by Tom Clancy
The exchange between Clark and the Stasi extorters was to be in a surreal location, unique to Berlin and the Cold War. The West German subway system had a few underground rail lines that, rather inconveniently, ventured under East Berlin. Before the partition of the city this was of no consequence, but after the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, the lines that rolled under the wall were no longer allowed to stop at the stations on the other side. The East Germans boarded or barred the doors at street level, in some cases they even built apartment complexes over their access, and they wiped any references to the subway stations from East German rail maps. Down below, these dark, vacant, and labyrinthine halls became known as Geisterbahnhöfe—ghost stations.
A few minutes past midnight, John Clark dropped out of the back of the last car of the U8 train that rolled under the Mitte district of East Berlin. As the train clicked and clacked its way up the tunnel, the American pulled out a flashlight, adjusted the satchel over his shoulder, and walked on. In minutes he’d found his way to the Weinmeisterstrasse U-Bahn ghost station, and here he waited on the darkened concrete platform, listening to the sounds of rats below him and bats above him.
Within minutes a flashlight’s beam appeared in a stairwell. A single man appeared behind it, shined his light on Clark, and told him to open the satchel. Clark did as he was told, and then the man lowered a package to the dusty concrete and slid it over to the American.
Clark picked up the package, checked it to make certain they were the negatives, and then he left the satchel.
It could have, it should have, ended right there.
But the Stasi crooks were greedy, and they wanted their negatives back for another round of blackmail.
John Clark turned and began heading toward the edge of the platform, but he heard a noise on the opposite platform, across the rails. He shined his light over there in time to see a man with a handgun leveled at him. Clark dove and rolled onto the filthy concrete floor as a pistol shot cracked and echoed around the maze of tunnels and open halls.
The American CIA officer came out of his roll onto his feet with a Colt .45-caliber 1911 model pistol in his hands. He fired twice across the tracks, hit the shooter both times in the chest, and the man dropped where he stood.
Clark then shifted to the man with the money satchel. The Stasi agent had retreated back up the stairwell. Clark took a shot but missed low just before the man disappeared from view. He considered going after the man, it was the natural tendency of a direct-action expert like Clark, as he could not be certain the surviving Stasi man would not turn the tables and come after him. But just then the next train through the ghost station approached, and Clark was forced to quickly duck behind a concrete column. The bright lights of the train cast long shadows on the dusty platform. Clark slid to the tiled floor and chanced a look toward where the East German had disappeared. He saw nothing in the moving lights, and he knew that if he missed this train, he’d have to wait here another ten minutes for the next one.
Clark timed his leap onto the rear car perfectly; he caught onto a handhold by the back door and then moved around behind the car. He rode back there through the dark for several minutes, until he was in West Berlin, where he melted into the light station traffic.
Thirty minutes later he was on a streetcar full of West Germans heading home after working the night shift, and thirty minutes after that he was handing the negatives off to Gene Lilly.
He flew out of Germany on a commercial flight the next day, certain that nothing that had happened would ever go into the archives of the CIA or the East German Staatssicher-heitsdienst.
Standing there in the cold rain in Cologne, he shook off the memory and looked around. The Germany of today bore little resemblance to the divided nation of thirty years ago, and Clark reminded himself that today’s problems needed his undivided attention.
At four p.m. the day’s light was leaving the gray sky, and a light came on in the tiny lobby of number thirteen Thieboldgasse. Inside he could see an elderly woman leashing her dog at the foot of a stairwell. Quickly Clark crossed the street, hitched his collar higher up around his neck, and arrived at the side of the building just as the woman exited the front door, her eyes already on the street ahead. As the door closed behind her, John Clark moved up the wall through the grass and stepped in silently.
He was already halfway up the staircase with his SIG Sauer pistol in his hand by the time the door latch clicked behind him.
