by Marko Kloos
“And you did not know these people at all?” one of the cops asked. “You had never seen them before since you got to Germany?”
“No.”
“What about the person you said was a”—he consulted the notepad in front of him—“joker-ace? The man who looked like his skin was made up of tree bark?”
“No,” Khan said. “Trust me, I would know if I had. Bastard picked me up and threw me fifty feet. Haven’t met a lot of joker-aces who can do that. Look, I love chatting with you fellas, but you really ought to be out there looking for the people who kidnapped Miss Scuderi. I think you won’t much enjoy the media shitstorm that’s about to come down on you.”
“The criminal police are already investigating,” the other cop said. “We have set up a dragnet to look for the car you have described, and for anyone matching the description of Frau Scuderi. But in the meantime, we have to be certain that you are telling the truth.”
“Of course I’m telling the fucking truth. What, you think I helped kidnap my own client?”
The cop shrugged and smiled in an apologetic way that seemed entirely insincere.
“I don’t know how such things work where you come from, but over here, that would not be unusual. We have many organized crime groups. Germans, Russians, Italians. Chechens, Serbians, Turks. There is a lot of competition. People cross over sometimes. For money or power.”
Khan felt the blood rise in his face.
“I’ve been in this business for ten years. The people I deal with, they go by reputation. Loyalty is everything to them. You betray their trust, you end up on your knees in a junkyard somewhere while they take your fingers off with a fucking pipe cutter. That’s how such things work where I come from.”
He extended his claws a little and drummed them on the table in front of him. They made a tapping sound that seemed very loud in the small room.
“Arrest me and inform the American embassy so they can send someone over. Or get off my ass and let me get back to my job. I have a missing client, and I don’t see you people doing jack shit to find her.”
The two cops exchanged a few sentences in German. Khan wondered what he’d do if they took him up on his challenge and locked him up. Finally, one of the cops rapidly clicked his pen a few times and dropped it on the notepad in front of him.
“You are not under arrest, Herr Khanna. But you will need to keep yourself available for further interviews. We have asked for assistance from our colleagues at the federal office for special abilities. They are sending someone from Kassel to talk to you.”
“Great. Tell them they can find me at the Hotel Adlon. If I’m not out and about.”
The two plainclothes officers got up from their chairs, and Khan rose with them.
“You will find that we here in Germany do not like it when people try to bring justice about on their own. Leave the police work to the police.”
“No worries,” Khan said and flexed his tiger hand slowly. “I’m just going to do some tourist stuff. Sightseeing. Maybe get some souvenirs.”
* * *
They’d handed him his stuff back when they released him, and his phone never stopped buzzing with incoming messages on the entire half-hour taxi ride back to the hotel. In her Rikki persona, Natalie was a big enough deal in the pop culture scene that her violent kidnapping would make front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic. Back home in Chicago, they were seven hours ahead of Berlin time, which meant the news clips reporting on the incident would make the evening broadcasts.
When they were almost back at the hotel, his phone chirped again. This time, it wasn’t the chime of a message, but an incoming call. Very few people had his mobile number, and those who did were people who wouldn’t react well to being ignored. The caller ID was “unknown,” but that wasn’t unusual. A lot of his clients were allergic to easy identification. He swiped to accept the call.
“Hello,” he said.
“The fuck have you been,” Sal Scuderi said, in a voice that was just one or two decibels short of a shout. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for hours. What the hell happened?”
“The German cops had my phone,” Khan replied. “Event last night went sideways, and we got jumped in the parking garage when we left the venue.”
“They said you were the best in the business. That’s why I fucking hired you. To keep shit like this from happening.”
“It was three nats and a joker-ace,” Khan replied. “They knew what they’d be up against. And they brought just the right guy for the job.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck if they hired Mighty Joe Young for the job. You were supposed to keep her safe. You find my girl and bring her home. If you want to ever get another job in this town, you bring her home and fix what you fucked up.”
Khan gritted his teeth. Scuderi was an insurance salesman, not a mob boss, but plenty of people in the Chicago scene relied on his services. Losing the man’s daughter on the job would be a fatal black mark on his professional resume. Khan had never lost a client, and he wasn’t about to start a habit.
“I’m going to find her,” he said. “That was a kidnapping, not a hit. They’ll come to someone with a ransom demand. Makes no sense any other way.”
“They already did,” Scuderi said. “I got a message this morning. They want thirty million. I have forty-eight hours to come up with the cash.”
“Did you take it to the Feds?”
“Fuck the Feds. The message said they’ll cut her up into small pieces if I involve the cops. Whatever you do, don’t fucking tell the Germans anything.”
“I may have to,” Khan said. “Not sure I can do this by myself. This isn’t Chicago. I don’t know the local players.”
“Then find someone who does,” Scuderi said. “You’ve worked for enough high rollers around here. Gotta be some favors you can call in. Just don’t run your mouth. If they kill my little girl, you’re going to be in a world of shit.”
