With that the president hung up and stared off, praying he was right, that Marten would find a way to get in touch with him. What he would do then, he truly didn’t know. At the same time, he knew he’d better have something to tell him.
4:52 P.M.
35
BERLIN. SATURDAY, JUNE 5. 1:27 A.M.
Marten slumped in the worn overstuffed chair watching Anne sleep on the bed across from him. A bottle of the Radeberger Pilsner in his hand, he wore boxer shorts and the light blue sport shirt he had on when he’d gone to meet Theo Haas in the park.
He took a sip of the beer and looked restlessly up at the ceiling. The apartment was warm, and Anne slept with only a sheet pulled up around her. She’d invited him to sleep beside her for no other reason than that the bed was the only place to rest. Instead he’d chosen the chair, chiefly because it gave him a clear view of the apartment’s front door. If anyone was coming through it, he wanted to see them before they saw him. Especially if they were police with orders to shoot.
1:32 A.M.
Marten took another drink of the Radeberger and looked at Anne across from him. He could just see her in the dark, sleeping on her side, her legs pulled up toward her chest in an almost fetal position. The CIA, he thought. Jesus, what department had she been in? Research, an operative, what? Whatever it was, it had certainly been important enough for her to still be connected to people who would shadow strangers for her, help her elude the police and provide a safe house and then somehow get them out, or at least try to get them out, of the city.
At forty-two, she was seven years older than he was, but looking at her now she might have been a child. She’d told him she’d been married, and he wondered if she had children herself. If so, how many? And how old? And where were they now? For all he knew they could be in high school or college or in their early twenties and out on their own.
1:40 A.M.
He finished the Radeberger and took the empty bottle into the kitchen. He was exhausted and wired tight at the same time. The idea of sleep seemed impossible. The murder of Theo Haas had been horror enough, but the combination of circumstances that made him a prime suspect was beyond imagination. That a top cop like Franck had been assigned to the case made it all the worse. His credentials aside, his physical bearing, his body language, and the intense look in his eyes as he’d addressed the television cameras had chillingly reminded Marten of his mentor on the Los Angeles Police Department, the late Commander Arnold McClatchy, who had been one of the most revered, relentless, and feared homicide detectives in California history. Like McClatchy, Franck had the entire department at his disposal, and like McClatchy, Marten was certain, once he’d taken on a case he wouldn’t let go until, one way or another, his man was brought to the ground.
Then there was the other thought. Poor as his photograph was, it was everywhere. What if the guys on the LAPD still hunting him saw it and got in touch with Franck? Then what? A little cop-to-cop talk and suddenly a couple of detectives show up from L.A. waiting for Franck to get him. And when he does, he keeps it quiet and hands him over to them. The next day his body is found in a ditch somewhere. Nobody knows who did it. It would save the Berlin PD a big noisy trial and a lot of expense. It made him want to kick himself for blurting to the jerk-off dope dealer on the street that he was an L.A. cop. What if the police caught the guy and he brought it up?
It had been a stupid thing to do.
Just plain stupid.
1:42 A.M.
Marten set the bottle on the kitchen counter and was starting toward the bedroom when he heard sirens approaching. He stopped and listened. What were they? Fire? Ambulance? No, police, he was certain. They grew nearer. He went into the front room and stood beside one of the narrow windows to peer out at the dimly lit alley below. The sirens were closer still. He counted one, two, and then three, all traveling close together. Instinctively he listened for the sound of a circling helicopter. What would he do if they pulled up outside?
“What is it?” Anne called from the other room.
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
Christ, maybe he should tell her to get up and get dressed. But then what? Go out the tiny air-shaft window in the dark and up the fire ladder to the roof? Why? If the police knew where they were, they wouldn’t have a chance to begin with.
He moved farther back from the window, giving him a view of the alley where it met Ziegelstrasse. The sounds grew louder, the shrillness bouncing off the old brick facades of the neighboring buildings. His heart was pounding. If they came, they came. Just give up. There was nothing else to do.
