merrimanlyon | (no subject)

Merriman automatically reaches up to adjust the collar of his overcoat as he steps through the door, holding it open for the others to pass through.

There is no sense of anyone in their immediate vicinity -- the key had apparently allowed them to time their entry to miss whatever patrol had most recently come through the area. But where one patrol had missed them, another would certainly follow. And a group of people this close to the Wall in gathering twilight, in what promises to be an evening of heavy fog, would have the guards flipping off the safety catches on their rifles in next to no time.

Ryan is the last one to pass through the door. It closes behind him with a soft thud and he feels a small surge of adrenaline rush through his veins. Nervous energy that makes him flex his fingers. He wishes he could have a cigarette right now.

The fog makes it difficult to see but what he does looks both familiar and unfamiliar to what he remembers of Berlin.

For a moment he has doubts about this mission and him being here but he pushes those out of his mind. It's too late for that. We have to follow this through. It's the only way to help Chris.

He looks at the others and sees the same emotions play out on their faces. Curiosity, surprise and then something that was a mix between disappointment and sadness. East Berlin was a dreary place. Still reeling from the effects of World War II, parts of it had been left in rubbles for decades. Falling under communist rule had only made it worse. Even after rejoining West Berlin when the wall came down, it still took years for it to rebuild and catch up to it's other half.

One wall. Two different worlds.

The wall rises behind her, Val turning for a bare moment to put her hand on it. So much emotion comes through the wall, so much that she can somehow feel. The division of families, the division of what should be an entire people, over a political ideal.

She shakes it off, turning toward the street, and blinks. There is a poster for the Russian ballet company, with the lead dancer emblazoned on the front in a white tutu. There was little difference between that girl and herself. It seemed almost as if she'd found Meg's tutu and tried it on. Frightening, that. Her hand clentches the fabric in her pocket, and she takes a deep breath. Deep down, she has a bad feeling about this, that she had gotten herself into something which she didn't really understand, somewhere that she didn't belong.

Merriman has also spotted the poster...and his eyes narrow.

As if the entire situation was not already complicated enough.

But the poster also provides some useful information, such as the lead dancer's name: Elena Pavlovna Stakhanova. The poster itself seems to have been only recently affixed to the wall of the building, so the company's arrival is fairly recent. And at the bottom of the poster, below the information about cast members and reviews and performance dates and telephone contact numbers, is a small sentence declaring that this poster is part of a promotion organised by the Department of Cultural Affairs at the Soviet embassy.

'South,' he murmurs, just loud enough for the others to hear him. 'To the Soviet embassy. Any enquiries we make on the company's whereabouts will have to start there.'

He takes a good look around as he walks through the door; a reflex, checking for threats, checking for escape routes, memorizing the terrain. It's twilight, but at the end of the alley he can see that the street is dim, the few lights acting more as a hindrance to night vision than a help. The chill is a bit of a shock after the warmth of the bar, as is the heavy smell of burning coal in the air.

He follows Merriman's gaze to the poster, his mouth narrowing at the prima ballerina's resemblance to Val. This doesn't bode well.

"We'd better get going, then. Getting to wherever the company is will likely be easier than getting back here with the tin, and we don't want to be running through the streets too late at night."

Ryan simply nods to this and starts walking. His only thought is to get away from the Wall and away from the empty apartment building before the patrol passes through.

Through the fog he sees the headlights of one car, then another and then a third. They were sleek black limos and all were headed in the same direction, towards the Soviet Embassy.

He pauses for a moment and turns towards the group. "It looks like we're going to a party."

Walking along the way to the embassy, Val falls to the rear of the group, as she scans the buildings, taking it all in. Perhaps she's a bit too obvious, perhaps it is just ill luck, but right as the group reaches the embassy, two figures come out and start yelling at Val in rapid-fire Russian.

Blinking gently, she straightens, looking confident, but not overly so. "Entshuldigen Sie, mir, Herren, aber wir sint jetzt Gaeste hier. Wir sollen seiner Spraeche sprechen, in Fruendschaft. Das ist warum wir heir sind, nicht war?" She smiles gently, innocently at the men.

[*Excuse me, sirs, but we are guests here. We should speak their language in friendship. That is what we're here for, yes?]

Re: Initial Entrance

merrimanlyon - 2005-07-17 02:13 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Initial Entrance

chelleuncurled - 2005-07-17 02:46 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Initial Entrance

merrimanlyon - 2005-07-17 02:58 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Initial Entrance

action-antihero.livejournal.com - 2005-07-17 03:15 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Initial Entrance

http://users.livejournal.com/_chappy_/ - 2005-07-17 03:23 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Initial Entrance

chelleuncurled - 2005-07-17 03:26 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Initial Entrance

merrimanlyon - 2005-07-17 03:48 (UTC) - Expand

Jack nods at Merriman's last comment, then turns to Ryan, his focus on the mission complete. "I'm assuming the tin is being passed as a dead-drop; it's probably too large and too awkward to pass by hand. And it'll have to be in a public place if it's a member of the company passing it to someone not in the embassy."

Ryan scans the room, noting where the guards are.

"There wouldn't be that many areas open to the public. The banquet room, maybe the balconies. The bathrooms."

He considers for a moment. "The main room will be crowded and busy. Might be too much of a chance of someone finding it inadvertantly. Bathroom first?"

