by Allan Folsom
“This is Two. He came out of the gate area. Security swept in and we lost him. One?”
“I don’t have him.”
“There’s three of you out there! Somebody had to pick him up! Four, where are you?”
Silence.
“Four, repeat, where are you?”
Silence.
“This is One. Four isn’t answering.”
9:11 A.M.
Anne Tidrow watched Marten enter Hall 2D, then go into the boarding area, looking at the gate numbers as he went. No one had had to tell her he’d been lying about his British Airways flight to London and his connecting flight to Manchester. In the minutes before he’d seen her watching him from the upper balcony, she had seen him. He’d been about to enter a café area in Hall 2B when he’d stopped a uniformed Air France flight crew and asked directions. One of them had pointed in the direction of Hall 2D. Marten had nodded, then thanked them and gone into the café, where he’d purchased coffee and a croissant and soon afterward made a call on a cell phone.
9:15 A.M.
She saw him enter the section at Gate D55 and join the line of passengers boarding flight 1734 for Berlin. Ninety seconds later he handed an Air France gate attendant his boarding pass, then entered the jetway and disappeared from view.
A breath and she lifted her hand to her mouth as if to stifle a cough.
“This is Four. I’m in Hall 2D. I thought I saw him come this way, then he took the escalator down and I lost him.”
“Roger, Four.” The voice of One came back.
Anne Tidrow watched for a moment longer as the last of the passengers slipped into the jetway and the Air France people closed the door behind them. She lingered a few seconds, then walked off. As she did she took a cell phone from her purse, flicked it open, then tapped in a number and waited for it to ring through.
Past lives, fond memories, old friends.
By the time Marten reached Berlin and entered the city—by taxi, private car, public transportation, or even if he walked—she would know where he had gone and where to find him.
22
BERLIN TEGEL AIRPORT. STILL FRIDAY, JUNE 4. 11:15 A.M.
Nicholas Marten exited Air France flight 1734 in a group of passengers. Suitcase in tow, he left the Gate A14 area and passed through the green NOTHING TO DECLARE customs archway into the crowded arrivals area, where people were gathered to meet travelers from incoming flights. Two minutes later he was outside in warm sunshine and walking toward the taxi area. A dozen paces more and he moved to the edge of the curb away from sidewalk traffic. He gave a quick glance around and unzipped the upper pocket on his suitcase and took out the dark blue throwaway cell phone. By now Theo Haas’s private phone number was etched in his memory. He punched in the number and waited. The phone rang four times, and then a recording clicked on. A husky male voice that he took to be Haas’s made a brief announcement in German. The recording ended and there was silence, followed by the usual beep signaling the caller to leave a message. For an instant he thought about identifying himself and mentioning Joe Ryder’s name, then decided against it and clicked off. Who knew what other party might retrieve Haas’s calls—wife, girlfriend, house man, secretary? Maybe he talked about personal business with people he knew well, maybe he didn’t. Besides, there was every chance Joe Ryder hadn’t yet reached him. Or maybe he’d tried and like Marten got only a recording. No, Marten thought, better to wait, call him a little later in the day. Immediately he clicked off, slipped the phone into his coat pocket, then walked off toward the taxi queue.
A gray-haired, matronly woman wearing a lightweight summer coat watched him go. She had been in a group of others waiting at Gate A14 to meet arriving passengers and had followed him when he left. She’d seen him step to the curbside, take a cell phone from his suitcase, and make a call. Now she followed him again. Safely and at a distance. She stopped as he entered the taxi line, then watched as he got into a black Mercedes Metrocab. Number 77331.
11:35 A.M.
MADRID, BARAJAS INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. SAME TIME.
Tired, but happy to be finally home after a flight delay of nearly two hours in Paris because of mechanical problems, Marita Lozano and her medical-student charges—Rosa, Luis, Gilberto, and Ernesto—left Iberia baggage claim, passed through the customs area, and went out into the arrivals hall on their way to the Metro that would take them into the heart of the city.