Manfred Kromm reacted to the knock at his door with a groan. He knew it would be Herta from across the hall, he knew she would have locked herself out yet again while walking that little gray bitch poodle of hers, and he knew he would have to pick her lock like he’d done dozens of times before.
He’d never told her where he learned to pick locks. Nor had she asked.
That she locked herself out purposely so that he would pay attention to her only annoyed him further. He could not be bothered with the old woman. She was a pest of the highest order, only slightly less annoying than her yapping Hünd-chen Fifi. Still, Manfred Kromm did not let on that he knew her weekly lockouts were a ruse. He was a loner and a social hermit, he would no more insinuate to people that they were interested in him than he would sprout wings and fly, so he smiled outwardly, groaned inwardly, and unlocked the old bitch’s gottverdammt door each time she knocked.
He climbed up from his chair, shuffled to the door, and lifted his picks off of the table in the entryway of his flat. The aged German put his hand on his door latch to step into the hall. Only the old force of habit made him look through the peephole. He went through the motions of glancing into the hallway, had begun to remove his eye after looking so he could open the door, but then his eye widened in surprise and it rushed back to the tiny lens in the door. There, on the other side, he saw a man in a raincoat.
And in the man’s hand a stainless-steel automatic pistol with a suppressor attached was pointed directly at Manfred Kromm’s door.
The man spoke in English, loud enough to be heard through the woodwork. “Unless your door is ballistic steel, or you can move faster than a bullet, you’d better let me in.”
“Wer is denn da?” Who the hell is it? Kromm croaked. He spoke English, he’d understood the man with the gun, but he had not used the language himself in many years. The right words would not pass his lips.
“Someone from your past.”
And then Kromm knew. He knew exactly who this man was.
And he knew he was about to die.
He opened the door.
I know your face. It’s older. But I remember you,” Kromm said. As instructed by Clark, he had moved to his chair in front of the television. His hands were on his knees, kneading the swollen joints slowly.
Clark stood above him, his weapon still pointing at the German.
“Are you alone?” Clark asked the question but searched the tiny flat without waiting for a response.
Manfred Kromm nodded. “Selbsverständlich.” Of course.
Clark kept looking around, keeping the SIG pointed at the old man’s chest. He said, “Keep perfectly still. I’ve had a lot of coffee today, you don’t want to see how jumpy I am.”
“I will not move,” the old German said. Then he shrugged. “That gun in your hand is the only weapon in this flat.”
Clark checked over the rest of the tiny apartment. It did not take long. It could not have been four hundred square feet, including the bathroom and the kitchen. He found a door to a fire escape in the kitchen, but nothing whatsoever as far as luxuries. “What, thirty-five years in the Stasi, and this is all you get?”
Now the German in the chair smiled a little. “From the comments of your government regarding you, Herr Clark, it does not look like your organization has rewarded your efforts much more than my organization has rewarded mine.”
Clark cracked a sour grin himself as he used his legs to push a small table flush against the front door. It might slow someone coming in from the hall for a moment
, but not much more than that. Clark stood next to the door, kept the SIG trained on the burly man sitting uncomfortably on the recliner.
“You have been telling tales.”
“I have said nothing.”
“I don’t believe you. And that is a problem.” Clark kept his weapon trained as he moved sideways along the front wall of the room into the corner. On the adjoining wall sat a tall antique china cabinet. He pushed it toward the open doorway to the tiny kitchen, in order to block the entrance to the flat from the rear fire escape. Inside, dishes rocked and a few tipped over as the big wooden piece came to rest, covering the doorway. Now the only entrance to the room was the bedroom behind Manfred.
“Tell me what you told them. Everything.”
“Mr. Clark, I have no idea what you—”
“Thirty years ago, three people went into the Geister-bahnhof. Two of those people came out alive. You were working for the Stasi, as was your partner, but you two fellows were not playing by Stasi rules, which means you extorted that money for yourself. I was ordered to let you two walk away, but your partner, Lukas Schuman, tried to kill me after you got the money.
