Read Chapter 7: The Dead Brother

The smell of damp concrete and stale cigarettes greeted Hartley as he stepped into the workshop bay. The crew had turned it into a makeshift mess hall—folded chairs around a trestle table, a radio humming low against the wall, and the ever-present hiss of the ventilation system that never quite filtered the Berlin air. He let the door clang shut behind him. Four faces looked up. Cole was absent, still on the midnight rotation, which suited Hartley fine. He needed fresh eyes today, unclouded by whatever demons his sergeant was wrestling.

“Gentlemen,” he said, dropping a leather satchel onto the table. “Personal interviews. Ten minutes each. Nothing to fear—routine morale assessment. London wants to know how the team is holding up.”

Lance Corporal Eric Turner scratched his stubble and grunted. “Morale assessment. Right. That’s what they called it before they shipped me to a signals post in Tromsø for six months of snow.”

“Tromsø built character,” Hartley said, allowing the faintest edge of a smile. “You’re first.”

Turner pushed himself up with theatrical reluctance and followed Hartley into the adjacent storage room. The space was cramped, stacked with cable drums and vacuum tubes. Hartley sat on an upturned crate. Turner leaned against a shelving unit. For ten minutes, they spoke about equipment resupply, rotation fatigue, the quality of the food. Turner’s answers were crisp, professional, unrevealing. He had that knack of the long-serving soldier—talkative about nothing, silent about everything. Hartley noted nothing amiss. Turner’s file indicated two brothers in Coventry, both factory workers. No inconsistencies surfaced.

Next came Corporal Alan Reeve, the tunneller’s mate. Reeve was a stocky man from Cornwall whose hands were permanently calloused from the digging shifts. He sat opposite Hartley, cap in his lap, and answered questions about his section’s progress with the fluency of someone whose mind lived in the earth, in the rhythm of the jackhammer.

“And your brother—the one in the Royal Navy?” Hartley asked, consulting his notepad. “Still on the destroyers?”

Reeve’s brow furrowed. “My brother’s a teacher, sir. In Truro. Navy’s my cousin. Bert.”

Hartley made a small correction with his pencil. “Right. My mistake.” He noted the speed with which Reeve had corrected the error—the natural reflex of a man with nothing to hide. Or an excellent liar. Two minutes later, Reeve was dismissed.

Corporal James Whitaker entered with a spring in his step and a folded newspaper under his arm. Whitaker was the youngest of the men, twenty-four, with an eager face and a slight stammer that emerged under pressure. He perched on the edge of his chair, elbows on knees, projecting a willingness that bordered on desperate.

“Whitaker. How are you finding the rotations?”

“Good, sir. Good. The night shifts take some getting used to, but—steady work. Beats guard duty at the embassy.”

“You were at the embassy before this posting?”

“Yes, sir. Six months.” Whitaker’s eyes flickered to the window, then back.

“Family back home?”

“Just my mother, sir. And—” He paused. “I had a brother. Died at Dunkirk.”

Hartley’s pencil did not move. He had read Whitaker’s file cover to cover on the flight from London. An only child. No siblings listed. No next of kin beyond the mother in Leeds. He set the pencil down slowly.

“Dunkirk was a hard time for a lot of families,” Hartley said. “Which regiment was he in?”

Whitaker’s throat moved. “The—the East Yorkshires, I believe. He never spoke much about it. My mother wrote to me. I was too young to remember.”

“Of course.” Hartley made a note. Whitaker watched the pencil scratch across paper, and his hands tightened on his knees. “And you have no other family? Cousins? Uncles?”

“An aunt in York. That’s all.” Whitaker’s voice had dropped half an octave, steadier now, as if he had recovered his footing. “Look, sir, I didn’t mean to give the impression—he was a brother in arms, really. A friend from training. We called each other brothers. That’s all I meant.”

Hartley looked up, letting silence stretch. Whitaker’s face reddened under the attention.

“I see,” Hartley said. “A brother in arms. That makes sense. The file didn’t mention it.”

“I always think of him that way, sir. It slips out. Sorry for the confusion.”

“No need to apologize, Corporal.” Hartley leaned back. “Is there anything else you wanted to raise? Anything about the operation that concerns you?”

Whitaker shook his head, a little too quickly. “No, sir. Everything’s running smooth.”

“Good. That’ll be all, Whitaker.”

The young corporal stood, nearly knocking over his chair in his haste to leave. He paused at the door. “Sir. What—what is the purpose of these interviews? Are we being investigated for something?”

“Routine, Corporal. Nothing more.” Hartley’s voice was calm. “Thank you for your time.”

Whitaker left. Hartley sat in the dim storage room, listening to the hum of the ventilation. His mind churned through the exchange. Whitaker had stumbled, corrected himself, then recovered with a plausible explanation. But the initial hesitation had been telling. A man remembering a lie is different from a man recalling a fact. The first requires calculation.

Hartley lifted a pencil and tapped it against his teeth. His instincts warred with discipline. On one hand, a young corporal making a small, clumsy falsehood could be explained by nerves. On the other, every detail in this operation had become radioactive. What had started as a routine check had just surfaced a crack in the floor.

He rifled through his mental records of the team’s movements. Whitaker had been one of the men who set up the relay antenna last week—within sight of the sector where Brandt had indicated Soviet monitoring stations. He had also volunteered for the inventory duty the morning Cole discovered the theft. Not an accusation. But a pattern worth watching.

Behind that, a darker thought surfaced. If Whitaker had lied about having a brother, what else had he lied about? And more importantly, whose instruction had he been following when he lied?

Hartley stood and walked back into the workshop bay. Reeve had gone back to his bunk. Turner was playing cards with the rigger, a corporal named Harris. Whitaker was in the corner, head bent over his newspaper, seemingly absorbed in a story about the Berlin weather. His shoulders were slightly hunched, tense.

“One more thing, Corporal Whitaker.” Hartley’s voice cut through the quiet. The younger man looked up, newspaper rustling. “That brother in arms—what was his name?”

Whitaker blinked. “His—his name, sir?”

“Yes. You said you remembered his name. It slips out often enough.”

The silence in the room was sudden and complete. Even Turner paused, cards hovering mid-air, eyes sliding toward the exchange. Whitaker’s mouth opened and closed before he produced an answer.

“Pryce, sir. Tommy Pryce.”

“Tommy Pryce,” Hartley repeated, committing the name to memory. The lie had two layers now. If Pryce existed, Hartley could verify the story. If Pryce did not, Whitaker was improvising, and that was its own kind of tell. Hartley nodded once and turned back toward the storage room.

But he didn’t close the door all the way. He stood in the gap, unseen, watching as Whitaker’s shoulders relaxed by a fraction, the tension bleeding from his frame as he looked down at his paper, not reading—staring at words he would later pretend to have absorbed. Hartley saw the young man’s hand reach up and scratch at his collar, a gesture too fast and too nervous to be comfortable.

At the far end of the workshop, the radio crackled. A news bulletin from London. Hartley barely registered the words. His mind was already running ahead, past the interview, past the team, to a single conclusion crystallizing in the dark of his thoughts.

The mole wasn’t above the crew. The mole wore their uniform.

Hartley closed the door fully. He had three days before Brandt’s deadline at Friedrichstraße, and a new secret in his pocket. The question now was whether Brandt had told the truth—the mole was real—or whether Brandt was another piece of a stage play, crafted to make Hartley dance in whatever direction someone wanted him pointing.

He looked down at his notepad. The name *Tommy Pryce* stared back at him, waiting for a verification he couldn’t perform without revealing what he suspected.

Outside, the rain began to fall on Berlin.