Brooklyn, New York
May 24th, 1976
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."
--
Now
Triskelion
Washington D.C.
13:51 Local Time
Phillip Coulson could hear his pulse in his ears as he rode the elevator to the twelfth floor. He was in the middle of researching information about Albania when a stern-faced security agent summoned him from the archives. Smiley wants to see you, he said without any preamble, and led him to the elevator. He stood behind Coulson in the elevator, hands clasped together in front of him and watching Coulson with that sort of bored intent only a long-term SHIELD security man could manage.
The archives were his home now. After that mess with the drone in Yemen, he'd been taken off the drone center and dumped into the basement where he did legwork for the analysts desks on the sixth floor. He'd been waiting for the shoe to fall ever since that day, waiting on someone to round him up and hand him his walking papers or worse. Today looked like it was coming to pass. Why else would be going to see the Accountant? That was the nickname the SHIELD wags had given the newest member in the command chain. It derived from his short, dumpy appearance and large glasses as well as the large ledger he seemed to carry wherever he went. Already the rumors about the man were flying thick. According to one, he broke down a suspicious agent simply by staring at them for twelve straight hours and not uttering a word, another was that he got the job because Nick Fury was his spy and he was running SHIELD with the director as a puppet, another had it that Smiley was telepathic. That rumor was not as far-fetched in today's world as it may have been ten years ago.
The elevator dinged and Coulson stepped out onto the landing with his babysitter right behind him. The twelfth floor was counterintelligence's domain. Coulson had never been here, but he felt uncomfortable the second he stepped off the elevator. Compared to other parts of the building, this floor was offputting. It was the tiny corridors, Coulson theorized. Whereas most of the building had lots of open space and lighting, the hallways here were smaller and dimly lit. It felt like to Coulson that he was traveling back in time to the old SHIELD headquarters near the reflecting pool. He was guided down twisting hallways to a large, soundproof door at the end of a hallway. A simple G. Smiley was the only thing on the plate beside the door.
"Deputy Director Smiley," Coulson's babysitter said into a buzzer beside the door. "Coulson is here."
"Send him in," a voice in an English accent replied. "That'll be all, James, thank you."
The door buzzed unlocked and Coulson stepped inside. Smiley's office still looked as if no one occupied it. Nothing on the walls except a world map, nothing on the man's desk beside a neatly ordered inbox/outbox. Not even a computer. The man himself rose from his desk and held out a pudgy hand for Coulson to shake. His hands were soft, Coulson noticed as they shook, but his grip was firm.
"Phillip, take a seat please," Smiley said graciously. "Do you go by Phillip? What shall I call you?"
"Phil, sir."
The two sat and Smiley let out a reassuring grin. It was small, but it put Coulson at ease almost at once. Even though in the back of his mind he knew the rug could be pulled out from under him at any second, he had a feeling that he would be alright.
"I prefer George myself. Could never stand it when someone called me Georgie or Georgie Boy. Now, Phil, I wanted to bring you in here today to speak about something."
Smiley leaned back in his chair and stared at Coulson through half-open eyelids. Coulson got the feeling that this was his serious face, the one that supposedly made that agent crack. He figured if he had to stare at that for twelve straight hours, he may just crack as well.
"You applied for field work straight out of training, but was instead sent to technical services, working as a janitor out of Bulgaria and tapping embassy phones and computers. Do you know why?"
Coulson shrugged. "At the time they said they needed janitors more than they needed fieldmen. I believe I scored high in surveillance training."
"Oh you did. You scored quite well all across the board. Too well to be just a simple janitor. What did you make of your... custodial service?"
"It was a mixed bag,sir. I loved the tech I got to play with, but it was tedious when it came to the sitting. Though I've learned now that actual spy work is mostly sitting and waiting."
Smiley drummed his fingers on the table and nodded. He stayed silent for several moments, leaving Coulson to wonder what was going on in the man's head.
