Locked On Part 32

When Chavez hung up with Granger, he flopped on the couch next to Ryan. Both men were worn out.

At first Jack Jr. was dejected with the success of the mission. "All that work and just three out of five cams and mikes are online? Are you serious? For all we know Rehan likes to sit at the kitchen table when he works. If that's the case, we're f.u.c.ked, because we won't hear a d.a.m.n thing that isn't in the office, the great room, or the master bedroom."

But Domingo calmed his junior colleague. "Don't ever forget, 'mano, the real world isn't like the movies. As far as I'm concerned three out of five is a home run. We are in. Doesn't matter if it's one camera or one hundred cameras. We are f.u.c.king in! We'll get the goods, trust me."

Chavez insisted the other two celebrate with him by ordering a ma.s.sive breakfast. Ryan begged off at first, said he needed to catch some sleep, but once the Moet Champagne, huge omelets, and flaky pastries arrived, Ryan got his second wind and he indulged with the other two.

After breakfast, they cleaned their scuba gear.

And then they slept.

It took Clark several days to locate his target in Germany. The man he sought was Manfred Kromm, and Kromm had proven to be an exceedingly challenging person to find. He was not undercover, nor was he taking active measures to ensure he remained hidden. No, Manfred Kromm was difficult to locate because he was a n.o.body.

Thirty years ago he had played a role in East German intelligence. He and his partner had done something illegal, and Clark had been brought in to sort it out. Now the man was in his seventies, and he was no longer in Berlin, no longer a government employee, and no longer someone who anyone cared about.

Clark knew he was still alive because the questions the FBI asked Hardesty could have been triggered only by Manfred Kromm. Yes, it was possible Kromm could have written down his version of events years ago and pa.s.sed away in the interim, but Clark did not suppose that was a doc.u.ment Kromm would have written willingly, and he did not suppose there was any reason that information should come to light right now, unless Kromm had only recently told his story.

Kromm now lived in Cologne, Germany, in the state of North RhineWestphalia, on the Rhine River. Clark had found his man finally after going to his last known address, a two-story building in the Haselhorst section of Berlin, and then pretending to be a long-lost relative. A woman there knew Kromm had moved to Cologne, and she knew he wore a brace on his leg due to nerve damage from his diabetes. Clark took this information and headed to Cologne, where he spent three full and very long days posing as an employee of a medical equipment company from the United States. He printed up business cards and invoices and phony e-mail exchanges, and he took them to nearly every end-user supplier of medical devices in town. He claimed to have a customized ankle-and-foot orthotic ordered by a man named Kromm, and requested help finding the man's current address.

Some shops turned him away with a shrug, but most efficiently checked their databases, and one had a listing for a man named Manfred Kromm, age seventy-four, address Thieboldga.s.se thirteen, flat 3A, who was sent monthly supplies of insulin test strips and syringes.

And just like that, John Clark had found his man.

Clark found the home of his target in the Altstadt of Cologne. Number thirteen Thieboldga.s.se was a four-story white stucco apartment building that was a carbon copy of the fifty or more that ran down both sides of the road, accented here and there with a single tree out front. The near-identical properties had tiny gra.s.s lawns bisected by fifteen-foot walkways up to the single gla.s.s doors to their lobbies.

For an hour John strolled the neighborhood in an afternoon rain shower that allowed him to use an umbrella and wear the collar of his raincoat high above his ears and thereby mask his face. He determined possible escape routes in case his meeting did not go well, found his way to the bus stop and to the Stra.s.senbahn, and from the streetcar he kept an eye out for cops or postmen or any others who could be a bother if they pa.s.sed up the street at the wrong time. These were rental buildings, and there was enough foot traffic in and out of them that he did not worry about drawing attention from pa.s.sersby, and after the hour of peripheral surveillance he focused his attention on building number thirteen.

The building was not old in the European sense; very little in Cologne could be considered old, as the city had been altogether flattened during the Second World War. Spending several minutes across the street staring at number thirteen Thieboldga.s.se through the rainfall, Clark found the building to be as featureless and colorless and charmless as the Cold War itself.

