He could smell the peat and ferns as he walked in the darkness. Moonbeams threading through the trees made the needles on their boughs glow silver. For all the natural beauty of the place, Franz always felt its atmosphere dripped tragedy like an oversaturated sponge. A curse of bad timing hung over its silent graves, the first of which were dug just four months after Kristallnacht, and in the same winter the scar-faced brute Rohm took command of Hitler’s storm troopers. Somewhere on the grounds, buried anonymously, were the bodies of several thousand inmates of Stadelheim Prison, convicted and executed by the Volksgerichtshof, or People’s Court, a twisted caricature of criminal justice empowered by the Nazi regime. Most were Jews, Catholics, and Communists. Others merely insulted the wrong individuals or were accused of sleeping with some prominent person’s spouse. Here, too, in forty-four burial grounds were the ashes of several thousand cremated men, women, and children from the Dachau concentration camp, all nameless inside their urns.
Franz wondered how they could rest, when he, born to the generation that followed theirs, was unable. Death was part of being human, but too many of Perlacher’s graves were testimony to the brutal, murderous violation of human rights.
Taking a shortcut very few knew, Franz reached those he sought in minutes. Marked by simple stones, they were at the intersection of lots 73 and 120. In tonight’s haste, he would not visit them and leave flowers at their markers. Instead, he waited behind their bordering shrubs, mouthed something like a prayer, and threw a kiss over the hedge with his fingertips.
He checked the time on his phone—9:34 p.m. Kali was due to arrive at any minute. Courageous Kali, his angel of liberty. He hoped no harm would come to her.
Alone with his thoughts, Franz bowed his head and improvised a prayer for the living, as he had done moments ago for the lost.
* * *
Renault Chaput pushed through the forest gloom, weaving between stands of tall, columnar tree trunks, treading with caution over an obstacle course of hillocks, root clusters, fallen branches, and half-buried rocks. He wore flip-up night-vision goggles on a head mount assembly, their image-intensifier tubes resembling the eyestalks of a terrestrial snail. The Beretta Px4 Storm in his right hand was loaded with a full fifteen-round magazine plus one in the chamber, and the smart watch on his right wrist had been set to GPS compass mode. His Mini Cooper was parked a half mile behind him on a quiet rural road, left there so the driver of the Interactive Ephemerals van would not grow suspicious he was being followed.
Chaput was no nature lover, but he could hardly complain. It was a short hop from Nussbaumpark to the Perlacher Forst, perhaps ten miles, and his trip was mostly one of comfort behind the Mini’s wheel. Only after his quarry turned onto Geiselgasteigstrasse, at the north end of the cemetery, did he decide upon extra prudence and leave the car to continue tracking him on foot.
Now the inspector paused a step to check his wrist compass, saw that he was getting close, and was about to move forward again when he heard a noise up ahead. Was it the rumbling of a motor vehicle? Listening, he decided it was. And not a small one, either.
Suddenly, Chaput could almost see the Interactive Ephemerals van before his eyes. The mental image was so vivid it might have been floating in the darkness ahead of him. After several seconds, the rumbling stopped. Then he heard another sound. The vehicle’s door opening and shutting.
Might Franz Scholl the tinkerer have reached his destination?
Chaput plunged ahead, the moss carpet spongy underfoot. His extensive dossier on Scholl led him to believe his ties to Outlier went back years. When she arrived in Munich in time for the beginning of the Selbermacher fair, renting a flat only blocks away from Nussbaumpark, he had known it was no coincidence. Franz Scholl was one of the expo’s founders, a proponent of the cybernation ethos and close friend of the late Eric Bergmann. On a hunch, Chaput had wasted no time deciding to keep an eye on him after the BfV woman, Krauss, discovered tonight’s interruption in the NORN satellite coverage.
He was not surprised when Scholl got into the van and drove out here. The inspector knew all about his frequent visits to Lot 73 at the Perlacher cemetery. About the white roses he left on the two flat granite markers. His sentiment was admirable, and Chaput credited him for it.
