, two businessmen were arguing loudly with a station employee.

Kiefer moved forward, trying to skirt the edge of the crowd, but the density of the passengers had increased. A group of students with oversized backpacks shifted suddenly, cutting off his view.

Kiefer stepped around them, his eyes snapping back to the kiosk.

The charcoal jacket was gone.

He scanned the hall—the exits, the restrooms, the narrow corridors leading to the bus bays. The station was filled with a sea of grey and navy coats, an ocean of unremarkable men. Blume had vanished into the noise of a broken transit system.

Kiefer stepped away from the kiosk, moving toward the station exit to find a pocket of space. He pulled out his device and entered a coded sequence.

Target lost. Location: Bahnhof Bad Wilsnack. Mobility compromised. Requesting extraction.

He locked the phone and stood still, his back against a damp brick wall. He didn’t look at the crowd; he looked at the ground, focusing on a discarded cigarette pack crushed into the concrete.

The wait for a response lasted fifty-four seconds. In the noise of the station—the shouting, the crying children, the distant drone of the intercom—the silence from the device felt heavy, a physical weight pressing against his chest. It was the particular silence of a failure being processed by people in a comfortable office one hundred and fifty kilometers away.

The phone vibrated.

Proceed to the southeast corner of the town square. Wait in front of the pharmacy. Pickup pending.

Kiefer exited the station. The air in the square was sharp, cutting through his jacket. He found the pharmacy—a small, sterile storefront with a green neon cross that flickered intermittently. He stood under the eaves, out of the wind, watching the grey street.

Twenty-three minutes later, a black Volkswagen Passat slowed to a halt at the curb. The passenger window slid down with a mechanical hum.

Kiefer leaned in. Matthias Hankel sat behind the wheel.

Hankel was a relic of the BND’s older guard, a man whose face looked like a crumpled map of every cold war outpost in Eastern Europe. He was six months away from retirement, a period usually spent pushing papers and attending farewell lunches, not driving extraction runs to regional halts in Brandenburg.

Kiefer opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. He pulled the security belt across his chest and clicked it into place.

“Thanks, Matthias. You’re fast.”

“I was on my way back to Berlin,” Hankel said. He didn’t look at Kiefer; his eyes were fixed on the rearview mirror. “I was in the area when the order came through.”

Kiefer looked out at the stagnant traffic on the main road. “The trains are a disaster.”

“Never mind the trains. All of Brandenburg is the same right now. No service.” Hankel shifted the gear into first. “Technical interference. You know how it works.”

“Yes,” Kiefer said. “The most advanced railway network in the world.”

Hankel didn’t smile. He shifted back to neutral, his hand pausing on the gear stick. “Almost forgot. I was told to escort you. Your weapon, please.”

Kiefer looked at him. “I don’t have a gun. I was eyes only. The ground team was handling the apprehension.”

Hankel’s expression remained flat. He didn’t argue, but he didn’t immediately believe him. “Do you mind if I verify?”

“Go ahead.”

Hankel picked up his phone and made a brief call to the control center. He spoke in short, clipped sentences, his voice a low rasp. He listened for ten seconds, then ended the call and dropped the phone into the center console.

“All good,” Hankel said. “Let’s roll.”

He engaged the gear and pulled away from the curb, leaving the flickering green cross of the pharmacy behind. They headed toward the autobahn, two men in a black car moving through a landscape of grey skies and broken signals.

As he passed the security checkpoints, the guards didn’t look at Kiefer; they looked at his badge, then back to their monitors. It was a building designed to strip away individuality. Here, you were not a man, but a function—a set of eyes, a source of intel, a liability.

The light in the BND headquarters was a flat, sterile white that seemed to bleach the color from everything it touched. Kiefer sat at his desk, staring at a black coffee that had long since gone cold. He hadn’t slept. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the charcoal jacket of the target disappearing into the crowd at Bad Wilsnack, and he felt the suffocating pressure of too many bodies in too small a space.

The debriefing from the night before had been a slow dissection. The officers hadn’t shouted; they had simply asked the same questions in slightly different ways, searching for a gap in his logic. They had mapped the timeline of Blume’s disappearance second by second, treating his report of “technical interference” as a convenient excuse. In the windowless room of the debrief, a train delay was a logistical failure, not a tactical variable. To the men in the room, Kiefer hadn’t been outmaneuvered by the SVR; he had simply been careless.

A chime sounded on his terminal. A message from Director Ludwig Schulz.

Office. Now.

Kiefer stood and smoothed the front of his jacket. He walked down the corridor, his footsteps muffled by the industrial grey carpeting. The BND was a labyrinth of reinforced concrete and tempered glass, a place where the movements of states were reduced to spreadsheets and encrypted cables.

