Tier One (Tier One Series Book 1)

by Brian Andrews

  In his peripheral vision, he noted he was passing Pohland Exklusiv on his right. Once Grimes dropped off, Vogel was his sole responsibility. He kept the conversation going with Smith, asking questions about the office building on Kleiner Hirshgraben, where his company wished to purchase two floors of space. Smith read him information about the building. He asked a question about renting out half of the property to help offset the cost. All the while, he maintained his distance and kept Effi Vogel in sight.

  At the corner just beyond the Zeilgalerie indoor mall, Vogel made an anticipated left turn onto An der Hauptwache.

  Dempsey paused at the corner, glancing both ways as if lost. He glanced at the German street sign. “Do I turn left on Ender-Hopped-Wacky?” he asked, mispronouncing the street name badly.

  “Ja,” Smith said, his tone suggesting that Americans were a pain in the ass. “Left on An der Hauptwache. Do you see a big brown cathedral?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, walk toward that. The street will become Rossmarkt and then change names to Kaiserstrasse several hundred meters farther.”

  The pause allowed Dempsey to let out some line on the girl before turning left on An der Hauptwache. “Why do you guys change the name of your streets every damn block?”

  “Germans are proud, and so we have many families who wish to be honored,” answered Smith, a patient German businessman dealing with another ugly American.

  A few minutes later, Dempsey arrived at World Coffee on Kaiserstrasse, thanked his German business partner for the navigation help, and stuffed his mobile back in his pocket. He stood for a moment in front of World Coffee as if trying to decide which one of the available café tables he should occupy under the maroon-colored umbrellas. He watched Vogel continue southeast to an intersection, where Mendez was waiting by yet another fountain in yet another square. The Germans loved their fountains. Mendez would follow Vogel through the intersection at Friedenstrasse and Willy-Brandt-Platz, where Smith would pick her up just before Gutleutstrasse and follow her the rest of the way to the Hotel InterContinental. Wang would be in the lobby and would confirm her check-in and then commence the SIGINT on the executive suite on the twenty-first floor that Rostami perpetually reserved. Wang would be using listening devices already put in place by Mossad, which apparently he was unhappy about for some reason.

  At least that was how it was supposed to happen.

  Dempsey was in the middle of dialing a number in Texas to check in with his “wife” when things went wrong.

  Effi Vogel unexpectedly crossed to the other side of the street and turned left on Bethmannstrasse, before passing the square where the handoff would happen with Mendez.

  Shit! She was supposed to stay straight onto Friedenstrasse. What the hell is she doing?

  Dempsey took a step, then forced himself to pull back, silently cursing himself for the mistake. That step alone could alert a watcher conducting surveillance detection.

  “Crazy fucking city,” he mumbled. The words would be picked up by the microphone in his ear, and now everyone on the team knew something had gone wrong. He watched Vogel disappear around the corner and dialed a new number. Smith answered immediately.

  “Guten Morgen,” he said.

  “Hey, it’s Purcell again. Is that other property we talked about on Bethmannstrasse? Every street in this damn city looks the same. I was thinking about walking down there to check it out?”

  “Nein, Herr Purcell. I am nearly to the coffee shop. Let me meet you there, and we can look at both properties together. I don’t wish for you to get lost. I have another colleague who is researching that property for your needs, and he will let me know if it is worthy of a visit.”

  Dempsey looked toward the square and the fountain where he saw a young man with a backpack start toward the corner—Mendez. The Marine was dressed like some metrosexual college student on holiday.

  Hurry the hell up, dude. You’re gonna lose her.

  If they lost the girl, they would lose the opportunity to grab Rostami. Sweat trickled from his armpits down his sides, and Dempsey felt his nerves getting the better of him. He paced, looking at his phone, debating whether to place the call to his “wife” and alert Jarvis directly about the situation. He knew Jarvis was monitoring all the comms from their makeshift TOC—a black-site apartment on loan from the Mossad—but the SEAL in him felt compelled to interface up the chain of command. Phone in hand, he spun on his heel and collided with a uniformed policeman walking up the street behind him.

