Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  “So now the Germans have this big election. But what happens a few weeks before election day? A massive stock market crash. A complete and utter catastrophe. The German economy—well, you can see it; you’ve heard it—is in ruins. A wasteland. It’s in a depression that’s in some ways worse than the Great Depression in the U.S. in the thirties.

  “So the Germans panic. The incumbent is thrown out, of course, and the new face is elected. A man of the people. A man of honor—a former schoolteacher, a family man—who’s going to turn it all around. Save Germany. Make it great again.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The way Hitler came to power in 1933 in the midst of the Weimar disaster. Are you suggesting Vogel is secretly a Nazi?”

  For the first time, Kent laughed, more a snort than a laugh. “Nazis—or, really, neo-Nazis, to be precise about it—are repellent. But they’re extremists. They don’t represent anywhere close to a majority of the German electorate. I think the Germans get a bum rap for that. Yes, Hitler did happen. But that was years ago, and people change. The Germans want to be great again. They want to reclaim their status as a world power.”

  “And Vogel—?”

  “Vogel is not who he says he is.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “This was what I was trying to dig up when I couriered those documents to Ed Moore. I knew he was a good man, someone I could trust. Outside the Agency. Outside whatever’s going on. As well as a specialist in the politics of Europe.”

  “What did you dig up?”

  “I was transferred here a few months after the Berlin Wall came down. I was assigned to debrief KGB agents, Stasi, all those guys. There were rumors—only rumors, mind you—about Vladimir Orlov having moved huge amounts of money out of the country. Most of these low-level guys didn’t know diddly-shit. But when I tried to call up information on Orlov, I found that his whereabouts were marked ‘unknown’ in all the data banks.”

  “His location was protected by CIA,” I said.

  “Right. Odd, but okay. It happens. But then I debriefed one KGB guy, a fairly highly placed officer in the First Chief Directorate who—I think the guy was desperate for money, frankly—began gassing on about some file he’d seen on corruption in the CIA. Right, sure. Is the CIA corrupt? Does the Pope shit in the woods? A group of officials, I forget the name. It’s not important.

  “But here’s what got me thinking: This KGB guy told me about some American plan—some CIA plan, he claims—to manipulate the German stock market.”

  I just nodded and felt my heart thud against my rib cage.

  “In October 1992 the Frankfurt Stock Exchange agreed to create one centralized German stock exchange, the Deutsche Börse. Given the interconnectedness of Europe, the way all the European currencies are linked now through the European Monetary System, a failure in the Deutsche Börse would devastate all of Europe, the guy says. Especially in this day of program trading and portfolio insurance, computer trading gone berserk. There weren’t any circuit breakers in the German market. Computers were programmed to sell automatically, triggering massive sell-offs. Plus, it was a time of great currency instability, ever since the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, was forced to raise interest rates. So the rest of Europe had to follow suit. That hurt stock market valuations. Anyway, the details aren’t all that important. Point is, this KGB guy says there’s a plan under way to undermine and destroy the European economy. The guy was a financial whiz, so I listened to him. He said all the levers are already in place; all it would take is the swift and sudden infiltration of capital—”

  “Where is this guy, this KGB guy?”

  “Measles.” Kent smiled sadly and shrugged. That’s a killing that’s meant to look like a death from natural causes. “One of his own, I assume.”

  “Did you report this?”

  “Of course I did. It’s my job, man. But I was told to drop it. Drop all efforts to investigate this; it’s disruptive to German-American relations. Don’t waste any more time on it.”

  Suddenly I noticed that we were standing in front of Atkins’s old rust bucket Ford Fiesta. We had made a large loop, though I was concentrating so hard I hadn’t noticed. Molly joined up with us.

  “You boys done?” she said.

  “Yep,” I said. “For now.” To Atkins I said: “Thanks, buddy.”

  “Okay,” he said, opening the car door. He hadn’t locked it; no one, no matter how needy, would take the trouble to steal such a vehicle. “But now take some advice, Ben, please. You too, Molly. Get the hell out of the country. I wouldn’t even spend the night here if I were you.”

