The first swallow of vodka went down hard, as was always the case. He’d powered through half of the liter during the previous evening, which should have been enough to put an elephant to sleep, but was just about right for a continuous, low-level buzz that created a pleasant psychological distance from the horrors of Kittredge’s day. He was sure Nora had noticed. She was a smart girl, and would undoubtedly come to the right conclusions about his drinking habit, but he was still not eager to down his early morning constitutional in front of her.
He took another healthy swig from the bottle, endured the gastric near-revolt it induced, and shook his head vigorously with the burn in his esophagus. The anesthetizing effect settled over him almost immediately, and he got it in his mind that he would prefer the rest of his morning vodka over ice.
Kittredge dressed and padded down the hallway to the hotel’s ice machine. He’d made several trips for ice over the course of the previous evening, but the hallway had somehow taken on a more ominous appearance, possibly due to his relative sobriety. Kittredge suddenly had the unsettling feeling that he was in danger. He glanced over both shoulders as he shoveled ice into the container, checking for anyone sneaking up on him.
He heard a noise nearby. God, they found me! Adrenaline flooded his veins, and he nearly dropped the ice bucket on the floor as he turned to face the noise.
But there was no one in the hallway in either direction. He shook his head, wondering if it was just a bit of momentary paranoia in the aftermath of the previous day’s unbelievable events.
When he’d gathered enough ice for a couple of drinks, he walked quickly back to the room he’d shared with Nora the previous evening. He twisted the deadbolt into place once he was safely inside.
He noticed that he was sweating, and his heart felt like it was trying to escape his chest. This is no way to live, he thought, dropping a handful of ice into a plastic hotel cup and pouring it full of vodka, wondering how people lived their lives looking over their shoulder all the time. He figured he would prefer death to a life lived in constant fear of it.
His thoughts turned to their predicament. Three assaults since Friday morning. One murder, and two attempted murders. Two of those assaults happened inside a locked apartment. He racked his brain to find common denominators between the different events.
He could think of only two. Peter Kittredge and Nora Jane Martin were the only common links between all of those events. And that guy had her goddamned apartment key! He shook his head, still afraid of the possible implications. Was Nora somehow involved in all of this? She had been at Kittredge’s apartment right before Sergio’s murder, and she had left her own apartment an hour or two before the intruder had almost choked Kittredge to death.
Nora, I hope you’re not involved, Kittredge found himself muttering. Truth be told, despite all of the craziness swirling around them, he thought he might have been falling for Nora. They had been together just a short time, but Kittredge already felt as if a betrayal would have a devastating effect on him.
But he had to know.
He listened at the bathroom door. Nora was still in the shower, probably washing her hair. He eyed her purse, perched precariously on the edge of the table at the far end of the hotel room. He made his way quickly across the room, grabbed her purse, and felt around for her phone. It was password-protected, and he couldn’t gain access to listen to voicemails or read text messages.
He emptied the contents of the purse onto the table and began sifting through things. Kittredge had no idea what he was looking for, and he really hoped he found nothing at all. It would be the best possible scenario. He would have satisfied his need to take action to answer his questions about how the assholes had come to be in possession of Nora’s apartment key, but would have found nothing that forced him to change his approach to Nora.
Kittredge heard the shower turn off. He frantically threw items back into Nora’s purse, anxious not to get caught rummaging through her possessions.
The bathroom door opened. Nora emerged, naked but for a towel around her hair, her athletic body stunningly beautiful in the reflected light of the bathroom. Kittredge’s head snapped to her, one hand still clutching her purse, the other stuffing an appointment book back inside.
Her smile disappeared and her mien turned instantly frosty. “What are you doing?”
“I… I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I was just looking for some sort of connection, you know, to all this craziness, and I thought maybe…”
“You think I’m involved in this?” She pulled the towel from her hair and covered her body. “You can’t be serious.”
“I… I don’t know,” he said, instantly aware that it hadn’t made things any better with her. “I mean, I don’t know what to think.”
“You asshole,” she said. “You screw me like a man possessed all night, and then you go through all of my things in the morning? Why didn’t you just ask me last night?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t think of it. I was just thinking about things this morning, and I wondered how they got your apartment key.”
She frowned. “What makes you so sure they had my key?”
Just the fact that the guy I killed in your kitchen had your key, is all. That’s what makes me think such a thing. But he couldn’t tell her that. “Well, Strauss said there’s usually more scoring on the lock after someone picks it,” he reprised the previous day’s lie, “so I just figured maybe they got their hands on your key somehow.”
“So you rifled through my purse? I don’t get it.”
He turned his palms upward and shrugged. “I don’t know what I was looking for, really. I mean, how the hell have they found us three times now? Maybe they put something in your purse. You know, to track you.” It sounded lame as soon as he said it.
Nora snorted. “Unbelievable. You could have just asked me, you know. And I think you would have, if you weren’t suspicious of me.”
“What? That’s ridiculous…” His voice trailed off, because it wasn’t ridiculous at all, and Kittredge didn’t know what to think, about anything, really, but especially about Nora and the way he felt vulnerable and small beneath her anger.
