Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) Read Online Free PDF

did laugh, and Saskia looked satisfied, as though she were a doctor confirming a diagnosis. ‘There’s an underground station just down this road and to the left. We’ll be home in time for a Schnaps before Friends . How does that sound?’
    Like Wolfgang will be delighted , thought Jem. She looked at the offered hand and grasped it, weaving her fingers. Her palm was grazed. She focused on that pain. I guess this is Plan B.

Chapter Five
    Berlin, a month before
    On the Friday mornings of her new life, Saskia collected Die Zeit , the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , and The Guardian from a kiosk on Müllerstrasse. From there, she walked to her favourite café, ordered an espresso, and lingered over the columns and terse leaders, though she could read each word in parallel and be gone before her coffee arrived. Her quiet Fridays were rocks of habit. She considered her loneliness a success.
    Six months earlier, she had entered Germany on an illegal passport and made her way to Berlin. She found an empty apartment in Wedding and filled it with second-hand furniture. She had little knowledge of German history and her life became that of an autodidact. Her discovery of Germany was, she believed, a discovery of herself.
    It was an August night when she first saw footage of Checkpoint Charlie. She learned there had been Checkpoints Alpha and Bravo at Helmstedt and Dreilinden. Each name a military fingerprint on the map. And there was the Wall. She watched flag-waving young men and women axing and hammering at its grafitti’d face, assaulting it with feet, pressing with the weight of their bodies until a section fell like a concrete drawbridge. East and West together. Past and present combined. And Saskia, viewing the video, had cried with those young men and women from fourteen years before. Now, it was 2003. The protagonists of that night were well into their lives; the length of a generation had passed. But Saskia saw it for the first time.
    ~
    An eddy caught her newspaper and brushed it shut. Saskia looked up to see that a customer had entered the café. She scowled at him and pinned the newspaper with her elbows. Kaspar came to her with a second espresso and shut the door. He nodded to her and she smiled back.
    She sipped her coffee and watched the winter crowd through the glass wall.
    There was a game she played. She picked two people at random and counted the degrees that separated their lives. With nothing more than a sense of curiosity about a person’s mobile phone number, that number would enter her attention as though whispered in her ear. Or a face. Who? she would think, and, moments later, a pixelated image from a driving licence application would fall across her mind’s eye. From this data Saskia could step to, say, the person’s first school, his employment history, criminal record, credit transaction history, and bank account. Once the first person was known, she selected a second. The only rule was that one of the pair had to be visiting Berlin. On average, a person would have one-hundred close friends and several hundred acquaintances. A pool of contact. Where there was potential for the pools to overlap, intermediate lives were stepping stones. In this way, she knew that the sister of Ibrahim, the kiosk owner, had been to school with the bank manager of her café waiter’s third girlfriend. Saskia made the steps and counted the stones.
    Today, she did not play this game. In her pocket was a betting receipt worth more than one-hundred thousand Euros, which she planned to redeem within the hour. The victories survived only as trivia in the year 2023; they had been passed to Saskia by her dear friend, David Proctor, in the fast moments before she entered a time machine bound for 2003. She intended to work through this list and finance her life with winning bets. The receipt for one-hundred thousand Euros represented a risk, but a minimal one. The pink sheets on which the sporting victories were scrawled