[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/DqjRXKJ.png[/img][/center] [b]Brooklyn, New York May 24th, 1976[/b] The crimson Cadillac Coupe DeVille glided at a slow and steady pace down Coney Island Avenue towards the beach. The neighborhood the car drove through was known as Brighton Beach. This part of Brooklyn was created as a beach resort one hundred years earlier, but was soon restructured into a residential community in the 1920's. Since the 30's, Jewish immigrants drifted to this patch of New York upon their arrival to the United States. Many of the residents bore marks on their body, scars and reminders of their time in concentration camps. Since 1970, the demographic of the neighborhood had begun to shift again. Although plenty of Jews still found their place in Brighton Beach, more and more of them were coming from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. The shops in the area were accommodating, the writing in the store windows in Cyrillic script as well as English. Like Little Italy and Chinatown in Manhattan, the growing influx of immigrants gave rise to the nickname of Little Odessa. The Coupe DeVille sped past kosher butcher shops, makeshift synagogues, and jewelry and appliance stores that lined both sides of the avenue. Red, white, and blue streamers were hung from light posts and storefronts in celebration of the America's upcoming bicentennial anniversary. The car contained three men. They were stern-faced and silent, the only sound coming from the car was the steady drone of the engine. Today marked their fifth day in America. They had flown in from West Berlin, their passports marking them as residents of various cities in West Germany. In actuality, the names and locations on the passport were a grand fiction. The names and identities were just one of many the men used for their work. The man driving was the oldest by at least twenty years. His steel-colored hair had been grown out from its usual military crew cut. He wore a thick mustache matching the color of his hair. A pair ray-bans on his face and the current American fashion, a burnt orange turtleneck with a checkered sports jacket and a golden medallion, made him look the part of an average America. In truth, he felt ridiculous and foolish in this get-up. It was too flashy and ostentatious, like something a clown would wear. The two other men dressed in similar clothing of various colors, each article of clothing chosen to help them blend in with the current styles and trends of the country. They all smoked cigarettes, their brand not the common Marlboro or Pall Malls. These were Turkish brands purchased from a special store many miles away from Brooklyn. The foul-smelling smoke of the cigarettes spread through the car and out the cracked windows. The car turned right onto Brighton Beach Avenue and sped along with the traffic. The Cadillac turned off the Avenue and swooped into a parking spot outside a four-story apartment building. The driver kept the car running as he looked at the two men in the back of the car. His hard eyes sized them up. He removed his sunglasses, excitement glittered in his eyes as he gave his men one last look. "Bewegen," he said in the harsh German tongue. Move. Quickly, the two men exited from the running car. They hurried up the concrete steps into the apartment building's foyer. The man in the car checked his wristwatch. It was 2:14 in the afternoon. The next five minutes were the most crucial of their operation. The three of them had practiced, trained, and prepared for months. They had committed the map of the area to memory, knew the schedules of the NYPD patrolman who passed by the apartment once every fifteen minutes, knew who would be in the apartment building at this time of day and when others would be back. The man in the car would run interference if any of the apartment's residents attempted to go in, waving them away with a forged NYPD detective badge and speaking in perfect American English that there was a gas leak in the apartment and it was not safe to go inside. Short of an epic fuck up by the two men inside, this operation would go off without a hitch. A successful operation today would be their sixth such outcome in the past two years. The three were the best of the best their service had to offer. Clever and ruthless, they were the proverbial sword for the party. While other directorates and sections did more acceptable work to protect the GDR, they were the unseen knife that those in control slipped between the ribs of the state's enemies. They were the necessary evil the politicians that ran the world did not want to face. The two men inside came off the stairs on the third-floor landing, their cigarettes gone from their mouths. The older of the two was a squat, chubby man with a wrinkled face and watery eyes. Sweat clung to his brow. His