Oskar waved a wisp of smoke from his face and leaned closer. “Talk.”
From the sofa, Schwartz explained, “Mr. Weaver, we may be rushed, but we have all night. Gustav has a carton of cigarettes in his bag.”
Milo stared at his taped knees. He heard Gustav blow on the cigarette behind him, but when he looked up the man was stepping back, sticking the cigarette between his lips.
Milo said, “It was for you.”
“Me?” said Schwartz.
“The plural you. German intelligence. I don’t know what department, just German intelligence. Adriana was killed so that the Company’s relationship with German intelligence could continue.”
While Oskar stared doubtfully, Erika Schwartz squinted at him. “What does that mean, Mr. Weaver?”
“No one defined it for me. Now that you’ve told me her background, I can make some guesses. I think you can, too.”
He could tell from her face that she was already ahead of him.
“It’s why I asked you,” he said. “Who told you to get rid of me?”
She wasn’t listening. He knew what she was thinking, because he’d had a whole day to think it over. She was thinking that a girl with a history like Adriana’s meant nothing to an organization. Not to the CIA, not to the BND, not even to the human traffickers who’d already gotten their money’s worth out of her. Adriana Stanescu only meant something to an individual, or a few individuals. The kinds of individuals who took trips to questionable clubs to find gratification in the sweat and allure of anonymous, illicit sex.
“Erika,” he said, and even he was surprised by the softness in his own voice. “Tell me who your boss is. Tell me who wants us to stop talking to each other.”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she got to her feet and walked to the stairs and ascended without a word. Her three men seemed confused by the sudden lack of direction, and Gustav settled on the cot to finish his cigarette. Heinrich sat on the vacated sofa but didn’t look at Milo. Oskar remained standing, staring at the empty stairwell. Then he followed her up, carrying the wine and glasses she had forgotten.
16
In the morning, she asked Oskar to stay behind. She would call within the hour with instructions, and in the meantime Weaver should be allowed to rest. The videos had ended last night, and they had even dined together in the panic room. She had let him shower in the house itself with Heinrich as company. Though no more information was exchanged, Weaver spent dinner asking questions before realizing that she would not answer. Primarily, he wanted to know Theodor Wartmüller’s identity.
When she arrived at the Pullach office she rolled slowly through the parking lot. There-his bright red MINI. She took her time hobbling to the building and emptied her pockets into a small plastic basket before walking through the metal detector. It blipped, and with the guards’ magic wand they discovered a ballpoint pen that had slipped through a hole in her pocket to settle in the lining of her quilted coat. When one offered her back the metal items she’d removed, she asked to keep the basket for a little while. With a wry grin, the guard told her that that was fine.
She placed the basket on her desk and, without sitting, called up to the second floor. Wartmüller was in, she was told, but on another line. She asked if he would please call her as soon as he had time.
As she waited she found herself unable to do a thing. She turned on her computer and stared at the blue start-up screen but still didn’t sit. When her desktop appeared, she didn’t even bother checking her e-mail, only gazed at the artistic flower photo that was the background to her daily work. Her phone rang.
“Erika? I heard you wanted to talk to me.”
“Outside, if you don’t mind.”
“Now?”
“If that’s at all possible.”
He considered it. “Not too long, though. I’ve got a conference call with Berlin soon.”
“Then you could probably use a cigarette.”
“Probably right, Erika.”
She returned to the front-door guards, who expected her to hand over the plastic basket, but she hadn’t brought it. All she did was stop a few feet short of them and turn around to face the corridor. When Wartmüller appeared, tapping the filter end of a cigarette against his knuckle, they shifted, suspecting now that they were in serious trouble.
“Hello, Erika.”
“Theodor.” She turned to the guards and pointed at the metal detector. “Is this still on?”
They nodded-of course it was on. Regulations required it to be on.
“Good,” she said and walked through it. The light above her head flickered green. Wartmüller continued around it. “You saw that, sir?”
“Sure,” said Wartmüller, frowning. “You really are an oddball, aren’t you?”
She smiled and continued through the door he held open.
As they crossed the road, heading to the park, Wartmüller began to talk about the party at the consulate. There had been an American musician there, over on a Fulbright grant to research Swabian folk music. So that’s what he played. “Unbelievable! I mean, none of us would listen to that stuff for money, but can you imagine being forced to listen to it sung with one of those flat midwestern accents? Jesus, what were they thinking? Next time I’m getting you an invitation. You’ll only believe it if you see it with your own eyes.”
It was the friendliness that grated on her. That catty camaraderie was Wartmüller’s best weapon. It had the nasty effect of making everyone feel like a partner in this man’s worldly ways. It made her feel a partner in everything he did, and only now did she fully understand what that meant.
He lit a Marlboro as she settled on the same bench from yesterday, then sat beside her. “So,” he said.
“You want him quiet,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“You want Milo Weaver sent away so he won’t fill in the blanks of Adriana Stanescu’s murder. You want… yes,” she said and nearly smiled, then stopped herself. It had come to her before, but now she felt sure. “Blackmail, I suppose. That’s really what provokes these things.”
