Without Options (23 page)

Toni explained the hit in Baden-Baden. She left out the important details, though.

When she was done, Franz gave a little whistle. “Sounds like this goes much deeper,” Franz said. “So Jake isn’t alone.”

“Do we know what Anna was working on with Interpol?”

“As you know, I’m sure, she worked with The Public Safety and Terrorism Sub-Directorate.”

“That could cover a lot of things,” Toni assured him.

“I know. But I’m sure your friends at the Agency could find out more about her work.”

Toni raised a finger while she dug out her phone and called back the director, explaining what she needed. Jenkins said it could take some diplomacy and a few favors to get that information, but said he’d find out.

She hung up and said, “You better get down something solid. We’ve got a little drive this morning. I’ll go check out.” She got up to leave.

“Great. Crazy woman on the Autobahn again. I hope I can keep my food down.”

She laughed and left him there. It was good to see he still had a sense of humor.

●

Alexandra Schecht reluctantly drove into work, getting to the BND building outside of Munich by nine. As she passed through security, she was stopped and held for a moment until two of her colleagues showed up—Martin Mayer and a young officer, whose name kept escaping her, but who she knew as a smug suck-up.

“I thought you were off for the rest of the week,” Mayer said as they walked down the main corridor.

Where would they bring her? To one of the interrogation rooms? Settle down, Alexandra. She’d run every scenario through her brain, trying to assure herself, and was ready for every possibility.

“I need to report some contacts over the past couple of days,” she said, trying to get ahead of the conversation.

“Wait on that for a moment,” Mayer demanded.

Why was he being such a hard-ass? More so than normal. He would have made a great Gestapo officer, she thought.

The three of them went into a conference room, and Alexandra knew it was not only sound proof, but she would be recorded visually and audibly. Not only that. The chair had hidden plates inside that would check her pulse for lies. If they were trying to intimidate her, they were far from doing so. They were just pissing her off.

In their chairs now, Martin Mayer leaned back and smiled. “All right. Please explain your actions.”

She started from the beginning, like Jake had asked to do, from him showing up in town, to the men chasing her to the Autobahn, and through the Luxembourg incident. She also brought up the fact that Jake had to kill the two men in France. However, she left out the part about her and Jake making mad passionate love for a few days, or the fact that they’d gone to the Interpol officer’s house near Lyon. No need to get Andre involved. When she was done, she leaned back in the chair and let out a slight breath of air to observe Herr Mayer. She knew he had no field experience as a BND officer and had come from academia only a few years ago. Psychology professor from Berlin.

“An interesting story, Fraulein Schecht,” Mayer said, his elbows on the table and his hands clasped together with a steeple, the spire touching his lips. “Why did you come back through Geneva, Switzerland?”

Calmly, she warned herself, or they’d know she was lying. “I said I dropped Mister Adams at a train station in France. If you look at a map, it’s not really out of the way.” This was true from Lyon, but not from much farther north in France, closer to Luxembourg. In her story, she had only said she’d dropped Jake at a train station in France, and not which station. But now he would ask her that location.

“I assure you I understand European geography, Alexandra. Geneva is quite a distance from Luxembourg. Where did you drop off Mr. Adams?”

No harm in telling this, she thought. “Lyon.”

“Ah, then that makes sense.” Mayer spread his hands out onto the table, his eyes shifting to his young minion, who stood in the corner behind Alexandra, and then settled back on her.

Something was bothering her. How did they know she had gone through Switzerland. It had been a long time since there had been any requirement to stop at the borders.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Mayer said. “How did we track you through Switzerland?”

“Exactly. You are brilliant,” she said diffidently. “I didn’t think I had a GPS tracker on my car.”

Martin Mayer grinned broadly. He explained the new tracking system that had been adopted by Germany and Switzerland and would probably spread to all of Europe in the near future.

“Wow,” she said. “That’s going to piss off a lot of people when the word gets out.”

“It’s a closely-held secret,” Mayer explained. “Only a few people in the Polizei even know of the system.”

Someone will leak it to the press, she thought. And it will only take one passing over of a promotion, or some other snubbing to anger a bureaucrat into releasing the information. These things never remain a secret for long. And once it got to the press, they’d blab it to the world.

