‘I know you’re not that naïve, Leigh. The new order is built on top of the old. Nothing ever really changes.’
‘I thought Arno was the conspiracy theorist.’
‘Maybe he was right,’ Ben said.
‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
He nodded, paused. ‘I haven’t told you much about things I did in the forces. I don’t talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it. But there’s a lot that happens that ordinary people don’t get to hear of. Ever. We fought whole wars that the history books will never mention. We operated far from the main battlefields, and we carried out operations that even we didn’t understand. We had no idea what we were doing. We were just given targets and orders. We destroyed places without ever knowing their names. We were pawns in a game. We were fools. Oliver knew that years ago, but I didn’t have the sense to listen to him. And the men pushing the pieces, the players who actually control things, are people you’ve never heard of. Hardly anyone knows who they are.’
‘So who are we dealing with here?’
Ben shrugged. ‘Who knows? People right inside the infrastructure, hidden behind layers and layers of fronts. People with connections. People who come after you when you show your face, use your passport or credit card, or try to talk to the police. This goes very deep. That’s why we need to tread carefully if we’re going to come out of this. And we’re going to do it my way.’
There was a long silence.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘What do we do now?’
Chapter Thirty-Five
Vienna
Late that night
Markus Kinski sat up in bed, blinking. His mobile was screaming near his ear. He planted his feet on the floor. The clock on his bedside table glowed 1.09 a.m. He snatched up the phone. Was it Clara calling him so late? How could it be? He’d been sure to take her phone away. Panic rushed through him. What was wrong?
It wasn’t Clara. The woman on the other end introduced herself as Leigh Llewellyn. He listened, waking up fast. ‘So where can I meet you?’ he asked her.
Leigh covered the phone with her hand and looked questioningly at Ben.
They’d talked about this. Her idea had been a public place in the heart of Vienna, somewhere that offered the safety of bustling crowds. It was a smart idea, but Ben wanted to put this Kinski to the test. The best way to do that was to set up an initial rendezvous that would offer a good opportunity for an ambush. Ben nodded, and she gave Kinski the reply they’d agreed on.
‘Meet me at the lake,’ she said.
Kinski didn’t need to ask which one she meant. ‘OK. When?’
‘Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock.’
Kinski was there at quarter to. The Mercedes turned off the road and crunched on the thin snow as it lurched towards the lakeside in four-wheel-drive mode. He got out, checked his watch, and walked up and down the edge of the lake for a while. Minutes passed. His breath billowed and he clapped his hands to keep them warm. In the pocket of his heavy greatcoat he had a Thermos of hot black coffee, and he slurped back three scalding cupfuls. This winter was a cold one, colder even than last year, and the lake was fully frozen over now.
He heard a car in the distance and tensed. He shielded his eyes from the low sun. Through the scattered pine trees he could make out bits of the road that swept around the lake, three hundred yards away. There was a bright yellow hatchback moving along it. He watched. It kept going. He looked at his watch again. It was well after nine. Where was she?
He kicked his heels and walked around. This was stupid. She wasn’t going to turn up. He flapped his arms, skimmed some stones across the ice and drank some more coffee, and then he had to go and piss in the bushes. By half past nine he was freezing and the coffee was all gone. By ten he decided to give up.
He went back to the Mercedes, muttering to himself. ‘What the fuck’s the matter with her? OK, fine, if she doesn’t want to know what I know, I’ve got better fucking things to do with my time…’ He turned the key in the ignition and the heater started blasting cold air. Kinski swore again and turned the blower down.
And froze as he felt the cold steel against the base of his skull. The click of the safety resonated through his head. ‘No sudden moves,’ said a voice from behind him.
Raising himself up onto the back seat, Ben reached forward with his free hand and drew Kinski’s SIG-Sauer out of its holster. Now, at least, he had a pistol with something in it.
He watched Kinski. He was a bear of a man, somewhere shy of fifty, weathered and ruddy, with the features of a prize-fighter and a nose that had been broken more than once. He looked like he could be dangerous, but he was built more for strength than for speed. If he could land a punch it would be over. But Ben was faster.
