by Larry Bond
Outside the Europa Center, Berlin
Inside the phone kiosk, Helen Gray turned her back on the Wasserklops, the gigantic fountain outside the towering Europa Center. She glanced at Peter Thorn. “Any sign of trouble?”
He continued scanning the crowded, neon-lit square and streets around them for a moment longer before shaking his head. “Nope. A few cops on patrol — but they don’t seem to be looking for anyone in particular.”
Helen nodded — relieved but not especially surprised. Even if the Berlin police were hunting for them, they’d have a hard time picking out two particular foreigners from among the tens of thousands milling along the Kurfiirstendamm — the German capital’s busiest and most prosperous boulevard. The Europa Center behind them was a hive of activity — housing everything from fine jewelry stores to overpriced restaurants and even a pallid imitation of a Monte Carlo casino.
She punched in Mcdowell’s office number, waited for the automated operator, and then swiped the phone card they’d purchased at a local store through the electronic reader. Glowing digits on the phone’s display showed how many longdistance minutes her German marks would buy. Thank God for modern technology, she thought while waiting for the call to go through.
In an earlier day, she and Peter would have needed a satchel to carry all the coins necessary to call overseas using untraceable cash.
This time Mcdowell’s secretary patched her straight through.
“Mcdowell here.”
“This is Gray,” Helen answered steadily. “We’re ready.”
“You should be,” her boss said. “You were right. The German police are looking for both you and Colonel Thorn. Or at least two Americans matching your physical descriptions.”
Helen sighed. “Damn.”
“Exactly,” Mcdowell agreed icily. “The Berlin field office has obtained a copy of the Wilhelmshaven police report. It doesn’t make pleasant reading. The German authorities don’t exactly approve of so-called tourists dropping corpses all over their nice clean streets.”
“Have they identified the bodies yet?” she asked.
“One of them. The older guy carried a walletful of ID and credit cards made out in the name of Heinz Steinhof. The local police say he apparently owned some kind of export-import business in Hamburg.”
Helen snorted. “Sure. And John Gotti just ran a little mom-and-pop pasta shop in Brooklyn.”
“There’s one more thing you should know, Special Agent Gray,” Mcdowell said, sounding smug.
Helen didn’t like the sudden shift in his tone of voice. “What’s that?”
“The German cops found a plastic bag containing fifty grams of pure heroin sewn into Steinhof’s jacket. In case you can’t handle the math, that’s worth roughly twenty-five thousand dollars on the street. So they’re assuming this was some kind of midlevel drug buy that went sour.”
Helen made a face. More heroin. More misdirection for anybody in authority eager to jump on the easiest and safest explanation for everything they’d discovered. Terrific.
“You still there, Agent Gray?” Mcdowell said.
She fought down the urge to let her temper flare. “I’m still here.”
“Good. Anyway, whatever the hell you and Thorn have stuck your big dumb feet in, it’s pretty clear we’ve got to scoop you out of Germany before you wind up in the slammer. God knows, the FBI, the U.S. Army, and I personally don’t need the kind of bad PR that would generate.”
That rang true, Helen thought. Trust Mcdowell to worry more about his image than about the truth of their story. She took an even firmer grip on her temper. “So, what do you suggest, sir?”
“Nothing fancy. Just make your way to the following intersection,” Mcdowell said, rattling off a couple of street names in badly pronounced German. “That’s in some district called Neukolln. Can you find it?”
Helen flipped through the city-guide map book she’d picked up on their first pass through Berlin. Neukolln lay just east of the city’s old Tempelhof Airport. “Yeah. What happens there?”
“You’ll meet Special Agent Crittenden. He works out of the Berlin office. Do you know him?”
Helen ran through her memory quickly. She had the impression of a tall, broad-shouldered man with the beefy look of a former football player. “Yeah. I met him once, I think. Either at the academy or at one of our conferences.”
“Crittenden will be waiting there at 2030 hours, local time.”
Helen glanced at her watch. That gave them a little under an hour and a half to make the rendezvous point. Plenty of time.