“Perhaps. But by then we will have a list of successes to lay out for the public. Explanations to describe how their government has kept them secure, with little loss of civil liberties to law-abiding citizens. We will assure them that we don’t have the time or inclination to observe the comings and goings of ordinary citizens—only those who we suspect have committed a crime. There are legal safeguards in place.”

Right. “Truthfully, it sounds like a great system.” The detectors would find no lie in that statement.

“Now, let’s get to work,” Mayer said. He clicked on the LCD screen on the far wall and the lights dimmed immediately. “If you’re ready to come in off vacation, we have an assignment for you.”

On the screen was a grid of photos of six men and two women. The slide show pulled up each briefing on the individuals, along with short bios. The last man was Vladimir Volkov.

Alexandra found a perfect opening. “That man was just killed in Baden-Baden,” she said, bringing a shocked look to Martin Mayer.

“How do you know that?” Mayer asked.

“I was on the internet last night,” she explained. “They mentioned three Russians had been killed in Baden-Baden, but hadn’t given the names. I checked on the address and found out it was Volkov. My uncle Gunter mentioned the man many times. How Vladimir was the spy master of Germany, running more agents than any other Russian during the Cold War. So last night I dug deeper and found a hit had been put out on the net for the man. One million Euros.”

“Just like Jake Adams,” Mayer said with a smile.

“You knew this?”

“Of course,” Mayer said. He pointed to the screen. “All of those on the panel have been killed in the past month. All had one million Euros on their head.”

“But what do they have in common?” she asked. “There were Russians, Czechs, a Pole and two Hungarians.”

“They are all former Cold War spies,” Mayer muttered.

She thought for a moment. Jake had been right. Someone was killing all kinds of former spies. “What do we do about it?”

Mayer clicked off the screen and the lights rose to a near-blinding sheen. “That’s where you come in, Alexandra. You are going to Berlin to take responsibility for the hit on Vladimir Volkov.”

Wunderbar. She didn’t even have to ask to be put on the case. “Why me?”

“You are one of our best field officers,” Mayer praised. “And not well known in Berlin. You will be fully briefed on the details of the shooting in Baden-Baden. Right down to the type of underwear the man was wearing.”

“What kind would that be?” she asked curiously.

Mayer smiled and said, “He wasn’t wearing any.” He got up to leave. “Wait here. An analyst will be here in a minute to brief you. Show you Polizei photos. The whole works. You must leave by this afternoon. We’ve already made contact online, having you claim responsibility. Your meeting is tomorrow in Berlin.”

He left her in the room alone, her thoughts going to Jake, who had been right. They would let her get into the case. But she didn’t have to convince them of anything. They had her in mind all along. That was more than a little interesting. Perhaps disturbing as well.

26

Jake woke that morning in Baden-Baden unsure how the local Polizei would react to what they thought was a triple homicide, but what Jake knew was a hit on a former Russian spy, with him getting in the way and ruining their hopes to collect on a one million Euro bounty.

When he got to the main train station, security hadn’t seemed any different from normal. Nobody checked his backpack or passport, and with a Eurail pass he simply walked on to the train to Frankfurt.

That was earlier in the morning. In Frankfurt Jake had taken a 12:13 InterCity Express train to Berlin, a four-hour non-stop that got him in to Germany’s capitol at around 4:19 that afternoon. Again, security hadn’t been a problem. Not until he got off the train at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, where the Polizei asked to see bags when they got off the train—a strange occurrence, since they hadn’t stopped anywhere along the way.

The two Polizei officers carrying HK MP5 sub-machine guns asked Jake for his passport, holding up the line of passengers.

“No problem,” Jake said in German. He handed them his Austrian passport and they scrutinized it carefully. His photo on the passport was similar to his current appearance—with the long hair and ten days of stubble on his face—and looked nothing like the photo the German Polizei was using while searching for him concerning the Garmish affair, or that Interpol was using for their Red Notice. When the Polizei officers found out it was a diplomatic passport, they slapped it back into Jake’s hand and waved him through. They didn’t look too happy with their job.

