Silver

7

They fought as they walked down the street. It was stupid stuff. Sarah wanted to go to Checkpoint Charlie, and he wanted a piping hot Americano and a sickly sweet pastry first. The two didn’t need to be mutually exclusive. He’d tried to reason with her. They were on vacation, and by definition that meant there was no need to rush, but Sarah was being Sarah. She had got it into her head she wanted to get to Friedrichstrasse early so they didn’t waste the rest of the day.

She wanted to hit the Brandenburg Gate, the cathedrals in the Gendarmenmarkt, and if they could manage it, make Spandau around lunchtime. He wanted to take his time, cross over into what had been East Berlin and try to imagine what it had been like back in ’61 when the Russian tanks blocked the road. It was a crying shame they’d torn down the old Watchtower. There was nothing left of the original Checkpoint Charlie buildings, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to soak up the history of the place.

It had become something of a pilgrimage for him-and not the usual honeymoon fare. His grandfather had died trying to come across that no-man’s land between East and West. He knew it was just going to be a street now, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t what it was, it was what it had been. Sarah understood that. That was one of the reasons he loved her. There were plenty of those. They might fight like cats and dogs but she understood him. Hell, she loved him for his flaws, not despite them, and that was worth every stupid fight they’d ever had.

She’d marked the route on the map, they needed to take the U2 east from Potsdamer Platz to Stadtmitte and transfer on to U6 north.

“For God’s sake, Sarah,” he grumbled, wrestling with the weight of the backpack as he tried to follow her. She was walking too fast for him and he hated talking to the back of her head-even if it was a beautiful back of the head. “It isn’t going to kill us if we don’t get to the concentration camp by twelve. We can always catch a later train,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m hungry, I’m tired and we’re meant to be on bloody holiday!” he shouted. He couldn’t help himself.

“Go to hell,” his wife of seven days turned and yelled at him.

Germans turned to look at them, no doubt wondering at the tourists who lacked the good grace to keep their arguments inside.

“Sarah!” he shouted after her, but it only made her walk faster. “Oh, for crying out loud, woman!”

She didn’t so much as break her stride. He hiked the backpack farther up his back and tried to push his way between the unmoving Germans as they gathered around the turnstiles leading n onto the U-Bahn. He didn’t have the tickets. She did.

“Sarah!” he shouted above the heads of the Germans. She ignored him.

He pushed his way over to one of the ticket machines, fumbled with the coins in his pocket and fed them into the slot. It seemed to take forever to print his ticket out. He pushed his way back to the barriers. He couldn’t see Sarah, but he knew where she was going. He looked at the signs, trying to work out which platform he needed for Stadtmitte. He chased her down to the platform, arriving as the train doors shut.

He waved at the driver and ran as best he could with the weight of the backpack slapping against his back and trying to knock him over. Sarah was in the fourth car down. He saw her looking at him through the glass. She was crying. She looked so beautiful and so sad with the tears staining her cheeks. They had only been married for a week. She wasn’t meant to be crying. Seeing her like that hurt him. He wished he’d just shut his mouth and kept up with her instead of whining about wanting a cup of coffee and a stupid, bloody muffin. He knew it was important to her that everything was just so. She needed order, and he didn’t have to be a prick about it all of the time.

As the train pulled away from the station he tried to pantomime that he was sorry. She stopped looking at him. It wasn’t that she was angry-he could live with that, anger came and went-it was that she looked so sad sitting there alone.

He tried his cell phone but there was no reception.

He dropped his shoulder and shrugged out of the pack. The next train wasn’t due into the station for seven minutes. He dragged it over the wall and slumped down against it, using the backpack as a backrest. He wanted a cigarette, but the entire U-Bahn was no smoking, so he resigned himself to suffer in silence. He’d light up as soon as he left Friedrichstrasse, and then he’d set about finding Sarah and making it up to her.

The platform didn’t take long to fill again.