The sounds grew louder and louder. Then they were right there on top of him. He expected to hear the screech of brakes, the instant cutting of sirens, the slam of doors as armed police jumped from the cars. Instead he caught the briefest glimpse of flashing lights. And then, like that, they passed, taking their noise with them.
For a long moment he just stood there in the darkness listening to the pounding of his heart and the sound of his own breath. Suddenly he wondered about his emotional state, if things were beginning to get to him that shouldn’t, or at least that he should have control over. Thinking, too, that this was no time or place for such fragility. It was far too dangerous.
“You need to sleep.” Anne’s voice floated out of the darkness nearby. He started and looked up.
He saw her in the light-spill from the streetlights, standing in the doorway watching him. Her dark hair tucked behind her ears, she was barefoot and still wearing nothing but the T-shirt and panties.
“You’re overtired,” she said quietly.
“I know.” His voice was barely a murmur.
“Come to bed.”
Marten stared at her.
“Please.”
“Alright,” he said finally, then left the window and followed her down the narrow hallway into the bedroom.
1:48 A.M.
36
BERLIN POLICE HEADQUARTERS,
PLATZ DER LUFTBRÜCKE. 2:02 A.M.
“Why this took so long to reach me, I don’t know. But I promise you I will find out.” Hauptkommissar Emil Franck sat behind his serviceable steel desk in his very utilitarian office, his black eyes cold and unblinking.
Two uniformed motorcycle officers stood in front of him; Detectives Gerhard Bohlen and Gertrude Prosser were to his left. For a moment he stared at the motorcycle officers, then pressed the PLAY button on a digital recorder in front of him. A short silence was followed immediately by a recorded conversation between a motorcycle officer and a Funkbetriebszentrale, a central radio dispatcher at police headquarters.
MOTORCYCLE OFFICER: West for West 717.
DISPATCHER: West 717, go ahead.
MOTORCYCLE OFFICER: Male and female pedestrians with resemblance to fugitives on Schiffbauerdamm, approaching Weidendamm Bridge at Friedrichstrasse. Copy.
DISPATCHER: I have it, West 717.
There was a several-second pause and then:
MOTORCYCLE OFFICER: Ah, West for West 717, again, Dispatch. Cancel that. They’re just two lovebirds playing suck face.
DISPATCHER: I have it, West 717.
Immediately Franck’s right index finger shot out and punched the STOP button. The player went silent, and he looked up at the two motorcycle officers across from him.
“Your first call came at 19:38:44 hours,” he snapped at the officer designated West 717. “Why did you cancel it?”
“It seemed like nothing. They saw us. They didn’t care. Hardly the style of fugitives, Hauptkommissar.”
“How do you presume that? You said yourself they resembled the suspects. How do you know what they were doing or why? Schiffbauerdamm at the Weidendamm Bridge is less than a twenty-minute walk from the Hotel Adlon, and 19:38 was in the correct time frame.” Immediately Franck’s eyes shifted from West 717 to the second officer.
“Did you agree with the evaluation?”
“Yes, Hauptkommissar.”
“I want a report
on my desk in five minutes. Exactly what those people looked like. What they were wearing. What they were carrying. And any other circumstance or par tic u lar either of you can remember. You may go!”
Both men drew up, saluted, then turned and left, their futures in the Berlin Police Department very much in doubt.
The door closed behind them, and Franck looked to Bohlen and Prosser. “Maybe they were our Mr. Marten and Ms. Tidrow, maybe they weren’t. The time was right, the area was right. Handler’s dogs lost them at the Reichstag construction site, a fistful of tossed rocks from the Spree. This ‘suck face’ couple were on Schiffbauerdamm at Weidendamm Bridge, also on the Spree and not far from the Reichstag.”
