When it slid back on quiet motors, Konrad stepped aside. Smith was initially a little hesitant to enter but his reticence faded when Randi strolled casually through in front of him.

“Darling!” the man rushing toward them said. He had a narrow head with a few wisps of gray hair still clinging to it and a spherical torso that suggested a lengthy love affair with sausage and beer.

“Johannes. It’s been too long,” Randi said, switching to German.

They embraced, but Smith barely noticed, instead looking in awe at the room around them. It was probably twenty meters high and seventy-five square, filled with teetering shelves that rose almost to the ceiling. Every inch was covered with some kind of crate, box, or garbage bag stuffed to the point of overflowing.

What little open floor existed was dominated by four huge machines that were a steampunk kluge of copper funnels, conveyor belts, and exposed electric cables. What they did or whether they were even functional, Smith could only guess.

“Colonel!” Johannes said, offering his thick hand. “What do you think of my little recycling center?”

“Impressive. Where did you get all this?”

“Oh, a bit here and a tad there. When East Germany began to fail, I understood that it was time to embrace capitalism. To become a Westerner, yes? But what did I know? What could I do? And then it came to me. I knew the Stasi. I knew the files.”

“The important ones,” Smith added.

“Just so. The rabble became bold very quickly, but I had three weeks before they gained control. And in that time, I managed to spirit away the documents you see around you. To keep them out of their hands and the hands of the BStU.”

Smith tried to calculate how many tiny pieces of shredded paper they were surrounded by. A hundred billion? A hundred trillion?

“Seems like intact files would have been easier.”

He laughed. “Never pay for an intact file, my good Colonel. The Stasi shredded the most important things first. That is where the valuable information is contained.”

“And is that what the machines are for?”

“Exactly! My son built them for me.” His expression transformed into one of pride. “I know that every parent says this, but he is a very fine young man. And a brilliant engineer.”

“So the machines can put it all back together?”

“We used to do it by hand. Unbelievably time-consuming and tedious work. But now we pour the scraps in these machines. They create three-D images of each piece and send the data to my computers. There they are reassembled like a puzzle.”

“Seems like it would have been expensive to develop and build machines like that.”

“Well, I do provide the fruits of my labor to select clients. And they’ve been very generous.”