“I killed Lukas Schuman, and you got away, and I know you did not run back to Markus Wolf and tell him about how your illegal moonlighting job turned ugly. You would have kept your mouth shut to everyone so you didn’t have to turn over the cash.”
Kromm did not speak, but only squeezed his hands into his knees as if he were kneading fat Brötchen before putting them in the oven.
Clark said, “And I was under orders to keep the affair out of the official record of my agency. The only person, other than you, me, and poor dead Lukas Schuman, who knew about what happened in the ghost station that night was my superior, and he died fifteen years ago without breathing a word of it to anyone.”
“I don’t have the money anymore. I spent it,” Kromm said.
Clark sighed as if disappointed with the German’s comment. “Right, Manfred, I came back thirty years later to retrieve a messenger bag full of worthless deutschmarks.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want to know who you talked to.”
Kromm nodded. He said, “I think this is an American movie cliché, but it is the truth. If I tell you, they will kill me.”
“Who, Manfred?”
“I did not go to them. They came to me. I had no interest in digging up the buried bones of our mutual past.”
Clark lifted the pistol and looked down its tritium sights.
“Who, Manfred? Who did you tell about ’eighty-one?”
“Obtshak!” Manfred blurted it out in panic.
Clark’s head cocked to the side. He lowered the weapon. “Who is Obtshak?”
“Obtshak is not a who! It’s a what! It’s an Estonian criminal organization. A foreign office of the Russian mob, so to speak.”
John did not hide his confusion. “And they asked you about me? By name?”
“Nein, they weren’t asking in the regular sense. They hit me. They broke a bottle of beer, put the broken bottle up to my throat, and then they asked me.”
“And you told them about Berlin.”
“Natürlich!” Of course. “Kill me for it if you must, but why should I protect you?”
Something occurred to Clark. “How did you know they were in Obtshak?”
Kromm shrugged. “They were Estonian. They spoke Estonian. If someone is a thug and they are Estonian, then I presume them to be in Obtshak.”
“And they came here?”
“To my house? Nein. They had me meet them at a warehouse in Deutz. They told me there was money for me. Security work.”
“Security work? Don’t bullshit me, Kromm. No one is going to hire you to do security work.”
The German’s hands rose quickly as he began to argue, but the barrel of Clark’s SIG was trained again on Kromm’s chest in the space of a heartbeat. Kromm lowered his hands.
“I have done some … some work for members of the Eastern European immigrant community in the past.”
“What? Like forgery?”
Kromm shook his head. He was too proud to keep quiet. “Locks. Lock picking.”
“Cars?”
Now the old German smiled. “Cars? No. Car lots. Dealerships. It helps to add to my tiny pension. Anyway, I knew some Estonians. I knew the man who asked me to go to the warehouse, otherwise I would never have agreed to go.”
Clark reached into the pocket of his raincoat, pulled out a notepad and a pen, and tossed it to the old man. “I want his name, his address, any other names you know, Estonians working in Obtshak.”
Kromm deflated in his chair. “They will kill me.”
“Leave. Leave right now. Trust me, whoever questioned you about me is long gone. That’s who I’m after. The men who set it up are just the local thugs. Get out of Cologne and they won’t pester you.”
Kromm did not move. He only looked up at Clark.
“I will kill you, right here, right now, if you do not do as I say.”
Kromm slowly began to write, but then he looked up, past the gun barrel, as if he had something to say.
“Write or talk,” Clark said, “but do it now or I put a bullet in one of those sore knees of yours.”
The German pensioner said, “After they took me, I spent a day in the hospital. I told the doctor I was mugged. And then I came home, angry and determined to retaliate against the men. The leader, the man who asked the questions, he was not a local. I could tell this because he spoke no German. Only Estonian and Russian.”
“Keep talking.”
“I have a friend still in Moscow, he knows his way around.”
“Around the Mafia, you mean?”