Back then, during a Cold War that was never cold enough for men on the sharp edge like John Clark, Clark had come to Germany on a special operation. He was CIA/SAD at the time, the Special Activities Division.

He was pulled out of a training evolution in North Carolina with members of the Army's newly minted tier-one unit, Delta Force, and he was put on a CIA 35A Learjet and flown to Europe. After a stop at Mildenhall AFB in Suffolk, England, to refuel, Clark was back in the air.

No one told him where they were taking him or what he'd be doing when he got there.

Clark landed at Tempelhof in Berlin, and was whisked to a safe house within pistol shot of the Berlin Wall.

There he met an old friend named Gene Lilly. They'd worked together in 'Nam, and now Lilly was the chief of CIA's Berlin Station. Lilly told Clark he was needed for a simple bag-drop operation over the border, but Clark smelled the bulls.h.i.t in the story. He knew they didn't need an SAD hard a.s.set for a bag drop. He relayed his doubt to his superior, and then Gene Lilly broke down in tears.

Gene said he'd been caught in a honey trap by a hooker working with a couple of Stasi foot soldiers who'd gone rogue to make some extra cash. They had extorted from him all of his life's savings, and he needed John to hand over the satchel full of cash and pick up a folder full of negatives. Clark did not ask what was on the negatives-he was d.a.m.n certain he did not want to know.

Lilly made it clear to Clark that there was no one else in the Agency he trusted, and the thirty-three-year-old SAD a.s.set agreed to help out his old friend.

Minutes later John was handed a satchel full of deutschmarks and taken to the U-Bahn, then he shuffled into a train half full of locals.

The exchange between Clark and the Stasi extorters was to be in a surreal location, unique to Berlin and the Cold War. The West German subway system had a few underground rail lines that, rather inconveniently, ventured under East Berlin. Before the part.i.tion of the city this was of no consequence, but after the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, the lines that rolled under the wall were no longer allowed to stop at the stations on the other side. The East Germans boarded or barred the doors at street level, in some cases they even built apartment complexes over their access, and they wiped any references to the subway stations from East German rail maps. Down below, these dark, vacant, and labyrinthine halls became known as Geisterbahnhofe-ghost stations.

A few minutes past midnight, John Clark dropped out of the back of the last car of the U8 train that rolled under the Mitte district of East Berlin. As the train clicked and clacked its way up the tunnel, the American pulled out a flashlight, adjusted the satchel over his shoulder, and walked on. In minutes he'd found his way to the Weinmeisterstra.s.se U-Bahn ghost station, and here he waited on the darkened concrete platform, listening to the sounds of rats below him and bats above him.

Within minutes a flashlight's beam appeared in a stairwell. A single man appeared behind it, shined his light on Clark, and told him to open the satchel. Clark did as he was told, and then the man lowered a package to the dusty concrete and slid it over to the American.

Clark picked up the package, checked it to make certain they were the negatives, and then he left the satchel.

It could have, it should have, ended right there.

But the Stasi crooks were greedy, and they wanted their negatives back for another round of blackmail.

John Clark turned and began heading toward the edge of the platform, but he heard a noise on the opposite platform, across the rails. He shined his light over there in time to see a man with a handgun leveled at him. Clark dove and rolled onto the filthy concrete floor as a pistol shot cracked and echoed around the maze of tunnels and open halls.

The American CIA officer came out of his roll onto his feet with a Colt .45-caliber 1911 model pistol in his hands. He fired twice across the tracks, hit the shooter both times in the chest, and the man dropped where he stood.

Clark then shifted to the man with the money satchel. The Stasi agent had retreated back up the stairwell. Clark took a shot but missed low just before the man disappeared from view. He considered going after the man, it was the natural tendency of a direct-action expert like Clark, as he could not be certain the surviving Stasi man would not turn the tables and come after him. But just then the next train through the ghost station approached, and Clark was forced to quickly duck behind a concrete column. The bright lights of the train cast long shadows on the dusty platform. Clark slid to the tiled floor and chanced a look toward where the East German had disappeared. He saw nothing in the moving lights, and he knew that if he missed this train, he'd have to wait here another ten minutes for the next one.

Clark timed his leap onto the rear car perfectly; he caught onto a handhold by the back door and then moved around behind the car. He rode back there through the dark for several minutes, until he was in West Berlin, where he melted into the light station traffic.