Franck stood up from his desk and crossed to a huge sectioned map of Berlin mounted on a far wall. He stared at it for a moment as if to reassure himself of the Schiffbauerdamm/Weidendamm Bridge location, an intersection he could have pointed to in his sleep, the same as he could almost every other street and intersection in the city. But it was his nature to double-check, and he did. Then, assured, he turned back to his detectives.
“That intersection has two things in par tic u lar. Friedrichstrasse station and the river itself, which means tour boats. The moment I have the report from our very observant officers, I want investigators sent out to interview all station and train personnel and all tour boat crews on duty from 19:38 hours on. They are to get people out of bed if necessary. If our ‘lovebirds’ were somewhere there, I want to know every detail of it. If they were in the station, which door they came in and went out. If they were on a train or boat, where they got on and where they got off.”
2:25 A.M.
Franck stood alone looking at the map trying to assess where in the city Marten and Anne Tidrow might have gone and to put it together with the other information that had come in. Just after midnight he’d received an answer to his query about Marten’s character and the architectural landscape firm where he was employed in Manchester, England. First, Marten was an American expatriate from Vermont who had no criminal record, rented a nice apartment, and paid his bills on time. Second, his firm, Fitzsimmons and Justice, was a long-established, highly respected business that catered almost entirely to municipal projects or private, mostly upscale clientele. Marten had worked there for more than two years following his graduation with an advanced degree from the University of Manchester. First-rate credentials all the way around. As for Hannah Anne Tidrow, she was not only a member of the board of directors of the AG Striker Oil and Energy Company of Houston, Texas, she was the daughter of the company’s late chairman, Virgil Wyatt Tidrow. Moreover, Striker Oil, in partnership with the American private security contractor Hadrian LLC of Manassas, Virginia, had been working in Iraq under a U.S. State Department contract since shortly after the war began and was currently under the scrutiny of the United States Congress for alleged questionable business practices there. Further, Striker Oil did not have an office in Berlin or anywhere else in Europe. Lastly, Marten had arrived at Berlin Tegel Airport at eleven o’clock yesterday morning, coming in not from Manchester but from Paris. Barely two hours later, Anne Tidrow had arrived, also from Paris.
Franck stared at the map a moment longer, then went back to his desk and sat down. Why in hell, he thought, would two people like that come all the way to Berlin to murder Theo Haas and in a place as crowded and public as the Platz der Republik?
He turned to his computer and sent an URGENT e-mail to Detectives Bohlen and Prosser.
Please get more on Striker Oil activities outside the U.S. and Iraq. Also find out where Marten and Tidrow had been before Paris.
Done, he pulled a stack of reports toward him, the findings of more than two dozen investigators who had interviewed witnesses and bystanders at the Platz der Republik and the Brandenburg Gate shortly after Haas’s murder. He opened the first and began to read. Maybe, hopefully, there was something somewhere in them that had been overlooked.
37
2:57 A.M.
In two of the first four reports, three eyewitnesses—one at the Platz der Republik and two near the Brandenburg Gate—had made mention of a young, curly-haired man in a black sweater running through the crowd as if he were being chased. That was all, just that. Nothing about what he looked like, his size, or what he was wearing other than the sweater. It all three cases it was just a throwaway observation. Certainly nothing that would tie him in with Marten, Anne Tidrow, or the Haas murder. Nonetheless Franck made a note about it and reached for the fifth report. As he did his phone rang. He glanced at the clock on his desk and then picked up.
“Yes.”
“Hauptkommissar.” It was Gertrude Prosser.
“You should be home sleeping. A few hours at least.”
“You are working.”
“Yes, but I’m foolish. Go home, Gertrude. You can’t work if you don’t rest.”
“Hauptkommissar.” Her voice became urgent. “I just received answers on two pieces of information you requested a short while ago. I think they should be regarded as confidential.”
“Go on.”
