But he would not do so unaided. First there were notes to be written and sent. Anonymous letters to the neighbors of his sleeping agents, letters containing signs and code words to remind them of the faith they once held, before the great betrayal and the Wiedervereinigung of 1990. Words to awaken them and call them to the flag. Words of action, saying: stand by.
They—or their parents, or grandparents—had been loyal members of the Hauptverwaltung Aufkl?rung, the foreign intelligence service of the Stasi, once upon a time. They’d been sent to these alien American shores to await an unspecified future mission. They were the members of the Wolf Orchestra, the last and greatest Communist sleeper ring, injected into the United States between the 1960s and the 1980s by order of the chief spymaster of the GDR, Markus Wolf himself. Comrade Wolf was long dead of old age, and the nation he had served was itself liquidated almost a third of a century ago, its ideology bankrupt and its walls smashed. The Stasi’s foreign files had burned before the capitalists, flush from their triumph over the Democratic Republic, could retrieve them. The members of the orchestra were stranded on foreign soil as aimless illegals, unable to return home despite (or because of) the end of their mission. But if they and their descendants held the faith—faith in each other, never mind the failed dream of a workers’ state—they would surely come to his aid when he called.
And so Kurt Douglas allowed himself to be goaded into action by Rita’s guardian Angel—unreasonably angered at the bumbling conscription of his granddaughter by the amateurs and clowns who passed for spies in today’s America—and raised his baton to summon the Wolf Orchestra back to life, to play the cold war blues one last time.
AFTERWORD
Extract from “Beyond the Labyrinth: The Department of Homeland Security’s Secret War on the Multiverse, 2004–2020,” by Bruce Schneier—the Definitive Unauthorized History of the DHS
The Office of Special Programs (OSP) was not, strictly speaking, part of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) chain of command. For the first two years of its existence it was an independent agency; where it relied on DHS assets, it maintained an arm’s-reach relationship just as it did with the FBI, NSA, and the other agencies from which it drew its personnel. It was only in the wake of the panicked dash to regroup after the attacks on the White House that the OSP was actually integrated into its parent agency. While everyone knew what the DHS was, what it stood for, and what it did, the Office of Special Programs stayed resolutely in the shadows.
From its initial formation as the Family Trade Organization (FTO) during the first world-walker panic in mid-2002, the agency operated on a small scale. Operationally it was divided into three departments. Forward Intelligence controlled the deployment of agents and special forces in the Gruinmarkt; Interdiction provided the Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI with intelligence leads pointing to Clan smuggling operations on US soil; and Technology drew on the resources of the national laboratories to develop and manufacture world-walking machines (under the rubric ARMBAND). Prior to the nuclear attacks of 7/16, the FTO was one of the smallest organizations in the intel community. With fewer than four hundred staff it was even smaller than the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).
The events of 7/16, the retalliatory bombing of the small nation of Gruinmarkt in the Clan’s home time line and the subsequent congressional hearings, changed everything. The FTO brief became the policy football of warring rival bureaucracies. And the Department of Energy, DHS, and Immigration all made bids to become the parent stakeholder in the embryonic agency—in the case of DOE, because of the access to oil in other time lines that it promised. DHS “won,” much as a caterpillar that wins the race to eat the spores of a particularly grotesque parasitic fungus might be said to win. It engulfed the FTO and in the process renamed it the Office of Special Programs.
But, in short order, the business of transportation security—the DHS’s prior focus, via the Transportation Safety Administration—took a backseat to the business of building and managing world-walking machinery. The new machines provided access to all the oil under all the uninhabited parallel-universe versions of Pennsylvania and California, and a similarly vast number of biospheres into which carbon waste emissions could be exported. Transportation security is not merely about terrorists and train crashes; energy security is a huge part of the picture.
Protecting airliners, trains, and Greyhound coaches is only a hundred-billion-dollar-a- year industry. Oil is everything, and the para-time frontier is potentially infinite. The iron law of bureaucracy dictates that most of the people in any large organization will, after a time, be more preoccupied with preserving their own jobs than with fulfilling the mission statement of the agency. And the best way to ensure continuing employment is to build out the organizational empire. Who could possibly argue with that?
After a decade and a half of integrating the OSP’s core mission into the DHS policy apparat, there were precious few people left over from the wild ride of the early years. Fewer still understood the fraught legacy of potential disaster left behind—the legacy created by the government’s initial reaction to the world-walkers’ attack on D.C. These remaining individuals were the few, the proud, and the cowboys: in this respect they were much like “Wild” Bill Donovan’s OSS operatives, who after 1945 went on to form the backbone of the Central Intelligence Agency but who were rapidly swamped by a rising tide of bureaucrats.
Building on this foundation, the FTO sucked in staff from the FBI, NSA, DIA, NCS, Air Force Intelligence, and other more obscure provinces of the sprawling national security empire. The embryonic OSP was largely sidelined and left to its own devices. It should be no surprise that this branch of the organization is now known (dismissively) within the DHS as “our para-time CIA”—the subagency responsible for identifying and addressing threats to the United States originating from other time lines.
OSP is small in comparison to the DHS as a whole (its budget in FY 2019 barely topped four billion dollars, making it responsible for less than 2 percent of the total Homeland Security budget), but its responsibilities are vast. In the decade and a half following the development of the ARMBAND technology—devices that used stem cells originally harvested from the brains of captured world-walkers to enable aircraft and vehicles to move between parallel universes—OSP drones mapped out paths to hundreds of new time lines.