“And then Gabler was killed?”
“Yes. And Wetzel, one of the VPs of the bank. Didn’t know him. The Germans were blamed, as you know, and that was the end of it. I didn’t learn anything else about the affair till the early nineties, when I got a visit from a group of Russians.”
“KGB?”
“No, no. Far from. These chaps were just accountants. At the time Russia was swirling down the toilet, and they were in search of a mysterious black fund of ex-KGB money filched from Soviet coffers. They were quite up-front about it, and they only came to me because I had mentioned the affair with the RPB gold offer a few times at cocktail parties and the like. That got back to these accountants.” He laughed. “I remember thinking that the new Russia didn’t stand a chance because the KGB had been replaced with these friendly accountants asking friendly questions. Little did I know the KGB would eat blokes like that for lunch soon enough and take charge once again.”
“Did you learn anything from them about this black fund?”
He leaned forward. “No. Nothing to speak of, other than the obvious fact they didn’t think the RAF killed Swiss bankers in the eighties. Instead, it was clear to me, someone in the KGB stole the money, had it in a numbered account at RPB, and somehow KGB found out where the money was.”
“Any idea how?”
“No, but I can guess. I’d wager KGB was already inside RPB. Whoever stole the money and parked it there either didn’t know this or else they thought they were cleverer than they were. Word got to KGB that other Russians were moving large sums of money into the West. The KGB came looking for answers. When this happened the account holder made Gabler run around looking for someone inside the bank who had hard assets so they could physically take the money and run.”
Jack said, “But we don’t know if they found anyone to do the deal with.”
“We don’t,” Galbraith said with a smile. “But I have a suspicion who does.”
“Who?”
“Hugh Castor. Hugh and I knew each other from Eton. We weren’t chums, but I knew enough to know he was in the security services. When the Russian accountants met with me and asked me all the questions, I passed on all the information to him. He was quite excited by the prospect of missing KGB riches. He even had me introduce him to the president of RPB.
“I found out later Castor himself became a client of the bank. He grew quite wealthy over the next few years—this was the nineties. He was connected in the new Russia, left MI5 and went into private-sector intelligence. I knew he was trading in information, and that’s why, when I lost my company there last year, I went straight to him. I thought he’d be able to clear the matter up with his inside connections.”
Galbraith looked at Ryan and sighed. “The bastard protected his friends in power at my expense, didn’t he?”
Ryan nodded. “It’s beginning to look like that’s exactly what he did.”
Galbraith said, “The sod even bought a house in Zug, just to be near his money, I guess.”
“Castor has a place in Zug?”
“He does. A chalet right on the lake. I’ve had dinner with him there a few times.” Ryan could see the muscles in Malcolm Galbraith’s jaws flex in anger. “And then he swindles me on behalf of bloody Gazprom. What do you suppose they are paying him?”
Ryan admitted he had no idea.
Jack said, “Mr. Galbraith, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. I am not sure what is going to happen, but I don’t really expect the FSB to write you a check for one-point-two billion dollars when this is all said and done.”
Galbraith replied, “I can’t remember the last time I used this phrase, but at this point, this isn’t about the money.”
Ryan was glad to see Galbraith understood.
Galbraith said, “You are a brave young man for an analyst.”
Jack smiled, thought of his dad for a moment, then said, “I have some men with me.”
“What kind of men?”
“Men to watch my back if the Russians come after me again.”
“These chaps, they aren’t employees of Castor’s, are they?” Galbraith asked.
“No. Why?”
The Scottish billionaire shifted in his seat uncomfortably now. “Because I’m afraid there is a complication.”
Ryan cocked his head. “What complication?”
“I called Hugh this morning, asking him what his junior analyst was doing flying up to Edinburgh demanding a meeting.”
Jack groaned. “When I asked for this meeting to be discreet, and just between the two of us, Castor is exactly who I was worried about.”
Galbraith held up his hands. “That’s clear now, isn’t it? Wasn’t clear then.”
Jack wondered what this meant, but at the very least he knew it meant he needed to get the hell out of here now.
He said, “Just one more question. What phone number did you reach him on?”
The Scotsman pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket. He scrolled through some numbers for a moment, then passed it over to Ryan. “Thinking about giving him a call?”
“No. I have a buddy who just might be able to find him through his phone.” Jack looked at Malcolm Galbraith. “At this point in the game, I’d much prefer a face-to-face meeting with Hugh Castor.”
75
Thirty years earlier
After venturing out in the rain from his Berlin hotel, CIA analyst Jack Ryan found a small restaurant still open at eleven p.m., and he bought a meal consisting of bratwurst and french fries along with a large glass of pilsner. He sat at the front window and enjoyed his meal while looking out at the dreary weather. After a few minutes, he opened his map to orient himself, and he realized he was only a few blocks away from where the shootout took place on Sprengelstrasse very early that morning.
Though it was after eleven-thirty in the evening when he left the restaurant, he decided to walk the five blocks just to pass by the RAF flat.