Jake had worked in the Berlin area back when it was a divided city, with West Berlin apportioned to the Americans, the Brits and the French, and East Berlin one mess of crappy concrete block Soviet built buildings—the city cut through by the huge wall. Jake had been a young CIA officer during the exciting fall of the wall, and had worked there a number of times during reunification. It was a crazy time. Like the old west. Former East German agents of the KGB were trying to defect, saying they’d been forced to spy on their fellow citizens. Russians were culling the herd like ranchers taking down weak cattle. Those who managed to convince the German government would never convince their own neighbors, and many ended up stoned to death with chunks from the very wall that had divided them.

So Jake knew his way around the city. From the Hauptbahnhof, he got onto the U-Bahn subway until he reached the Alexanderplatz in the eastside of Berlin.

Rising to street level, backpack over both shoulders, he started walking across the large square where shoppers mingled with commuters on their way home from work. Darkness was falling heavily on the city and it looked like rain might follow.

It was a few more blocks to a section of row houses built in the 60s. Since Berlin was almost completely destroyed by the end of World War II, almost every building in the east could be traced back no more than 60 years.

But before he went there, he checked in to the Forum Hotel to drop off his bag. He took a quick shower and changed clothes, wanting to get a few winks, but knowing he might not wake until morning. Jake checked his two guns, the one under his left arm and the back-up clipped to his belt by his right kidney. He hid those with his leather coat and headed back out to the square. He bought a curry wurst and fries from a street vendor and scarfed the food before heading out again.

Crowds were clearing as darkness was complete, but the rain started now, a light mist carried in on a cloud of fog. As he walked down the sidewalk toward the eastern residential area that sat back from the square a few blocks, Jake kept his eyes open for anything out of the ordinary. But that was the problem. There was still too much activity for one person to take in and analyze. When he worked with the Agency, he had comm and back-up, with eyes and ears all around him. He felt isolated now.

He’d have to make a direct approach on the building, he knew. To hesitate would bring suspicion. The apartment buildings here were five stories high. Jake was following a young couple now, hoping they were going to the same place. When they turned up the steps to the building on the left, Jake followed them, keeping back far enough so as not to intimidate, but close enough to grab the door before it slammed shut.

The man held the door for the woman and Jake thanked him and took the door from him, making sure to smile. Now Jake had a choice. He could get on the elevator with the young couple, or linger back, which would look suspicious. Or he could take the stairs. He got in to the elevator and waited for them to punch in three. He hit four, even though he was also going to three.

When the elevator opened on three, Jake held the doors for the man and woman to get off, and then stepped back and rose up to the fourth floor. He got out and found the stairs, heading down one flight. The couple would be in their apartment by now, he guessed. But to be safe he waited a few seconds before peeking out into the third-floor corridor. It was empty. Good.

Jake unzipped his coat halfway and reached for his gun. No problem. As he walked, his eyes caught the apartment numbers. A few more. On the left.

Damn. No peep holes. He couldn’t check inside, but then the resident would also have to open his door to see Jake.

Direct approach, Jake reminded himself. This guy had worked for East German Secret Police, the Stasi, during the height of the Cold War, working closely with Vladimir Volkov. Bernard Hartmann had been one of the Stasi caught shredding documents in 1989 when the wall started coming down. He was lucky enough to escape the citizens with torches and pitch forks, but Jake had been assigned to find him and bring him in for a debriefing. Turns out the CIA had also been getting some reliable information from the man over the years. Some not so reliable. Regardless, his former CIA ties had kept him alive long enough to get a job with the Bundespost until he could retire with a civil service retirement a few years ago. Jake hadn’t seen the man in five years, and then the old Stasi officer looked like he had been drinking himself to death, his complexion a road map of mottled red and white and his formerly Arian locks having turned a dull blue gray. He was at least sixty-five, Jake guessed. Yet, when Jake first met the man in the late 80s, Bernard Hartmann was a bear of a man. One to be careful around, for sure. The briefing on him was littered with references of brutality, including death squads and political assassinations. Regardless of age, a former Stasi officer was still dangerous.