Chapter 4 - The Strategic Reserve
The military sanatorium in Bad Saarow was located fifty kilometers east of Berlin, surrounded by three thousand hectares of dense pine forest and the quiet, black waters of the Scharmützelsee. It was a place where officers went to recover from physical trauma or the lingering, grey exhaustion of long deployments in the east.
Beate sat on the wide wooden terrace of the clinic’s south wing, a green wool blanket wrapped around her knees.
The air here was cold and clean, smelling of resin, wet sand, and the distant, regular sound of the wind through the pines. It was a world away from the manicured lawns of Grunewald and the sharp, chemical smell of Gero’s citrus-scented kitchen.
She looked at her father.
Thomas Brand was sitting in a white wicker chair opposite her, a small wooden box on his knees. He had been there for three hours, silent and steady, his eyes never leaving the lake.
"He signed the divorce petition," Thomas said.
Beate’s hand went to her stomach. "He didn't fight it?"
"No," Thomas said. "The police found three other files on his company laptop. Files he had deleted, but that the state cyber-crime unit was able to retrieve from his cloud backup. It seems Beate... you were not the first."
The silence returned, but it was no longer a heavy, suffocating silence. It was the quiet of a room after a fire had been put out—cold, wet, but safe.
"The girl before me," Beate said. "Who was she?"
"An associate at his old firm," Thomas said, opening the wooden box. Inside were his military medals, their red and black ribbons faded by time, and a thick, yellowed envelope postmarked from Sarajevo in 1996. "She left the country in 2021. She lives in Switzerland now. She refused to testify then because Gero’s father was still on the board of the judicial review committee."
He reached into the envelope and pulled out a small, silver-plated whistle—the standard infantry officer’s whistle used to signal a charge or a retreat in low-visibility conditions.
"Your mother gave me this before I went to Bosnia," Thomas said, his fingers tracing the small dent near the mouthpiece. "She said, 'If you get lost in the fog, Thomas, blow this. I will hear it from Bonn.'"
He placed the whistle in Beate’s hand.
"I did not hear you, Beate," he said. His voice, for the first time since she had been a child, had a slight, uneven vibration at the edge. "I was in the forest. I was running my five kilometers. I was looking at the trees, and my daughter was drowning in five centimeters of water."
"You came, Papa," she said.
"Too late," he replied. "The perimeter was breached two years ago. I should have inspected the structure."
"Gero was... Gero was very clever," Beate said, looking down at the small silver whistle in her palm. "He made me believe that my own mind was the enemy. He would say things, and then three days later he would deny saying them, until I started writing down our conversations in a small notebook I hid in the pantry."
"A logbook," Thomas said, his eyes hardening.
"Yes," Beate said. "A logbook. I have three of them. They’re in the blue suitcase. I wrote down the dates, the times, and the reasons he gave for... for the belt. One was because I had spent forty euros on a book of poetry. Another was because I had left the car seat adjusted to my height instead of his."
Thomas stood up from his chair. He walked to the edge of the terrace, his hands behind his back, his silver hair catching the pale afternoon sun.
"The trial begins in September," he said. "The prosecutor has asked for five years without parole. The video from the nursery is the primary exhibit. Gero’s lawyers tried to claim it was an invasion of privacy, but the judge ruled that a parent’s right to monitor a child’s room extends to the protection of the family unit from criminal acts."
He turned to look at her. "We are selling the Grunewald house. The court has ordered an immediate freeze on Gero’s assets to cover your medical costs and the child’s future support."
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"I don't want his money," Beate said.
"It is not his money," Thomas said. "It is the penalty for his failure to maintain the treaty. In our world, Beate, when a force violates the terms of the armistice, they do not get to keep their territory. They pay reparations."