“He’ll have a car with embassy plates,” Mcdowell continued.
“You and Thorn pile in. He’ll drive you to the Air Force base at Ramstein where you’ll both meekly trundle aboard the first available flight heading to Andrews — just like the lost little lambs you are.”
Gritting her teeth, Helen nodded into the phone. “Got it.”
“You’d better get it, Agent Gray,” Mcdowell said. “We’ll sort out your story once you’re back here in D.C. In the meantime, make sure you’re at the rendezvous point on time. Capisce?”
Almost against her will, Helen forced out a terse, “Yes, sir.”
Then she hung up.
Neukolln Borough, 1, Berlin
Colonel Peter Thorn stepped out of the S-Balm car onto the Neukolln station platform — quickly scanning the surrounding area for signs of any watchers. Only four other passengers left the crowded three-car electric tram and they immediately headed for the nearest station exit.
He signaled the allclear.
Helen Gray followed him out onto the platform just before the car doors closed.
With a low electric hum and a hiss of hydraulics, the SBAHN train slid away from the platform and sped off down the above ground tracks. It disappeared around a bend in seconds — lost in the darkness and urban sprawl.
Thorn strode toward the exit, still keeping a wary eye out for anyone who looked out of place. He went through the turnstiles and came out onto the poorly lit street.
Neukolln was not one of Berlin’s more scenic neighborhoods, he decided.
Half the street lamps were out — evidently smashed by vandals and left broken by an overworked city bureaucracy.
Trash and dog excrement littered the pavement. Most of the tenement-style buildings packed close together in all directions were liberally daubed with graffiti, soot, and torn and tattered political posters.
Most of the cars in sight were old and cheap — a mix of Volkswagens, Fords, Renaults, and even a few dented Trabants. Except for a few elderly men and couples out walking dogs, there weren’t many pedestrians on the streets.
“What do you think?” Helen said, skeptically eyeing their surroundings herself.
Thorn shook his head. “I don’t like it. It’s too damned quiet. This isn’t the kind of neighborhood I’d have picked for a rendezvous. There’s not enough traffic. We’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”
“Maybe the RP itself is busier,” Helen said.
“Yeah … maybe.” He summoned up a mental picture of the street map he’d memorized before they set out to meet Mcdowelli’s man. The SBAHN station was about five blocks north of the intersection they were aiming for. About a five-minute walk if they headed straight there.
Not that he had any intention of doing anything that stupid.
If nothing else, the ambushes at Pechenga and Wilhelmshaven had again pounded home all the old lessons he’d learned as a combat soldier: Never move blind in unknown country. And never, ever, do the expected or the easy.
He turned back to Helen. “Feel like a little stroll?” He nodded up the street — directly away from the rendezvous point Mcdowell had specified.
She flashed a quick, thin smile. “My thoughts exactly, Mr. Thorn.”
Together, they turned and walked north — back the way the SBAHN tram had brought them — pausing often to check windows or the sideview mirrors of parked cars for any signs that they were bein
g followed. At the first opportunity, they turned right down a narrower side street and picked up the pace. From time to time, they stopped suddenly — hoping to flush out anyone trailing them.
Nothing.
Ten minutes of hard, fast walking and several more turns brought them out onto a wider north-south avenue — one running just a block east of the intersection they were heading toward.
There were even fewer cars and fewer pedestrians out on the streets now.
Thorn took Helen’s arm and pulled her into a shadowed doorway with him.
He nodded toward the next corner. “I should be able to take a quick look at the RP from there.”
“Oh? What’s this “I,’ Peter?” she asked quietly.
“This is where we split up,” he said. “If anybody unfriendly is out there waiting for us, they’ll be looking first for a couple. So I’ll just mosey on over there — run a fast recon — and then swing back. In the meantime, you keep an eye on my back just in case we missed somebody on our tail. Okay?”
Helen’s eyes narrowed. “You really don’t trust Larry Mcdowell, do you?”
