He’d already been paid, after all. He held all the cards.
43
Paris. The very name invoked romantic images of iconic landmarks, brilliant works of art, a gorgeously crafted and well-preserved city center, quintessential European architecture, and cuisine elevated to art and obsession. Paris was culture, and culture was Paris. The two were inseparable, and together they were immutably iconic.
It was perhaps poetic justice, then, that Paris should allow to fester on the fringes of its cultural masterpiece an unmitigated cultural disaster, Viktor Kohlhaas thought.
Muslims by the millions, living in Europe’s closest analog to Brazil’s famously foul favelas, had congregated around Europe’s most famous city. They brought with them all of the distasteful religious dogma and distrust that had rightfully earned the scorn of the civilized world. They were viewed as primitives and savages, luddites and losers, and they were relegated to the fringes of French society, where the wishful thinking of the incumbents had failed to calm the Muslim diaspora’s ever-growing churlishness and truculence.
Muslims flocked to France ostensibly on account of the country’s famously liberal employment laws. Once hired, it was nearly impossible to be fired. Every employee in France was like an American government employee. A man could be caught making sweet love to a goat in broad daylight and receive little more than a reprimand, and the word had spread about the good deal: once an employee in France, always an employee in France.
Except that Isaac Newton’s third law — every action spawned an equal and opposite reaction — had socioeconomic parallels, and it didn’t take French employers long to figure out the game. If you couldn’t fire people, it was best not to hire them in the first place. Nepotism and cronyism returned in force, and it became harder and harder to find a job anywhere in Paris. Especially if you had to get on your knees facing east and murmur nonsensical phrases in a foreign language five times a day, and your women had to dress up in burlap sacks with nothing but their eyeballs visible to the sinful world. It was no way to win friends and influence people in a culture known for its culture, which was to say, a city steeped in institutionalized snobbery.
The racial equality laws in France, which prohibited anyone from collecting racial or ethnic census data, had the unintended consequence of formally and officially blinding the government to what had become a serious festering wound, a cultural lesion that was steadily encircling the pride of France, a serious and possibly fatal blight on the beloved Parisian jewel. Unofficial data, which French officials were officially not allowed to countenance, placed the Muslim population at ten percent of France’s whole. Most had no jobs and no prospects, which left France home to six million angry misfits with nothing better to do than self-radicalize.
Muslims burned forty thousand cars every year in Paris. Forty freaking thousand cars. Viktor Kohlhaas had been utterly amazed when he heard that figure. Police had stopped publicizing the numbers half a decade ago when it became apparent that publishing any such figures served only to highlight the utter absence of the rule of law. Nobody liked to display their own impotence and ineptitude, so it became a poorly kept secret that there was a new French Revolution brewing. But this one didn’t have its roots in the disenfranchised and disenchanted peasantry, slaving away to enrich the fat and stupid nobility of the day. This particular revolution had its roots in the earth’s anus, the intellectual vacuum devoid of all things sensible and rational, the bastion of barbarism and backwardness: The Middle Freaking East.
It was something that had given Kohlhaas pause before he’d accepted the position at Synergique. It was only a matter of time before rival Muslim gangs figured out that they would create far more havoc if they stopped fighting amongst themselves and started doing real damage to the educated and civilized Frenchmen who were doing their level best to ignore the growing cancer in French society. And a guy like Viktor Kohlhaas, with his fancy flat and his chauffeured lifestyle, would certainly be a juicy target for a random act of violence.
But in the end, Paris’ charms and the paycheck won him over. Besides, it wasn’t like he spent any time anywhere but the office. Sometimes he even slept on the couch ten feet from his desk, a very un-executive thing to do, but characteristic of the drive and dedication that had made him an in-demand CEO, and it certainly kept the roiling Muslim problem at a comfortable psychological and physical distance from his life.