He reached the Director’s door and paused. He could hear the distant, rhythmic sound of a printer in the outer office. He knocked and pushed the door open.

Schulz was standing by the window, his silhouette sharp against the grey expanse of the Berlin skyline. He didn’t turn when Kiefer entered. Matthias Hankel was already there, sitting in one of the low-slung visitor’s chairs. He gave Kiefer a brief, imperceptible nod and gestured toward the seat beside him.

“The German General Railway report came in an hour ago,” Schulz said. His voice was flat, the tone of a man reading a weather report. “It is officially categorized as a protective system response.”

“A fail-safe,” Hankel added.

“Precisely. According to their engineers, a signal discrepancy was detected in the interlocking system near Bad Wilsnack. The data integrity of the trackside relay was compromised for a window of approximately ninety seconds. The system couldn’t confirm the occupancy of the block, so it triggered a mandatory safety lockout.” Schulz finally turned, his eyes tired. “It cascaded through the Brandenburg sector. A total standstill to prevent a potential collision.”

Kiefer leaned in. “And they are certain it was a technical error?”

“They are certain the system behaved exactly as it was programmed to behave,” Schulz said. “But they cannot explain why the error occurred. They are looking at hardware fatigue or a localized electromagnetic surge. They are looking at it through the lens of engineering.” He paused, his gaze narrowing. “We need to look at it through the lens of intent.”

Schulz slid a thin, silver tablet across the grey surface of the desk. It clicked softly against the laminate.

“You two are being reassigned for the next twenty-four hours. You are going to German General Railway Headquarters. They have a technical security division working with the GGR engineers to perform a forensic audit of the signaling logs.”

Kiefer looked at the tablet, then at Schulz. “I’m an intelligence officer, not a systems engineer.”

“That is exactly why you are going,” Schulz countered. “The engineers will see voltage drops and data packets. They will see a glitch. You need to see a pattern. I want you to cross-reference their timestamped error logs with your own timeline of the target’s movements.”

Schulz leaned over the desk, his voice dropping an octave. “If that ‘glitch’ provided the exact window Blume needed to vanish, then we aren’t looking at a technical failure. We are looking at a synchronized extraction.”

Kiefer picked up the tablet. The screen was cold under his thumb. The task was tedious—hours of staring at logs and timestamps—but the implication was far more disturbing. If the SVR could trigger a fail-safe in the German rail network from a distance, the scale of the compromise was larger than a single missing agent.

“When do we leave?” Hankel asked.

“Now,” Schulz said, already turning back to the window. “They are expecting you. Don’t get bogged down in the jargon. Just find the moment the ghost entered the machine.”

“I drove you yesterday. Your turn,” Hankel said, walking around to the passenger side.

“Sure.”

Kiefer climbed in and started the engine. The Passat’s motor turned over with a muted thrum that echoed through the underground garage. He shifted into gear and navigated the car up the concrete ramp, leaving the sterile safety of the BND compound for the grey, congested arteries of Berlin.

The city was caught in its usual morning gridlock. A drizzle had begun to fall, smearing the windshield and turning the asphalt a dark, oily black. Kiefer kept his eyes on the brake lights of the car in front of him.

“Matthias,” Kiefer said. “Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Why us?” Kiefer glanced at Hankel, then returned his gaze to the road.

Hankel leaned his head back against the seat. “The Director said we look for patterns.”

“No, I mean—why our division?”

A dry, short sound that might have been a laugh came from the back of Hankel’s throat. “We are Division 13. CI Unit. Communications and Infrastructure.”

“If GGR is insisting this wasn’t an attack, it should be the Bundespolizei,” Kiefer said. “Or the railway’s own security. Why send the BND’s infrastructure unit to audit a signal failure?”

Hankel didn’t answer immediately. He watched a pedestrian in a yellow raincoat struggle with an umbrella on the sidewalk. He didn’t offer a theory or a piece of inside intelligence. He simply shifted his weight in the seat, his expression remaining blank.

In the BND, the logic of an assignment was rarely shared with the people executing it. The order was the reason; the instruction was the justification. To ask why was to admit you didn’t understand how the machine worked.

“Just drive, Felix,” Hankel said. “And try not to hit the curb.”

The German General Railway headquarters was a monument to functional efficiency. Glass, steel, and the hushed, hurried footsteps of people managing the arteries of the country. It lacked the heavy, paranoid atmosphere of the BND; the tension here was corporate—a frantic effort to manage a logistical crisis and protect a reputation for punctuality that was already a joke to the public.

