“It won’t work.” Anne was looking directly at him.
“Why? In ten seconds I’m out the door and vanished.”
“Not without me.”
Marten glared at her. “Don’t start that again, not now. Not with this Hauptkommissar Franck on the trail. You get caught with me, you’ll be locked up for as long as I am.”
“I want the photographs, Mr. Marten. I’ll take my chances. Besides, as I said, there may be a way out of this yet, but you’ll need me or it won’t happen.”
“How?”
“As my mother used to say, that’s for me to know and you to find out.”
Marten watched her carefully, then gave in. “Once again, I seem to be at your mercy.”
“Then let’s get to it.” Immediately she dug in her suitcase, pulled something out, and tossed it to him. “It’ll help cover you up. A little anyway.”
Marten caught it and looked at it—a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap.
He looked at her as if she were crazy. “This isn’t going to help.”
“It’s better than nothing, darling. Now collect your things, take a pee, and we’ll get the hell out of here.”
Abruptly Anne threw off her robe. Marten saw a flash of taut body, beautiful breasts, and pubic hair, and then she was pulling on underwear, jeans, sweater, and the jeans jacket and running shoes she’d worn earlier.
Three minutes later they were walking out the Hotel Adlon’s rear entrance, then turning onto Wilhelmstrasse in the direction of Unter den Linden and the Spree River. Marten wore the Dallas Cowboys cap and pulled his suitcase behind him like a tourist. Anne carried an over-the-shoulder bag taken from her luggage. In it were last-minute basics: clean underwear, toiletries, passport, credit cards, money, BlackBerry. Her suitcase had been intentionally left in the room with the rest of her clothes, making it look as if she fully expected to return.
7:07 P.M.
HOTEL ADLON KEMPINSKI, OFFICE OF THE CONCIERGE. 7:28 P.M.
“We have over three hundred rooms and seventy-eight suites. It is not possible to know the physical description of every guest.” Paul Stonner, the Hotel Adlon’s proud, dark-suited, bifocal-wearing concierge, stood across from the shaved-headed, six-foot-six Erster Kriminalhauptkommissar Emil Franck in his private office. With Franck were his colleagues Kommissars Gerhard Bohlen and Gertrude Prosser. Bohlen was forty-one, skeleton thin, deadly serious, and married. Prosser was thirty-eight, a sturdy, handsome blonde whose only marriage was, and always had been, to the department. Gerhard and Gertrude. Franck often referred to them as “the two Gs.” Both were top homicide investigators.
“Herr Stonner,” Franck said coldly, his coal-black eyes barely pinpoints in his head, “you are going to bring your employees in here, and we are going to do our best to find a match. Our man here will describe them exactly as he has to you and to us.”
Franck looked to fifty-year-old Karl Zeller, the white-haired taxi driver who had driven Marten and Anne Tidrow from the Hotel Mozart Superior and delivered them to the Adlon’s rear entrance, by his records, at precisely 6:02 P.M.
“We will be very happy to help as we can, Hauptkommissar,” Stonner said respectfully, “but how do you know these people were guests of the hotel?”
“We don’t, Herr Stonner, but we are going to find out.”
7:32 P.M.
The two walked quickly down Schiffbauerdamm, the roadway on the far side of the River Spree from Unter den Linden. Marten’s suitcase was long gone, weighted down with chunks of concrete taken from a construction Dumpster near the Reichstag and tossed into the river. His own essentials—passport, driver’s license, credit cards, cash, and the dark blue throwaway cell phone he’d used to call President Harris—he carried on his person.
7:34 P.M.
The river and city still glimmered in the warm glow of the long summer day. In a way the daylight helped because it enabled them to blend in with the tourists crowding the streets and cafés that sat on the quay above the Spree, where people could look out at the maze of tour boats plying the water. After sunset the crowds would lessen, making them more visible to the police who seemed to be everywhere—on street corners, on motorcycles, in patrol cars—in a massive search for the still-unnamed man whose blurred photograph Hauptkommissar Franck had shown on television.