But that did not erase the web of connections between Bergmann, Scholl, and Outlier. A subversive Dark Web cell, perhaps.
Chaput moved forward, convinced the strands of that mysterious web were drawing Franz Scholl and Outlier to the cemetery tonight. It would be shrewd of them to meet at the Lot 73 grave sites, away from the smart pods and the drones, and with the satellites temporarily blinded.
Shrewd, yes...but Chaput was the most cunning of foxes.
The hoot of an owl, fireflies spinning crazy spirals in the darkness. Something buzzed near Chaput’s ear and he brushed it away with the barrel of his gun. Then a few yards ahead, through the trees, a bright, shifting glow. The beam of a flashlight.
Chaput glanced at his compass again, sucking in a breath. This was not his first reconnaissance of the grave site. But before, he had always come by day, and things looked very different in the black of night. He was farther along than he’d realized. About fifteen yards up ahead the forest ran up to a rain ditch five or six feet deep. Beyond that was a dirt road. Across the road, on the far side of a hedge, the graves.
And someone with a flashlight.
The Beretta held out in front of him, his eyes wide with expectation behind his NVGs, Chaput inched quietly toward the tree line.
* * *
At that moment, two miles to the north, Braithwaite snarled out a torrent of invective as the Audi overtook him with a surge of speed. It jostled past his BMW on the right, cutting into his lane a few feet up ahead.
He slowed to keep from smashing into it and almost got rear-ended by the Opel behind him. As it dropped back slightly, his gaze swept the road for the woman on the motorcycle. But she’d disappeared from sight.
“Where is she?” he said with a quick glance at the dashboard display.
“The screen shows her just ahead,” Lau said. “The smart pods are still picking her up.”
Braithwaite saw her on the display, too. But not the Audi. The Audi wasn’t on the screen. And it should have been. It should have been there between his vehicle and the motorcycle...
If the screen was still displaying real-time images.
He clenched his teeth. Fool me twice.
“Balls,” he said. “We’ve lost her again.”
* * *
Carmody had no sooner overtaken Braithwaite than he realized he was chasing a ghost.
He was a half mile past the vineyard. Outlier well ahead, her rear reflector and taillights swinging in and out of sight with the road’s increasingly frequent curves. Suddenly, his high beams swept across a road sign for a cemetery on the left—and beyond it a break in the procession of trees, where an access road ran up into the graveyard. As he sped past the sign, his dash display showed Outlier barely in the lead, passing the sign.
Except, looking out his windshield, he could see the sign, and the foot of the access road, but not Outlier. Which seemed about right. Or righter than her being there. She had built up too much of a lead for him to catch up just like that.
Driving, he radioed Long.
“She’s slipped,” he said. “We lost her.”
“I noticed,” Long said. “But my display’s still picking her up.”
“She hacked GoMunich. No other explanation.”
“Okaaaay. What now?”
Carmody checked his speedometer. He was doing over a hundred, Braithwaite hugging up to his bumper in the BMW, Long’s Opel right behind Braithwaite. All three dangerously bunched together on the dark country road.
“The two-hour NORN gap,” he said. “Everything we know tells us she waited for it. But that isn’t much time.”
; “Not sure I follow...”
“She could have gone wherever,” Carmody said. “She didn’t. She came here. Led us here.”
“Us and the operators.”
Carmody was thinking that might be the whole idea. He didn’t exactly know why Braithwaite and his men wanted Outlier. He wasn’t even absolutely certain of his own reasons anymore—whether he was more interested in helping her or putting her in cuffs. But he knew that the guy he’d fought off on Ruppertstrasse had pulled a submachine gun on him, and Carmody had needed to hurt him badly enough to make sure he didn’t try it again. And he knew that he, Long, and Braithwaite were now in pursuit of no one but each other, the person they had all come for having left them to speed pointlessly along on a dark country two-laner in the middle of nowhere, Bavarian style.