Kinski snarled. ‘What the fuck do you want from me?’
Ben didn’t reply.
The detective wanted to whirl round in his seat and rip this guy’s head off. ‘If you’re the motherfucker who took my daughter, let me tell you that she’s safe now. You won’t get her again.’
‘Why would I want your daughter?’ Ben asked.
Kinski hesitated. It was a strange question. The gunman’s German was good, but he spoke with a foreign accent. What was it? American? British? He rolled his eyes round as far as he could, trying to get a glimpse of him. Trying to get a look at his ear. But the guy was careful to keep out of sight. Who was he?
‘Because I know you murdered Llewellyn,’ Kinski replied, probing, testing. Now for the big bluff. ‘And I’m not the only one who knows, so kill me if you like but it won’t end there.’
‘Oliver Llewellyn was my friend,’ Ben said. ‘Someone murdered him, but it wasn’t me. I’m here to find out who did it, and when I find them I’m going to kill them.’ He withdrew the empty .45 and shoved it back in his belt. The police SIG-Sauer 9mm was well cared for and fully loaded. He didn’t think he was going to need to use it.
He’d been there half an hour before Kinski arrived, hiding in the trees. The big cop’s behaviour hadn’t been that of a decoy with hidden cronies waiting to pounce. No man would chuck stones, flap his arms like a kid or take a piss in the open knowing his friends were watching. He would have been glancing around him at their hidden positions, looking hunched and nervous with the anticipation, trying too hard to seem cool. And Kinski’s reaction to the gun at his head inclined Ben to trust him.
Though not too much. It was Ben’s nature to be cautious.
‘You got any coffee left in there?’ he said.
Kinski had felt the pressure of the gun disappear. He turned round slowly and looked at Ben, his heavy brow knitted. His own 9mm was in the intruder’s hand, but only loosely.
‘I’m sorry I had to do that to you, but I needed to check you out.’ Ben pointed at the Thermos. ‘And I would appreciate some of that coffee.’ The air from the heater was beginning to warm up, but his long wait in the snow had chilled him to the bone.
‘It’s finished.’
‘Then it’ll have to be this,’ Ben said. Keeping one hand on the SIG, he reached for his flask and unscrewed it. He took a swig and then handed it to Kinski.
The cop shook his head. ‘I’m on the wagon,’ he muttered.
‘Good man.’ Ben put the flask away.
Kinski relaxed a little. At least it didn’t look as though he was going to die. Not today, anyway. ‘So what’s your relation to Leigh Llewellyn?’ he asked. ‘Boyfriend? Husband?’
‘Neither. Like I said, a friend of the family.’
‘Do opera stars usually have friends with guns?’
Ben smiled. ‘I was in the army with Oliver.’
Kinski nodded. Ex-military. That made sense, from the way this guy had sneaked up on him so easily. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked tentatively.
‘You can call me Ben.’
‘Markus Kinski.’
‘Good to meet you, Markus. Now perhaps we could drive a while, and you could tell me what you know about Oliver’s death. And th
en, if I’m satisfied that I can trust you, I’ll take you to meet Leigh.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
Kinski parked the Mercedes in a sidestreet in central Vienna and they walked to the Sacher Hotel on Philharmonikerstrasse, opposite the imposing Vienna State Opera House. Ben wanted a busy place, as public as possible, for their talk with the detective, and the Sacher was about the most public place in the middle of the city. Even if someone spotted Leigh here, they’d be less likely to come running for autographs. Music stars were nothing new in Vienna.
The Sacher café was bustling with people taking a break from their Christmas shopping for a morning coffee and a piece of the café’s famous cake. Ben guided Kinski to a table in the corner.
‘Where is she?’ Kinski asked, sitting down, expecting Leigh to be there. Not another damned tearoom, he was thinking. He hated these places.
‘You sit here and keep yourself occupied for an hour,’ Ben said. ‘And I’ll be back with her.’
Kinski grunted. ‘Great.’
‘I’ve got people here watching you,’ Ben lied. ‘If you make any phone calls or try to make contact with anyone, I’ll know about it and you won’t see me again until I come to kill you. Is that very, very clear?’