The area was crowded with friends, relatives, business associates, and others gathered to meet arriving passengers. Among them were perhaps a dozen limousine drivers, most of them in dark suits and white shirts, holding cardboard signs that were hand-lettered with the names of the clients they’d been hired to pick up.
“Marita!” Rosa was the first to notice. “A sign with your name.”
Puzzled, Marita looked to the bank of limousine drivers. A handsome young man was holding a sign that read DR. LOZANO.
“Some other and richer Dr. Lozano.” Marita said with a laugh and kept walking.
As they passed, the man suddenly approached. “Marita Lozano?”
“Yes.”
“I have a limousine to take you into the city.”
“Me?”
“Yes, and your friends.”
“I don’t understand.”
He smiled. “It was paid for by the oil company in Bioko. To thank you for your work there and help compensate for your trouble with the army. I was instructed to take each of you to your homes.”
Marita looked at him carefully. Something didn’t feel right.
“That’s very nice,” she said politely. “But I think we’ll just take the Metro.”
“Please, doctor, the company insists. You have all had a very long trip.”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on, Marita.” Rosa giggled. “We’re all tired. It’s very nice of them to do this.”
Luis grinned. “Who wants to take the Metro when we have a limo?”
“Nobody,” Ernesto added.
Marita hesitated a moment longer, still unsure.
Rosa pressed her again. “Marita . . .”
Finally she gave in. “Alright, Rosa, we’ll take the limo.”
“Good.” The driver smiled warmly, then took her bag and Rosa’s and led them toward the exit.
23
BERLIN, HOTEL MOZART SUPERIOR,
94 FRIEDRICHSTRASSE, ROOM 413. 1:35 P.M.
Freshly showered and shaved, Nicholas Marten stood in the window looking down at the street below. He was barefoot and bare chested, wearing jeans and nothing else. The dark blue cell phone was in his hand. He hesitated for the briefest moment and then, for the third time since he’d checked into the hotel ninety minutes earlier, he called the number President Harris had given him for Theo Haas.
Again it rang through. After the fourth ring he again got the husky-male-voice recording. Again he clicked off.
“Damn it,” he swore angrily. Where the hell was Haas? What was he doing? When would he be home?
Suddenly it occurred to him that the Nobel laureate might be traveling and not in the city at all. Then what? Try to have the president or Joe Ryder track him down? That could take days, even longer. In the meantime, where were the photographs, assuming Father Willy had indeed sent them to his brother? Where? Sitting in a branch of the Berlin post office? In Haas’s home, just lying around, opened or unopened? Or did Haas have them with him? Was he at this moment preparing to reveal them as only an irascible world-famous writer could, and most likely would?
As quickly Marten thought of something else: that maybe Conor White’s people or operatives from the Equatorial Guinea military hadn’t been as slow to put Father Willy and Theo Haas together as brothers as he’d first thought. Maybe one group or the other had already reached him. If so he could be in grave danger or even dead. In what could only be described as an urgent, near-involuntary reaction, he lifted the phone and punched in Theo Haas’s number again.
Once more the call rang
through. Once more he listened as it rang four times. He was expecting the recording to click on once again when instead a male voice answered.
“Yes?” came a grumble in German.
“My name is Marten, Nicholas Marten. I’m trying to reach—”
“You’ve got him,” Theo Haas said sharply in English.
“I would like to meet with you. Could I come to your apartment?”
“Across from the Tiergarten. Platz der Republik. The grassy park in front of the Reichstag. Five o’clock. I’m an old man in a green cap and carrying a walking stick. I’ll be sitting on a park bench near Scheidemannstrasse. If you’re not there by ten minutes past I will leave.”
There was an abrupt click as he hung up and the phone went dead.
“Well,” Marten said out loud and with relief. At least no one else had gotten to him. Not yet anyway.
PLATZ DER REPUBLIK. 4:45 P.M.