Thorn shrugged. “From what you’ve told me about him, and from what I saw at the crash site, I trust him to be a lying, slimy, incompetent asshole.”
She laughed softly. “I’d say you have the man pegged just right. Okay, Peter, you go run your sweep. I’ll watch your back.”
He kissed her once and then stepped out of the doorway. He sauntered off, whistling softly under his breath — determined to look and act as much as possible like a local making his way home from one of the several pubs they’d passed.
At the corner, Thorn stopped briefly — looking both ways before crossing the street. He let his eyes sweep west down the block toward the intersection Mcdowell had picked out as the rendezvous point, scanning for anything and anyone out of the ordinary.
Nothing. Nothing.
There! His eyes lingered for an instant on the dark Mercedes sedan with Berlin plates parked halfway down the block under a burned-out streetlight. That’s too nice a car for this neighborhood, he thought grimly. And he’d bet a month’s pay there were a couple of guys sitting inside that can-hidden behind tinted windows. His senses went on full alert.
Without breaking stride, Thorn crossed the street, putting a graffiti-smeared apartment building between him and the Mercedes. It took him another five minutes to circle his way east and then north again to get back to the doorway where he’d left Helen on watch.
“Well?” she asked.
“We’ve got trouble,” Thorn said. He filled her in on the car he’d spotted.
“Might just belong to the local Lotto winner …” she said slowly.
Thorn grinned. “Why, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus …”
“Very funny, Peter.” Helen tapped her watch. “We’ve still got fifteen minutes before Crittenden is supposed to show. You want to scope this out a little further?”
He nodded. “Let’s say I’m kinda curious to find out who may be gunning for us this time.”
She shook her head. “Jesus, Peter, I sure hope you’re just being paranoid.”
They headed east for several blocks before turning south again. Once they had gone far enough that way, they swung back west down a trash-filled alley. It took them the better part of ten more minutes to work their way closer to the target intersection, approaching it from the south this time.
They were within a hundred meters of the rendezvous point when Thorn felt Helen stiffen slightly. Her hand closed around his arm — and tugged him off the street into another alley between two brick tenements.
“Shit,” she said under her breath. “I don’t frigging believe it.”
She looked up at him, eyes wide in the darkness. “There are two more up ahead fifty meters or so. Standing in a doorway on our side of the street.”
“Describe them,” Thorn said.
“Dark leather jackets. Jeans. One’s wearing a baseball cap. The other’s bareheaded.” Helen shook her head in disbelief. “How the hell did they know where to find us?”
Thorn spread his hands. “Maybe there’s a leak in the Bureau’s Berlin office. Or in D.C. somewhere. Hell, maybe Mcdowell’s phone’s being tapped …”
She grimaced. “I can’t believe that. The phone lines into and out of the Hoover Building are checked and rechecked practically every day.”
“Well,” he said slowly, “all I know is that these people have been all over us every time we get close to their goddamned operation.
As to how exactly they’re doing that …” He shrugged.
“We should start doing some serious thinking about it later. After we get ourselves out of this fix we’re in right now.”
Helen nodded.
Thorn looked intently at her. “So, if you were setting up a tight surveillance net around that intersection, how would you do it?”
She didn’t hesitate. “I’d cover all four approach routes, and I’d use at least two foot teams and two cars to do it. That way I’d be set, no matter how my targets entered the zone.”
“So we’re facing around eight hostiles here,” he concluded.
“At least.” Helen looked troubled. “We’re outside the net now, Peter.
We could just back off quietly and slip away. God knows, that would be the smart move.”
“Yeah.” Thorn knew she was right, but somehow the idea stuck in his craw. Fading back meant ceding the initiative to their unknown adversaries — again. And it would leave them right where they’d started: stuck in Germany while what they suspected was a stolen Russian nuke was sailing into an unsuspecting American port city.
He suddenly realized that Helen was watching him closely.
“You getting tired of playing it safe, Colonel Thorn?” she asked quietly.
