They could file their patents immediately, hoping for protection from the courts, but the patent adjudicators would certainly look at the timing of it all, the sudden patent submission just moments after the Prizer announcement, with a very wary eye.
And what could he do, accuse Prizer of stealing his smuggled shipment of illegal drugs, which he had pre-positioned to respond to an epidemic he had started?
There was no compelling play to be made. Prizer had stolen the shipment. They had won. Synergique was finished.
Kohlhaas would go through the motions, because it was his duty, and because what remained of his dignity and pride would demand it, but Kohlhaas knew that it was a fait accompli.
Kohlhaas was too tired, too completely crushed, to muster even a whimper. He wallowed. He filled a tumbler with scotch. He drank it down and poured another.
Slowly the feeling of abject defeat gave way, and cold anger took its place. His mind moved to retribution. There was something that could be done. And he had the will, the stones, and the anger to do it. He picked up his burner phone, dialed a memorized number, and was relieved when Gunther Fleischer picked up on the second ring. It sounded like Fleischer was in a train station. “I have a new task,” Kohlhaas said through clenched teeth. “One you will enjoy.”
58
Gunther Fleischer was indeed inside a train station, the Cologne Hauptbahnhof. And Fleischer’s immediate course of action remained unchanged, Viktor Kohlhaas’ new wishes notwithstanding. There was no way to strike at the beast’s head when its claws were digging into your throat. So Fleischer determined that it was best to take care of the claws first.
Fleischer sported a giant mustache, baggy green pants, a discordant button-down shirt, and a hunter’s hat, the very picture of an old German gentleman awaiting his train. Glasses with half-round lenses perched precariously at the edge of his nose, and he tilted his head backwards slightly to read a newspaper through them.
But he occasionally peered over his glasses. In his view was Nora Jane Martin. She was undeniably pretty. She possessed what so many similar women in Fleischer’s experience possessed, a certain way she carried herself, a certain coy knowingness, a toughness, that elevated her from mere ingénue to something else entirely. A piranha with a pussy, perhaps.
Nora Jane Martin was classic bait. She was a walking honey trap. How she had ensnared a gay man was beyond him, though Fleischer was aware of a growing number of bisexual men, perhaps in response to the avant-garde aura that society had bestowed upon bisexual women of late. Perhaps Kittredge was one of the new breed.
Fleischer shrugged. It didn’t matter how Kittredge had been ensnared. It only mattered that he was ensnared. Balls deep in piranha waters, he thought with a chuckle, amused at his own humor.
Curiously, Nora Jane Martin had bought two train tickets. Fleischer had watched her make both purchases. The first transaction, paid in cash, had involved the attendant at the ticket window. Munich was the destination. Then the girl had bought a second ticket at an electronic kiosk, again using cash. Paris was the destination printed on the second ticket.
Consequently, Fleischer was also in possession of a ticket to Munich and a ticket to Paris. He hoped he had guessed correctly at the departure times — he had chosen the next available train to both of those cities. Munich left at 8:24 in the evening, and Paris left at 8:56.
He spotted the other agent almost immediately. The man was young in his job, which explained why he was relegated to a backup role, keeping an eye on the main player. But the young man wasn’t terribly talented, because, like a shitty poker player, he had an entire library of giveaways in his demeanor. Fleischer almost wouldn’t know where to start, were he in the position of having to straighten out the young man’s trade craft.
Shitty spy work notwithstanding, Fleischer made a mental note not to underestimate the young male agent. The agent’s trade craft might have been abhorrent, but Fleischer reminded himself that the man might be a martial arts master, or the best marksman in his class at The Farm, or a hardened military veteran who’d run over baby Iraqis with his tank, or all of the above. Fleischer was grateful that the man was easy to follow, but vowed to remain vigilant in order not to put himself at the young agent’s mercy.