  “Eh, eh, achten Sie darauf, wohin Sie fahren?” the officer said, scowling and gripping the sleeve of his jacket. “Was machen Sie denn hier?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and unconsciously pulled his leather satchel in tight against his side.

  This made the officer shift his gaze from Dempsey’s face to the bag—a bag with a Sig Sauer pistol in the bottom easily visible under his “business papers.”

  “Ich spreche kein Deutsch,” Dempsey said, butchering the words. “Sprechen Sie English?”

  “Ja, I speak good English,” the young man said, still eyeing the bag. “What is in Ihrer Tasche?” The officer paused and looked up, as if looking for the proper English words floating in the air. He raised a finger, proud of himself, but he still hadn’t let go of Dempsey’s sleeve with the other hand. “What you having in you case—in you bag with you?”

  Dempsey looked at his bag. “A real estate contract waiting for signature. If I lose these papers, my boss will kill me.” He smiled. In his peripheral vision, he saw Mendez disappear around the corner onto Bethmannstrasse.

  “I have her.” Mendez’s voice was low and quiet in his left ear. “Hold on . . . she’s going into a building.”

  What building? Dempsey thought, distracted.

  “May I see into your papers, please?” the policeman said, snapping Dempsey back to the moment.

  Dempsey played out scenarios in his mind for incapacitating the police officer and the “run like hell” escape that would follow. Assaulting a German police officer would transform him from an asset to a liability for the rest of the mission in Frankfurt. He needed to buy more time.

  “My what?” he asked, stalling.

  “Guten Morgen, Officer,” Smith’s voice said from behind him. Dempsey turned to see his partner dressed in a tight-fitting suit, tailored in the European fashion. A BMW sedan was parked along the curb. “Ist Alles in Ordnung mit mein Freund?”

  “You are to know this man?” the officer said, wanting to show off a bit more of his English.

  “Ja,” Smith said. “Ich spreche Deutsch.”

  Smith and the policeman spoke for a moment in quick, clipped German, and Dempsey understood nothing. Unable to help himself, he looked toward the corner where he’d last seen Mendez.

  “Echo Victor went inside an apartment building over a women’s boutique and a little café,” Mendez said in his ear. “The address is 50 Bethmannstrasse. She had to code herself into the building. The building has an underground parking garage. From my current position, I have no way of knowing if she ducks out another exit. She could also exit using a vehicle from the garage. Do you want me to breach?”

  “Negative, three,” said Jarvis over the open channel, his voice cool and collected.

  Dempsey smiled awkwardly as Smith and the policeman started laughing, no doubt at his expense. The officer released his hold on Dempsey’s sleeve. Dempsey took the cue to join them in the revelry—let’s all laugh at the good-natured American buffoon.

  “Five is heading your way with ears. You’re college buddies meeting after a prolonged absence. Be excited to see him. One and Two should be back in play momentarily,” said Jarvis, indicating that Wang was en route to Mendez with SIGINT.

  Jarvis sounded more optimistic than Dempsey felt. He wondered how this would impact their grab plan. Perhaps Rostami had changed the rendezvous location with Vogel. If so, would the Israelis be able to reposition the ambulance in time? The plan was already a lot of moving part
s, and it seemed difficult to move to a new location.

  He returned his attention to his immediate situation. Smith and the German police officer had moved a step away and were laughing at something Smith was pointing at down the street. With all drama and suspicion thoroughly defused by humor, the policeman turned to Dempsey and said, “Hope you are to having a good day, sir.” With a tip of his cap, and a wink at Smith, the young officer headed off.

  Smith smiled at Dempsey and gestured to the BMW. “I was worried I would not be able to find you, Herr Purcell. You sounded quite lost on the mobile phone.”

  “The streets keep changing names,” he grumbled, walking to the car.