black hair had traces of gray in it. The grayness, mixed with the wrinkles, made him look ten years older than his current age of thirty-three. The man beside him was taller by at least four inches, coming in around six-foot-three. His dark blonde hair was close to his scalp in a buzzcut. His cobalt blue eyes stared straight ahead calmly, never once betraying the nervousness he felt. The fat man looked up at his younger comrade and nodded. The man tall returned his nod. Today was the young man's first time doing work of this sort. He had been part of the unit for six months now, acting as runner and lookout for the others. But now, it was time for him to truly become one of them. As they approached the apartment marked 3H, the two men reached into their sports coats and produced weapons from hidden shoulder holsters. They each had a Browning Hi-Power nine millimeter. Screwed on the end of the barrels were two suppressors. The older man nodded as they stopped outside the apartment. With no further words, the tall man thrust a shoe forward at the door. His foot crashed at the base of the doorknob, splintering the door jamb and snapping the lock in two. He led the way into the apartment, rushing in with the short man close behind him. They came through the door and into the dirty, dimly lit apartment that reeked of the same sour cigarettes they used. Standing in front of a television set, wearing only an undershirt and a dirty pair of underwear, was a thin bald man with a ginger mustache. He held his left hand up while his right hand stayed by his waist where he cupped a velvet bag. He looked at the two men in front of him with no fear or defiance in his face. "Stasi," he said in a thick German accent. It was a declaration and not a question. "Ja," said the fat man. "Schild und Schwert der Partei." "Verpiss dich, du kommunistischen bastarde," the bald man sneered. Without hesitation, the tall man opened fire with his Browning. The gun kicked three times, three soft pops accompanying the bullets. The bald man fell to the floor, the three shots striking his head and chest. The tall man ventured forward to the body and looked down. The dying man stared up at him, his eyes opaque and his dingy shirt stained with dark red blood. What caught his eye was the bag beside the dead man. The little pouch dropped beside the body in the ruckus, its contents spilled out onto the floor. "Fritz," the tall man said urgently, picking up a shiny stone and holding it up in the light. "Ich habe etwas gefunden. Diamanten." --- [b]Berlin Now[/b] The custom agent looked at the passport in front of him and scanned it with his well-trained eyes. The stamps of other countries' custom officials dotted the side of the passport opposite the photo. India, Australia, France, Serbia, and the United States were the freshest stamps on the paper. The official looked at the photo and then back up at the man before him. "You need to update your photo," he said in English. "For the scar." "Right," said Theodore Roosevelt. "I'll remember that when I get back to the US." To the customs agent, the man before him was not the 26th president but instead a nondescript American traveler with a common name. The magic that Roosevelt and his organization employed made them routinely forgettable to almost all those that they encountered. "Welcome to Germany. Next." Roosevelt collected his papers and walked through Terminal A of the Berlin Tegel Airport. The pedestrian traffic in the area was a shadow of its usual bustling activity. He chalked it up to the time. It was a half hour past midnight and only red-eye flight travelers were out and about at this time. He collected his black attaché case at baggage claim and headed towards the exit. The warm summer night greeted Theodore as he walked through the airport's sliding doors. Taxis and shuttle buses were coming and going from the picking up and dropping off sections. The traffic was pretty steady considering the time. A bored voice came over the PA system, first in German and then in English and French, reminding all incoming and departing traffic that the white zone was for loading and unloading only. A navy blue Mercedes-Benz with heavily tinted windows sat parked in the white zone, openly flaunting the PA address. Leaning against the passenger side door was a tall thin man with jet black hair. He finished smoking a cigarette before flicking it away. "Mr. Roosevelt," the man said as his form shifted. The tall man with jet black hair disappeared, becoming instead the tiny figure of James Madison. "Mr. Madison," TR said with a nod. "Welcome to Germany," she said, flicking the cigarette away. "[i]Back [/i]to Germany," said Roosevelt. "I haven't been here since '45." "The Götterdämmerung," Madison said softly. "Shall we?" "Let's." Roosevelt placed in the back of the Mercedes and then they were