“Listen, Nora, I’m really sorry. I’m just freaked out about all of this, and I…”
Nora’s mouth opened in shock. “Jesus, Peter, what the hell happened to you?” She pointed at Kittredge’s neck, and his hands went instinctively to his Adam’s apple.
“What do you mean?” he asked, but he was afraid that he knew exactly what she meant.
“Your neck! Peter, it’s one big bruise, all the way around!” She approached, her towel falling to the floor, her hands loosening his collar from around his neck and gently tracing the arc of the bruise left by the man who had almost strangled Peter to death the day before.
“Peter, it’s horrible! I mean, it’s purple and green all the way around your throat.” Her eyes showed deep concern. But it gave way to an understanding, and then suspicion. Her eyes narrowed. “You lied to me. About the intruder.” She spoke the words as if she already knew they were true. “He attacked you.”
Kittredge closed his eyes. What could he say to her? He nodded slowly, his mouth twisted in a grimace. “I didn’t want you to worry.”
She slapped him. “You asshole. I was already worried. Somebody broke into my apartment yesterday. You didn’t think that would creep me out? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” She focused her eyes on his bruised neck again, taking in the extent of the bruising, the depth of its color. “Holy shit, Peter, it looks like he almost killed you.”
Kittredge nodded at her. “Almost.”
“You didn’t tell Strauss.” She shook her head, disgust on her face. “If you had told him, they’d have given us police protection, and we wouldn’t be hiding out like fugitives.”
Kittredge didn’t know what to say. He sure the hell couldn’t tell her the truth, that he’d mutilated and dismembered a guy in her apartment, then stuffe
d the body parts into the basement trash compactor. He shook his head and shrugged. “I’m sorry, Nora. I just… I thought it would be best not to worry you too much about all of this, you know…” He sounded ridiculous and he knew it.
His eyes pleaded with hers. But Nora’s eyes darkened. “I liked you, Peter.” She shook her head, and it looked like she might cry. “But we have trust issues. Already. It’s been, what, four days?”
An injured chuckle escaped her mouth, and she shook her head again. “I’m sorry, but I don’t do trust issues.”
Nora retreated into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.
33
Gunther Fleischer looked out the window. Early afternoon. He’d spent the entire day inside his apartment, and he was feeling a little stir crazy, the way he always felt after a sedentary day of desk work with too little physical activity.
He’d spent the lion’s share of the time communicating with various parties in Washington, DC. The problem he’d set about solving was a simple one. He needed to line up a courier to deliver the cash to Jefferson Ames.
But in Fleischer’s business, one didn’t simply hire a courier and hope for the best. That would be asking for trouble, and eventually, for a bullet to the brain. What would stop the courier from banking the cash and disappearing, or engineering a fake mugging with the same effect? When business called for a courier, that meant it also called for someone to watch the courier, both to protect him from harm, and to make sure he didn’t act on any of the entrepreneurial ideations that a suitcase full of cash had a tendency to foster.
So Fleischer had arranged a short-notice courier, and he had also arranged some short-notice muscle to keep an eye on the courier. It wasn’t just helpful to be well-connected; it was absolutely necessary in Fleischer’s line of work.
He had also obtained from Viktor Kohlhaas the necessary banking information to facilitate the transfers. Kohlhaas had a number of US-based accounts, for reasons that Fleischer couldn’t personally fathom given the American tax apparatus’ insatiable appetite. But Kohlhaas’ American accounts would dramatically ease the money transfer difficulties. It had the added benefit of removing any need for Fleischer to use his own accounts in the transaction, which was always best for plausible deniability.
At quarter past two in the afternoon, after a solid day of phone calls, text messages, and cryptic postings on obscure bulletin board sites, Fleischer was ready to contact Ames.
He invoked an IP-masking service that would obscure the origin of his activity on the site. Fleischer had suffered a close call during an operation a few years prior, and he had almost learned a very hard lesson about computer security. Subsequently, he had made it a point to educate himself.
Reasonably confident in his anonymity, Fleischer navigated to the Serious Sensei Strength forum and filled out an online membership form. Roger Rabbit Punch was the user name he typed. It was a stupid name, Fleischer thought, but it’s the name that Jefferson Ames had specified, and Fleischer didn’t deviate from his instructions.
Fleischer uploaded the photo captured from the video inside Mathias Kohlhaas’ apartment. The photo showed an attractive young man of Spanish descent, at least to Fleischer’s eye. The young man was slight but had an athletic frame, in a mildly feminine way, and his face was more pretty than handsome. Fleischer understood what had attracted Mathias to the young man.
But he needed to understand what had attracted the young man to Mathias. And, more importantly, in whose employ the pretty young Spaniard might have been operating when he opened the door to let in Mathias’ murderer.
Fleischer scanned the forum postings. As a result of his computer security education, and because obscure internet chat rooms and website forum posts were an effective method of clandestine communication, provided one used sufficiently robust codes, Fleischer was familiar with the chat forum ecosystem.
