Effrem said, “A few e-mail headers and a dicey-looking hyperlink.”
“Roger. Send it to me:
[email protected]”
Jack got on his cell phone and forwarded Mitch a Dropbox link containing the e-mail headers from Belinda and the suspicious link Jack had lifted from Peter Hahn’s computer. Mitch walked over to a laptop sitting on the counter, checked his e-mail, clicked on Jack’s link. He studied the material, then said, “Okay, well, nothing suspicious about these headers. Let’s have a look at the link. Interesting.”
From there Mitch fell into a stream-of-consciousness conversation with himself that sounded only vaguely like English to Jack:
“Have to hide my IP . . . Let’s go with a proxy from Ecuador. Boot up the VM, get you sandboxed . . . Let’s see how good you are. Oh, trace route, how I love you . . .”
After another two minutes of this Mitch straightened up and said, “So, Effrem’s friend, did you click on this link?”
“No.”
“Smart. I’ve got good news and bad news. Good news is I can do something with this. Bad news is it’s going to take a few hours, maybe the day. I’ll call you.”
MUNICH, GERMANY
Mitch called Effrem’s cell phone mid-morning the next day. Effrem put him on speaker. “Is Mr. X there, too?” asked Mitch.
“I’m here,” Jack replied.
“Okay, so the computer you got this hyperlink from . . . Did you happen to check the Web browser history? Anything odd about it?”
“You could say that.”
“I figured. You’re right. The site it links to is down, but I was able to root out some interesting stuff. This is malware—a bot, actually—designed to insert Web history into the target computer. It’s also designed to sign up the user at some discussion forums, do some troll posting, and so forth.”
“What kind of forums?”
“Political crap, conspiracy stuff.”
This matched what Jack had seen on Hahn’s computer. “Anything else?” he asked. “Was it monitoring him?”
“Nope,” said Mitch. “Just playing grab-ass with his browser history. Cleverly designed bot, too.”
Effrem asked, “Any idea who created it?”
“I know exactly who created it. All the servers he used were anagrams for Game of Thrones characters: storkbarb, hotboarbanterer, tinylionsranter.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope. This guy’s good, but everybody’s got their peccadilloes. This is his.”
“What’s his name and where can we find him?” Jack asked.
“The name part is easy,” Mitch replied. “Gerhard Klugmann. As for where, that’s a bit trickier. Gerhard ain’t exactly somebody you Google. I can do some digging, but he’s skittish. If I don’t pin him down without him realizing it, he’ll pull up stakes and move on.”
“Digitally or physically?” asked Effrem.
“Both, maybe. Guys like him can work anywhere.”
“Find him,” Jack ordered.
—
After running a few errands, they spent the afternoon waiting in Jack’s room at the Hotel München Palace. Waiting for a call from Mitch; waiting for a call from Belinda; waiting for a call from one of Jack’s own contacts, a gun guy he had met a year earlier during a routine mission for The Campus. Given the penalties for a foreigner carrying a weapon on German soil, Jack had wanted to avoid doing so, but Effrem’s search for 8 Friedenstrasse led to something called Kultfabrik. In Jack’s eyes, urban ambush points didn’t come any better.
A popular hangout that catered to what one website described as Munich’s “bacchanalian night people,” Kultfabrik was a noodle factory turned warren of pubs, discos, a skate park, gambling pavilions, game arcades, and flea markets. The twenty-acre complex was in an industrial area of Munich just east of the Ostbahnhof rail complex. Kultfabrik was closed, Effrem told him, and in the middle of conversion to Werksviertel, an office park/cultural center/apartment complex. In short, Kultfabrik was a construction zone.
This alone put Jack on guard, but in perusing Eric Schrader’s day planner, Effrem had discovered a disturbing discrepancy: Over the last four months Schrader had met with S.M.—Stephan Möller—six times in Munich. However, for three of these meetings Schrader hadn’t even been in the city, but rather in Lyon or Zurich. This left two possibilities: one, Schrader was bad with dates; or two, the day planner was a plant and they were being lured to Kultfabrik. By whom? The most obvious answer was Möller, but that meant either Möller had known about their pursuit of him or he’d learned of their arrival in Munich and assumed they would find Schrader’s apartment.