It might have been comical if it wasn’t so deadly serious.
“You still with me?” he asked Long over the RoIP.
“Affirmative.”
“Hit your left flasher.”
“My what?”
Carmody pushed down his own directional.
“It’s time for a full stop,” he said, and swung his steering wheel hard toward the left.
* * *
Two bends of the road past the Perlacher cemetery, Kali spotted a reflectorized white mile marker poking up from the verge of the blacktop. Almost there. She trimmed speed and turned off the music in her helmet, wanting silence. A short distance farther along, she slowed again and cut left onto a nameless side road extending through the forest.
Barely wide enough for a midsize automobile, the road was paved and fairly straight. Pines soared high on both sides. Kali followed it about five hundred yards through the darkness, found an opening in the trees to her right, and leaned into a dirt trail.
The forest closed in, breathing moistly down her neck. Overhanging pine boughs slivered the rays of the moon. Tiny winged insects and bright-eyed rodents fled from the bike’s single headlight.
Kali rode deeper into the pines, her wheels spinning up soil, pebbles, and the thin, spidery roots of aggressive creepers picking at the trail’s edges. When she called up a memory, she could relive it almost as if it was the present, and she knew these woods from many childhood hikes with her dear ones. Franz Scholl and his wife, Lotte, long before early-onset Alzheimer’s stole her identity. Eric and Munsey Bergmann, Munsey like a little sister. The Navarros with their son Lucien, with eyes only for her. And her grandmother Norma, fit and strong into her midseventies.
After their walks, in the late afternoon, Franz would take them to the pub for three-meat stew. Norma went grudgingly, wary of the children taking example from the drinkers who filed in with the evening...
The trail snaked along. Pitch-black darkness poured thick and syrupy around the Ducati’s headlight, and its sensors raised the brightness setting to maximum. Checking the time on her HUD, Kali rode a little faster for another hundred yards.
Stopped, listened.
She heard the gurgle of moving water. From behind the trees to her left.
Kali turned the bike in that direction, stopped again, lowered its kickstand, and swung off the saddle with her engine idling quietly. She took off her helmet and strapped it to her backpack. The bike now faced the trees marshaled at the edge of the path. Its headlight threw a wide stripe of radiance across the path and through the trees. She followed it through the woods toward the sound of gurgling water.
A few yards in, her eyes confirmed the crisp photographic accuracy of her recollection.
The creek ran from left to right, parallel to the dirt track behind her. She stood on its soft dirt bank and looked down. The bed below her at ten or fifteen feet was rocky, its stones worn smooth and flat by erosion. The creek water cackled over them from right to left, brewing over the weathered rocks toward a low fall. The current swirled and foamed underneath the waterfall, splashing up droplets that caught the glow of the Ducati’s headlight, spinning and dancing and glittering like diamonds in the darkness.
Kali could not allow a wasted moment. She turned from the embankment, doubled back to her humming motorbike, and screwed open the cap of the red carbon-fiber fuel tank. She tossed the cap into the roadside brush, untucked her scarf from her half-zippered jacket, and pulled it from around her neck. Twisting the scarf into a tight makeshift fuse, she pushed one end into the mouth of the fuel tank and fed it in with her fingers. When two-thirds of it was inside the tank, Kali reached into her jacket pocket for a disposable cigarette lighter.
Thumbing the spark wheel to fire up the lighter, she kept the red plastic button down to feed the flame and held it to the end of the gasoline-soaked scarf. The scarf started burning at once and then whumped and brightened as the gasoline saturating its threads ignited.
Balancing the bike against her hip, she took hold of the handlebar grips, pushed up its kickstand with the toe of her boot, and throttled fuel into the lines. The Ducati revved, growling ferociously. Kali felt it trembling with barely restrained power, opened the throttle some more, and rolled with it a bit as she released the brake and clutch. She needed to let out the clutch easily, without hitching her grip, or the motorcycle would buck hard and stall.