It took him less than ten minutes to find the corner, and he was immediately surprised by how dead the area seemed now. The evening before, he had assumed the police cordon was keeping any traffic clear of the intersection, but tonight, with no police cordon whatsoever, the activity level in the neighborhood was virtually the same. Other than the occasional slow-moving taxi and one or two pensioners under umbrellas taking their dogs for late-night strolls, Ryan did not see anyone out on Sprengelstrasse.
The cold rain picked up as he neared the intersection, and he noticed a police car parked in front of the building, facing in the opposite direction. He couldn’t see anyone inside the vehicle, but the engine was running, so he suspected the police had posted a guard to keep any curious people away from the crime scene.
Jack stepped back into a darkened doorway on the northeastern corner of Sprengelstrasse and Tegeler Strasse, and from here he could take in the entire scene.
The bay doors of the auto repair shop were closed, which came as no surprise to Jack. There was no light coming from the big brick building at all, and the windows on the higher floors that had been shot out during the gunfight nearly twenty-four hours earlier were now covered with a shiny black material.
As he stood there, it occurred to him that he’d love to get another look inside that flat. Even though he was certain the BfV would have pulled anything of obvious intelligence value, Jack wondered if there was some way they might have missed some small thing, some tiny item that could possibly connect Marta Scheuring, the girl who died in Switzerland, with the Russians.
Ryan wondered what that might be. He wasn’t a cop like his dad, crime scene investigation was not his forte, so he recognized the fact he’d need to find something as obvious as a photo of Marta on Red Square to know he had the smoking gun he was looking for.
No chance of that, he told himself.
While Jack stood there, another police car pulled up close to the one parked in the street. Both drivers rolled down their windows and started talking. From a hundred feet away, Jack could hea
r muffled voices, and he saw the flash and glow as one of the cops lit a cigarette.
Jack stepped out of the doorway and crossed Tegeler Strasse, and began walking along the side of the building. Here he was surprised to see that the fire escape ladder he had climbed the evening before had not been reset all the way. He realized that if he were so inclined, he would be able to reach it and pull it down with the hook of his umbrella.
He was certain the patrol cars around the corner could not see him where he was, and he also knew the cops were distracted by their conversation, so, with no advance plan whatsoever, Jack decided to climb the fire escape and slip inside the building. He knew the police might wander around the corner here at some point, but he seriously doubted that they would be getting out of their warm and dry patrol cars anytime in the next few seconds.
Still, Jack did not reach for the ladder immediately; instead, he kept walking along, his umbrella and his waterproof coat keeping him dry, although he began to sweat as he thought about the prospect of getting another look inside the third-floor flat used as a safe house by the Red Army Faction. Twice he talked himself out of going ahead with his idea, but twice more he reasoned that, in the unlikely event the policemen caught him in the act, he wouldn’t be in any serious trouble. He could drop a few names of BfV officers he’d met in the past day, and he’d likely receive an uncomfortable tongue-lashing from the Germans, but the prospect of this paled in comparison with the possibility of having his curiosity satisfied by another look at the flat.
While considering his next move, he’d walked half a block up the street. He stopped, turned, headed back to the fire escape, and looked around at all the buildings, searching for anyone who might be watching what he was doing.
There was no one.
As Ryan arrived again at the fire escape, he used his umbrella to pull down the ladder slowly and relatively quietly, then tossed his umbrella between a couple of nearly bare bushes alongside the building and began climbing.
The window on the first floor had been shattered the night before; this was where Ryan had fired at the sniper two blocks east of here on Sprengelstrasse. Now cardboard wrapped in a black plastic tarp had been fitted in place of the window. Ryan had no trouble pushing in the cardboard and climbing inside the building. He looked back out onto the rain-swept empty street, then pushed the cardboard and plastic back into place.
Just like that, he was in. It was quiet, as he expected, and though this hallway had been dark last night, it had been nothing like this. Now there was not a single source of light.
Fear of the dark is a natural fear, and Jack had no reason to be afraid here, as he was certain the building was both empty and covered by the police, but his heart pounded against his chest as he felt his way to the stairway to the second floor.
Compared with the pitch black of the hall and the stairwell, the second floor was relatively well lit by the large windows on all sides. Several of these windows had been shot out and they, too, had been replaced with the same cardboard and plastic sheeting, but several more were intact, and Jack had no problem finding his way forward through the art collective, toward the stairs up to the third-floor flat.
Jack took a chance in the RAF flat. As in the hallway two floors below him, he could barely see his hands in front of his face. Fortunately, he remembered from the evening before that all the windows in the flat had been destroyed by gunfire or concussion grenades. He presumed that whoever had covered the windows downstairs would have done the same here, so he felt around until he found a small desk lamp on a side table. He pulled the cord and was not surprised to find the lamp was inoperable.
It took several more seconds to find a second cord; this one led to a lamp with a bulb that had not been damaged in the chaotic melee of the evening before.
He took a blanket off a chair against the wall and partially covered the lamp, leaving just enough light for him to take in his surroundings.