In the half hour since they’d left the Adlon, Marten had said little, just turning this way and that at Anne’s direction. Clearly she knew the city, at least this part of it, and was seemingly intent on taking them to some destination in particular. Just where that was and who would be waiting when they arrived were questions that made him as uneasy as the two that remained from earlier: how she had known where he was staying in Berlin and where he’d gone when he went to meet with Theo Haas. And then there was the business with the shower before they’d left the Adlon and the phone call she’d made from behind its closed door. At this point they all troubled him. As if he didn’t have trouble enough.
“Where are we going?” he said abruptly.
“It’s not far.”
“Wherever it is, it’s taking too long. We’re giving the police too much time.”
“I said, it’s not far.”
“What’s not far? Bar, restaurant, another hotel, what?”
“A friend’s apartment.”
“What friend?”
“Just a friend.”
“The one you called when you went in to take a shower?”
“What do you mean?”
“The shower was an excuse. The real reason you went in there was to make a call without me hearing.”
“Darling,” she smiled, “I wanted to get cleaned up, nothing more.”
“Your BlackBerry was on the bed before you went in. It wasn’t there afterward.”
Anne’s smile faded. “Alright, I did make a call. It was to my friend. To help us.”
“Then why the secret?”
“It was personal. Do I have to explain everything?”
“Just get us there.”
“We—” She hesitated.
“We—what?”
“Have to wait.”
“For what?”
“She has to make arrangements.”
“Arrangements?”
“Yes. She’ll call me when it’s ready.”
“Who the hell is ‘she’?”
Anne’s eyes flashed with anger. “Understand something. The police are everywhere. There is no other place for us to go.”
Marten didn’t like it. Any of it. He pressed her hard. “Verbrechen des Jahrhunderts.”
“What?”
“Verbrechen des Jahrhunderts. Crime of the century. That’s what you translated from the television. You understand German. You know your way around the city. You had me followed from the airport. That’s how you knew where I was staying. You had somebody watching the hotel, telling you the moment I left it and which way I had gone. It’s how you found me in the park. Then with the police swarming all over you suddenly have to take a shower. And now we’re going to a ‘friend’s’. A woman who has to make ‘arrangements’ first. What kind of friend is she, darling, when everyone in the city is looking for me, and probably by now for you as well? You told me to stop playing games; now it’s your turn. You’re not just Striker Oil. You’re something else. Who? What?”
Ahead was Weidendamm Bridge where Friedrichstrasse crossed the river. Stairs led up to it.
“Take the stairs,” she said quietly.
“I asked you a question.”
Just then two Berlin policemen went by on motorcycles, slowing as they did. A half block later, they stopped and looked back, one of them speaking into a microphone mounted to his helmet. Abruptly Anne took Marten by the hand and pulled him around.
“Kiss me.” She looked into his eyes. “And act like you mean it. Do it now.”
Marten glanced at the police and then did. She kissed him back, long and hard.
The motorcycle cops watched, then rode off.
/> “The stairs,” she said again and steered him toward them
7:40 P.M.
29
7:42 P.M.
Two more motorcycle officers were waiting when they reached the top of the stairs at Weidendamm Bridge. Their machines were parked to one side, and they stood on the sidewalk chatting. Left was the way Anne wanted to go, but to do it they would either have to walk directly past the police or cross the street to the other side, which might well be interpreted as a deliberate move to avoid them. Instead Anne turned them right across the bridge.
As they went she leaned in and kissed Marten again, whispering as she did. “Ahead is the train station. As soon as we get there, go inside.”
They didn’t look back. If the police were following them, there was no way to know. Forty seconds later they were at the station and going inside.
“If they saw us go in and they’re onto us,” Marten said quickly, “they’ll have cops watching every train. They probably do anyway. We have to get out, and now, but without getting on a train or going back out on the street.”