“I’ll get her back. They won’t … oh, fuck me.” The car had slowed down and taken a turn into the driveway of the hotel, and Khan looked up to see a throng of people under the awning of the entrance, most wielding cameras or microphones.
“What is it?”
“I just got to the hotel. Fucking reporters everywhere. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”
Khan ended the call, glad for an excuse to exit the conversation. If he wanted to find Natalie and determine who snatched her, he would need a clear head and no distractions.
The throng of reporters streamed around him as soon as he stepped out of the taxi. A dozen different people stuck microphones in his direction and asked him questions in both German and English. He tried to ignore them and quickly make his way to the entrance, but he found his way blocked by people and camera lenses. His frustration manifested itself in an unhappy growl deep in his throat, and the path ahead magically cleared enough for him to pick up his stride. The crowd of newspeople moved with him, but nobody tried to block his way again, and they all kept at least an arm’s length away.
Natalie’s talent agency had rented a huge three-bedroom suite on the top floor of the hotel. Khan half-expected to find the place tossed and ransacked, either by the cops or the people who had taken Natalie, but when he walked in, it looked just the way it had when they left it. He went into his own bedroom and changed out of his suit, which was now in tatters and smelled of medical disinfectant. When he peeled his old clothes off his body, he looked at himself in the mirror. The fight with Tree Guy had left its mark in the shape of a dozen bruises of various sizes and colors, from light red to angry purple. Khan’s wild card had given him the gift of rapid regeneration and recovery from injuries, but for some reason the quick healing factor didn’t extend to bruises, which took just as long to disappear as before. He stepped into the bathroom and turned on the shower, cranking the temperature adjustment as hot as it would go, then ran the water until the room was filled with steam. The scalding hot water hurt his bruises as if som
eone was punching him all over again, but the sensation wasn’t unwelcome. It kept his anger simmering, which was where he wanted it so he could bring it to a boil quickly.
It felt good to be in a clean suit and smell like himself again. Khan went through his luggage and took stock of the gear he had brought. There were no weapons in his bag, but even if he had brought any, he doubted that anything in his gun safe back home would make a dent in Tree Guy, who had shrugged off slashes from Khan’s claws that could have gutted a steer. He remembered the blows the other joker-ace had dished out, and the feeling of getting tossed over several rows of parked cars like a half-eaten bag of chips. This was not a fight he’d be able to win with his claws or teeth, but his brain wasn’t serving up any solutions to the problem, and the bag in front of him held no answers either.
Out in the suite, Khan heard the soft click of the main door lock and the voices of Natalie’s friends. They stopped their chatter when they saw him emerge from the bedroom. It took him a few seconds to recall the names of the two boys: Travis and Eli. Travis was wearing a large adhesive bandage above his eyebrow.
“You guys all right?” he asked.
“We’re okay, man,” Eli answered. “They didn’t do anything to us. Travis just got cut by some glass from the window. But they took Natalie.”
“No shit,” Khan said. “Tell me what you saw after they smashed in your window.”
Between the three of them, Khan was able to assemble a sketchy picture of what had gone on while he was busy getting the tar whomped out of him by Tree Guy. The attackers had bashed in the rear passenger window, dragged Natalie and her three friends out of the car, and made off only with Natalie, who had struggled against her abductors while they had stuffed her into the back of a second car that had pulled up while Khan was tied up fighting.
“Did they say anything?”
“Not to us,” Melissa said. “They were just talking to each other. Just a few words.”
“Any idea what language?” Khan asked.
Melissa and the boys shook their heads. He sighed and sat down on the couch next to them. Everything about this shouted mob hit to Khan. But why would the foreign mob here in Berlin have any interest in a socialite rich girl from Chicago? Kidnappings were usually high-risk, low-reward schemes thought up by desperate bush league amateurs, not pulled off by professional enforcers.
“I need to find out where they took Natalie,” Khan said. “If any of you have any ideas or remember anything else, tell me now. I want to know all the details. Even if you think it’s not important.”
“Have you tried her phone?” Melissa said.
Khan shook his head.
“That’s the first thing they would have taken from her. Unless they’re dumber than dirt. Everyone knows you can track a cell phone’s location.”
“Well, let’s see anyway.” Melissa pulled out her phone and tapped away at the screen. “We use that friend tracker thing. So we can find each other when we’re out together.”
Khan watched her mess around with her phone for a few moments. There was virtually no chance the kidnappers would have forgotten to strip Natalie of her phone, but he was fresh out of ideas at the moment, so he decided to humor Melissa. As expected, she let out a disappointed little huff and showed Khan the screen of her phone. It showed a map, and the last location of Natalie’s phone was marked with a gray dot. Khan took the phone and zoomed in on the map to see that the spot where her phone had last connected to the data network was the parking garage where they had gotten jumped.
“They turned it off. Or probably smashed it right there,” Khan said.
“Hey, I wonder if they got her watch too,” Eli said.
“What watch?”
“She bought one of those watches that connect to your phone. So she can track her workouts. You know what I’m talking about.”
