The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  He didn’t have much to go on. Just a hotel name and a general physical description that the other agent had passed along before he’d passed away. Quinn didn’t ask how the agent preceding him on the case had met his end, because it didn’t matter. People screwed up all the time, in myriad creative ways. The key was not to screw up.

  His mark was about five-ten, forty-something, thin, kind of light in his loafers, reputed to be gay or bisexual, and with the ashen pallor of a dedicated drunk. It sounded like a guy he knew once, Quinn thought. In Venezuela. If his mark was as big a pussy as that guy was, it would be an easy afternoon’s work.

  Quinn left his hotel, gathered the fake passport he’d given the desk clerk, and took the subway to the hotel the fat case officer had specified. His boss’ urgency notwithstanding, Quinn took his time surveying the hotel. He made note of all the exits, made sure to ferret out where the employees took their smoke breaks, cased stairwells and elevator shafts, and surveyed the large trash area behind the building. It always paid to recon the op. Haste made wasted in Quinn’s line of work.

  He decided that he was ready. He adjusted his sunglasses, really an unnecessary accoutrement in Germany’s famous winter gloom but absolutely necessary for a man with the eyes of a wild animal who wished to remain anonymous. He pulled the wide-brimmed German hat down low, as well. Then he stroked his beard, which was long and disturbingly gray. It had become a nervous tic with him, something he fancied himself above, but obviously wasn’t. It annoyed him, because he’d been in the business far too long to have nervous tics. He shook his head to clear the annoyance from his mind and focus his senses on the job at hand.

  Quinn strode confidently into the hotel entrance, pausing to hold the door for a dumpy man in oversized sunglasses and a German alpine hat heading the opposite direction.

  36

  It didn’t take Nostradamus-like insight for Kittredge to figure out that he was now officially a fugitive. There might have been a time when Strauss and the Polizei could have protected him from whoever was chasing him, but that time ended at about the fourth stab of the knife into the goon’s gut in Nora’s kitchen the previous morning. Kittredge had flipped out, and in the process had gone to a place from which there was no retreat.

  And it was now clear to him that the Agency was back in his life in a meaningful way. They undoubtedly had access to the same video surveillance feeds that Strauss and the German police used. And it was obviously possible that they were using any of a number of other methods to track him down, maybe even down to the questions he had asked Google to answer for him. It was certainly within the realm of the possible, and it would explain the dead Consulate employee’s inordinate interest in the computer screen at Kittredge’s hotel over the weekend, and again at Nora’s apartment. He recalled that when he had come out of the bathroom at Nora’s, the guy had been standing in front of the computer, reading the screen.

  That led him to the Sherlockian deduction that perhaps the Agency had an interest in Sergio. Or, possibly, that the CIA had an interest in Kittredge’s interest in Sergio. Which might lead one to believe that the Agency had a hand in the young man’s untimely death.

  Sergio’s murder was certainly a clean enough job, Kittredge thought. If Strauss was to be believed, there wasn’t much in the way of evidence left at the scene, at least not any evidence that pointed to anyone other than Kittredge himself. That was the kind of thing the Agency specialized in, it seemed to Kittredge. Untimely deaths seemed to happen with alarming frequency at the periphery of the Agency’s activities, at least in Kittredge’s limited experience.

  So, for the moment, Kittredge would stop searching for Copenhagen-born Sergios. He might try to find a discreet way to call the remaining numbers on his Sergio list at some point, because it still seemed important that the German police had brought up Copenhagen in his interrogation and also in Nora’s, and Kittredge still had no idea how Copenhagen fit into the picture. But he resolved to stay the hell off of the internet. Perhaps it was irrational paranoia, but it wasn’t without cause.

  The other dilemma was that of his appearance. If he were to be caught on camera, he would undoubtedly be caught in person shortly thereafter. If Facebook could tag John Q. Public’s face in a thousand random users’ photographs, every government agency in the civilized world would surely be able to do the same thing. He had to change his appearance, or at least hide it from the cameras.

  He went to the hotel gift shop. He used the ATM to withdraw as much cash as the machine permitted. He bought an oversized sweatshirt and an even larger jacket. He picked out a pair of sunglasses as well, the excessively large kind that old people wore. He also selected a clichéd German hat, one of those Tyrolean deals with as large a brim as he could find. It came with a feather tucked inside the ribbon running around its circumference. Kittredge threw the feather away. There were limits to the steps he was willing to take in the name of disguise, and he drew the line at feathers.

  Kittredge retreated to his room, put on both of his shirts, and added the frumpy sweatshirt and jacket on top. It gave the appearance of adding twenty pounds to his frame. Every little bit helped, he reasoned.

  He donned the hat and ridiculous sunglasses. Together, they did a decent job of hiding recognizable features on his face. It was a start, but it probably wouldn’t be enough for the long term. He decided to let his beard grow to further obscure his features, and he wondered if there was a place in town where he could find temporary facial prosthetics. It seemed like a bit of an extreme step, but he reflected that he had managed to place himself in a set of somewhat extreme circumstances.