And the time had come when the Muslim issue had actually solved a significant problem he faced in the execution of his plan. He needed a disaffected ideologue to perform an act of terror against a high profile target in the West. He needed someone so steeped in a twisted, hate-filled culture that all vestiges of human compassion had been erased.
He needed, in short, an angry young Muslim man.
He had his pick. There were only about two million of them in Paris.
Certainly, there had been some screening involved. Kohlhaas couldn’t have chosen just any wannabe terrorist, because most of those young fellows were chiefly interested in the glory of martyrdom. They longed to put on a suicide vest, splatter themselves and a hundred disinterested bystanders all over the pavement, and graduate from this horror of an existence to the glorious afterlife, where they would get to deflower a planet full of virgins, or whatever the bearded old men claimed to be the heavenly reward for mass murder.
Perhaps Kohlhaas was confusing one ridiculous religious myth with another, but he was confident in the generalities if not the specifics. He couldn’t offer anyone the chance to blow themselves up in a crowded American cafe. But he could offer them the chance to make a meaningful statement, from which they would earn great honor as a courageous jihadist, and perhaps later graduate to blowing themselves up in a crowded place, some bullshit about Allah’s mercy on their lips as their face disintegrated. He didn’t understand the utter stupidity of it, nor did he understand how nearly a billion humans could be stupid enough to subscribe to the insanity, but it was clear that he could use it for his purposes.
There was some finesse involved, and a Danish-born infidel with riches beyond most Muslim kids’ wildest imagination wasn’t the right guy to do the finessing. But, again, he knew a guy who knew a guy, and soon a young man named Khalil Ahmed al Wahdi arrived to fill a very important role for Viktor Kohlhaas and Pharma Synergique.
Kohlhaas glanced at the ornate clock on his desk, the gift from his gay disappointment of a son whose horrible murder was on his own head, and registered the time as nine o’clock on Wednesday morning. Young Mister Al Wahdi would soon be boarding a carefully arranged charter flight from Paris to Washington, DC. Al Wahdi would, in his own mind, be performing his moral duty as a Muslim warrior. He would bring death and suffering to people who subscribed to the wrong mythology, the false mythology.
Or, more accurately, he would be bringing suffering and death to the children of such people, for that would make the greatest statement, cause the loudest gnashing of teeth, injure most deeply the hearts of the people he had learned through a carefully crafted and artfully delivered narrative to despise unconditionally.
But Khalil Ahmed al Wahdi had no inkling that he was part of something else entirely, something far less religious if not any more ignoble, something that didn’t aim to kill the infidel children at all. Had he known those things, Kohlhaas suspected, there would be no amount of cash that would have enticed the young man to participate.
And it had come down to cash, of course, once al Wahdi had figured out that a planet full of virgins to deflower in an eternal holy orgy was not in the cards as a reward for this particular act of Muslim piety, and that his family would not be forever taken care of as the family of a martyr, a true hero of Islam, one who had given his life to take a gaggle of indifferent Westerners with him to the afterlife. If al Wahdi wanted his family taken care of, the young man had figured out, he was going to have to do it himself, which meant a sizable sum of money up front.
It was no problem for Kohlhaas. It wasn�
��t like the kid was ever going to be able to spend the money anyway. In fact, Kohlhaas would never actually have to pay the lion’s share of the agreed upon sum. It was part of the beauty of the arrangement.
Five pounds of aerosolized death. That’s what accompanied the foolish young zealot to the land of the Great Satan. And a single pill, placed in the man’s pocket, to be taken after he administered the disease in the appropriate spots. The instructions to the young man had been explicit, on Kohlhaas’ orders: the pill was to be taken immediately upon his return to the hotel, after dispensing the bacteria-laden mist at the specified locations. The pill would cause sleep as it did its work, and it was imperative that al Wahdi be someplace where he could rest.
And if he did not take the pill, then there would be no further jihad in al Wahdi’s future. The disease would kill him. That was made abundantly clear to the young man.