“I really don’t,” Khan said. “But go on.”
“It’s like a computer on your wrist. You can even make calls with it.”
“Does it need the phone nearby to work?”
Eli shook his head. “Not the kind she’s got.”
“Can you track that thing?” Khan asked Melissa. She looked at her phone’s screen again and shook her head.
“It’s not on here.”
“You gotta be the owner,” Eli contributed. “Natalie could do it. From her laptop. It’s set that way so you can track down your stuff if you lose it.”
“Well, she’s indisposed,” Khan said.
“But her laptop’s here,” Melissa said. She got up and walked over to the bedroom the girls shared. A moment later, she came back with the laptop Khan had seen Natalie use on the plane. She handed it to Khan, who opened it and put it on the coffee table in front of him. The excitement that had been welling up inside of him died down again when he saw the login screen.
“Fuck. It’s locked.”
“I know her password,” Eli offered. “I set up all her tech stuff for her. Unless she changed it recently.”
“Give it a shot,” Khan said. He turned the laptop around and slid it in front of Eli, who hunched over the keyboard and started typing away.
“Got it,” he said.
“Holy shit.” Khan grinned at him. “So you do have some useful skills. Now I’m glad I didn’t chuck you out of the plane on the way here.”
* * *
The tracking map on the laptop looked like a bigger version of the one on Melissa’s phone. Eli logged in, toggled a few settings, and turned the laptop so Khan could see the screen.
“There’s her phone,” he said. “Same place. And there’s her watch. It’s gray too. If it was turned on right now, it’d be blue.”
The dot that marked the position of Natalie’s watch was right in front of a large square building labeled as Flakturm.
“What the fuck is a Flakturm,” Khan asked. Eli took the question as a directive and did a search, then scrolled through the results.
“Whoa. It’s a thing left over from the war. Big concrete tower, for air defense.”
“You mean like a bunker?”
“Look.” Eli brought up an image. The structure looked square and brutal. The concrete was stained and dirty from decades of weather exposure. There were no windows or other external reference points, but judging by the height of the trees lining the pathways around the building, he guessed the concrete monstrosity was at least six floors high.
“Does it say what’s in that thing?”
Eli closed the picture and scrolled through a few more pages.
“It says there’s a museum inside now. Some artist commune. And a nightclub. Looks pretty cool, actually.”
Something tickled Khan’s tiger instincts, and he felt the hair on his neck bristle. Over by one of the windows, there was a soft scraping noise. Khan looked up and saw a hint of movement in the corner of the window, like a fluttering drape. Then it was gone. He heard another sound, the faintest ticking of something hard on metal, this one from above. Their suite was on the top floor, and there was nothing above them but the roof.
Khan got up and walked over to the window. The windows in their suite stretched from floor to ceiling and opened onto a narrow balcony that ran the width of the suite. He made a shushing gesture at Melissa and the boys. Then he opened one of the windows and stepped out onto the balcony. The night air was pleasantly cool and carried thousands of city smells with it. In front of the hotel, on the other side of Pariser Platz, the columns of the Brandenburg Gate glowed in the darkness, illuminated by dozens of spotlight fixtures.
Khan turned to look up at the edge of the roof and sniffed the air again. There was a presence up there, something bigger than an enterprising raccoon. Something was up there in the darkness, quietly breathing.
The part of the roof above the top floor was a sloping face of green-tinged copper sheeting, topped by a rail. The rail was just at the limit of Khan’s vertical leaping range. He flexed his leg muscles a few times and extended his claws. The copper roof
slope was almost too smooth for him to get traction, but he managed to get a hand on the rail at the top. He hauled himself up and dropped onto the roof.
The rooftop was flat and lined with rubberized material. Every few dozen feet, Khan saw the dome-shaped bubbles of transparent skylights. There were two small sheds in the middle of the roof that looked like maintenance shacks, and a large tripod antenna was anchored between them. In the darkness above the sheds, Khan saw a shape crouched on an antenna crossbar, twenty feet high.
“Don’t make me jump up there and pluck you off that thing,” he growled.
“Good evening, Herr Khan,” the shape said, in a dry and reedy voice that put the hairs on the back of Khan’s neck on edge again.
“So you know who I am. Not too hard to figure out, I guess.”
“We know who you are. We have been keeping an eye on you ever since you entered the country.”
“Who’s we?”
He walked closer to the base of the antenna to decrease the range between himself and the stranger, to improve his chances at making good on his threat and snatching him out of the air if needed. The rooftop visitor shrugged. A pair of leathery wings unfolded and blotted out the stars of the night sky behind him. He stepped off his perch and landed in front of Khan silently, with just a single flap of those enormous wings.
Close up, he made Khan’s hairs stand up even more. He was clearly a joker-ace. His body was squat and short, and covered with coarse black hair except for his wings, which looked like leather sails. Even his eyes were uniformly black, and when he opened his mouth to speak again, Khan saw that his teeth were pointed and very white, the only part of his body that wasn’t the color of spilled ink at midnight.