A woman sat down beside him and asked him if he had made his peace with God. He looked at her. She didn’t look like a crazy subway evangelist. She was cute in a Japanese-high-school-girl sort of way with her Heidi-pigtails and knee-length, white cotton socks. She could have been anywhere between 13 and 23 years old, given the bright blue eye shadow and lavender lip gloss. It was impossible to tell. She had a bag slung over her shoulder. There was one of those stylized Japanese cartoons painted on the side of it. He couldn’t remember what they were called. It didn’t really matter. She was the least likely evangelist he’d ever seen.

She reached into her bag for something. He assumed she was going to read him something from her Bible.

She wasn’t.

She pulled a small aluminum thermos flask from the shoulder bag and uncapped it. She up-ended it. A small amount of liquid dribbled out. It wasn’t water. It was a tiny amount of liquid sarin. Curls of almost smoky gas evaporated away from the puddle. The thermos hadn’t been keeping the liquid cold, it had been keeping the gas just warm enough to maintain its state. The dribble of liquid was all that had cooled enough to condense. Liquid sarin would kill a dozen people, maybe, if they came into contact with it. As a gas anyone who ingested it was dead. On a busy subway system that could mean thousands of people.

“In a moment your nose is going to run. You’ll feel a tightness in your chest, and your skin will feel as though it is shriveling around your body, becoming too tight for the flesh it contains. Then you’ll begin to lose your sight. Don’t be frightened, it will all happen very quickly,” she said, in the most soothing, sympathetic and psychotic voice he had ever heard. She was right, he could feel the snot running out of his nose already. “You’ll hardly know it is happening. A few moments of agony and then it will be over. I am going to die with you. I’ll hold your hand as we go, if that helps?”

He looked at her. She wasn’t mad. She wasn’t some raving fanatic. She reached out to hold his hand. He pulled away from her.

“What have you done to me?” he demanded. It hurt to talk. He felt the first flush of pins and needles creeping through his skin and down into his bones. She was right. It was happening quickly. He shivered once, painfully. He felt his gorge rise and leaned over, sure he was going to vomit. “What have you done to me?” he pleaded.

She ignored him. “In a few seconds you’re going to find it very difficult to breathe. It will feel like your entire body is shutting down. You’ll lose control of your body.” Her breath was coming harder now. She was gasping between words. “You will throw up. You will lose control of your muscles. In seconds you will soil yourself. There is nothing you’ll be able to do about it. It is death. Every nerve will cry out, and finally your flesh won’t be able to cope. You will twitch and jerk, wracked by spasms. The fit will be brief. As you go blind, you will suffocate. There is nothing you can do about it. You are already dead. We all are. Everyone down here is dead.”

He looked along the platform. The people were blurs, dark smudges leaning against the walls and each other for support. He could hear them coughing and gasping. Someone cried out, a woman, “Ich kann nicht sehen! Hilf mir, mein Gott, ich bin blind!”

He only understood the last word. He didn’t need to know any more to understand what was happening along the platform from him.

It had only taken seconds to spread.

He clutched at the woman beside him, trying to pull her toward him. His lips twitched, but the words wouldn’t come.

The world around him lost its shape, the blurred shapes of the damned spreading across his eyes until all he saw was black.

He heard the next train roll into the station, the doors hiss and the screams as people stumbled toward it as though it could bear them away to safety. He couldn’t see any of it. He couldn’t see the faces of the condemned pressed up against the glass. He couldn’t see them clawing at the platform, shivering and twisting as they tried to crawl another precious inch forward. He couldn’t see the fear on the passengers’ faces as they disembarked. It had been more than half a century since a train last rattled through Berlin carrying so many doomed souls. These passengers were just as dead, and just as unwitting.

He fell sideways, face hitting the floor as another wretched spasm wracked his body, and all he could think as he fought for that last breath was that their stupid argument had saved Sarah’s life.

And for that he was grateful.