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voice: “It says the building is abandoned now. Has been
     for twenty-five years. But back in the communist era, it was a state-run Schlachthaus . A slaughterhouse.”

CHAPTER 5
    A FEW MINUTES later, Mattie rode in the passenger seat of an agency BMW while Tom Burkhart drove them across the Spree River and then east
     through the city toward the neighborhood, or Kiez, of Ahrensfelde.
    Jack Morgan had ordered them out to the slaughterhouse, and demanded that Dr. Gabriel start figuring out how in the hell someone
     had managed to breach Private’s state-of-the-art firewall. Katharina was supposed to go to Chris’s apartment to see if his
     personal computer contained any notes on the cases he was working.
    Burkhart said nothing as he drove. Mattie was glad for it. She was in no mood to talk. Apprehension had enveloped her, and
     she tried to fend off the sense of being trapped by studying the giant television tower with its revolving ball and spire
     looming high above Berlin, getting closer with every moment.
    The communists built the tower in 1965 as a way of showing the West that they were modern enough to accomplish such a feat.
     At more than three hundred meters high, it was visible from virtually everywhere in Berlin on a sunny day.
    But it was gray now. The clouds hung low in the sky. Drizzle had begun to fall on the tower and on the S-Bahn, the elevated
     train station at Alexanderplatz, a bustling part of the city day and night.
    The tower loomed over it all as did the Park Inn Hotel, a communist-era building that had been spruced up. The Park is where
     Westerners would stay when visiting East Berlin before the wall came down. It was said that there were more electronic bugs
     in the Park Hotel than anywhere else on earth.
    Mattie tried to imagine Chris at eighteen. In her mind, she saw her ex-fiancé standing out there on the plaza between the
     tower and the Park Hotel, one of half a million protesters gathered in early November 1989.
    She saw Chris and the others acting and speaking in defiance of the scores of Stasi—the dreaded and oppressive East German
     secret police—who surrounded Alexanderplatz that night, filming the crowd, trying to intimidate the protesters into disbanding.
    During their two-year romance, Chris had told Mattie very little about his childhood and adolescence. She knew that his parents
     died in an auto accident when he was eight, and that he’d grown up in an orphanage out in the countryside somewhere southeast
     of Berlin.
    But Chris also told her that shortly after the uprising began in earnest, he left the orphanage with some friends and went
     to Berlin, ending up on Alexanderplatz the night of the largest protest, the one that showed the world how much the East Germans
     wanted freedom.
    Chris said that he’d felt like his life really began that night as the wall began to crack and crumble, falling not five days
     later.
    “I was free for the first time in my life,” Chris said. “We were all free. Everyone. Do you remember, Mattie? What it felt
     like?”
    Sitting next to Burkhart as they drove east, hearing Chris’s words echo in her mind, Mattie did remember.
    She saw herself at sixteen on the west side of Checkpoint Charlie, cheering and singing and dancing with her mother when East
     Berliners broke through the wall there and came freely into the West for the first time in more than twenty-eight years.
    Mattie remembered seeing her mother’s face when her sister came through the wall that night. They had all wept for joy.
    Then, in Mattie’s mind, her mother’s teary face blurred and became Chris’s the morning he’d asked her to marry him.
    She felt a ball in her throat and had to fight not to cry in front of Burkhart.
    Mattie’s cell phone rang. It was Dr. Gabriel. “Good news,” he said. “He’s moving. Not much, a couple of meters this way and
     that, but he’s moving.”
    “Oh, thank God!” Mattie cried. Then she looked at Burkhart. “He’s