  Kittredge surveyed the room. Nora’s stuff was everywhere. So was his DNA, undoubtedly, but it wasn’t like he was fooling anyone. The Polizei knew that he was in this hotel, and they still had the keys to his downtown apartment, so there was no shortage of DNA to collect for comparison. Sanitizing the hotel room would just look suspicious, he thought.

  As if disappearing wasn’t suspicious enough, he mused with a chortle and a shake of his head. His buzz was wearing off, and crushing fatigue and fear were replacing the pleasant Zen calm induced by the magical two-carbon molecule that ruled his life. He needed to get a move on, to find someplace to snuggle up with a bottle and sleep for a week while everything blew over.

  He wanted desperately to go to Nora, to tell her everything, to seek refuge in her company. They had parted on tenuous terms earlier that morning. Really, tenuous was shining the turd a little bit, because Nora had made no bones about her personal policy against sleeping with liars. It was hard to protest her diagnosis when the blazing purple bruise around his neck poignantly punctuated her point. He wanted to make things right, because he hated lingering conflict in his life, and hated it when people he cared about were upset with him. But he knew that as soon as he failed to show up at the cop shop to chat with Jürgen Strauss, Nora would be the first person they talked to. If he so much as called her phone, he figured, they’d be on him like flies on stink.

  Kittredge picked up Nora’s shirt from the day before and held it to his face. It smelled like her, that sexy feminine-but-vaguely-masculine scent that drove him wild, but drinking her into his nostrils served only to heighten the sense of loss that was growing in his chest as he thought about her.

  But the decision was simple, if not easy. There was just no way he could get in touch with her without putting himself in jeopardy.

  He left the hotel room. He wore everything he owned. He carried a little cash in his pocket, a bunch of credit and debit cards in his wallet, and four tons of baggage in his head.

  Kittredge affected a hunched, limping walk. He thought it might attract attention, but in the right kind of way. The man the goons and the cops were looking for was a tall, reasonably fit man in his early forties. The rumpled character who lumbered toward the hotel’s exit looked twenty pounds heavier and twenty years older.

  A giant of a man held the door open for him as he exited. He muttered his
thanks in German, vaguely noting something familiar about the stranger, but not daring to take a second look. He was probably just being paranoid again, but it was better not to draw attention to himself, from anyone. Even strangers.

  37

  Viktor Kohlhaas rubbed his eyes. They burned. He was sure they were bloodshot. He’d been working almost nonstop since his return from New York the previous Friday, the day someone dropped photos of Mathias’ mangled body onto his desk. He’d worked himself beyond exhaustion both because there was that much work to be done, and because it was only by working that he kept ahead of the grief, fear, and despair at his heels.

  Mariete had called. Her fiery rage had turned to ice-cold indifference. She’d spoken her mind and her heart before leaving for Cologne, and there was nothing left to say between them, except for handling the details of Mathias’ burial. She wanted him buried at home, in Copenhagen. Viktor agreed. It felt right, as right as anything could possibly feel in the wake of such a brutal event.

  He hadn’t shown her the photos, and he never would. No good would come of it. Mariete already suspected Mathias’ death was related to Viktor’s schemes, as she called them, and there was no benefit to confirming her suspicions. And it was entirely possible that, armed with that kind of knowledge, she would sue his face off. It was probably coming anyway, but he wanted to keep Mathias’ death, and the very personal message to Viktor Kohlhaas carved into their son’s chest, out of the inevitable divorce proceedings.

  Mariete was back at home, which meant that Kohlhaas would sleep on the couch in his office, or, if he stayed at work late enough to ensure she was asleep, he might risk spending the night at home in one of the guest rooms. But he sure as hell didn’t want to endure whatever scene she might have in store for him. He was exhausted, and he doubted he could handle a confrontation with his wife without doing further, irreparable damage.

  He turned his mind to more practical matters. Efficacy was in the bag. The drug worked. At least, the trial version, and he had every confidence that Albert LeBeque could successfully produce a production version with a sufficiently long shelf life to survive distribution and dissemination.

  The problem was now one of demand. The talking heads had made a momentary sensation out of a handful of hard cases, and the flash-furor might have been enough to shake loose a few more research dollars from the various national and multinational political entities that paid lip service to such things, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to produce enough wind to billow Synergique’s sails.

  A crisis wasn’t optional. It was a necessary ingredient, and had always been. It was the most secret element of Synergique’s operation, so secret that even Kohlhaas’ chief of security had been kept in the dark.

  The demand question had come up, of course. A lot. But each time, Kohlhaas had simply cited the growing number of recalcitrant bacteriological infections reported chiefly in Europe, and, lately, by the head-in-the-sand American health establishment. There’s bound to be an outbreak, he reasoned. It would be tragic, but also inevitable. Life always found a way. It would just take one mistake, one tiny little human error, and the drug-resistant bugs would escape their sterilized prison inside the infectious disease wards in which they had evolved.