Thirty minutes later he was on a streetcar full of West Germans heading home after working the night shift, and thirty minutes after that he was handing the negatives off to Gene Lilly.

He flew out of Germany on a commercial flight the next day, certain that nothing that had happened would ever go into the archives of the CIA or the East German Staatssicher-heitsdienst.

Standing there in the cold rain in Cologne, he shook off the memory and looked around. The Germany of today bore little resemblance to the divided nation of thirty years ago, and Clark reminded himself that today's problems needed his undivided attention.

At four p.m. the day's light was leaving the gray sky, and a light came on in the tiny lobby of number thirteen Thieboldga.s.se. Inside he could see an elderly woman leashing her dog at the foot of a stairwell. Quickly Clark crossed the street, hitched his collar higher up around his neck, and arrived at the side of the building just as the woman exited the front door, her eyes already on the street ahead. As the door closed behind her, John Clark moved up the wall through the gra.s.s and stepped in silently.

He was already halfway up the staircase with his SIG Sauer pistol in his hand by the time the door latch clicked behind him.

Manfred Kromm reacted to the knock at his door with a groan. He knew it would be Herta from across the hall, he knew she would have locked herself out yet again while walking that little gray b.i.t.c.h poodle of hers, and he knew he would have to pick her lock like he'd done dozens of times before.

He'd never told her where he learned to pick locks. Nor had she asked.

That she locked herself out purposely so that he would pay attention to her only annoyed him further. He could not be bothered with the old woman. She was a pest of the highest order, only slightly less annoying than her yapping Hund-chen Fifi. Still, Manfred Kromm did not let on that he knew her weekly lockouts were a ruse. He was a loner and a social hermit, he would no more insinuate to people that they were interested in him than he would sprout wings and fly, so he smiled outwardly, groaned inwardly, and unlocked the old b.i.t.c.h's gottverdammt door each time she knocked.

He climbed up from his chair, shuffled to the door, and lifted his picks off of the table in the entryway of his flat. The aged German put his hand on his door latch to step into the hall. Only the old force of habit made him look through the peephole. He went through the motions of glancing into the hallway, had begun to remove his eye after looking so he could open the door, but then his eye widened in surprise and it rushed back to the tiny lens in the door. There, on the other side, he saw a man in a raincoat.

And in the man's hand a stainless-steel automatic pistol with a suppressor attached was pointed directly at Manfred Kromm's door.

The man spoke in English, loud enough to be heard through the woodwork. "Unless your door is ballistic steel, or you can move faster than a bullet, you'd better let me in."

"Wer is denn da?" Who the h.e.l.l is it? Kromm croaked. He spoke English, he'd understood the man with the gun, but he had not used the language himself in many years. The right words would not pa.s.s his lips.

"Someone from your past."

And then Kromm knew. He knew exactly who this man was.

And he knew he was about to die.

He opened the door.

I know your face. It's older. But I remember you," Kromm said. As instructed by Clark, he had moved to his chair in front of the television. His hands were on his knees, kneading the swollen joints slowly.

Clark stood above him, his weapon still pointing at the German.

"Are you alone?" Clark asked the question but searched the tiny flat without waiting for a response.

Manfred Kromm nodded. "Selbsverstandlich." Of course.

Clark kept looking around, keeping the SIG pointed at the old man's chest. He said, "Keep perfectly still. I've had a lot of coffee today, you don't want to see how jumpy I am."

"I will not move," the old German said. Then he shrugged. "That gun in your hand is the only weapon in this flat."

Clark checked over the rest of the tiny apartment. It did not take long. It could not have been four hundred square feet, including the bathroom and the kitchen. He found a door to a fire escape in the kitchen, but nothing whatsoever as far as luxuries. "What, thirty-five years in the Stasi, and this is all you get?"

Now the German in the chair smiled a little. "From the comments of your government regarding you, Herr Clark, it does not look like your organization has rewarded your efforts much more than my organization has rewarded mine."

Clark cracked a sour grin himself as he used his legs to push a small table flush against the front door. It might slow someone coming in from the hall for a moment, but not much more than that. Clark stood next to the door, kept the SIG trained on the burly man sitting uncomfortably on the recliner.