Marten came into the park early, determined not to miss Haas through some happenstance beyond his control. In front of him the Platz der Republik sprawled for nearly a quarter of a mile and was filled with seemingly hundreds of people taking advantage of a warm early-summer afternoon. To his right was the massive edifice that was the historic Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building. He vaguely remembered that it had been burned down, purportedly by the Nazis in 1933, and was then rebuilt and reoccupied by the parliament in 1999 as a symbol of German unity following the Cold War. The words carved above its main facade in 1916 had been restored as well—DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE (“To the German people”). Maybe the historical significance of it was something Haas was trying to impress on Marten and the reason he chose to meet in its shadow. Or maybe it had no meaning at all. What was curious was why he had chosen to meet outdoors in public rather than in the privacy of his home, especially when he knew that what Marten had to tell him concerned his brother. He was known for being a “character,” and so maybe it was a whim, or maybe he simply didn’t want strangers in his home.
4:50 P.M.
Marten reached the far end of the park and turned back, staying close to the pathway that ran near Scheidemannstrasse. He looked carefully at every bench he passed, most of which were occupied, and then beyond them to the crowd in the park and what suddenly seemed like the impossible chore of sorting through them to find an old man in a green cap with a walking stick.
4:55 P.M.
He arrived at the Reichstag building and turned back, retracing his steps. Still no green cap, no old man with a walking stick.
4:57 P.M.
He stopped at the far end of the park and once again turned back. What if Haas didn’t show up? All he could do was call him and hope to hell he answered and that someone else hadn’t gotten to him in the meantime. It made him think of the ten-minute timetable Haas had given him. Why had he done that? Once again he wondered why the old man had insisted they meet in a place as public and crowded as this. Maybe it was simply that he felt safer meeting a stranger that way, especially in view of what had happened to his brother in Bioko. Still, a quiet restaurant or café would have accomplished the same thing.
Again Marten looked around. Still nothing. Then from the corner of his eye he saw a taxi suddenly turn out of traffic on Scheidemannstrasse and pull to the curb. A moment passed, and the rear passenger door opened and an old man in a green cap carrying a walking stick got out. He closed the door with a ferocious bang and started into the park and toward a nearby bench. It was exactly five o’clock. Theo Haas had arrived.
24
Anne Tidrow had been a good twenty yards behind Marten when he entered the park. She stayed with him until he reached the far end and turned back. At that point she stepped behind a group of chattering tourists and waited to see where he would go next.
She’d followed him to the Platz der Republik by cab, watching him turn the corner from Friedrichstrasse onto the boulevard Unter den Linden and walk several more city blocks until he reached the historic Brandenburg Gate. There, he’d turned right and then left before crossing into the park in front of the Reichstag. It was then she’d left the cab and pursued him on foot.
Her Lufthansa flight from Paris had touched down in Berlin a little more than an hour after his. Immediately she’d called her “past lives, fond memories, old friends” contact and learned that he’d taken a cab to the Hotel Mozart Superior and checked in, and that very soon afterward a private investigator had taken up residence in the lobby, carefully watching the comings and goings of people who passed through it.
Twenty-five minutes later she’d checked into the nearby Hotel Adlon Kempinski, keeping a taxi at hire just outside. After a little more than three nail-biting hours and numerous cell phone exchanges with the private investigator in the Mozart Superior’s lobby, he called to tell her that Marten had just left his key at the front desk and was on his way out. Seconds later he reported that he was following him up Friedrichstrasse toward Unter den Linden.
In less than three minutes—wearing dark glasses, her hair pulled back, and dressed as a tourist in jeans, athletic shoes, and a stylish denim jacket—she was in the hired cab rushing in that direction, concerned all the while that the investigator would lose him if he suddenly hailed a passing taxi himself. And then she’d seen him, just as he turned the corner and started down Unter den Linden.