“It must be too early for you, Erika. You’re not making sense.”
“You have a history,” she told him. “An open history. The rumor mill is full of Theodor Wartmüller’s sexual adventures. Not all of them are legal, are they?”
He grinned around his cigarette. “Please, Erika! You’re embarrassing me!”
“There was a place in Berlin. Very expensive. You could go there and be assured of confidentiality. You weren’t the only one-no. Politicians and directors, businessmen. Actors, maybe. A who’s-who of the sexually deviant rich.”
He exhaled smoke and knotted his brows. “That’s what the dance with the metal detector was about, wasn’t it? You wanted me to know you’re not wired.”
“Exactly.”
He thought about that, going through his options.
She said, “There was a girl at the club. You were being blackmailed with photos of her and you, yes?”
He didn’t answer.
“So you asked your friends in the CIA to get rid of her.” She paused. “Of course you would do that. You couldn’t kill her yourself, and if you’d asked one of us to do it-even Franz or Brigit-we would ask why. And we both know how rumors get around the office.”
“Yes,” he said distantly. “We do.” He took a long drag.
“Theodor,” she said. She made her voice as soft as she could manage. “I just want to understand.”
He flicked away some ash, but the movement was clumsy, and the whole cigarette tumbled to the ground. He sighed. “This hasn’t been going on so long. Just since December.”
“Of course it hasn’t,” she said, though she wasn’t entirely sure what he meant.
He patted his jacket and came up with his crumpled pack. He took his time lighting another one. “A letter. To my home. A package, really. It contained a letter and photographs. It asked for money to be transferred to an offshore account. The photos w
ere stills from a video-that was obvious. Me and a girl in bed. The light was poor, but it was clear enough who I was, and who she was. She was very young-too young. That was obvious, too. I could still remember that night, and I knew that on the video it would look like…” He took another drag. “It would look like I was forcing myself on her.”
“Like you were raping her.”
“Something like that.”
“And the girl was Adriana Stanescu.”
Wartmüller stared at the ashy end of his cigarette. “I didn’t know her name. This was a private club. Berlin. I wasn’t the only customer. It was-at least, it was supposed to be-extremely confidential. Like you said. It had a reputation for this. I believed, as did the other customers, that I had no reason to worry.” He shook his head. “For that price, confidentiality should have been assured.”
Erika looked past him to where a figure moved along the edge of the park. An old woman with a tiny dog. What was an old woman with a dog doing on the grounds? She said, “When was this?”
“December. I told you.”
“No. The night with the girl.”
He exhaled. “Four years ago? Something like that.”
“And who sent the extortion letter?”
“That was the question, wasn’t it? I had our lab go over the envelope, but I wasn’t about to show the letter or the photos.”
“Of course.”
“Mailed from Berlin. No recognizable prints. Address from a laser printer-nothing to tell from that. So I went back to the club myself. The thing had been shut down. I backtracked and found out who had been running the club back then.”
“Rainer Volker.”
Wartmüller halted in midsmoke. “You are good, aren’t you?”
“Was he the one?”
“Before I got a chance to talk to him, I got a call from one of my American contacts.”
“Who?”
When he exhaled, smoke drifted from his nostrils. “Owen Mendel. Turns out they had been watching Volker. They learned what he was up to, that he was blackmailing me. It wasn’t their business, really, but Mendel understood that I couldn’t take care of it through BND channels. He offered an exchange of services.”
“An exchange?”
“He makes my problem go away, and in return I lobby for a little more cooperation with the Americans. The cooperation that was lost, mind you, because of your obsession with Afghan heroin.”
The woman and dog had left Erika’s field of vision, but then a young couple began to cross the park in the opposite direction. That’s when she knew-it was Brigit, suspicious Brigit, keeping an eye on her mentor with some of the extra staff.
Wartmüller continued, “The Americans knew that Volker was blackmailing me, and they even knew the name of the girl in the photos-Adriana Stanescu. All this trouble, over a Moldovan!” He shook his head. “Very quietly, they took care of Volker.”
“Killed him.”
“Yes. But quietly. I thought it was done. Just to be sure, I did a search on this girl, this Moldovan. Somehow she’d gotten a visa and was living up in Berlin. I started to think. Soon, we’ll all be up in Berlin. It was too easy to imagine-me on the street every day, my photo appearing in the newspaper. Really, there were a hundred ways for this girl to look up one day, raise her finger, and point. For her to start screaming.” He rubbed his face, which despite the cold was damp. “It began to drive me crazy. I called Mendel, but it turned out that he’d left the Company and I was passed on to some other guy. Alan Drummond. We talked turkey, as they say. After conferring with his people, he promised to get rid of my anxiety if he could start seeing some results from my side.” Wartmüller paused. “I told him thank you very much.”
“Did he?”
Wartmüller cupped his ear. “Eh?”
“Did he see results from your side?”