Kromm shrugged. “He is an entrepreneur. Anyway, I called him up and asked him for information on Obtshak. I did not tell him the real reason. I am certain he assumed I had business. I described the man who interrogated me. Fifty years old, but with hair dyed like he was a twenty-year-old singer in a punk-rock band.”
“And your friend gave you a name?”
“He did.”
“And what did you do?”
Kromm shrugged. He looked at the floor in humiliation. “What could I do? I was drunk when I thought I could get revenge. I sobered up.”
“Give me the man’s name.”
“If I do that, if I tell you about the man in Tallinn who came here and ordered the others to beat me, will you bypass the men here in Cologne? Maybe if you go directly to Tallinn they will not know that I informed.”
“That suits me just fine, Manfred.”
“Sehr gut,” said Kromm, and he gave Clark a name as the last of the afternoon’s light left the sky outside.
52
Unlike the government agencies searching for international fugitive John Clark, Fabrice Bertrand-Morel Investigations billed by the man-hour, so they used a lot of men working a lot of hours.
And it was only this intense canvassing of choke points across Europe that helped them locate their quarry. Bertrand-Morel had concentrated his hunt in Europe because Alden had, through Laska, passed the Frenchman a copy of the dossier on the ex–CIA man. FBM decided Clark’s recent work in Europe with NATO’s Rainbow organization would mean he would have sympathetic contacts on the continent.
So a single FBM man had been placed in each of sixty-four train stations across Europe, working fourteen-hour shifts, passing out fliers and showing photos of Clark to station employees. They had turned up nothing in days of waiting and watching. But finally a man working a pretzel stand at the Cologne Hauptbahnhof had caught a glimpse of a figure in a crowd passing by. He looked at the photo on the small card he’d been handed three days earlier by a bald Frenchman, and then he quickly dialed the number on the back of the card.
The Frenchman had offered him a large reward, paid in cash.
Twenty minutes later the first FBM man arrived at the Cologne Hauptbahnhof to interview the pretzel salesman. The middle-aged man was clearheaded and c
onvincing; he was certain John Clark had passed him heading for the front entrance of the Hauptbahnhof.
Soon three more FBM men, the entire force within an hour’s drive, were in the station working on a plan of action. They had little to go on save for the report that their man had entered the city; they could not very well just spread out, sending four men out into the fourth-largest metropolis in Germany.
So they left a man at the station while the other three checked the nearby hotels and guesthouses.
It was the agent at the station who got the hit. Just after nine on the cold and rainy evening, forty-year-old Lyonnais private detective and employee of Fabrice Bertrand-Morel Investigations Luc Patin stood just at the entrance smoking a cigarette, his eyes occasionally drifting up to the incredible Cologne Cathedral just to the left of the train station, but his main focus remained on the foot traffic that streamed past him toward the tracks behind. There, in a large group of pedestrians, a man who bore a reasonable resemblance to his target shuffled by with the collar of his raincoat up high.
Luc Patin said softly, “Bonsoir, mon ami.” He reached into his pocket and retrieved his mobile phone.
Domingo Chavez had set up a more low-tech monitoring operation for Rehan’s Dubai safe house than that of the two younger operators with their robot cameras and microphones. One of the three bedrooms in the bungalow looked out over the lagoon, into the waterway between the crescent-shaped breakwater upon which the Kempinski sat and the palm-frond-shaped peninsulafea where Rehan’s safe house was located. The distance between the two locations was easily four hundred meters, but that was not too far away for Chavez to employ a toy he’d brought along on the flight in from the States.
He set up the variable-power Zeiss Victory FL spotting scope on its tripod, and he placed the tripod on a desk in the bedroom in front of the window. From his chair at the desk he could see the very back of Rehan’s walled-in compound, and several second-floor windows. The blinds had remained closed as had the back gate, but he hoped that the property might open up a little bit when it was actually being lived in by Rehan and an entourage from Islamabad.