For her part, the fetching Ms. Martin did an admirable job of studiously ignoring the young agent sent to watch her back. She read a novel, appearing alternately rapt and then bored, as if she really were interested in the book but had to keep reminding herself to remain aware of her surroundings. Her trade craft also left much to be desired, Fleischer decided, which made what was between her legs her strongest attribute. He was certain she lied well, also, which was a mandatory Agency prerequisite for the role she played. But Fleischer had no intention of engaging her in conversation.
The announcer called for Munich passengers to prepare to board. Let the games begin, Fleischer thought with amusement. Best to watch the opening round.
Ms. Martin rose and gathered her bags. She walked purposefully across the catwalk, down the escalator, and toward the proper platform to board the Munich train. She milled about amongst the crowd of commuters, her bag at her feet, her face buried again in her book. But Fleischer, stooped over his cane at the edge of the gathering, could see her eyes moving about the crowd.
The young male agent waited on the far side of the platform. It meant that he was armed. If the lovely and talented Ms. Martin got into trouble, her escort was too far away to be of any help unless he had a gun. That had additional implications, along the lines of help from inside the train station itself, because security had become nearly unbearable in the wake of the Spanish train bombings. Fleischer felt a flash of excitement at the realization. This particular game was being played by all the right kinds of players. It promised to be interesting.
The Munich train arrived, disgorged its passengers onto the platform on the opposite side of the tracks, and finally opened its doors to the waiting crowd.
It was precisely these kinds of situations that made operating as a single-man tail difficult under the best of circumstances, and irresponsibly dangerous under the worst. If Nora Martin were indeed headed to Munich, Fleischer would simply board the train after her, and that would be that. But if the girl were to first board and then disembark from the Munich train, a common and clichéd method to either discover or shake a tail, there was no way that Fleischer would be able to follow her through the maneuver without giving himself away. There was simply no way that Fleischer could maintain his cover while hopping on and off the train, no matter how much he tried distracting onlookers with tales of a lost wallet or lost key.
So he had to take a risk, but he felt confident that he was playing the correct side of the odds. The girl had only bought two tickets. If she were Munich-bound, buying two tickets would only be useful if her tail were watching her at the ticket counter and nowhere else. She wouldn’t have the opportunity to hop on the train, and then hop off again just before it departed. The Paris ticket would have served only one purpose: deception at the ticket counter.
If, on the other hand, Ms. Martin had Paris on her agenda, the Munich ticket would serve two purposes. First, it would offer deception for anyone watching her at the ticket counter. Second, it would give her the chance to play the train game on the platform.
Having made his decision, Fleischer began patting his pockets with an angst-ridden expression on his face. “Mein Geld,” he muttered. “Ich mein verdamtes Geld verloren habe.” I’ve lost my money. He puttered back toward the escalator, ostensibly toward the ticket counter, where he might have left his billfold.
Fleischer reached the top of the escalator as the Munich train finished boarding. Nora Martin was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Shitty Male Agent.
Fleischer cursed himself. Evidently, he’d made the wrong call. The Munich train made a number of stops along the way, and taking a subsequent train down to the Bavarian city would do him no good whatsoever.
The train pu
lled away. She was gone.
And then she wasn’t.
She had exited the train on the opposite side of the platform. So had her backup. Fleischer smiled in spite of himself, ducking into the men’s room to throw away his glasses, hat, and cane, and stopping in a stall to quickly turn his reversible clothing the other side out. He ditched the hunched posture and fake limp, and emerged from the water closet a handsome, confident, fit older man on his way to Paris, maybe to visit a long lost love, or possibly to take in a little wine and escargot along the Seine.
The 8:56 departure went off without a hitch, and Fleischer joined Nora and her not-so-clandestine cohort as they sped in the gloomy darkness toward France.
59
Beyond a certain point in the city, Gunther Fleischer knew where Nora Martin was headed. There had been plenty of doubt in the old assassin’s mind as the train hustled southwest from Cologne to Paris, and then when the blue Peugeot sedan had absorbed Nora and headed further south from the train station, south beyond the southern edge of what the blue-bloods called the habitable zone, even further south than the immigrant slums. Then, there was no doubt, and Fleischer didn’t have to go through the trouble of tailing Nora. He just had to meet her at her destination.