‘Absolutely clear. Thank you.’
Ben smiled. ‘Nothing personal, Markus.’
Left alone, Kinski glowered at the menu. When the surly waiter arrived, he ordered enough black coffee and buttery Malakofftorte to keep him going for the next hour. Then he sat back and waited and thought hard about this guy he’d just met.
Ben walked across the busy Philharmonikerstrasse, heading in the direction of the Albertina Palace. He saw a sign marked Strassenbahn and boarded a tram. Leigh was waiting for him at the cheap bed and breakfast on the other side of the Danube Canal.
Kinski was into his fourth coffee when Ben and Leigh walked into the Sacher café just over an hour later. Kinski rose to his feet as Leigh approached the table and greeted her politely. He turned to Ben. ‘I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.’
‘Another coffee?’
‘Forget it,’ Kinski said.
Leigh took off her sunglasses and laid them on the table. Her hair was tied up in a ponytail and she was wearing a woollen hat. Ben sat down beside her.
She studied Kinski carefully. ‘I believe you have some information about my brother.’
‘Tell her what you told me,’ Ben said.
Kinski spent the next few minutes going back over it, explaining in detail what he knew. Leigh listened carefully as he talked. He described how he’d accidentally stumbled across Madeleine Laurent, who had then turned out to be Erika Mann, which was almost certainly another false name. The whole Laurent episode had been an elaborate cover. Then he took the little plastic bag of spent 9mm cases out of his pocket and laid them on the linen tablecloth in front of Leigh. ‘I found these by the lakeside,’ he said.
She studied them, recognizing what they were. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘My brother drowned. He wasn’t shot.’
‘They weren’t shooting at him,’ Ben said. ‘They were shooting at the ice.’
Leigh closed her eyes for a moment. He patted her hand, gave it a brief squeeze.
Kinski went on. He explained how he’d tried to re-investigate Oliver’s case. How someone had taken Clara from her school and used her to silence him, how his old Chief had been suddenly removed, and with him any chance of reopening the case.
Leigh looked concerned. ‘Where is Clara now?’
‘Somewhere safe. She’s OK.’
‘Tell her what you told me about the guy with the ear,’ Ben said, tapping his own earlobe.
Kinski related what Clara had told him about her abductor. Leigh turned and looked at Ben with wide eyes. ‘The ear,’ she said. ‘The man on Oliver’s video-clip. He had a mangled earlobe.’
‘What video-clip?’ Kinski asked.
‘We need somewhere private with a computer,’ Ben said.
‘Shouldn’t be a problem,’ Kinski replied. He got up and approached the counter. He asked for the manager, produced his police ID, and within five minutes they were being shown to a small conference room at the back of the hotel. They sat at a long table and Ben loaded the CD-ROM into the computer’s disk drive.
Kinski watched the clip in silence. His brow furrowed at the end, but he didn’t take his eyes off the screen when the victim’s tongue was hacked off and his guts were slashed open. Leigh had turned away and was standing at the window watching the traffic go by.
Kinski sat back in his chair when it was over. He exhaled deeply. ‘And you think this happened here in Vienna?’
‘Look at the times,’ Ben said. ‘The film was shot not long before Oliver’s death. It had to be somewhere nearby. It looks like a big house, an old house, and part of it is a cellar or a crypt of some kind.’
‘The victim looked familiar to me,’ Kinski muttered. ‘I’ve seen him somewhere, but I can’t place him.’
‘What about this other guy, the one in the foreground, with the ear?’
Kinski nodded. ‘From what Clara said, it could be the same guy who took her, yeah.’
‘One more question,’ Ben said. ‘Does Adler mean anything to you?’
‘Common enough name. What about it?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Ben said. ‘Never mind.’
‘Anything else on this disc?’ Kinski asked.
‘Just some photos.’
‘Show me.’
Ben clicked out of the video file and brought up the images. Kinski shook his head at each of them in turn. Then he said, ‘Wait a minute. Stop. Go back. I saw something.’
