'Too long. It's good to see you again, Dale.'
'I have to tell you, when Jane called to tell me you were coming over, I said to her, "I thought that old dog was
dead!"'
Malloy smiled and let one shoulder kick up. 'It's not like people haven't tried.'
'I hear that!'
Dale had arrived in Zürich twenty-some years ago, a young world-beater Jane had recruited as one of her NOCs, operatives like Malloy working with No Official Cover. He had been through training at the Farm, but his German was a bit wobbly, and he had no street credentials in Europe. A reputation was something you could not counterfeit. You had to earn it. Malloy got him a bartending job at a strip club one of his assets owned, and then sent him on to Hamburg six months later.
Dale's tour was supposed to last three years, but Jane Harrison had persuaded him to stay on for another two. She was good at that. After five years her people were so deeply entrenched they didn't want to come home. Too much power, too much loose money floating about, and way too much freedom to want to relearn conformity. Dale had got married
to a Russian immigrant who worked at a downtown law office whilst he was finishing his second tour. They had settled down in the St. Pauli District, a few streets north of the harbour, tourists and streetwalkers. It was a good working class neighbourhood with families and decent schools. Five years became ten. Ten turned into twenty, and now, like Malloy in his last days in Zürich, what he feared most was getting the call to come back to Langley.
There wasn't anything in Hamburg Dale didn't know or couldn't find out, and the beauty of it was that absolutely no one suspected his link to the agency, including his wife. In fact the Germans had arrested him a number of times and had once even sentenced him to two years at a minimum security facility. Dale's key resource was a lively trade in stolen cell phones, though he could turn out fairly decent counterfeit passports and credit cards. Of course anyone doing business with him usually came to his bar at least once. That got a photograph, finger and voice prints. Better still, the merchandise he sold inevitably turned into tracking devices - with the cell phones having the shortest life but giving the most precise information on movements and contacts.
'How about you? Is life good in Hamburg?'
Dale let a shoulder kick up and offered a crooked smile. 'Getting old, T. K. Thinking about leaving the game when Jane retires.'
'Jane is never going to retire.'
'When they fire her then.'
Malloy tipped his head, offering a weary smile. 'At the moment I'm afraid that's looking like a distinct possibility.'
'She told me. I have got to tell you, my friend, you are not her favourite horse in the barn.'
'What can I say?' Malloy answered sheepishly. 'Jack Farrell surprised me.'
'That's not supposed to happen in our business, T. K.'
'Everybody makes mistakes, Dale.
It's
just that
in our business no one admits it.'
'In our business nobody admits anything! Come on,' he said, 'I'll show you my digs.'
A set of wooden steps led up to a storage room, beyond which was the bar. A second set of stairs led to the cellar. At the bottom of these Dale opened the basement door. They walked into a clean furnace room with a steel door cut into the back wall. Dale unlocked this door and showed Malloy into a surprisingly comfortable basement flat.
'It's yours if you need it,' Dale told him. He gestured at the panelling. 'Sound proof, fully stocked with food, medicine, clothing, equipment, weapons, even some cash - whatever you need.' In the office he pulled a rucksack out of the corner that he had packed for Malloy. 'I got you a Glock 23, like the Feds use, an extra clip, a box of shells, a silencer and a shoulder holster.' He tucked this back into the bag and brought out a phone and charger. 'The access code is JANE. Two numbers on the menu - both safe. I'm the first. Jane's the other. Basic encryption. I wouldn't trust it too much, though.' He pointed to the computer. 'That's safe. Anything you need to send or receive is secure from everyone but the agency and God. Password is set on JANE - so you don't have to strain the brain.' He held up a set of keys. 'For the doors and the Toyota you saw at the back of the bar. If you use the car, make sure you lock off the parking area when you leave. Otherwise someone will steal your spot. The car belongs to some lowlife who is spending a couple of months in jail. Prints all over the thing, so use gloves, and if things go to hell ditch it. The
Polizei
will round up the usual suspects.'
Malloy took the keys and asked, 'were you able to download the material Gil Fine sent you?'
'Just getting to that.' He pulled a couple of disks from the rucksack. '
Two
DVD disks. Ton of stuff on Helena Chernoff.'
'Did you look at it?'
'I checked it out to see what I didn't have, saw quite a bit I didn't know about, and made a copy for my files. We don't catch her this time I might find something in that mess that can
help, but I expect better minds have tried. You know they think she's doing hits on Western politicians?'
'Gil told me about a U.S. Senator's plane going down in 2004.'
'That and a contender for the Presidency in 2000 - another plane crash. There was also maybe a stroke in 2006 that could have turned the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. But it's not just
our
politicians, T. K. They think she might be linked to three members of the House of Lords in the past ten years - two accidental deaths and one suicide. There was also a scientist in London who was screaming about no nukes in the run-up to Iraq-Two. The official cause of death was suicide, because he was being discredited for his opinion, but Chernoff was in the UK, and they think. . .
maybe.'
'How do they know she was in the UK?'
'The usual. She blew an alias a couple of years later, and they tracked it back to three different trips to the UK, all corresponding to suspicious deaths.'
'Who's paying her, Dale?'
Dale shook his head. 'Apparently someone interested in changing the political landscape in the West. . . or employed by people who are.'
'So you think she has a handler?'
'The lady doesn't crawl out of the woodwork to contract these deals. Someone is arranging this stuff, maybe even providing the talent she needs for different kinds of jobs - mechanics, doctors, muscle. There's a network somewhere. We just can't find it.'