The living room felt smaller now that he stood alone in it. A dozen detectives and commandos and British agents had added a sense of expanse to the space, but now it was just a fifteen-foot-by-fifteen-foot room with too much cheap furniture that was mostly shot up and smashed, and walls pockmarked with holes. There was an outline on the floor in the shape of a body lying on its side, with the arms out in one direction and the lower legs in the other, making an S-shape. This was the woman who’d been killed in the front room; Jack had read her name in the report this afternoon. Ulrike something. He remembered seeing her bullet-riddled body the evening before and an automatic weapon lying next to it.
The girl and the gun were gone now, but her outline and a four-foot-wide bloodstain remained.
He stood still in the room for a moment, thinking about the scene last night. He was sure he could still smell the smoke, and he thought he could detect the scent of death.
After a minute, he flipped off the lamp and felt his way forward to the hallway, and then he headed back toward the bedrooms.
Marta Scheuring’s little room seemed even darker than the hallway. He felt around on the wall for a moment, hunting for a light switch, but when he found nothing, he dropped to his knees and reached out in all directions. He put his hand on a wire and followed it to some sort of a lamp lying on its side on the floor, and he flipped a switch on it. It was a blue lava lamp; apparently it had been sitting on a folding TV tray that Marta had used as an end table. The tray lay on its side on the floor next to the lamp.
Jack picked up the lamp and used it as a very poor flashlight. He looked around at the smashed furniture and the holes in the wall. He looked at the clothing in the closet and the shattered mirror on a tiny dresser.
It was quiet, the only sound the tinkle of precipitation on the plastic and cardboard covering the windows.
Jack took in his pale blue surroundings. No one had died in this room; there was no blood on the floor or the walls. But it felt like death, because the young woman who lived in this tiny space had been killed two nights earlier several hundred miles south in Switzerland. Her few personal effects were all that remained of her. There was laundry in a hamper in the corner. A threadbare towel, a pair of blue jeans. A black sweater, and a plain tan bra-and-panty set piled on top.
Suddenly it felt wrong to Jack to be here.
Intellectually, he knew the BfV would have searched everything, but Jack had wanted to poke around on his own. But now he did not want to touch her clothing, to look through her drawers or closet.
He realized he’d made a mistake. He’d been at the end of the road in his investigation, and logic had taken a backseat to emotion.
Jack sighed loudly. His mind switched gears, and he started thinking about how his unauthorized late-night visit to this crime scene would look to his peers. Should he even mention his skulking around here tonight to either Sir Basil or Jim Greer? Probably not, he told himself. It might make him look impetuous, undisciplined.
He couldn’t tell Cathy, either, but that was probably best for everyone. He told himself he’d just leave now and never mention a word of this to—
Jack heard a noise, the creaking of a floorboard somewhere far away. He leaned out into the hall. The sound continued, and after a moment he realized he was hearing the footsteps of someone coming up the wooden staircase that led up to the flat.
He quickly flipped off the lava lamp, put it down on the floor, and backed into the closet, pressing himself into the clothes hanging from the rack.
Damn it, Jack, he said to himself. He was certain it was the police. He knew he hadn’t been seen coming up, and he also knew he hadn’t made any noise. He figured the damn lights he had turned on had shone through some bullet hole in the wall and tipped off the cops.
The footfalls approached slowly, moving down the hall now. The closet door was open. Jack did not want to pull it shut, fearing the hinges might squeak, so he very slowly pushed himself backward even deeper into the dresses and coats Marta had left hanging in her closet. He thought he had a chance
to remain unseen if the cops just passed by the room and waved their flashlight in, since the closet could not be seen without stepping into the room.
But then it occurred to him. There was no flashlight. Jack would have been able to see any residual light of someone coming up the hall, but he saw nothing at all except complete darkness.
The fact that there was no beam was disconcerting. He had no idea who was in the flat with him now, but he suspected this other person had as little right to be here as he did himself.
The hardwood flooring in the hallway creaked with each step. The drops of pelting rain on the plastic sheeting continued unabated as the steps moved closer.
They stopped in the doorway to Marta Scheuring’s room. Jack was six feet away from the other visitor, only partially hidden in the closet.
A figure entered the room in front of him. He could feel the presence more than see anything in the dark. He thought about leaping out, taking the other figure by surprise; his mind raced, and he wondered if this could have been the person who had fired on him and the GSG 9 men twenty-four hours earlier.
He had no weapon at all; his only hope was to stay hidden. He did not move. He held his breath now, and forced his eyes open even wider to take in any ambient light that might give him an advantage.
There was a shuffling sound; Jack recognized the sound of the lava lamp scuffing the floor.
Shit. He poised himself to leap forward as soon as the light came on.
Suddenly the room was awash in dim blue light. A figure in a big black hooded coat knelt on the floor, and then the figure rose back up, facing away. Ryan balled his right fist, he needed to take only two quick steps to be in striking distance, but he quickly realized the figure was moving away from him, toward the bed.
The person knelt down and reached under the bed now. Jack heard the sound of the floorboards moving, and he knew what was going on.
After a few seconds of feeling around, the figure stopped moving, as if giving up, and dropped his head on the bed. Whoever this was, he had obviously been looking for the briefcase, and he’d obviously realized the police had found it.
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