She was now less than thirty yards away watching Marten approach an old man in a green cap with a walking stick who had just seated himself on a park bench. She saw Marten reach him and say something, then watch as the elderly gentleman studied him carefully before gesturing for Marten to sit down. She slowed, then stopped behind two boys kicking a soccer ball back and forth between them. She wanted to move closer in the hope of overhearing what was being said, but then determined it was too risky and stayed where she was. At this point the last thing she needed was for Marten to look up and recognize her.
How long she stood there watching she didn’t know. All around her was activity—the boys with the soccer ball, children at a birthday party chasing each other, people flying kites in the light wind, dogs scampering after tossed Frisbees, lovers walking hand in hand oblivious to the world around them. Others, many still in business clothes who looked as if they’d left work early for nothing more than to enjoy the late-afternoon sun, lounged on benches or lay sprawled in the grass.
Suddenly, not twenty feet from the bench where Marten and the old man sat talking, there was a loud explosion of firecrackers, thirty or forty or more going off at once. People cried out in surprise. Startled children shrieked. Dogs barked. Even Marten reacted, jumping from the bench and staring in the direction of the explosions. In the next instant horror struck. A young, curly-haired man in a black sweater appeared from nowhere and went to the old man on the bench. A knife flashed in his hand. A second later he dragged it across the old man’s throat, stared at his work for a heartbeat, then ran off toward Scheidemannstrasse.
Marten saw the assailant just as a woman screamed. In an instant he was at the old man’s side. He lifted his slumped head, held it gently, then slowly set it back down and raced off after the curly-haired attacker. In three steps he was at the curb. Then, dodging traffic, he darted hazardously across Scheidemannstrasse, and chased after him at a dead run heading toward the Brandenburg Gate.
5:16 P.M.
25
5:18 P.M.
Marten could see him forty yards ahead nearing the Brandenburg Gate. As he reached it he glanced back, and Marten saw his face clearly. It was young and thin, with wild narrow-set eyes under that great shock of black curly hair. Who was he? Why had he wanted to kill Theo Haas? And so viciously and in public? Had he been sent by Conor White? Or by the Equatorial Guinean army? Had he trailed him from his apartment? Did it mean someone already had the photographs and Haas knew it, and knew who they were, and they wanted him silenced quickly, before he told someone? If so, why hadn’t he tried to kill Marten, too?
Marten ran harder, trying to stay with him. He saw the young man wea
ve in and out through the cars, tour buses, taxicabs, and tourists congesting the area in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Again he glanced back. Again Marten saw his face. It was grim and wild and strangely triumphant. In that instant he had the gut feeling that he was chasing not a professional killer but a madman.
5:20 P.M.
Anne Tidrow was probably twenty seconds behind Marten and running nearly as hard. She saw him cut into a throng of tourists and then disappear within them. She kept going, pushing through the crowd, but not seeing him.
The sudden murder of the old man had thrown everything into turmoil. Who was he? Did he know about the photographs? If so, what had he told Marten before he was killed, and in what direction, if any, had he pointed him? If she lost Marten now and he went after the pictures instead of back to his hotel, she might never find out.
She kept on, taking the same route Marten had, moving into the thick of the crowd that was suddenly abuzz with tension in the wake of one man chasing another through them. She kept going, wishing now she had brought at least one of her contacts with her. For a moment she lost sight of him and almost panicked. Then there he was, less than a dozen feet in front of her, stopped in the congregation of tourists and beside a line of waiting taxis looking furiously around for the killer. Instinctively she started to look for him herself, thinking, like Marten, that he was hiding somewhere in the throng.
Suddenly came a violent rush of sirens. Green-and-white Berlin police vehicles screamed in from all directions. In seconds uniforms were everywhere, shoving through the crowd, looking for the murderer. For a moment she was uncertain what to do: confront Marten about the old man, in the event he darted off in the confusion and she lost him for good, or take a chance and stay back, see where he went next. Suddenly it made no difference. People were gesturing toward Marten.