off. Madison pulled the car on to the Autobahn Hamburg and sped up to draw even with the fast traffic of the highway. "Where are we headed?" He stared out the window and looked out at the city as it whizzed by. "A safehouse outside the city. We have Zimmer stashed there." Ten hours earlier, Roosevelt heard the named Friedrich Zimmer for the first time in his life. Now in his late 60's, Zimmer had defected from East Germany to the US in 1981. With him came his story of being part of a five man Stasi hitsquad that traveled the globe doing the KGB's dirty work. The team consisted of the best men the Stasi could offer. All of them were fluent in multiple languages, were expert tacticians, and they could each blend in across the world in any country with a Caucasian population. The squad killed twenty men in twelve different countries during Zimmer's eight years with them. For his intel on the inner workings of the Stasi's assassin operations, CIA had given Zimmer full immunity and a lump sum of three million dollars. He then quietly shuffled off to a rural house in Oregon. Then came the end of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union imploded, and the intelligence community began to primarily focus on terrorism. In 2001, Zimmer left the States for his native homeland. The Stasi's demise eleven years earlier meant that Zimmer's life was no longer at risk by being in Germany. That changed a week ago. Gunter Lang, one of Zimmer's former hit team members, had been gunned down in his home outside Düsseldorf. Joseph Baer was then found dead three days ago in Dresden, a slit throat bleeding out on the sidewalk three blocks away from his apartment. Like Lang, Baer had been a member of Zimmer's team. Following up on that was the brutal bludgeoning death of Whilem Furber. Three murders in as many days. Any other time, the Executive Branch wouldn't be bothered to investigate. But the witnesses who saw the death of Furber reported the murderer as matching the description of Manfred Ackerman, a Stasi major and leader of the former hitsquad. The only problem? Ackerman had died of lung cancer in 1980. The presence of the supernatural had drawn the shadowy Executive Branch into the case. With all this information relayed to Roosevelt, FDR had laid out the mission parameters in five simple words: Get Zimmer to America alive. Extract Zimmer as quickly and as quietly from Berlin as possible. All magic users were out of pocket, so they had to rely on traditional methods. There was a flight booked for the next morning in Roosevelt's fake name for two seats. Come hell or high water, Franklin had said with a sharp look, Zimmer would be in one of those seats. "We're here," said Madison TR blinked suddenly, being pulled out of his stupor. The car was pulling into a dirt driveway outside a two-story farm-house. He could see chipped white paint covering the house even in the dark. The bad paint job aside, the house looked sound. The most unassuming place to keep a safehouse. "Where is here?" He asked. "Spandau," said Madison, parking beside a black Mercedes SUV. "Outside the city." Madison led them into the house. Three men were in home's dully furnished sitting room. The Executive Branch employed security work, low-level agents and minders staffed from former law enforcement and intelligence personnel. Two young men stood from a card table as Madison entered. The three had a rapid conversation in German that TR understood enough of to know that he was sending them outside to patrol around the yard. They nodded and headed off while Roosevelt approached the third man in the room. He was squat and fat, his gray hair receding back in a widow's peak. His face was heavily lined and wrinkled, making him look closer to eighty instead of his mid-sixties. A smoking cigarette clamped in one nicotine stained hand. His watery eyes looked up at Teddy as he approached the sofa he was sitting on. "Mister Zimmer?" "Yes," he said, swallowing hard and taking a long drag on his cigarette. His right knee bounced nervously up and down as he watched. "You're with CIA?" His accent was nearly non-existent and his use of a contraction implied comfort with English. His team was fluent in many languages, Theodore remembered, and spending years in America would have softened his harsh German accent. "Something like that," said Teddy. He pulled a metal chair from the card table and slid it over beside Zimmer. He sat down in the chair and looked into the fat man's watery eyes. The eyes of a hardened killer, TR reminded himself. Was this what it looked like to stare into his eyes? "Who want to kill you Mister Zimmer?" "Ackerman," he said without hesitation. "I don't know how, but he's come for me..." "Why?" "Because of greed." There was a pause as Zimmer took a deep breath and sighed. "And a stupid mistake we all made in America."