Kiefer and Hankel were led to a secure briefing room on the fourth floor. They were met by Dr. Dagmar Schmidt, the lead technical liaison for GGR’s security division. She had sharp eyes and a clinical demeanor that suggested she spent more time with algorithms than with people.

“Agent Hankel, Agent Kiefer. Thank you for coming,” she said. She didn’t offer a hand. Instead, she gestured toward a large, high-resolution display that dominated the far wall. “I’ll be brief. We’ve run the diagnostics three times. The hardware is pristine.”

She tapped a command on a console. A series of complex, cascading graphs appeared on the screen. There were no flashing red warnings or dramatic alarms; there were only dry, rhythmic waves of data, pulsing in monochromatic blue and grey.

“What we experienced was a transient signal interruption in the GSM-R handshake,” Schmidt explained. Her voice was steady, drained of emotion. “Specifically, between the ICE 1017 and the trackside Balise—the transponder—located just south of the Bad Wilsnack junction. For a period of approximately eighty-five seconds, the interlocking system received conflicting occupancy data.”

Kiefer stared at the lines. He didn’t understand the mathematics, but he understood the result.

“The system couldn’t verify if the track was clear or if there was an obstruction,” Schmidt continued. “As per safety protocol, the system triggered a sector-wide fail-safe. The trains didn’t stop because they were broken; they stopped because the system lost its ability to ‘see’ the track.”

“And you’ve ruled out a hardware failure?” Kiefer asked.

“Completely.” A hint of frustration entered her tone. “No blown fuses, no corroded relays, no physical tampering with the signaling box. From a technical standpoint, the data simply… evaporated. It’s as if someone introduced a momentary vacuum into the communication stream.”

“A vacuum,” Hankel repeated. He stepped closer to the screen, squinting. “And the timestamp for this ‘evaporation’?”

Schmidt clicked a button. A thin vertical line dropped onto the timeline, slicing through the data waves.

“14:12:08,” she said. “The error was logged, the fail-safe engaged, and the Brandenburg sector was locked down by 14:12:45.”

Kiefer did the math in his head. That was the exact window. The precise moment the train had slowed, the precise moment the chaos had begun. It wasn’t a glitch; it was a scalpel.

“Can I have a copy of this log?” Hankel asked.

“Of course,” Schmidt replied. She began transferring the files to the tablet Schulz had given them. “I assume you’ll be looking for a signature? A trace of the software used to create the vacuum?”

“We’re looking for the pattern,” Hankel said. “The signature is for the engineers.”

Back in the Passat, the rain had intensified, drumming a hollow, rhythmic beat against the roof. Kiefer pulled a small, battered notebook from his jacket pocket. The pages were slightly damp, the edges curled. He opened it to the notes he had scribbled during the debriefing, then propped the tablet on the dashboard.

He ignored the graphs. The curves and waves were for the engineers. Kiefer looked at the timestamps.

14:10:00 – Target stationary. Seat 85, Wagon 13.

14:11:45 – Train enters approach to Bad Wilsnack.

14:12:08 – Signal interruption logged.

14:12:15 – Abrupt deceleration of ICE 1017.

Kiefer stared at the numbers until they blurred. He felt a tightening in his throat, the quiet realization of a professional trap.

“Dr. Schmidt said the system couldn’t verify the occupancy of the block,” Kiefer said. His voice was flat, barely audible over the rain. “It couldn’t tell if the track was clear.”

“Correct,” Hankel replied, staring straight ahead through the windshield. “That’s the baseline for a discrepancy in a GGR interlocking system.”

“And this interruption,” Kiefer pointed to the tablet, “it happened exactly as the ICE 1017 passed the junction. Not ten seconds before. Not ten seconds after.”

Hankel leaned in, squinting at the timestamp. He remained silent for a long moment, processing the symmetry. “The logs show the interruption coincided with the train’s passage through the Balise field. A window of eighty-five seconds.”

Kiefer closed the notebook. The precision was an insult. It wasn’t the result of a lucky break or a systemic failure; it was a surgical strike.

“If you want to vanish,” Kiefer said, “you don’t just need a distraction. You need a window. You need a moment where everyone stops looking at the passengers and starts looking at the machines.”

He looked at Hankel. The older man’s face was shadowed, his expression grim.

“This wasn’t a glitch, Matthias. It was a synchronized event. The signal wasn’t lost; it was triggered.” Kiefer leaned back into the seat, the leather cold against his spine. “Someone knew the exact position of that train to the second. They knew how the safety protocol would react. They didn’t just stop the train—they manufactured the exact amount of chaos required to let Blume walk away without being seen.”

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