  I shook his hand. “Would you mind giving us a lift to the city center?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Last thing I need is to be seen with you. I agreed to meet with you because we’re friends. You’ve helped me through some tough times. I owe you. But take the U-bahn. Do me a favor.”

  He got into the driver’s seat and put on the seat belt. “Good luck,” he said. He slammed the door, rolled down the window, and added: “And get out of here.”

  “Can we meet again?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Stay away from me, Ben, or I’m a dead man.” He turned the key in the ignition, smiled, and added: “Measles.”

  Taking Molly’s arm, we started down the path toward Tivolistrasse. Kent’s engine failed to turn over the first two times he tried, but the third time took and the car roared to life.

  “Ben,” Molly began, but something was bothering me, and I turned around to watch Kent back his car up.

  The music, I remembered.

  He’d shut the car off with the music blasting, that Donna Summer stuff. The radio, he said. But now the radio was off.

  He hadn’t turned it off.

  “Kent!” I shouted, vaulting toward the car. “Jump out!”

  He looked up at me, surprised, smiling uncertainly, as if wondering whether I were attempting some sort of joke.

  That half-smile disappeared suddenly in a flash of white light, an absurd, hollow pop like a piñata shattering, but it was the windows of Kent’s Ford Fiesta, then a tremendous, thundering explosion like a clap of thunder, a sulphurous blaze that went amber and blood-red, run through with great leaping tongues of ocher and indigo flames, then a column of ashen cumulonimbus thunderclouds out of which sprayed oddments of the car high into the air. Something struck me in the back of the head: the face of his fake Rolex watch.

  Molly and I clutched at each other in mute terror for a second, and then we ran as fast as we could into the gloom of the Englischer Garten.

  FIFTY-ONE

  At a few minutes after noon we reached Baden-Baden, the famous old spa resort nestled in woods of pine and birch in Germany’s Black Forest. In our rented, gleaming smoke-silver Mercedes 500SL (outfitted with burgundy leather upholstery, it was just the sort of car an ambitious young diplomat with the Canadian embassy would drive), we had made very good time. It had taken just under four hours of frantic yet careful driving on the autobahn A8 west-northwest of Munich. I was dressed in a conservative yet stylish suit that I had picked up off the rack at Loden-Frey on Maffeistrasse, on my way out of the city.

  We had spent an agonized, sleepless night at our hotel on Promenadeplatz. The terrible explosion in the Englischer Garten, the horrific death of my friend: the images and the terror had lodged themselves in our minds. We comforted one another and talked for hours, each trying to allay the other’s fears, trying to make sense of what had happened.

  We knew it was now imperative to find Gerhard Stoessel, the German industrialist and real estate baron who had received the wire transfer from Zurich. He was at the center of the conspiracy, I felt sure. Somehow I would have to place myself in proximity to Stoessel and receive the conspirator’s thoughts. And I would have to reach Alex Truslow, in Bonn or wherever he was, and warn him. Either he should leave the country, or he’d have to take appropriate security measures.

  Early in the mo
rning, having given up the battle to get some badly needed sleep, I called a financial reporter for Der Spiegel, whom I had known slightly in Leipzig.

  “Elisabeth,” I said, “I need to track down Gerhard Stoessel.”

  “The great Gerhard Stoessel himself? I’m sure he’s in Munich. That’s where the headquarters of Neue Welt are.”

  But he wasn’t in Munich, as I had learned after some preliminary calling. “What about Bonn?” I asked.

  “I won’t ask why you want to reach Stoessel,” she said, sensing the urgency in my voice. “But you should know that he is not easy to get to. Let me make some calls.”

  She called back twenty minutes later. “He’s in Baden-Baden.”

  “I won’t ask your source, but I assume it’s reliable.”

  “Very much so.” Before I could ask, she added: “And he invariably stays at Brenner’s Park Hotel and Spa.”

  * * *

  In the nineteenth century Baden-Baden had swarmed with European nobility; it was there that, having lost everything at the Spielbank casino, Dostoyevski in despair wrote The Gambler. Now Germans and other Europeans went there to ski, play golf or tennis, watch the horse races at Iffezheim Track, and partake of the mineral-rich baths fed by artesian wells deep beneath the Florentiner Mountain.