Fleischer was certain of the place where the meeting would take place. In a time of crisis, all of the key employees would still be at work, late hour notwithstanding. And it would undoubtedly be one of the key employees who was involved, maybe even behind the whole thing.
There was a chance that Fleischer was wrong, a possibility that Nora Jane Martin was not headed to Pharma Synergique’s headquarters in the drab warehouse on the outskirts of Paris, a place no self-respecting Parisian considered to be part of Paris at all.
But that chance was slim, Fleischer judged. The connections were just too strong between Mathias’ death, the death of the access agent, and the discovery of the CIA’s involvement. Fleischer couldn’t imagine how Kittredge, inept sot that he was, had managed to kill a hired assassin, but that was the break in the whole thing, the missing piece that made the rest of it make sense in Fleischer’s mind.
So he accelerated ahead of the dark blue sedan containing Ms. Nora Martin, or whatever her real name might have been, and continued into the drizzle, driving slightly faster than prudent to reach Synergique’s headquarters building with sufficient time to find an appropriate vantage from which to observe the meeting.
There was still lingering doubt in Fleischer’s mind, and he knew there was a nonzero and therefore non-ignorable probability that he had jumped to the wrong conclusion, but it wouldn’t be enough just to tail the alluring Ms. Martin to her meeting place. Fleischer had to know who she was meeting. And he would never learn that unless he arrived beforehand.
There was a complication, however, and that related to Viktor Kohlhaas’ paranoia. Kohlhaas had installed one of the world’s most sophisticated security systems, and it included state-of-the-art perimeter security. There were undisguised cameras, of course, which were intended more as deterrent than anything else, but there were also hidden cameras, which filmed in visible, infrared, and even ultraviolet spectra. Kohlhaas’ security team could see a fart wafting in front of the building.
Therefore, the security team would see Fleischer, positioned within view of the building’s entrance, poised to follow whomever emerged to meet with Nora Martin. That might spook the party. The meeting might never take place. Something had to be done to keep Fleischer’s position concealed from the cameras.
Fleischer called Kohlhaas with an unusual request. Kohlhaas agreed instantly. “Give me ten minutes,” Kohlhaas said.
“I need it done in five,” Fleischer replied before hanging up.
He exited the highway, driving fast but not fast enough to warrant police attention, and wound his way to Synergique’s block. He parked, grabbed his compact digital camera, walked quietly in the shadows for the remaining tenth of a kilometer, and perched himself behind a dumpster across the street from Synergique’s warehouse.
Fleischer waited.
He wondered whether his hunch was right. He wondered whether he’d made a huge mistake. He wondered whether he’d blown the entire job. He wondered whether Kohlhaas would forgive him, or whether Kohlhaas would refuse to pay him, retribution for his failure.
Fleischer let those thoughts run their course, and dismissed each of them with a hard-won patience. He willed his heart rate to settle, his breathing to slow, his mind to remain clear, focused, aware, and sharp.
But no car arrived. Ten minutes elapsed, and then fifteen. Twenty.
Perhaps I really have screwed this up.
At twenty-five minutes, which was twenty minutes longer than it should have taken the sedan carrying Nora Martin to arrive in front of the warehouse, Fleischer considered that he might have walked into a trap. He began planning a tactical retreat, his mind plotting two escape routes back to the car a block away.
Then the car pulled up. It was the same dark Peugeot sedan that had whisked the young lady away from the train station. Fleischer confirmed it by the registration number, which he had memorized. He readied his camera.
The woman climbed out of the vehicle. As she did, the door to Synergique’s warehouse opened, spilling light from inside out onto the damp, dark pavement. Fleischer snapped half a dozen photos of the person whose outline stood in stark relief, and took half a dozen more as he walked with a heavy gait to meet her in the drizzle.
