Scheuer hammered the steering wheel with excitement as he turned us onto Trift Strasse. “I can’t believe we’re really gonna get this guy,” he said. “We’re gonna get Mielke.”

“Fuck, yeah,” said Frei, and whooped loudly.

The three of them sounded like a basketball team trying to rouse themselves for an important game.

“If only you knew, Gunther,” said Scheuer, “what this guy is capable of. He likes to torture people himself. Did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“Les Bauer,” continued Scheuer. “A party member since 1932, he was arrested in 1950 and Mielke beat him like a dog. The Russians sentenced Bauer to death, and the only reason he’s still alive is because Stalin is dead. And Kurt Muller, head of the KPD in Lower Saxony. The Stasi lured him to East Berlin for a party meeting and then accused him of being a Trotskyite. Mielke tortured him, too. Poor Muller has spent the last four years in solitary confinement in the Stasi’s own prison at Halle. The Red Ox, they call it. And you don’t want to know what Mielke’s done to the CIA agents they’ve caught. Mielke’s a real Gestapo type. They say he has a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky in his office. You know—the first Bolshevik secret police chief? Believe me, this guy Mielke makes your friend Heydrich look like an amateur. If we get Mielke, we can cripple the whole Stasi.”

I’d heard it—or something like it—before and I hardly cared. This was their war, not mine. Probably the Stasi thought the CIA “fascists” were just as bad.

As we neared the end of Trift Strasse, I told Scheuer to turn right onto Müller Strasse.

“That’s Wedding Platz just ahead,” I said.

Approaching the apartment building on the corner of Schulzendorfer Strasse, Hamer, kneeling behind us, said, “What a dump. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to swap a cottage in Schönwalde to live here.”

Scheuer, who had been to the apartment himself, said, “Really, it’s not so bad inside.”

“Well, I don’t get it.”

I shrugged. “That’s because you’re not a Berliner, Hamer. Erich Mielke’s father has lived in and around this area all his life. It’s in the bone. Like the allegiance to a tribe or a gang. For an old Berlin communist like Stellmacher, this is the center of German communism. Not police headquarters in East Berlin. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he has some old friends who live in these very streets. That’s a big thing for Berliners. Community. I don’t expect you get that much where you come from. You have to trust your neighbors in order to be neighborly.”

Scheuer stopped the van and turned in his seat. A few meters away, the ambulance containing our security came to a halt.