Barnes had made a strong case to accompany the young Muslim man to DC, but in the end, Kohlhaas had decided to keep Synergique’s head of security in Paris. There was still the security breach to run to ground, and the production center had to be guarded at all costs. He had made the decision to beef up security, as well, hoping to have sufficient manpower to quell any last-minute attempts by the opposition to invade Synergique by force.
Just a few days to go, thought Kohlhaas. He drew a long, deep breath, and blew it out slowly. He gathered a stack of data on the deposition rate achieved by the new equipment he’d just finished installing in a hole in the earth at the bottom of an abandoned quarry. It looked like the new facility was ready to enter full production, provided there were no glitches during the transition.
He believed there wouldn’t be, even if the security problem wasn’t fully contained. Only Albert LeBeque, a security man, and LeBeque’s assistant were permitted in the new facility until further notice. It would be enough manpower to shepherd the automated production process to full capacity, and they would soon be churning out a thousand doses an hour.
Despite the added security measures and the drug’s encouraging test results, Viktor Kohlhaas still had a stone in the center of his gut. It was formed of worry, guilt, sorrow, loss, and naked ambition.
And it was bound together by hope, or the thing that happens to hope when it becomes an all-encompassing obsession, when everything in the future hinges on a random universe choosing one particular outcome from among its infinite possibilities.
And the goddamn feds. Gunther Fleischer’s suspicion that an American clandestine service was somehow involved in Mathias’ demise was news that Kohlhaas lacked the capacity to fully regard. If true, it was simply too big, too important, and too dangerous to deal with. It was an unsolvable problem. Kohlhaas had no recourse but to hope with a zealot’s fervor that Fleischer’s information was incorrect.
He shook his head. Just a little longer. He hoped he could keep it all together.
44
Gunther Fleischer had been in similar positions countless times, and he was used to feeling flummoxed, but that acquaintance with dead ends made it no less frustrating in the moment. He had learned to let the anger and frustration pass, and then to approach the situation with the intention of forming a more complete view from a wider perspective. It always achieved better results, and it allowed him to surpass obstacles that stymied men with less mental discipline.
Finding a solution to the logjam required him to take several steps backward in his mind, to ask more fundamental questions, to seek answers to less specific questions.
Why had Mathias Kohlhaas been killed? That was the key to finding who had done the killing. That answer invariably coincided with the solution to another riddle: who stood to gain from the murder?
Fleischer had already been around this mental tree several times. Clearly, Viktor Kohlhaas had something his competitors wanted. And Viktor Kohlhaas had numerous and powerful competitors. So a number of people stood to gain in the event that Viktor Kohlhaas capitulated, an answer that proved far too general to be of particular use.
Fleischer decided to narrow the question a bit, and wondered who stood to gain most immediately from Mathias’ murder. Clearly, pharmaceutical people were not trained in the art of slicing throats and carving messages in bodies while leaving virtually no evidence behind, which meant that someone else was employed for that task, someone for whom it was far more than an occasional hobby. That person, or those people, obviously reaped a reward of some sort in the most proximate way.
In this way, the cloud of possible malefactors hovering over Viktor Kohlhaas’ life coalesced into a manageable focus point: the hired killer.
Hired killers killed, of course, but they were often forced to commit other crimes in the process. Those crimes were occasionally discoverable. And in the absence of anything better to go on, Gunther Fleischer set about learning what other crimes might have occurred in the city over the past few days.
A web search produced a few hits. Some auto theft — always a good bet, because stealing a car usually left far less of a trail than renting one, but two youths had confessed to that crime. There was a pair of assaults, as well, with what looked like a similar MO: thuggery occurring in dark hotel hallways, despite the obvious danger of creating witnesses. It seemed a little too amateur, and there was nothing remotely amateur about the guy who had slit Mathias’ throat and carved the message into his chest.