  The day had started out overcast and quite cold, and by the time we approached Brenner’s Park Hotel and Spa, surrounded by a private park by the Oosbach River, a chill drizzle had begun to fall. Baden-Baden seemed a town accustomed to grandeur and festivity; the tree-lined Lichtentaler Allee, with its vibrant adornments of rhododendrons, azaleas, and roses, was its centerpiece, its great promenade. But now it looked forlorn and deserted, resentful and furtive.

  Molly waited for me in the Mercedes while I entered the hotel’s spacious and quiet lobby. I had traveled such a distance in these last few months, I reflected. So much had happened to me, to both of us, since that rainswept March day in upstate New York when we laid Harrison Sinclair’s coffin in the ground, and here we were, in a deserted German spa in the Schwarzwald, and once again it was raining.

  The uniformed desk clerk who appeared to be in charge of the registration desk was a tall young man in his mid-twenties, towheaded and officious. “May I help you, sir?”

  “Ich habe eine dringende Nachricht für Herrn Stoessel,” I said as importantly as possible, holding in one hand a business-size envelope. I have an urgent message for Mr. Stoessel.

  I introduced myself as Christian Bartlett, a second attaché with the Canadian consulate on Tal Strasse in Munich. “Will you please give him this letter?” I said in my heavily accented but still serviceable German.

  “Yes, of course, sir,” the clerk said, reaching for the envelope. “But he is not here. He is gone for the afternoon.”

  “Where is he?” I slipped the envelope in my breast pocket.

  “The baths, I believe.”

  “Which one?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  There are really only two leading spas in Baden-Baden, both on Romerplatz: the Old Baths, also called the Friedrichsbad, and the Caracalla-Therme. At the first one I came to, Caracalla-Therme, I went through my routine, and was met by blank stares. There was no Herr Stoessel here, I was told. One of the older attendants, however, had overheard the conversation and said, “Mr. Stoessel doesn’t come here. Try the Friedrichsbad.”

  At the Friedrichsbad, the attendant—bulky, sallow-faced, and middle-aged—nodded. Yes, he said. Mr. Stoessel was here.

  “Ich bin Christian Bartlett,” I told him, “von der Kanadischen Botschaft. Es ist äusserst wichtig und dringend, dass ich Herrn Stoessel erreiche.” It is urgent that I reach Stoessel.

  The attendant shook his head slowly, with mulelike truculence. “Er nimmt gerade ein Dampfbad.” He is taking the steam. “Man darf ihn auf gar keinen Fall stören.” He has instructed us not to disturb him.

  The attendant was, however, awed and impressed by my imperiousness, and perhaps by my foreignness, and agreed to escort me into the private thermal steam bath where the great Herr Stoessel was. If it really was a matter of urgency, he would see what he could do. We passed white-uniformed stewards carting silver trays of mineral water and other cold drinks, and others carrying stacks of thick white cotton towels, and finally reached a corridor that seemed to be off limits to the other employees.

  Outside the steam room sat a wide, potato-faced man in a gray security officer’s uniform, sweating profusely and visibly uncomfortable. He was obviously a bodyguard.

  He looked up as we approached and snarled: “Sie dürfen nicht dort hineingehen!” You can’t go in there!

  I looked at him, surprised, and smiled. In one lightning-fast motion I pulled my gun from my front pocket and slammed the butt against the side of the bodyguard’s head. He groaned and slumped to the ground. Whirling the gun back the other way, I caught the attendant on the back of his head, with the same result.

  Moving quickly, I dragged both bodies into a nearby service alcove and out of sight, then closed the doors to close the area off. The attendant’s white uniform slipped off easily. It hung on me, but it would have to do.

  I grabbed an empty tray from the stainless steel counter and several bottles of mineral water from a small refrigerator, and ambled casually to the steam room door. I gave it a hard tug and it came open with a loud hiss.