He photographed the meeting, zooming in on their faces to the limit of the camera’s resolution. He was confident there was sufficient detail to identify the other party, even if he had to phone his friend at the NSA to get it done. But he had a hunch that, like the last person Fleischer had asked Jefferson Ames to identify, this particular person would not be found in the worldwide biometric database kept by the United States of America.
The woman handed something to the man, and Fleischer snapped more photos. It looked like a small package. In exchange, the large man slipped an envelope into her hands.
This was a very risky meeting, Fleischer realized. It was right underneath Kohlhaas’ nose. But the rapid pace of unfolding events surrounding Synergique might have demanded the meeting, despite its inherent risks.
It didn’t matter. Fleischer wouldn’t have to guess at the meeting’s purpose. He would find out for certain.
The large man walked back inside the building.
Fleischer studied the cameras. He hoped Kohlhaas had held up his end of the deal by superimposing a stale image in the front quadrant of the building’s perimeter, masking Fleischer’s presence. If not, Fleischer would have the rest of his life to figure it out.
He retreated back into the shadows of the adjacent building, and sprinted back to his car. He got the engine started just in time to tuck in behind the Peugeot at an unobtrusive distance.
It had been an interesting evening, Fleischer reflected, and would undoubtedly become even more so.
60
Viktor Kohlhaas looked again at the ornate clock on his desk, the gift from Mathias, the olive branch not refused but not fully taken. Nearly midnight, the clock said accusingly, underscoring the degree to which the situation had gotten completely out of control.
It was six in the evening in Washington, DC. Jim Firth had been missing for just shy of eight hours. And Albert LeBeque, too. The shipping company had finally called back. Actually, a lawyer for the shipping company, who informed Kohlhaas that Synergique’s pallet full of pharmaceuticals had been confiscated by two uniformed police officers at Reagan International Airport. The attorneys had investigated the officers’ identifications. The men were real police officers. There wasn’t yet a paper trail at DC Metro in support of the confiscation, and such things were normally within the purview of the US Customs Service, but so far the confiscation looked to be legitimate.
The news wasn’t really news — Kohlhaas had already deduced from Prizer CEO Alexander Toney’s press conference that Prizer had somehow
absconded with Synergique’s shipment of antibiotics. It merely satisfied Kohlhaas’ curiosity regarding the mechanism of the theft. He had wondered whether there might be legal recourse of some sort, but the involvement of two police officers meant that Prizer had covered all the angles, for the moment, anyway.
Which was all that mattered. The game would be long over before any US court heard any mealy-mouthed plea from a foreign pharma company, particularly one claiming industrial espionage and theft of a pallet of drugs — which, it would become painfully obvious, had clearly been smuggled into the country.
There was no chance in hell.
So it was down to retribution, anger, spite, and after-the-fact punishment that wouldn’t make a bit of difference for the outcome.
Kohlhaas’ thoughts returned to the culprit within Synergique. Clearly, someone had sold them out. Sold him out, Kohlhaas reflected, as this particular project had demanded so much of him personally, so much of what remained of his life, that it was nearly impossible to separate the development of the new drug from Kohlhaas himself.
He wondered what Fleischer had learned. There had been a meeting outside the building. Kohlhaas had ordered the security firm to alter the camera coverage in order to disguise Fleischer’s presence, to keep the culprit from aborting the meeting due to Fleischer’s presence across the street. Not much time had passed, but Kohlhaas was impatient to hear the results. Retribution would be swift, merciless, and absolute.
Kohlhaas heard heavy footsteps in the hallway outside his office. His secretary had long since gone home for the night, so there was no one to run interference for him, to announce visitors, but Kohlhaas recognized the footfalls.
Franklin Barnes knocked twice on the open door as he passed through the doorway and into Kohlhaas’ office. “Bad news, I’m afraid,” the heavyset chief of security said, using his hand to flop his gravity-defying comb-over back into place and smash it down against his bald pink dome. “They found Jim Firth. Said it looked like a heart attack.”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 110