  “Well, you have a guide now, mein Freund,” Smith said, and held the passenger door open for him. “Let me drive you on a tour of this area, then we will head over to the property on Moselstrasse. I think you may like that location better, but let us have a look here first.”

  Once in the car, Smith pulled them away from the curb, and because of the one-way streets, they were forced to backtrack the long way. They wasted five precious minutes circling back to Bethmannstrasse. When they rolled past the coffee shop, Dempsey spotted Mendez and Wang sitting together by the window. Wang was tapping away on a laptop, while Mendez was thumb-typing on his smartphone. Two young technophiles having coffee and paying more attention to their devices than to each other. Sadly realistic, Dempsey thought.

  Smith pulled into a taxi queue on the right side of the street and put the transmission in neutral. Dempsey looked up through the BMW’s glass moonroof at the austere-looking apartment building across the street. His gut told him Vogel was now inside one of those apartments, alone and waiting, without Mossad’s ears to safeguard her.

  “Thanks for the save back there,” Dempsey said, dropping his gaze back to street level. “It was about to get ugly.”

  “Yeah, it was. In hindsight, a concealed waist holster would have been prudent,” Smith said. “But together, we defused the situation. Adapt and overcome, right?”

  Dempsey pursed his lips and nodded. Easy access to the weapon in the bag had been Jarvis’s mandate, but he kept the comment to himself.

  “Rostami changed the meet location,” Dempsey said, craning his neck to scan the windows and balconies of the apartment building for some signal from Vogel. A piece of laundry hung on a railing, a quick appearance on the balcony, a window opening and closing twice . . . anything.

  Nothing.

  “So it seems,” Smith eventually said.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Maybe we spooked him. Do you think he knows we’re here?”

  “Unlikely. If he did, he would have canceled the rendezvous.”

  “Then why change locations?” asked Dempsey, scratching his neck. “The motherfucker did it for a reason, Shane. That much I’m sure of.”

  Smith was silent for a several long seconds before answering. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Ember Local TOC

  Apartment at Mosselstrasse and Taunusstrasse

  Frankfurt, Germany

  May 21, 1650 Local Time

  Jarvis had an overpowering urge to pace, but he refused himself the luxury.

  Instead, he forced himself to stand at parade rest—feet apart, hands clasped behind his back—a position of disciplined military waiting.

  Directly in front of him sat the TOC mission controller—Rachel Loren, a young Israeli woman on loan from the Mossad. Loren was the person most familiar with the equipment in this particular apartment, as she was already Levi Harel’s mission controller in Frankfurt. She sat on a roller stool at a rectangular desk, working three computer monitors with two keyboards while simultaneously fielding all telephone traffic. The headset she wore made her look more like a telemarketer than a member of the most elite covert operation in the world. Loren’s presence in the TOC during the mission was the only concession Jarvis had been forced to make for the Mossad’s unrestricted cooperation in Frankfurt. Jarvis couldn’t help but smile at the irony. His two most generous benefactors, Robert Kittinger and Levi Harel, had employed identical strategies—pick the most beautiful, competent, loyal young woman on the payroll, stick her inside Ember, and order her to report the unit’s every move. The brilliance of the strategy was that it worked perfectly. The request was not one he could refuse, and both Grimes and Loren had entwined themselves like English ivy into the trellis of his operation in no time. Thankfully, he didn’t have anything to hide. He was doing exactly what he said he would do—hunting down the bastards responsible for annihilating the Tier One SEALs. The only secret he cared about protecting was the secret existence of Ember itself, and neither Grimes nor Loren had the power or incentive to jeopardize that.

  “Five is bringing the camera feeds online now,” the Israeli girl said in her soft and accented English. “Patching external vid to monitor number one.”