He shrugged. “Hamburg, primarily. You know about that operation. But there were some other things in Cologne and Nuremberg. Rwanda, too.”
Erika considered whether or not to say it aloud, because both of them knew it already, but her anger got the better of her. “That’s treason.”
“Is it?”
“Unless you got clearance to pass on that information. Did you?”
He pursed his lips, then changed position, and it struck her that Wartmüller had passed through the emotional stages very quickly and come out the other side. “Listen, Erika. I’ve been in this game as long as you have. You’re good-we both know that. You’ve connected the dots and ended up with me. Really, though, what do you have? Suppositions. Rumors, at best. Trust me: You’ll find nothing else. I’ve made sure of that.”
Now he was doing it, giving voice to the fact that both of them already knew. She had an American spy’s single line-It was for you… German intelligence-the tragic history of an immigrant girl, and the involvement of a secret department across the ocean that would never open up its files for her perusal. She had nothing, but she wasn’t about to admit that. The best she could do was fan his anxiety. “The photos of you came from a videotape, which is still out there.”
He shook his head. “The Americans destroyed it.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
He wasn’t going to take the bait, not yet. “You lie like a politician, Erika. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.” He stood and squashed his cigarette beneath his heel and looked down on her. “I’ve got that conference call.”
She didn’t bother watching him walk away. Instead, she took out her cell phone and called Oskar. “It’s your mother,” she told him. “Send your friend home immediately.”
“Is that all?”
“Just do it, and I’ll be in touch.”
“Of course you will,” Oskar muttered. He sounded very disappointed.
17
It was a simple enough transfer, but even Milo, eye-strained from two days of television and sore down his burned arm, could see that they were worried. Oskar led the way while Heinrich followed; Gustav had left earlier. They didn’t blindfold him or bind his wrists, just walked with him out Erika Schwartz’s back door and down the woody incline of her yard to a dried creek bed that separated properties. They followed it to the left-north, Milo thought, then wasn’t sure-and passed the occasional high security fence and signs warning trespassers away from the homes of important people.
“No cameras?” Milo asked after a while.
Oskar rocked his head while, behind, Heinrich stumbled in the undergrowth. “Here, no. At each end, where the roads are, yes. We’ll have to be careful there.”
“You could have just taken me out the way you brought me in.”
“Unfortunately, this is the only way to assure your safety.”
“I didn’t know you cared.”
Oskar stopped and looked back at him, hard. He didn’t need to say a thing. They went on.
They reached a residential road where a quaint stone arch spanned the creek, and Oskar pointed out the cameras. There were three-one on the stones, two in the trees-so they remained in the woods and continued fifty yards up the road. They waited until a white van with the insignia of a Karlsfeld plumbing company pulled up to the side of the road. Gustav was behind the wheel. Heinrich took the passenger seat; Oskar joined Milo in the rear.
The drive took about an hour and a half, and during that time Oskar slowly relaxed. He never warmed to Milo, but neither did he seem to view him as a tactical enemy. The distinction was important. Then his phone rang, and he answered it, grunted a few times, and handed it to Milo. “It’s for you.”
“Hello?”
“Theodor Wartmüller,” Erika said. “He’s the one who ordered your release.”
“Thanks,” Milo said, then waited. Only silence followed, and in that silence he realized he knew the name Wartmüller, but wasn’t sure where from. “Do you have it covered?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Have you got the whole story?”
“Enough of it.”
“Yo
u have evidence?”
More silence followed. No, she didn’t have the evidence to arrest the man.
“If I can, I’ll help.”
“Why?”
“You know why. You know I didn’t hurt her.”
“I don’t know anything, Mr. Weaver.”
“Was it blackmail?”
“Of course.”
Then Milo hesitated, because he finally remembered why he knew that name. “When?”
“What?”
“When was the blackmail?”
“Do I get the sense you know something?”
“I need details if I’m going to help you.”
“December.”
Milo felt a wave of acid climb into the back of his throat. He swallowed it down. “Anything else you want to tell me?”
She sighed, and Milo thought he heard wind-she was outside, away from ears. “I don’t think I need to tell you anything. You can ask your own people.”
“I’ll do that. And I’ll find a way to pass on anything that looks useful.”
“Let’s hope I don’t need anything from you.”
“Let’s hope,” said Milo. “One last thing.”
“Yes?”
“Budapest. You told me I’d been in Budapest, but I hadn’t. Were you making that up?”
She sounded surprised. “We have it through a source. You were there, all right. Not just a writer-you also claimed to be a doctor and a film producer.”
“Why?”
“You don’t know?”
“Please. It’s important.”
“You were looking for an American journalist named Henry Gray. He’d just come out of a coma and had disappeared. You apparently plagued his girlfriend, who’s also a journalist.”
“Does she have a name?”
“Zsuzsanna Papp, I think. Hungarian. Works for Blikk.”
“Did I find this Henry Gray?”
“Not as far as we know. All we know is that you were there some days, asking around, then disappeared.” She paused. “Is someone out there using your name?”
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