“Playing it safe’s not exactly our forte, is it, Special Agent Gray?”
“No, I guess not.”
He nodded toward the unseen intersection. “Okay. Pretend you’re running that op out there. One of your teams spots someone who might be one of the two people you’re after — but this person is heading away from the place you’ve staked out. What would you do?”
Helen hesitated for only a split second before answering. “I’d detach a team to investigate.”
“But not your whole force?” Thorn pressed.
She shook her head. “No way. Not with so many variables still in play. I’d want confirmation first.” A wolfish smile crept across her face. “You want a little personal contact with a Couple of these folks, Peter?”
He nodded grimly. “You could say that.”
Two minutes later, Thorn waited alone inside the dark alley — near the opening to the street. He could feel the damp, dirty brick wall right at his back. A dog barked somewhere off in the distance. Soon now, he thought.
Helen strode right past the opening — heading straight toward the intersection they knew was under surveillance. Her eyes didn’t even flicker in his direction.
Good work, he thought.
She left his field of view. Her footsteps faded.
Thorn ran a slow countdown in his head. She must be forty meters from the closest two-man surveillance team. Thirty meters.
Twenty.
Adrenaline flooded into his bloodstream — distorting his sense of time.
Seconds passed with agonizing slowness. Doubts crept in and multiplied. Had they spotted Helen yet? Would they react the way he hoped?
Helen came back into sight, walking faster now. She stopped, looked toward the alley as though seeing it for the first time, and then darted in. She slipped into the shadows beside him.
“Two on the way,” she whispered.
Thorn listened carefully — trying to screen out the dull rumble of background traffic noise to pick out the sound of any nearby car engine starting. If the people out there looking for them started pulling the whole surveillance net around them, he and Helen would have to bug out fast. He listened harder. There. He
heard the sound of footsteps ringing on the pavement, coming closer.
Soon. Soon.
Two men appeared at the entrance to the alley. Both wore leather jackets and jeans. One had a baseball cap pulled down right over close-cropped hair. Without hesitating, they plunged into the narrow, dark, trash-strewn passageway. They walked right past him.
Now!
Thorn lunged out of the darkness, grabbed the closest, the one wearing the baseball cap, by the scruff of his neck and the back of his jacket, and whirled him around — slamming him face-first into the brick wall. A quick neck chop dropped the moaning man to the pavement — out cold.
A rapid glance showed him that Helen had put her target down and out in that same split second.
Moving quickly, they dragged the two unconscious men further into the alley, behind a row of overflowing trash bins.
Thorn knelt beside his victim, rapidly frisking the man for weapons and ID. Helen did the same.
“Jesus, I feel like a mugger,” she muttered.
“Yeah. But at least we’re highly efficient muggers,” Thorn said with a wry grin. He set the Walther P5 pistol he’d found in the unconscious man’s shoulder holster down on the ground and kept searching.
The smile slipped off his face as his hand closed around a small leather wallet, thin but stiff, in the man’s jacket pocket. He flipped it open. One side held a photo identity card of the man he’d knocked out. The other held a badge. The word “Polizei” practically leapt off the ID card.
“Oh, shit,” Thorn said softly. “Now we are well and truly fucked …”
“No kidding.” Helen showed him the police credentials she’d found on her own man. “And there’s more.” She handed him a crumpled sheet of paper. “I found this next to the badge. Take a look.”
Thorn glanced down at the paper. He couldn’t read all the German but the two Xeroxed black-and-white photos — one of Helen and one of himself in his U.S. Army uniform — were clear enough. He frowned.
“That’s my FBI file photo,” Helen said.
“That son of a bitch Mcdowell set us up,” Thorn growled.
“Looks that way.” Helen shook her head. “I’d guess he decided to have us locked up before we could do any more damage to his precious reputation inside the Bureau. He must be betting he can do enough spin control so that we come out of this smelling real bad — and he gets the credit for shopping us to the German authorities.”’ “I think Mcdowell and I have a few things to sort out,” Thorn said.