"You have been telling tales."

"I have said nothing."

"I don't believe you. And that is a problem." Clark kept his weapon trained as he moved sideways along the front wall of the room into the corner. On the adjoining wall sat a tall antique china cabinet. He pushed it toward the open doorway to the tiny kitchen, in order to block the entrance to the flat from the rear fire escape. Inside, dishes rocked and a few tipped over as the big wooden piece came to rest, covering the doorway. Now the only entrance to the room was the bedroom behind Manfred.

"Tell me what you told them. Everything."

"Mr. Clark, I have no idea what you-"

"Thirty years ago, three people went into the Geister-bahnhof. Two of those people came out alive. You were working for the Stasi, as was your partner, but you two fellows were not playing by Stasi rules, which means you extorted that money for yourself. I was ordered to let you two walk away, but your partner, Lukas Schuman, tried to kill me after you got the money.

"I killed Lukas Schuman, and you got away, and I know you did not run back to Markus Wolf and tell him about how your illegal moonlighting job turned ugly. You would have kept your mouth shut to everyone so you didn't have to turn over the cash."

Kromm did not speak, but only squeezed his hands into his knees as if he were kneading fat Brotchen before putting them in the oven.

Clark said, "And I was under orders to keep the affair out of the official record of my agency. The only person, other than you, me, and poor dead Lukas Schuman, who knew about what happened in the ghost station that night was my superior, and he died fifteen years ago without breathing a word of it to anyone."

"I don't have the money anymore. I spent it," Kromm said.

Clark sighed as if disappointed with the German's comment. "Right, Manfred, I came back thirty years later to retrieve a messenger bag full of worthless deutschmarks."

"Then what do you want?"

"I want to know who you talked to."

Kromm nodded. He said, "I think this is an American movie cliche, but it is the truth. If I tell you, they will kill me."

"Who, Manfred?"

"I did not go to them. They came to me. I had no interest in digging up the buried bones of our mutual past."

Clark lifted the pistol and looked down its tritium sights.

"Who, Manfred? Who did you tell about 'eighty-one?"

"Obtshak!" Manfred blurted it out in panic.

Clark's head c.o.c.ked to the side. He lowered the weapon. "Who is Obtshak?"

"Obtshak is not a who! It's a what! It's an Estonian criminal organization. A foreign office of the Russian mob, so to speak."

John did not hide his confusion. "And they asked you about me? By name?"

"Nein, they weren't asking in the regular sense. They hit me. They broke a bottle of beer, put the broken bottle up to my throat, and then they asked me."

"And you told them about Berlin."

"Naturlich!" Of course. "Kill me for it if you must, but why should I protect you?"

Something occurred to Clark. "How did you know they were Obtshak?"

Kromm shrugged. "They were Estonian. They spoke Estonian. If someone is a thug and they are Estonian, then I presume them to be in Obtshak."

"And they came here?"

"To my house? Nein. They had me meet them at a warehouse in Deutz. They told me there was money for me. Security work."

"Security work? Don't bulls.h.i.t me, Kromm. No one is going to hire you to do security work."

The German's hands rose quickly as he began to argue, but the barrel of Clark's SIG was trained again on Kromm's chest in the s.p.a.ce of a heartbeat. Kromm lowered his hands.

"I have done some . . . some work for members of the Eastern European immigrant community in the past."

"What? Like forgery?"

Kromm shook his head. He was too proud to keep quiet. "Locks. Lock picking."

"Cars?"

Now the old German smiled. "Cars? No. Car lots. Dealerships. It helps to add to my tiny pension. Anyway, I knew some Estonians. I knew the man who asked me to go to the warehouse, otherwise I would never have agreed to go."

Clark reached into the pocket of his raincoat, pulled out a notepad and a pen, and tossed it to the old man. "I want his name, his address, any other names you know, Estonians working in Obtshak."

Kromm deflated in his chair. "They will kill me."

"Leave. Leave right now. Trust me, whoever questioned you about me is long gone. That's who I'm after. The men who set it up are just the local thugs. Get out of Cologne and they won't pester you."