“This way.” Anne led them past the ticketing booths to a down escalator.
At the bottom she turned them left and then right and along a corridor that took them to an exit door at the far end. From there they crossed to the banks of the Spree as it wound through the city. Seconds after that they were at the top of a landing, then walking down a gangplank with a large group of tourists to board a double-decked tour boat named the Monbijou. The lower deck was a restaurant and already full, so the upper deck was where they were instructed to go. The upper deck, open to the view of anyone watching from another boat, a bridge, or from the banks of the waterway itself.
HOTEL ADLON, ROOM 647. 8:05 P.M.
“Get a technical unit up here right away,” Hauptkommissar Emil Franck snapped at Detective Bohlen. Immediately the ghostly thin Bolen clicked on a police radio and left.
It had taken Franck and his colleagues Bohlen and Prosser—with the help of the white-haired taxi driver, Karl Zeller, and concierge Stonner’s excellent staff—little more than thirty minutes to determine the room number and identity of the woman Zeller had picked up from the Hotel Mozart Superior and dropped off at the Adlon’s rear entrance at 6:02 P.M. With her had been a man who clearly resembled the person wanted by the police in the murder of Theo Haas.
“Her full name as registered is Hannah Anne Tidrow,” Stonner read from a computer printout just handed to him by a young hotel employee in a navy business suit.
“Address: 2800 Post Oak Boulevard, Houston, Texas. She checked in at one ten this afternoon and requested an open departure date. She has stayed with us before. She used an American Express credit card in the name of the AG Striker Oil & Energy Company of Houston, Texas. The billing address and the address she gave are the same.”
“When was the last time she was here?” Franck walked carefully around the room, looking at everything, touching nothing.
“Two years ago. March twelve through fifteen.”
“Hauptkommissar.” Detective Gertrude Prosser came in through the open door to the marble and polished-wood bathroom. “One or both of them took a shower. The hotel robe is still damp, as are three towels.”
“Two pieces of luggage.” Franck’s eyes scanned the room. One of Anne’s suitcases was on a luggage rack near the door; another was on the floor next to it. A pair of dark slacks, a designer blazer, two business suits, a pair of black dress slacks, an evening jacket, and a pair of expensive, somewhat wrinkled white linen slacks with a matching short-sleeve top hung in the open closet.
“Technical unit is on the way.” Detective Bohlen came back in from the hallway.
Immediately Franck lifted a small police radio and spoke into it. “This is Franck. I want information on a Hannah Anne Tidrow of the AG Striker Oil and Energy Company of Houston, Texas. What she does there, her title, how she’s involved with the company. If there is a recent photograph of her.” He clicked off and looked to Bohlen. “Get a canine team up here as quickly as possible.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You and Prosser go to the Hotel Mozart Superior. Get the names and addresses of everyone who registered there in the last ten days. Then assemble the staff, give them a description of Hannah Anne Tidrow, and show them the suspect’s photograph. Maybe they were only passing through or using the hotel as a way to throw us off, but if he was a guest there somebody will recognize him, and then we’ll have a name, a room number, and an address.”
“Yes, sir.”
8:12 P.M.
30
MONTE DE EL PARDO, SPAIN. SAME TIME.
The soil under the ancient olive trees was soft from a recent, unseasonable rain and made the grave easy to dig. A few minutes with a shovel and the job was done. Conor White lifted the corpse himself. It was small and delicate in his large hands. For a moment he studied it—the two tiny feet at the end of spindly legs, the unruly fluff of feathers at its neck, the proud twist of its beak, its gray wings, looking as if they could still take flight, neatly tucked back against its body. What kind of bird it was, or had been, he didn’t know.
“I hope you had a good life, my little friend,” he said reverently. Then, turning the creature over so that it would be on its side in the earth, he placed it gently in the grave and covered it over with soil. “Farewell and safe journey,” he said with the same reverence. Then, shovel in hand, he walked off through the olive grove toward the farm house.
