Episode 1: Countdown To Disaster!

This wasn’t an op. Intelligence agencies and hardened soldiers performed ops, taking on tasks in careful, predictable actions with skills that had been honed over years. This was something else. This was... jazz.

First it was a light touch with a brush on a snare, steady, hisses of static played over silence as the team stepped off the train into the early morning sunrise creeping over the grey buildings of West Berlin.

Henry Murray unleashed a few low notes of a standing bass as he orchestrated his contacts on the other side of the wall, their explosions even deeper notes, a chest rattling thump of blunt energy. He brought higher sounds to play over those static snares as Hank brought his hand down on the necks of the unfortunate guards left behind at the checkpoint, a little more dazzling drums has the Commander dragged their limp, unconscious bodies out of sight, Laura revving the van’s engine in anticipation for the former military man to be finished.

The van was a piano and Laura was a virtuoso behind its wheel, the traffic laid out like the rigid lines of sheet music, her nimble hands playing notes up and down each gap. It wasn’t so much that the van moved from lane to lane, from line to line, so much as it drifted over them, between them, up and down the keyboard the same way it rolled up and down the snowy, frigid streets of East Berlin. Laura didn’t play her instrument — she let it sway and drift, finding its own time, finding its swing.

The surveillance, or more accurately, the act of cutting through that net of cameras and sweeps by guards, was a horn, each note pulled long and lonely over the rest of the music, with plenty of gaps between each soulful blow of air. That was where Friday worked, in those gaps, those spaces between, those pauses to pull in more air for that sorrowful, crying saxophone. The others seemed to play their instruments, but Girl Friday slipped into their gaps, their spans that didn’t overlap, plotting courses and timing in a song that was thick with activity, finding the spaces that were empty.

Maxime stepped up to the microphone when it was his turn, swaying to the music the others played, then offering his own voice, trained and precise, spinning tales and stories that couldn’t be anything but truth. That was the talent of a good singer, the ability to spin something incredible, but make the audience have no doubt, no questions. The building didn’t have guards in the traditional sense, only nosy neighbors with hidden walkie talkies, and each one of them nodded along to Weis’ tales of sewer lines that had never been made right again after the war, another monument of haste and disinterest that plagued the Gemini city.

The song was almost over too soon. Everyone played so well, so masterfully, it seemed like they could go on for hours, but each agent... each musician... had their moment to shine, before they took a moment and allowed the music to fade. As those last few notes drifted into silence again they found themselves standing inside the tenement building, coming in through one of the washroom windows, so assured, so confident, they may as well have been invited in.

The building beyond the washroom was like so many others rebuilt in the rubble of Berlin. The tenement apartment was split with strangely wide halls, like a hotel, with narrow doors on each side. The doors must have been thin, because music could be heard through them, the low murmurings of disinterested conversation, or maybe the occasional news broadcast droning over the AM band, finding boxes of drab German engineering, not fancy, not shiny, but dependable.

It was five floors of these sorts of halls, slow seniors carrying groceries up and down the halls, shuffling over thin carpet past those same thin doors. The J.E.T.S.E.T. team would likely be seen in those halls, either by the residents who were out wandering them or by people nosily looking through the peep holes in their doors to watch them pass. They had their Transmission Strength Meter. That would help, but it would still take time to find the source of the numbers station in the building. The needle on their meter jumped when they got close, swayed like they were still spinning a sweet, careful tune. They knew they were in the right place.

Even with the transmission signal strength meter leading the way, searching the tenement building was going to be tricky. It was fairly large, with five floors, and a likely basement beneath them, but common sense would narrow their search. For example, with the laundry line antenna stretching over the roof, it was likely that the numbers station would be on one of the top floors. It would take too much work and create too many questions, to stretch wires from the roof down to lower floors or into the basement. And, while the photos they had been given wouldn’t contain the faces of every Stasi agent at the building, even a cursory glance at the stack of suspected agents made it clear that despite being "undercover" they shared a common enough appearance that it would be fairly easy to identify them. Most of the photos showed larger men, broad shouldered, with sharp eyes and grim lips. The little old lady that was pacing by the washroom where the team had collected, moving at a snails pace up and down the carpeted hall, probably wasn’t East German secret police.

Still, moving from floor to floor, taking a moment to check the meter for jumps in signal strength, would likely attract attention. A building like this one was a close knit neighborhood inside of its own walls, with everyone inside being able to recognizing each one of their neighbors. The J.E.T.S.E.T. team was small, but they were strangers to be people that lived there and strangers often inspired questions. If Maxime decided to continue presenting himself as a maintenance worker, that would be enough, but what about the others? Maybe they would attract less attention if they split up? What if they sent a couple of them back outside to create another diversion to draw attention and Stasi away? It was hard to tell what would be their best plan of action, but the team were professionals and had done this sort of thing before.

The clamor of their arrival in East Germany seemed to be dying down already. They could hear cars passing on the wet, snowy roads outside, no longer hearing sirens or emergency vehicles. Pausing in the bathroom they heard the muffled sounds of radios, of slow footfalls, of a vacuum cleaner being pushed over carpet a floor above them. Already East Berlin was getting sleepy again, everything muffled under the cold and snow of mid January.