There was also another murder. This caught Fleischer’s attention. Wet men weren’t often keen to perform multiple jobs in the same city in roughly the same timeframe, but sometimes that’s what the work required. He read the newspaper article with growing interest.
Newspaper articles were always wrong, he reminded himself. There had been many times over the years when his own work had generated newspaper interest, and the common denominator was always that the reporter had managed to mangle the story somehow. But there were still useful clues to be gathered, and Fleischer noted a few interesting things about this second murder.
First, it had occurred the day after Mathias Kohlhaas was murdered. Second, the victim had been a young man. Third, the young man had been asleep at the time of his murder. Fourth, there were no signs of forced entry. Fifth, police had few clues and fewer suspects.
Fleischer had learned never to get too excited about coincidental events — in the truest sense of the term, defined as two or more events occurring at roughly the same time. Such events weren’t necessarily related to each other, conventional wisdom notwithstanding. But there were enough parallels between these two murders to warrant further digging, Fleischer decided.
The article provided the general location of the second murder — a trendy area full of the young and upwardly mobile — but didn’t provide a specific address, which was what Fleischer was really interested in obtaining.
In addition to his zen savvy and old-man strength, Fleischer had accumulated four decades worth of contacts in his rolodex, and he phoned a friend at the Cologne police department. Police were the people who most closely resembled criminals, in Fleischer’s experience, and they lived their lives snuggled right up against the line between good and evil, so they were exceptionally useful contacts to cultivate and nurture. “Guten Tag,” Fleischer said when his friend answered his desk phone.
A beat passed during which Fleischer’s friend associated the voice with a name. “Gunther, mein Freund,” he said. “Long time, no?”
“Too long.” They caught up briefly — families, hobbies, women, and dogshit politics hamstringing the police force were the usual topics, and Fleischer was pleased to discover that these pet themes worked just as well during this particular phone call as they always did.
Rapport comfortably reestablished, Fleischer moved toward the point of his call. “I’m looking into a situation for a friend,” he started, and he imagined he could see the knowing roll of the eyes that was undoubtedly occurring on the other end of the connection, but the police inspector didn’t interrupt. “This friend is upset about a financial situati
on between him and another acquaintance, and was hoping I could find out a few more details.”
The cop didn’t say anything, which Fleischer had come to understand as a good sign. The cop hadn’t yet said no. “Neustadt-Sud,” Fleischer said. “That’s where this guy lives, and I noticed that there was a problem there over the weekend.”
“You’re wondering about a connection,” the cop said. “Listen, to be honest with you, if your… friend knows anything, we’d be interested in a conversation.”
Fleischer smiled. There was the pro quo for his quid. “As you know, it’s important to me that I’m helpful whenever possible,” he said. “I may know something, but what I don’t know is the address involved. That would help me understand who might be involved, which is what I think you’re interested in knowing, too.”
“Ach,” the cop said. “I don’t think that will help you. The dead guy didn’t live at the place where he died.”
Fleischer thought about that a moment, wondering how he might weave it into his story, and also wondering how it might possibly fit into the Mathias Kohlhaas situation. “That’s interesting,” he said, stalling for time while his mind worked.
“Yeah, some gay guy staying over at some other gay guy’s apartment.”
Coincidence Number Six. Mathias was gay, much to his father’s chagrin.
“This is very interesting to me,” Fleischer said. “I am pretty sure that the man who owes my friend a great deal of money is also a homosexual. So maybe he is not the dead guy, but maybe it’s his apartment?”
The cop was silent a moment. “I don’t know what to tell you, Gunther,” he said. “We don’t have a lot to work with. I mean, a lot of people live in the Neustadt Wohnplatz. Maybe if you told me a name.”
Neustadt Wohnplatz. Thank you very much! Fleischer filed it away for later. He didn’t have a name to give the cop, but that wasn’t a problem. “I wish I could, but you know how these things go. If it ever came out that I passed a name around to the police, you’d be digging me out of the river.”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 104