To his right he could see the A6, the main highway to Madrid, and the evening traffic on it leading to and from the city. A thick forest of conifers surrounded the house from behind and to the side, obscuring it from the roadway, while fallow, unplowed fields stretched out in front and to the right in an expansive fifty-acre semicircle. The farm was for sale and had been since its elderly owner had passed away more than two years earlier. So far there had been no offers to buy and no funds allotted for upkeep. As a result the olive trees had gone unattended. So had the mile-long dirt and gravel drive leading into the property, an ingress/egress that had been washed away in any number of places by winter rains and was mottled with rocks and overgrown with weeds. Yet, troublesome as it was, it had not deterred vandals from breaking into the house and taking anything and everything of value, leaving only the stove and toilets and a few pieces of unwanted furniture. The only other structure on the property was a dilapidated barn in a state of such disrepair that the only reasonable thing to do would be to knock it down and rebuild it from the ground up. Altogether, the location made an ideal setting for the interrogation that had been going on since he and his colleagues had arrived from Madrid via private jet from Malabo and then been driven here in a hired car some six hours earlier.
Six hours of questioning was a long time and had left the people being talked to both terrified and exhausted. Which was, perhaps, the reason he still had no answer to his queries, and why he’d walked out, to give them a rest and let them consider the gravity of their situation and to get some fresh air himself. It was then he’d found the dead bird in the shadows just outside the door.
8:18 P.M.
He was closer to the house now. Inside he could see the dull glow of a portable lantern one of his men had brought correctly assuming the property no longer had working electricity. He looked up at a sky filled with red streaks and wisps of clouds as the sun set in the west. If he were the smoking man he once had been, this would have been the time he would have brought out a cigarette. But not now. Smoking was in his past, so he had nothing to use as a crutch except his own thoughts and emotions, which at the moment were deeply troubling.
This was hardly the situation he’d imagined when he took the job creating SimCo for Striker and Hadrian more than a year before, resigning from his own company to take a position that would be a major step forward in the highly lucrative world of private security companies. Not just a step but a leap, one that had begun with a ten-year contract with Striker Oil to protect their worker
s in Equatorial Guinea and that was renewable every five years afterward for the next fifty years. It was a situation that had instantly put him on a level with major private security firms worldwide, and that included Hadrian. But in that heady rush of expectation, neither he nor anyone else had foreseen the bizarre, even obscene, minefield that he and SimCo were in now. How graphically simple and stupid the whole thing with the photographs was. Almost as graphically simple and stupid as the Watergate break-in that brought down the Nixon administration almost a half century earlier. Yet it was as real for him as it must have been for Richard Nixon. But he wasn’t a paranoid president locked up in the golden hell of the White House; he was a highly educated, seasoned warrior whose charge it was to bring the nightmare of the photographs to a fast and silent resolution before everything disintegrated because of it.
In the last hours he had heard from Loyal Truex—twice—and from Josiah Wirth, who, at this moment, was on his way to Europe from Texas on an AG Striker corporate jet. Coming, he was sure, for one reason alone, to look over White’s shoulder and direct his every move. Both men had demanded to know where he was and how he was progressing and when, exactly, the problem would be resolved, as if he were a plumber called in to repair a broken toilet while a wedding party waited outside to use it. Both wanted it done yesterday, yet neither understood the complexity of finding the ghost he was chasing. Truex was trouble enough, but at least he and White spoke the same language. Wirth was entirely different, a man too driven, too egotistical, too rich, and too single-minded to view the world from any other perspective but his own. People like that easily became reckless, even foolhardy, especially when they began to lose confidence and feel things were slipping out of their control. As a result they left themselves wide open to their own brand of panic, one that easily led to judgments that could be hugely damaging and sometimes dangerous or even deadly, and not just to themselves but to people around them. And that was the last thing Conor White wanted.