“You wanted to know where Nicholas Marten and Anne Tidrow had been before Paris. Answer, they had both come in on the same Air France flight from Malabo, on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea.”
“Equatorial Guinea?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The second piece?”
“Striker Oil has oil field service and exploration contracts around the world. Lately they have expanded exploration activities on the island of Bioko and have hired a British private military contractor called SimCo to provide protective services there. And then I discovered something else.” She paused, and he could feel the excitement in her.
“Go on.”
“A catholic priest, a Father Willy Dorhn, was killed in southern Bioko by members of the national army a day before Marten and Ms. Tidrow left there.”
“So?”
“Father Dorhn was the brother of Theo Haas.”
“What?”
“That’s all I have so far. There is a major civil war building in Equatorial Guinea. Maybe they are all connected.”
“Yes, maybe. Good work, and thank you, Kommissar Prosser. Go home and get some sleep.”
Emil Franck hung up. This was a turn he would never have expected. Was it possible Marten and Anne Tidrow, and maybe her oil company, were somehow involved in the civil war in Equatorial Guinea? And had some part of it spilled over into Berlin via Theo Haas and his brother? If so, why? The questions puzzled and troubled him at the same time, and he suddenly wondered if this was something that should be handled by either the BND, the Federal Intelligence Service, or the BKA, the Federal Criminal Police, rather than his office.
But bringing in either agency would change everything. Their presence would be too unwieldy and have too much media coverage. As a result he might lose Marten and Anne Tidrow altogether. No, can’t do it, he thought. For now, at least, he would do as Gertrude Prosser had advised and keep the information confidential.
Again he glanced at the clock on his desk.
3:09 A.M.
Time to lie down on the worn leather couch across from him and get some sleep himself. He closed the reports he’d been studying and was reaching to turn off his desk lamp when his personal cell phone sounded, announcing an incoming call with a musical ringtone a technical assistant had programmed, which he detested.
Who was it? His wife would have long been asleep. His children were out of the country, his twenty-year-old daughter spending a college year in China, his nineteen-year-old son backpacking in New Zealand. Very few others had the number.
The phone went silent, then rang again. He picked up and clicked on.
“Yes.”
“I thought I’d find you working,” a throaty female voice came back.
Franck paused, trying to place the voice. Then he did. “It’s been a long time.”
“We need to talk.”
“When?”
&
nbsp; “Twenty minutes.”
“Same place?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Franck said, then slowly clicked off. He was right, it had been a long time. But putting things together, he knew he should have expected to hear from her.
3:12 A.M.
38
7:15 A.M.
Marten woke with a start. The bed beside him was empty. He looked around. The clothes Anne had taken off the night before to carefully fold and lay atop the chest of drawers were gone.
“Anne?”
There was no reply. He got up fast.
“Anne?”
He went down the hall, glanced at the open bathroom door, then went into the front room, then into the tiny kitchen. She wasn’t there. It was then he smelled the coffee and saw the automatic coffeemaker on the counter near the sink. A freshly brewed pot was nestled inside it. A cup sat alongside. So did a note.
Back soon. Stay here.
I have your passport.
His passport? Maybe he had threatened to leave and take his chances with the police, but in truth, for the moment, at least, he was better off staying right where he was and letting her try to find a way to get them out of Berlin. Trouble was, by now she would be vulnerable to capture, too, and would know it, so where the hell did she go? Immediately came another thought. What if someone knocked on the door? Or had a key and just came in? Anne would have been able to handle things because she set it all up. He didn’t even know whose apartment this was.
As if in answer to his concern, he suddenly heard voices in the alley outside. Immediately he went into the front room, stood by the window, and carefully looked out. A light rain was falling, and a number of people were entering the alley from the street under umbrellas. Most looked like they were college age or close to it. It made him think there might be some kind of school farther down the alley that had Saturday classes. If so, passport or not, it might be a place for him to hide, to blend in among the students, in the event the police began a house-to-house search.