  Jarvis looked at the leftmost video monitor. The screen flickered, then switched from a traffic camera outside the Hotel InterContinental to the feed of a store security camera on Bethmannstrasse that Wang has just tapped. The glare was terrible because of the angle of the sun, but both the image clarity and camera position were exceptional. He saw Mendez and Wang sitting at a bistro table, ideally located for surveillance of the apartment and parking-garage entrances.

  “Apartment feeds coming up on monitors two and three,” she said.

  The middle and right flat-screens switched to eight window splits with feeds from various hallway security cameras inside the apartment building. Jarvis glanced at the digital mission clock; it had taken Wang less than two minutes to tap into all the feeds. God, he loved the new generation of networked surveillance cameras; it made life so much easier.

  “There she is,” Loren said, her voice smooth and without emotion. “Victor Echo stepping out of the stairwell onto the fifth floor.”

  “Find me all apartment owners and leases for fifth-floor units,” Jarvis said to Loren.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “One and Two, report?” Jarvis said into his mike.

  “One and Two are covering the back of the building from our vehicle,” Smith’s voice said. “Any word on our Romeo?”

  “Negative,” Jarvis said. “But we have Victor Echo on a fifth-floor hallway security vid.”

  “Roger that. One out.”

  “Which apartment did Vogel go into?” Jarvis asked the Israeli controller.

  “Sixth door down on the right, but we don’t have a camera that can read the number.”

  “Which number can you read?”

  “Only the closest one to the camera. Apartment 502.”

  “Then enlarge the window with that feed, and count the damn doorknobs,” Jarvis said, gesturing to the image of consecutively smaller doors in one of eight windows on the middle monitor.

  Loren did as instructed. “It should be apartment 508,” she said.

  “Find out who owns apartment 508.”

  “Yes, sir. I have an asset in a Frankfurt real estate firm who I hope can help us.”

  “Good, make the call.” Jarvis shifted his gaze from Loren to the left video monitor, where Wang was plugging a piece of hardware into a USB port on his computer. He instantly recognized this device. He waited for Loren to finish her call with her Mossad real estate contact, and then he touched her shoulder. “Give Five the phone number for the burner phone Vogel is carrying.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and sent a text message with the number to Wang’s phone.

  Jarvis saw Wang glance at the mobile phone resting on the table screen-up beside his computer and then continue typing.

  “What is Five doing?” Loren asked.

  “Improvising. Right now he’s tapping into Vogel’s burner phone using T-Mobile’s GSM network. He’ll activate the phone’s microphone for continuous data transmission and configure it to leak the data over a secure Wi-Fi hotspot he just set up outside the b
uilding. Vogel’s phone will stay logged in to Wang’s Wi-Fi network, but there will be no indication of this on the phone’s display. Also, this technique leaves the phone free to make and receive calls normally.”

  “Zero, Five. We’ve got ears,” came Wang’s voice over the radio a minute later.

  “Excellent.”

  “Sir, I have an Ian Baldwin holding on the secure line for you,” Loren said.

  “Tell him I’ll call him back in a few minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In the left monitor, Wang’s fingers were flying across the keyboard of his laptop, but he seemed to have no trouble multitasking—smiling and laughing in conversation with Mendez about some girls they had met at Luna Bar. The IT whiz had proven to be even better in the field than Jarvis had suspected. As long as his hands were on a computer, he didn’t appear nervous. Rookie field operatives typically find a security blanket; for Wang it was his computer.

  “We’ve got Romeo One on monitor one,” said Loren, her voice brimming with excitement.

  Jarvis looked at the left screen, too late to be sure that the man exiting the frame was indeed Rostami.

  “Confirm, Romeo One,” Mendez whispered over the radio.

  The upper-left square on monitor two showed a man stepping into the apartment lobby. He was clean shaven and wore an expensive suit. Jarvis smiled as the man removed his dark sunglasses, revealing himself to the camera for a split second before stepping out of the frame.

  Behrouz Rostami.

  “Gotcha, asshole,” Jarvis said. He tapped Loren on the shoulder. “Anything on apartment 508 yet?”