"If I could sum up my evaluation of SHIELD personnel thus far, two words come to mind: Wasted potential. So far I have encountered a few very talented agents either in backwater posts or in a section they are ill-suited for. You may be adept at technical surveillance, Phil, but I see your talents more suited to my line of work. Janitors are a dime a dozen, but a good network man is damn near impossible to come by. I want you to come over to my shop, Phil. Work under me and cultivate intelligence and counterintelligence networks."
Although he didn't show it on the outside, Coulson let out a huge sigh of relief from inside. There would be no walking papers, nor a black bag over his head.
"I need someone to carry out the operational side of things," Smiley said, a hand disappearing into his desk. "I cannot gallivant across the globe on a whim. I did that a few days ago and it nearly killed me. Plus, I'm needed here in Washington. I'll be spending most of the week on Capitol Hill and something has come up in Eastern Europe."
Smiley pulled a collection of photographs and handed them to Coulson. He looked at grainy, black and white footage of two men huddled together in a doorway. One was large with a crew cut that looked gray, but the color palate made it hard to tell for sure. The other man was tiny with a bald head and a pair of glasses hooked at the end of his nose.
Smiley adjusted his glasses and spoke as Coulson flipped through the photos. "A surveillance unit caught this in the Czech Republic thirty-six hours ago. The tall man is Wilhelm Wolf, formerly of the Stasi. He was part of a three-man hitsquad in the 70's and 80's that were responsible for at least two dozen murders of GDR enemies. He moved up in ranks and was Stasi security chief just before the Berlin Wall came down. Wolf disappeared shortly after East Germany fell. He's wanted for a laundry list of crimes, including the 1976 murder of a German defector to SHIELD."
Coulson waved the photo of the little guy, an eyebrow arched.
"That is Zastrow. As far as names, that's all we know about him. It's more than likely a work name. He was a major in the KGB and was a protegee of a Russian spymaster I went up against name of--" Smiley paused. Coulson looked up as the older man let the name come out in something approaching a hiss. "-- Karla. Zastrow ran several deep penetration networks into the West during the Cold War. Like Wolf, he fell off the grid as Mother Russia imploded in on herself. Both SHIELD and my old outfit appealed to the Russians for information on him, but they wre mum on that one. There have been sightings here and there of both of men since their disappearances, but the two of them meeting together raises eyebrows. There was no known Cold War connection between the two of them, both served in separate countries doing very different work. It is doubtful they crossed paths, so why are they meeting now?"
"HYDRA," Coulson said softly. "Intelligence reports have indicated they're using criminals and renegade intelligence operatives to fill out their networks. Have you read the report, sir?"
"I wrote it," Smiley said cheerfully. "SHIELD has a station in Prague and there's an active network still running through the Czech Republic, one of the few holdovers from the Cold War. Phil, I want you to go to Prague and serve as my eyes and ears, use the Prague station staff and the network and whatever means you can to find Wolf and Zastrow and see what kind of game they're playing."
Coulson felt a bolt of excitement and nervousness go through him. Finally, honest to god field work. But he was rusty in tradecraft, he wasn't sure if he could play it the way Smiley wanted it. Plus there was the lingering question that bothered Coulson since Smiley mentioned bringing him into the fold.
"Why me, sir?" Coulson asked. "I heard rumblings that you used Captain America for a mission, why not use him again?"
"Because Captain America is bright and capable," Smiley said without hesitation. "But I need a different sort of mind for this one. A mind that is capable of pragmatic choice. For all his experience in covert affairs, our shield wielding friend is still used to fighting a war under the rules of engagement. I sense you have no such illusions. If you disagree with my assessment or find the task too overwhelming, you can walk out the door and that will be the end of it. Spend the rest of your SHIELD career in the archives, reading up on what they eat in Morocco. But, follow me down the rabbit hole and you'll enter another world altogether. My world. It is a world fraught with peril and deception, but I feel you will be adept in navigating through it. What do you say?"
Coulson thought about Smiley's words. He was promising nothing but work, a chance to do something and help someone and make a difference. It wasn't sitting in a musty room or sitting in a van listening to a fat man eating borscht. It would be dangerous and hard, it was Smiley's only real promise, but it came with Smiley's endorsement of his ability. In Coulson's mind, the rewards far outweighed the risk.
"Let's get started."
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