as he feared, it happened, and, just as he feared, he was forced to go on the run.
He made it to Poland, to Belarus, and then into Russia, but by then the Russians had their own problems, so he was carted back to Germany, where he spent four years in Landsberg Prison in Bavaria, before being released through a combination of old contacts and connections still in the reunified German government, and some luck that a few of the more incriminating files with his name on them had somehow disappeared.
Rudolf Spangler was still in his thirties when he moved to the Caribbean island of St. Maarten for a fresh start. He lived on the Dutch side and imported liquor for high-end resorts and restaurants. It was an eye-spinning fall from his former life, but he was, at least, alive, and after nearly a decade lying low, he again put the talents that made him a senior Stasi administrator to use.
As the world’s problems shifted from the scourge of communism to the scourge of organized crime and Islamic terrorism, Spangler slowly renewed contacts with former colleagues, many of whom had done prison time themselves for their crimes against their countrymen. When he felt the coast to be reasonably clear, he flew to Berlin. A man returning, not triumphant, but seemingly cleansed of the fallout of his past.
There he fostered new relationships with those in corporate intelligence all over the world, and by the beginning of the new millennium he’d opened his own small shop, doing risk assessments and consulting for midsized companies all over Germany. Grocery store chains, freight hauling concerns, telecom start-ups. His client list grew and grew, and within a few years he was being paid by Daimler-Benz, Siemens, and even the governments of Moldova, Slovenia, and Hungary for his services. He recruited case officers and analysts to keep up with the demand, location experts and subject matter experts and criminal intelligence experts and lots and lots of technical support personnel.
The German government harassed him some at first; there was no hiding that he was a high-level ex-Stasi man, and though he’d served his time for his crimes against the nation, there were those in power who felt he got off too light. But nothing stuck, and eventually his firm, Shrike International Group, named after the predatory bird, grabbed a coveted contract with the German government itself. Spangler consulted with the Federal Republic of Germany’s economic ministry, helping them gauge continued unrest in markets in the Middle East and Africa.
Shrike was growing and growing, and soon German intelligence operatives began leaving the BND, German foreign intelligence, as well as the BfV, German domestic intelligence, and joining the private firm.
And then the story broke.
The German magazine Der Spiegel found some papers, hidden by a Stasi functionary who stole evidence from HQ in those fast-moving dying days of the DDR in hopes of using them as a bargaining chip if ever captured. The man died alone and forgotten in a run-down flat outside Cologne, and among his things, incriminating official documents revealed fresh secrets of a foul past.
And one of the documents was a glowing performance review of Rudolf Spangler.
Colonel Spangler has exceeded every measure of the agency and the party. His operations in West Berlin in May of 1988 led to the unmasking of four senior agents of the Federal Republic of Germany on DDR soil, three of whom were expatriated, where they were executed in East Berlin by the KGB, and one of whom Spangler himself killed in a shoot-out in West Berlin.
It went on from there, and though no charges were ever filed for these particular crimes from back in the Cold War, he made the news, and he lost every single client in Germany, and all but a few others around the world.
And then, for the second time in Spangler’s life, he received a fresh start. He was asked to come to Dubai for a meeting, and there he was told a wealthy benefactor wanted to hire his European-based firm to keep tabs on the espionage activity of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The client, it was intimated, was the Israeli government, although there would be no official confirmation of this, ever. He was given what he assumed to be a cover story: a billionaire Israeli was worried that the world was too fixated on Sunni terror—Al Qaeda, the Palestinians, ISIS, and the like—and insufficient attention was being paid to the expansion of Shia influence around