'She started out by hitting key players in the Russian mafia,' Malloy said. 'Maybe she's still working for them.'
'I don't think the Russians are doing it. They have too many internal problems to worry about the world stage. I was just skimming the stuff, T. K., but it looks to me like she's hitting people with a particular political view.'
'Maybe she has grown a conscience since the early days.'
Dale laughed. '
Right.'
'So, any idea how a New York financier shows up in Hamburg and hires Helena Chernoff within twenty-four hours of hitting the ground?'
Dale rubbed his fingers together.
Malloy shook his head. 'He had to call someone. He had to have a contact.'
'They got cosy real fast, T. K. Maybe they knew each other in the old days.'
'He had to call someone to get to her, Dale.'
'I can put some of our analysts on calls out of Barcelona and Montreal to Germany over the past week.'
'I might have a better idea. If I remember correctly, you were looking at a businessman or lawyer here in town a few years ago. . .'
'I look at people like that all the time, T. K.!'
'This one was meeting with a neo-Nazi who went by the street name Xeno. No one ever got a last name on the guy...'
Dale nodded. 'I remember the deal. You must be doing quite a bit of reading since you retired if you remember that guy!'
'I had a run in with Xeno about eighteen months ago.'
'That was you - the thing with Julian Corbeau? I didn't know you were involved in that!'
'I'm a good Christian, Dale. I never let my right hand know what my left is doing.'
'Meaning you don't write complete reports for Jane?'
'They're complete. They're just not always true.'
'I remember the guy. I was watching Xeno on and off through a couple junkies for about two years, just keeping track of his network. First he had some people hustling dope and running a few home invasions. All small time, low rent kind of activity. This was right after the Wall came down. Then he got some muscle working for him, and then he hired some types who would pretty much do anything he asked - and the competition started falling by the wayside. He was turning into a real player, but I couldn't get close to the guy. He had been trained by the
Stasi
is my guess. Probably one of those people they were looking for after the reunification. Anyway, I was checking a cell phone I had sold a street hood one day and I realised it was in Xeno's pocket.'
'Nothing like dumb luck.'
'We get enough bad luck we're due some good every now and then. He had the thing right up to his death in 2006, so I knew every phone he called and tracked all his movements. After about three months or so I was charting his movements on a city map, and there was one meeting that took place every fourth Monday at dusk in the Stadtpark - same spot every time. So I set up surveillance on the area when the next fourth Monday rolled around, and who should join him on the park bench but Hugo Ohlendorf?'
'That's the guy!'
'He's a political heavyweight in Hamburg, former chief prosecutor, now a partner in one of the big law firms in town. Very clean, very anticrime, very,
very
rich. Ohlendorf is letting his dog run, and Xeno is like this homeless guy on a park bench. Ohlendorf says something and they talk for a couple of minutes. Something about the dog, the weather. Like that. After that, Xeno walks off. Next month, same deal. Like they're total strangers striking up a conversation about the weather.
'Any idea what they were really talking about?'
'Best I could figure, they were exchanging codes, maybe coordinates for drop sites - something like that. For what, I don't know, but this much I do know, Hugo Ohlendorf is dirty. I couldn't imagine he was on Xeno's payroll, but I thought maybe Xeno could have been on his. Maybe like a messenger, maybe like his chief of operations. Something like that.'
'That would explain Xeno's sudden rise from obscurity.'
'I thought so. I ended up watching Ohlendorf for a few months, got his cell number and tracked his calls and movements, looked at his money, his partners, his friendships. It didn't take me anywhere, and if I had pushed harder and asked Jane to go to the Germans I figured someone would tip him off. He's connected with the cops from his days as a prosecutor - lots of friends up and down the line, from blue collar beat cops to the chiefs - not to mention the people who run things. So I backed off.'
'I need to talk to this guy tomorrow evening, Dale - in private.'
Dale looked at Malloy, as if to be sure he understood what Malloy was asking. 'I can reactivate the trace on his cell phone, if that would help.'
Malloy smiled. 'That should do it. Then if you can give me a call tomorrow evening when it looks like he's home for the night, I'll handle the rest.'
'I can do that for you, T. K. If you want to have a look at his place, the canal tour goes right behind his house. I took it a few times just to see what I could see.'
'What do you have on his private life - the people living at the house, that kind of thing?'
'Wife and one daughter at home. There's a son who is going to school in Berlin, maybe doing an apprenticeship by now.'
'Any live-ins?'
'I never got that close to the guy.'
'Does he move around town with a bodyguard?'
'He's licensed to carry a gun, but I never saw a bodyguard.'
'One other thing. Kind of a long shot, but it's worth a look. You've got someone in the phone company, I take it?'
Dale Perry chuckled. 'I
own
the phone company, T. K. What do you need?'
'I've got the number of a public telephone. I want to know all the calls from it that were made to cell phones in the past seven days.'
'What is that going to give you?'
'It's the pay phone that was used to call the police about Jack Farrell. I'm thinking the caller should have given her name so she could claim her reward. Since she didn't, I can only speculate that she was part of Chernoff's network.'
'A double-cross?'
'Could be. Could be something else.'
'Like what?'
'I don't know. Like Chernoff had someone make the call.'
'Chernoff
wanted
a police raid?'
'Who knows? Maybe she was having trouble controlling her client. Maybe she wanted more money. The thing is if her people are using public phones to make their calls, maybe someone got sloppy and used the same phone to call Chernoff's cell phone at some point when she was inside the hotel.'