Serious Sensei Strength was no different than any other forum. There were people who were obviously deep into the subject, and who were undisputed subject matter experts whose opinions appeared on-point and well-considered. And there were also people who were clearly depriving a village of an idiot.
Fleischer aimed for the middle with his comment, some bromide about avoidance of violent conflict being the best form of self defense.
He took a deep breath and clicked enter. It was underway, and there was no turning back now. He hoped that Ames would hold up his end of the bargain.
34
Kittredge awoke in the bed he’d shared with Nora the previous night. He’d spent the day drinking, snoozing, and dialing the various Copenhagen-born Sergios whose phone numbers he’d harvested from the interwebs, as a geeky former lover jokingly referred to the internet. None of the Sergios were dead, at least not the ones he’d spoken to.
As he rinsed the sleep from his mouth with a healthy swill of vodka, the last of the bottle he’d bought the previous day en route to the hotel from Nora’s flat, it occurred to Kittredge that, given the time he’d already invested in the project, he really should find the phone numbers belonging to the remaining Sergios on the Copenhagen list. There were three left to find.
He rose, rinsed off the evidence of his earlier self-love, again with Sergio on his mind rather than the brunette beauty whose body he’d devoured repeatedly over the past two days — why was he continually looking over the fence at greener grass? — and dressed in the second of the two outfits he’d bought after cleaning up the dead goon’s body parts the day prior. He wrapped his scarf around his neck to hide the bruising from yesterday’s near-strangulation. He had to agree with Nora. His neck looked awful.
He had a vicious headache, and his stomach hurt. He realized that he hadn’t yet eaten. Kittredge stuffed some crackers into his mouth from the basket of junk food next to the mini-bar and washed it down with his vodka. It would have to do for the moment. He had work to do, he decided.
Kittredge ambled down to the hotel’s computer room. It sat inside a small business center with keycard access, and Kittredge chose the computer furthest from the door. In case of an intruder, the extra distance would maximize his reaction time, which he suspected would be suspect given his blood-alcohol content.
It took Kittredge the better part of an hour to find the three telephone numbers. As he jotted the last one down, belonging to a Sergio Joao Valenzuela, born twenty-five years ago last week, a thought struck him. Right before both of the assaults he’d suffered over the past couple of days, he’d been doing exactly the same thing: searching for Copenhagen-born Sergios.
A chill suddenly ran down his spine. That was the third common denominator between attacks. All three of them involved Sergio in some way. Even after his grisly death, Sergio had a part to play in the attacks against Kittredge.
He gathered his papers, deleted the search cache from the computer, and hustled from the business center.
The route back to his hotel room took him past the registration desk. “Excuse me,” the desk clerk said, somehow knowing from Kittredge’s appearance that he wasn’t German and would therefore likely be most effectively addressed in English. “Are you Herr Peter Kittredge?”
Jesus. How did he know that? But he soon recalled the answer. Since the rise of what the bureaucrats called Radical Islam, a redundancy in Kittredge’s view, it was impossible to check into a German hotel without a passport or other form of photo identification, and Kittredge was therefore forced to use his own name when he’d rented the room. “I am,” he finally said, wondering if he’d disguised his alarm.
“I have a message for you,” the clerk said, offering a folded slip of paper.
Kittredge’s blood froze when he read the message. Call Polizeikommissar Jürgen Strauss.
Kittredge looked over the message again, still in disbelief. How had Strauss found them? Kittredge had told no one about where they planned to stay. And for all Strauss knew, they were still staying in Nora’s flat. All that business about Strauss recommending they hide in a hotel was
pure fabrication, invented so Kittredge didn’t have to tell Nora about the freshly dead guy who now showed up on Kittredge’s eternal ledger.
The whole thing was beyond disconcerting. Kittredge’s skin crawled with that familiar feeling, the one he’d first felt when he realized how thoroughly the Central Intelligence Agency had invaded his idyllic little existence at the US embassy in Venezuela, four and a half millennia earlier in his life.
But what choice did he have? He dialed the number on the message. Police Inspector Jürgen Strauss answered after a few rings. “Guten Tag, Herr Kittredge,” he said.
“Strauss, what the hell are you playing at? Do you know how extremely creepy this is?”
He heard a small, breathy chuckle, like the Nazi villain in that old Indiana Jones movie. “Relax, Peter. I was only checking up on you. I’ve been a bit concerned since your assault.”
Kittredge felt suddenly, unaccountably guilty. Strauss had been concerned about him, and meanwhile, Kittredge had stabbed a man an ungodly number of times and chopped the body up into little pieces. His conscience where this issue was concerned was going to be a serious problem, he thought.
There was another serious problem, one that needed addressing right away. “Strauss, I haven’t told anyone where I am. How did you find me?”
“Were you hiding?”
“What do you think? Two assaults in two days and…” Oh, no. What have I done?
Strauss instantly caught the blunder. “Two assaults, Herr Kittredge?”
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