the world.
Spangler agreed to publicly resign from his own company, though in truth he would retain control of everything. For two years, the agreement went, Shrike would have only one client, and Spangler would recruit a special team to fulfill the client’s demands.
The work came with an incredible payout for Shrike International, enough for Spangler to not only get back on his feet but hire the best of the best throughout the world.
And the client was as good as his word. Over the next two years Spangler built a network all over Western and Central Europe to monitor known and presumed Iranian spies and to track Iranian nationals, no matter if they worked in a pizzeria in Belgium, a kindergarten in Germany, or an auto parts manufacturer in Italy.
Over time it became clear to Spangler that his mission was more than he’d been told. Many of the names his client gave him to surveil were actually anti-Iranian regime activists, groups of expatriates who wanted to overthrow the nation of Iran. He assumed the Israeli government was looking to recruit these Iranians as spies, but he also knew this skirted the law that private intelligence organizations were sworn to follow, that they could not themselves be involved in recruiting agents for a foreign power.
Spangler hid the aims of his clients, even from his employees. He kept senior Shrike Group operations officers apart, gave each one just a tiny soda-straw view of the overall mission, and endeavored to hire more employees from intelligence agencies around the world, specifically those who he felt would work on operations that were, to put it mildly, morally ambiguous.
This worked for a while, until his client upped the ante again and ordered Shrike to run operations against Western nations, not solely Iran itself. The rationale was not without merit, as far as Spangler was concerned. The EU had recently lifted many sanctions on Iran, giving the regime in Tehran the cash it needed to buy and build weapons, and that, in effect, made the EU Israel’s enemy.
But still, it was dirty work, a German spying on Germany, on Belgium, on France. But by now Spangler was in too deep to question the wishes of the one entity that had rebuilt him from the ground up for the second time in his life. He hired denied assets, kept them hidden from Shrike itself, and used them around Europe to do the dirtiest work.
He told himself he would do whatever his client wanted. Spangler was a former operative in the Stasi, responsible for death and misery to many; he had no personal qualms about being a spy against his own nation, against his own people.
He’d done it before, after all.
He only had to find employees who would do the same.
TWENTY-FIVE
One of these employees walked through the door of Charlotte & Fritz promptly at eight and began heading over in his direction.
Annika Dittenhofer was only thirty-six years old, but she had been one of Spangler’s most trusted employees for well over a decade. She was in charge of Section Four at Shrike Group, where she recruited and ran spies and analysts and technical support staff on behalf of Shrike, men and women who were kept away from the company itself for operational security concerns. They were intelligence officers, analysts, and technical support personnel who had stolen secrets from their former employers, had violated noncompete clauses with their former employers, or were on the run from someone or something and needed to stay in the shadows.
Her employees all assumed they were working for the Mossad, as Annika had been raised in Israel and could speak Hebrew almost like a native. She used the name Miriam in the field, but since Spangler had first met her himself when she was a twenty-four-year-old army sergeant in Department III (counterespionage) of the Military Counterintelligence Agency, he knew her as, and still referred to her as, Annika.
Annika had recruited Ric Ennis, an American former CIA officer, a year prior. He conducted human intelligence operations, as did “Miriam,” but she wasn’t privy to his tasks and targeting lists. The “need-to-know” culture Rudolf Spangler had instilled in his company was extraordinary. Spangler gave assignments to his senior employees, and they carried them out, reporting back only to Spangler, who then, in turn, reported to the customer.
Ennis had also done some recruiting of his own recently. He’d hired Zoya Zakharova into the denied division when she applied for a job under an alias on the white side of