The shot of Oliver playing the piano duet at the party came back up on-screen, and the big detective’s eyes narrowed. He pointed with a stubby finger at the second pianist sitting beside Oliver. ‘I know him,’ he said. ‘That’s Fred Meyer.’
Kinski had only seen him once before, and he’d been a corpse dangling from a rope. But it was the same man, no question.
‘Tell me more,’ Ben said.
‘Meyer was a music student,’ Kinski said. ‘I didn’t know he was a friend of Oliver’s.’
‘Can we speak to him?’ asked Leigh.
‘Tricky,’ Kinski said. ‘There might be an issue with availability.’
‘Dead?’ Ben asked.
Kinski nodded. ‘But that’s what’s interesting. He died on the ninth of January.’
‘The same day as Oliver,’ Leigh said quietly. She sat heavily down on a chair. Kinski could see the hurt in her eyes but he went on. She needed to know this. ‘Supposed to have been suicide,’ he said. ‘But I’ve never been happy with that. Didn’t check out at all. Suspicious.’
‘Suspicious how?’ Ben asked.
‘I’ve seen a lot of suicides,’ Kinski said. ‘There’s always a reason why a person makes that decision. Fred Meyer had none that I could find. He had everything to live for. Plus, I don’t like those kinds of coincidences. Two musicians both die on the same night, around the same time, just a few kilometres apart. One dies in an accident that doesn’t add up. The other dies in a suicide that nobody can explain. Tell me that’s not strange.’
‘And now it turns out he knew Oliver,’ Ben said.
Kinski nodded. ‘So now it’s even more suspicious. There’s another link, too. Meyer had a pair of opera tickets.’ He pointed at Leigh. ‘For the first night of your performance in Macbeth last January, here in Vienna.’
‘The one I cancelled,’ she said. ‘I was just about to fly over for rehearsals when I got the news that he was dead.’
‘These tickets were for a private box at the Staatsoper,’ Kinski went on. ‘And they cost a bomb, far more than a student can afford. I checked. Meyer was on a budget and big-time opera tickets were way out of his league. His family didn’t have a lot to spare either, so it wasn’t like someone got them as a present. So where did he get them?’
‘Oliver could easily have got them
,’ Leigh said. ‘He could get free tickets for any of my performances, because he was my brother. No mystery there.’
‘So they must have known each other well, these two,’ Kinski said.
‘Olly never mentioned him.’ Leigh’s brow creased. ‘But what does it mean that they knew each other?’
‘If Oliver died because he knew something,’ Ben said, ‘why did Meyer die?’
‘Maybe they both witnessed this together?’ Leigh said.
Ben shook his head. ‘It’s clear that the clip was filmed by one person. Oliver was on his own in there. If there’d been two of them, we’d have heard them talking. We’d have seen flashes of the other guy as Oliver was running.’
‘So what did Fred know, and how?’ Leigh asked. ‘Did Olly tell him what he’d seen, show him the clip?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t think he’d have had time to show him the clip. Maybe he called him.’
‘Or they were planning something together.’
Ben thought about it. ‘We need to know more. I’d like to talk to the Meyer family.’
‘They won’t tell you anything they haven’t told the police,’ Kinski said.
‘I’d still like to talk to them.’ Ben paused, thinking hard. ‘Now, this place you’ve hidden your daughter Clara. Where is it?’
Kinski smiled. ‘We’re trusting one another now, then?’
‘I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t. I’d have left you dead in the car.’
‘Thanks,’ Kinski grunted. ‘OK. She’s in a convent. An old friend of mine is the Mother Superior there.’
‘Nearby?’
‘No, it’s out of the country,’ Kinski said. ‘Over the border into Slovenia, about five, six hours by car. In the mountains.’
‘Secure?’
‘Totally. Nobody could ever find her there, and nobody knows about it, not even the few cops I still trust.’
Ben looked Kinski in the eye. ‘Could Leigh go there too?’
Leigh exploded. ‘What?’
Kinski thought about it and nodded. ‘I could arrange that, sure.’
‘Good,’ Ben said. He turned to Leigh. ‘Because I think it’s getting far too dangerous for you. I want to put you somewhere safe until this is over.’
The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET Page 50