  The steam swirled about me, thick and opaque like absorbent cotton, an undulating scrim. The room was unbearably hot, stifling, the steam sulfurous and acrid. I could taste it. The vaulted walls were tiled in white ceramic.

  “Wer ist da? Was ist los?” Who’s there? What’s going on?

  Through the gauzy mist I could just make out a pair of corpulent, reddened, nude bodies. They rested on a long stone bench, on white towels like carcasses in a slaughterhouse.

  The voice came from the body nearest me, hairy-chested and round. As I advanced through the dense clouds, holding the tray aloft, I could make out his prominent ears, his balding dome, his large nose. Gerhard Stoessel. I had studied his photograph in Der Spiegel that morning; there was no question it was him. I couldn’t quite see who his companion was, except that it was another middle-aged man, hairless, with short legs.

  “Erfrischungen?” Stoessel barked out. Refreshments? “Nein!”

  Wordlessly, I backed out of the chamber, closing the door behind me.

  The bodyguard and the attendant were still unconscious. Swiftly and deliberately, I paced the corridors outside the steam bath until I found what I wanted: a windowless door located at what would have been the rear of the chamber. It was the maintenance crawl space that I knew had to be there, in which the spa’s workers could do repair work on the steam pipes. It was not locked; there was no reason for it to be. I opened it and quickly, nervously, ducked into the low-ceilinged space. It was completely dark. The walls were slimy with moisture and mineral deposits. Momentarily losing my balance, I reached up to steady myself and accidentally grasped a scalding-hot pipe. Only with great effort was I able to restrain myself from bellowing in pain.

  As I crept along on my knees, I spotted a pinhole of light and moved toward it. The caulk fitting around a steam vent, where it entered the bath area, had come loose in one place, letting in a dot of light—and muffled sound.

  After a minute or so my ears became sufficiently accustomed to the poor sound quality, and I could recognize phrases, then whole sentences. The conversation between the two men was of course in German, but I was able to understand much of what I heard. Crouched in the darkness, my hands braced against the slimy concrete walls, I listened with horrified fascination, overcome with fear.

  FIFTY-TWO

  At first there were just isolated phrases: Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German Federal Intelligence Service. The Swiss Intelligence Service. The Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French counterespionage organization, the DST. Something was said about Stuttgart, and an airport.
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br />   Then the conversation grew more fluid, more expansive. A scornful voice—Stoessel’s? the other man’s?: “And for all their assets, their sources, their databases, they have not a clue as to who this secret witness is?”

  I could not hear a reply.

  And a wafted phrase: “To ensure victory…”

  And: “The confederacy.”

  And: “If a united Europe is to be ours.” Then: “Such an opportunity comes along once or twice in a century.”

  “Full coordination with the Wise Men…”

  The other man, who I now decided was Stoessel: “—at history. It is sixty-one years since Adolf Hitler became chancellor and the Weimar Republic was no longer. One forgets that at the beginning no one thought he would last the year!”

  The other replied angrily, “Hitler was a madman! We are sane.”

  “We are not burdened with ideology,” came Stoessel’s voice, “which is always the downfall…”

  Something I could not hear, and then Stoessel replied: “So we must be patient, Wilhelm. In a few weeks you will be the leader of Germany, and we will rule. But to consolidate our power will take time. Our American partners assure us of their restraint.”

  You will be leader of Germany … The other man was, had to be, Wilhelm Vogel, the chancellor-elect!

  My stomach turned over.

  Vogel, I was sure it was Wilhelm Vogel, made a noise, some sort of muffled objection, to which Stoessel responded, loudly and quite clearly: “… that they will watch and do nothing. Since Maastricht, the conquest of Europe has been made enormously easier. The governments will fall one by one. The politicians are not leaders anyway. They will look to the corporate leaders, because industry and commerce are the only forces capable of governing a unified Europe. They have no vision! We are visionaries! We can see much farther, beyond tomorrow and the day after. Beyond the immediate concerns of the day.”

  Another demurral from the chancellor-elect. Stoessel said: “A global conquest that is quite simple, because it is based on the profit motive, pure and simple.”