Olympiad (Europa Reich Book 2) by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Embassy of the United States of America,

Hermann-Göring-Strasse, Mitte District, Germania

The United States Embassy was a great shell of a building sited some one-hundred metres south of the Brandenburg Gate. Even seven years after its last – at the time token - re-opening in 1969, many of its echoing corridors were rarely trammelled and at least half of its rooms remained mothballed, and shuttered. Prior to the late 1960s it had been abandoned for several years after the brief US-Reich diplomatic rapprochement of the early 1950s, Adlai Stevenson having ordered it closed two days after his inauguration in January 1953. President Earl Warren had partially rescinded his predecessor’s Executive Order in the early sixties but the building had hosted no more than a consular office and small CIA presence, managed on a minimal care and maintenance basis for most of the 1960s until President Goldwater’s resurrection of full diplomatic relations eight years later. Even now, the Embassy retained an air of impermanence, as if most of its occupants had never bothered to unpack because they half-expected to be evacuated at any time.

During the reconstruction of Berlin, the Second World War bomb site to the immediate south of the embassy had been developed into a shopping centre accommodating a new U-Bahn station on its lower levels. Outside the embassy’s modest – by World Capital standards - neo-classical frontage, the Hermann-Göring-Strasse dual carriage way separating the embassy from Germania’s largest ‘green lung’, the forested Tiergarten, was often choked with traffic which was hardly surprising, given that the north-south road connected Potsdamer Platz with the Brandenburg Gate and Unter den Linden, and the Embassy building itself sat on the western edge of streets which hosted, among other great ministries, the Reich Foreign Ministry and the monumental headquarters complex of the Reich Bank.

Deep in the bowels of the embassy the passing of every train on the busy U-Bahn line running directly beneath the street outside, and rattling along the curving post-war spur mined under the south-eastern corner of the building, as the line cut the ‘Brandenburg Gate corner’ of the old underground metro system to connect to the Unter den Linden ‘Central Terminus’, reverberated softly through the Embassy’s foundations.

Chana Lieberman had risked taking a short cut through the Tiergarten that afternoon; she badly needed to touch base with Control at the Embassy. Not least because she was so exhausted that she was very nearly out on her feet – and actually, a little shot away – not least because nobody had warned her that while she was executing her own dual, frankly quixotic mission in Germania that the whole fucking world was going to be blowing up around her!

Need to know was one thing; but this was fucking ridiculous!

She smiled wanly at the soldier at the checkpoint at the exit from the park. A week ago the hardest-faced Leibstandarte SS stormtrooper would have glanced with disinterest at the her OIZD card hanging over her bust – much of which she would have thrust towards

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