She took, one, two, three long steps alongside the bike as it surged toward the embankment. Then she opened the throttle wide, and the handlebars jerked free of her grip as the bike shot away from her with a loud roar. Trailing flames, her Devil jumped forward over the gully’s edge and vaulted clear across the creek bed to slam into the opposite slope inches below the embankment. It plunged down into the channel, flipping end over end amid a shower of torn turf, pebbles, and soil.
Kali was already racing off through the woods as the bike hit the water and rocks.
The Ducati’s tank contained almost six gallons of fuel. Heated to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the pressurized gasoline and methyl vapor inside it quickly reached a flash point.
Turned into a gasoline bomb with the explosive power of three hundred pounds of dynamite, it blew with a gush of flame that obliterated the tank’s outer shell, generating a huge rumbling fireball that rose high over the tops of the pines and into the night sky.
The sound, like the pounding of thunder, could be heard for many miles.
* * *
Five minutes earlier, Carmody had stood leaning slightly against the front of his Audi in a dark turnaround that he supposed might double as a parking area for the cemetery when the official lot got too crowded. The vehicle was backed against a high white concrete wall that separated the parking area from something else. To his right was the drive he’d seen leading into the cemetery from Landstrasse. On the cemetery grounds, past a sweeping lawn and then rows of weathered old headstones, the chapel tower’s conical roof pointed at the night sky.
The Audi’s headlights were on. Carmody’s arms were folded across the front of his hoodie. The headlight beams threw him into partial silhouette.
He was not alone.
Long’s Opel was parked crosswise twelve feet to his left, facing Carmody and two other men in the roughly oval cul-de-sac. Long stood next to it. He wore a button-down shirt outside his pants over an Uzi micro in a concealment holster. His arms were straight at his sides to reassure the two men that he had no intention of pulling the weapon on them.
The other men were Braithwaite and Lau. Like Long and Carmody, they kept their hands at their sides. Their BMW had stopped on the right shoulder of the narrow drive, its front end pointed toward Carmody, its tail toward the road. The pair stood just in front of their vehicle, Braithwaite almost directly opposite Carmody, Lau hanging slightly back and to his left with a suspicious eye on Long.
The BMW’s lights glowed behind them. The beams from the lights of the three vehicles met and crisscrossed a few feet above the ground, hurling off bands of shadow that cut the cul-de-sac with light and dark stripes.
“Glad you coul
d come,” Carmody said to Braithwaite.
Braithwaite smiled. “It was short notice,” he said. “But I appreciate when people use their turn signals.”
“Always.”
There was no sound. The breeze was light. The intersecting shadows were still.
“So,” Braithwaite said. “Who the bloody hell are you?”
“Sheriff Woody,” Carmody said. He nodded at Long. “He’s Buzz.”
Braithwaite stared. “You have an interest in the woman. We have an interest in her. That puts us in the same spot.”
“Except I know your names,” Carmody said. “Aurelion and Dario. Catchy, I admit. But the point’s that my knowing yours, and you not knowing mine, should tell you who holds the cards here.”
Braithwaite’s face was impassive. “Let’s get to it,” he said. “What do you want?”
“A couple of things,” Carmody said. “First, I want your boys to quit pulling loaded guns on me. I put one of them down pretty hard outside the garage. But it gets old fast.”
Braithwaite said nothing. Carmody let him wait.
“Second’s an all in one,” he said after a long moment. “I want you to stay away from the woman. Stay out of my face, stay clear of my men. And third...okay I give you a third?”
Braithwaite nodded a little.
“I want you out of Munich. Or better yet, out of the country,” Carmody said. “Because your hardware won’t fit where I intend to shove it if you stick around.”
A second passed. Braithwaite said, “Anything else while you’re at it?”
“No.”
“Then you can go fuck yourself.”
Carmody shrugged. “Probably not,” he said. “But thanks for the suggestion.”
Braithwaite grinned icily. Carmody didn’t. Lau drifted almost imperceptibly closer to him through the shadows.
Net Force--Eye of the Drone Page 10