"All right," Ryan says with a brief nod.

"Now, where would those be," he mutters to himself. He had only been to this embassy once before and he remembers hating the internal design for being confusing but not much else.

Ryan stops a waiter, a polite smile on his face. "Entschuldigen Sie! Wo sind die Badezimmer?"

The waiter pauses and gives him a blank look before shaking his head and answering in Russian.

"Sprechen Sie Russen?" Ryan smiles more and asks again where the bathrooms are, but this time in Russian. The waiter answers and points them up the flight of stairs and down the hall.

Ryan remembers why he hated the design of this building.

"Spasiba," he replies to the waiter.

Jack can't follow the conversation in Russian, but he doesn't have to as the waiter clearly gestures to give directions. He nods to the waiter and heads up the stairs, passing the guards upstairs with hardly a glance; he's supposed to have his bladder on his mind after all. He can feel the guard's eyes on his back all the way down the hall, though, and not for the first time he wished his gun was on his hip where it would usually be, closer to hand.

They finds the men's room quickly and duck inside, Jack checking the stalls to make sure they're alone. They're empty, and the door's open a crack, so they can hear any approaching footsteps. With one ear cocked toward the door, he begins checking under the sinks, praying it wasn't one of the female members of the ballet company that was doing the smuggling.

A cursory glance at the urinals tells him the tin isn't hidden anywhere on them. He would have easily spotted it.

Ryan enters one of the stalls, looks behind the bowl and then underneath the tank. He then lifts the lid of the tank and, finding nothing, quietly places it back on.

He enters the second stall and repeats the process. Ryan lifts the lid of the tank to find a rectangular object wrapped in plastic taped to the top. He rips it off and places the lid back.

"Johann?"

'Try to blend in' Michelle thinks and unfortunately her knowledge of East Berlin society is virtually non-existant. Unless some famous actor was here, she wouldn't recognize them.

Still, she knows she has to make an attempt to be a society photographer.

The women near her are wearing dresses that make hers look like she made it from an old curtain and she suddenly wishes she wore a necklace or earrings.

Excuse me, I'm Marilyn Wood from Look Magazine she says in faltering German. The women turn towards her and give her their best 'we're used to doing this' smile. Without her having to ask, they pose, as if she should know who they are. She has this terrible feeling that she should.

A guard by a long table gives her the once over as she snaps the photo.

'Hurry up guys,' she thinks as she notices a few other guards that don't even try to blend into the crowd.

Val, for her part, has been wandering from group to group, hoping that no one figures out she doesn't know what she's talking about. She attempts to steer the conversation to German, hoping that everyone will keep on her ploy of friendship. It works, mostly.

Every so often, one male or another will attempt to draw her off to the side in a private conversation. She gracefully wiggles out of each proposition, shaking them off.

Merriman circles the party on the periphery, spending most of his time eavesdropping on conversations and attempting to identify the party-goers who are also involved in intelligence gathering, of one form or another.

He tunes out of the conversation he had been listening to -- between two men who are so clearly MI6 that they might as well be handing out business cards -- and shifts his attention back to Val. She is being followed, or rather circled, by one of the men who had accosted her earlier and a different man, shorter and with a florid complexion.

He sips his drink, and keeps his gaze moving about the room. He carefully does not follow what Jack and Ryan are up to. If he himself is being watched (and there is no guarantee that he is not), then there is no reason to draw untoward attention to the others.

Michelle takes a picture of Val and the man following her. She hopes that she doesn't seem too out of place.

She looks up and sees one of the crystal chandeliers hanging above her. 'All this money and none for the people outside' she thinks, part of her glad that they hadn't run into any beggars. The bar hadn't thought to provide cash.

When she looks around the ballroom, she notices that some of the guests seem to also be looking around surreptitiously. Most people wouldn't notice, but years of pouring over photos and looking through videos have made her keenly aware of the person who seems to be out of place. Here though, there were too many.

'Something's going on,' she thinks, forcing herself to just keep taking meaningless pictures.

Val senses that something's off, that people seem to be a bit haggard, but she puts it down to the time period, and the political climate. She engages one particular man in conversation, pretending even perhaps to flirt a bit, but getting political conversation out of him.

The conversation doesn't go any particularly interesting place, but Val picks up quickly that this man is not what he seems, perhaps some sort of spy. She grins at him, and tries to get more information from him, but at that certain conversation, all she seems to get is leered at.

It is a babel of languages, Russian and German mostly, with a liberal sprinkling of English. From what he is able to filter out...some of the words are distinctly unsettling, especially when they are accompanied by glances in Val's direction.

It doesn't properly click into place for him, though, until he overhears a woman's shrill voice uttering a particularly German phrase: Der Tropfen, der das Fass zum Überlaufen bringt!

Literally translated, it is 'the drop that makes the barrel overflow'. A more English rendition would be 'the straw that breaks the camel's back'. But Überlaufen has another meaning, an overtly political one.

Defection.

He turns on his heel and makes his way over to Michelle, taking a glass of wine from a nearby tray on the pretext of bringing her something to drink. And as he presents it to her, with a courteous nod of greeting, his voice is pitched solely for her ears alone:

'There are complications.'

Initial Entrance

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Party Thread

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Escape Thread

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