  But Synergique wasn’t infinitely capitalized, and while it was a private company, it still had private shareholders to answer to. Those men hadn’t earned the money that they had invested in Synergique by patient daydreaming of what might be around the corner, and they sure as hell didn’t expect Kohlhaas to wait on happenstance to provide their return. They’d never suggest, publicly or privately, the kind of thing that Kohlhaas had planned, but neither would they frown upon it if they learned about it in retrospect. Of that he was certain. These men were vultures and opportunists, and their boardroom smiles and easy banter disguised their well-developed shark instincts.

  But it didn’t matter. Nobody was going to find out, and nobody was going to figure it out. He had covered all the angles. The op would produce just a couple of loose ends, and he had a plan for them as well. Co-conspirators were witnesses for the state, and Kohlhaas had the kind of friends that could either reduce their stomach for testimony, or remove their capacity for it entirely. At least, those were the things that he said to himself when he felt squeamish.

  He dialed from a fresh, laundered burner. Governments were wise to the anonymity afforded by pay-as-you-go phones, and it was no longer possible to buy a phone without providing a picture ID, but Kohlhaas knew a guy who knew a guy, and a box full of shiny new burners fell off of a delivery truck somewhere. No paperwork, no hassle, and no trace.

  The Iraqi answered. “On schedule,” was all he said.

  Kohlhaas’ reply was equally terse. “Continue to completion.”

  When he disconnected, Kohlhaas noticed that his hands were shaking. He had taken all precautions against discovery, but that didn’t stop him from worrying.

  He was glad European courts didn’t have the death penalty. But every country in Europe had an extradition treaty with the US, and Kohlhaas shuddered to think of how the American zealots might treat him.

  Especially if they branded him a bioterrorist.

  38

  Peter Kittredge found a hostel and shuffled inside, hoping that his fabricated story held water with the desk clerk. He didn’t want to use his passport to secure lodging, and he didn’t want to provide any other form of photo identification, either. So he made up a lie about how his backpack had gone missing with his credit cards, identification, and passport still inside. He kept cash in his front pocket, he said, so he could still pay for the room.

  He could tell this kind of thing happened a lot, because the clerk didn’t bat an eye. “What are we going to do, make you sleep on the street?” she asked. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but she had a trim, athletic body, and Kittredge had involuntary sexual ideations as his eyes wandered. She noticed his look but ignored it and handed him the key to a room. “It’s empty tonight, so you have it all to yourself,” she said.

  He thanked her and wandered past the common area toward the long hallway with guest rooms on either side.

  A newspaper headline caught his eye: Buckel Sohn Brutal Ermordert. It translated roughly to ‘Mogul’s Son Brutally Murdered.’ Kittredge picked up the paper and took it to his room, where he struggled to translate it to English. His German was decent but not great, and he had trouble with some of the nuance, but he was able to piece together the gist of the article.

  The sub header said something along the lines of ‘Danish Man Was Parents’ Pride and Joy.’

  Danish man.

  Kittredge read on. Police apparently had few leads to go on. The victim, Mathias Kohlhaas, had been twenty-three, scion of a successful serial CEO. The young man was murdered in his apartment sometime on Wednesday night or Thursday morning. The victim was a native of Copenhagen, living in Cologne and commuting occasionally to Paris to visit his parents. His father was Viktor Kohlhaas, a renowned business luminary.

  Kittredge’s mind turned. Jürgen Strauss had asked him whether he’d ever been to Copenhagen, then refused to answer any questions about why that fact might have been important. Could this crime have been the connection Strauss was seeking? Was there a connection at all? If there had been another murder in Cologne, Strauss would certainly have known about it. Perhaps he was fishing when he asked Kittredge about Copenhagen, or perhaps it was something else.

  The victim was the son of a high-profile businessman. Kittredge wondered whether the murder was some sort of an extortion racket gone bad, or some sort of hostage and ransom scheme that had turned sour. It would be a surprise either way. Those things happened all the time in shithole countries in Africa and the Middle East, but they rarely happened in Europe.

  Kittredge read further. He struggled with the translation, but the article seemed to include a description of the crime: no signs of forced entry, and the victim was found in his bed, dead of knife wounds.

  Jesus
. No signs of forced entry.

  Found dead in his bed.

  Just like Sergio.

  The pieces were starting to tumble into place in Kittredge’s mind. He thought of the dead US Consulate employee who was really a CIA agent, or someone contracting with the Agency; he thought of the clean and tightly controlled scenes, with little evidence left behind. No witnesses. It all sounded very… professional. Kittredge couldn’t help but think of the way things went in Venezuela, the way the two Agency men worked so swiftly and decisively, the way dead bodies seemed to stack up like cordwood in their wakes. The recollection removed any lingering doubt in his mind about who was behind Sergio’s murder, and who was behind the attempts on his own life.

  It sent a chill through his body. He was up against the pros.

  Again.

  He needed a drink.

  39

  Evelyn Paulson felt a warmth in her heart that had been missing from her life for years. It was a sad truth that it often took a near-tragedy to awaken a person to the richness of the life they lived every day, and this was the case with Evelyn. She had become wrapped up in the story of her own life, the sadness and heartbreak of John’s untimely death of cancer, the bitter estrangement from her own family, the dead-end career that had turned into just a job, the bills that seemed to pile up and multiply like rabbits.