—
At seven o’clock Jack’s gun guy called and the meeting was set: one hour, at the Ostbahnhof.
Jack called Belinda’s cell phone and got her voice mail. He left no message.
“Let’s go,” Jack told Effrem.
—
They left moments later, Jack in his Citroën, Effrem in his recently rented Audi, and found a pair of parking spots just east of the Orleansplatz, a crescent-shaped public park across from the rail station.
With night falling, the lights of food vendors’ stalls were coming on, casting colorful stripes across the pathways and on through the trees. The afternoon crowds, made up mostly of parents and children, were thinning out and being slowly replaced by an early-twenties crowd of singles.
Jack stopped at one of the vendor stalls and got a small soda and a napkin, and he and Effrem sat down on a nearby bench. Jack gulped half of the soda, gave the rest to Effrem, then used the napkin to dry the cup’s interior before stuffing six hundred-euro notes inside and replacing the lid.
At seven-forty they crossed Orleansstrasse to the Ostbahnhof, a wide, flat-fronted building just east of the rail hub. In the distance Jack could hear the rumble and screech of incoming and outgoing trains, accompanied by a woman’s voice over the station’s public address system. The station buzzed with commuters.
Once inside, they picked their way through the throngs to a coffee kiosk counter on the north side of the station. Jack’s contact—actually, Ding Chavez’s contact—a man he knew only as Freddy, spotted Jack and waved a rolled-up newspaper at him.
“Wait here,” Jack told Effrem, and walked over.
He and Freddy shook hands. “Who’s that?” Freddy asked in heavily accented English.
“My intern. How’ve you been?”
“Ja, good. I could not get exactly what you asked for, but close. They’re clean.” Freddy placed a brass key with a red plastic dongle on the counter. “Locker twenty-six.”
This had multiple meanings, Jack knew. The guns hadn’t been used in a crime, weren’t stolen, and weren’t traceable; the first two were easy enough to manage, but the third was trickier. Most likely Freddy simply meant the weapons weren’t traceable to him.
Freddy asked, “Anything else I can do for you?”
“Maybe. I’ll let you know.” Jack placed his soda cup on the counter before Freddy, then palmed the key. “How’re you set outside Munich?”
“I have a few friends. Depends on what kind of help you need,” replied Freddy.
“Thanks. See you.”
Jack walked away, nodded at Effrem to follow, then walked across the station to a bank of temporary lockers. He found number 26, inserted the key, removed the blue backpack inside, then left.
—
Once they were back in their cars, Jack picked up Rosenheimer Strasse and headed east, passed beneath the railroad overpass, then turned north onto Friedenstrasse and slowed down to let Effrem make the turn and catch up.
Jack donned the headset/walkie-talkie rig they’d purchased earlier at Conrad, Munich’s version of Radio Shack, then keyed the talk button. “You there?”
After a few seconds Effrem came back: “Here. These are nifty, eh?”
&nbs
p; “That’s what I asked for when I went in,” Jack replied, and sped up again. “Stay close.”
A few hundred yards ahead on the right Jack saw strobing colored lights and lasers crisscrossing the darkening sky. He rolled down the passenger window and the car’s interior was filled with the muted thump of live German trance music.
“I thought you said Kultfabrik was closed,” Jack radioed.
“It is. That’s Optimolwerke. According to the Web, it’s Kultfabrik’s smaller, rowdier next-door neighbor. Developers have bought it. Another couple weeks and it’ll be shut down, too.”
Jack kept driving until they drew even with the entrance to Optimolwerke’s yellow-lighted archway, where hundreds of revelers, most of them dressed in skimpy clothes adorned with rainbow-hued glow sticks, milled about, drinking, laughing, and smoking. A pair of blond-haired girls sat on the curb, vomiting into the garbage-strewn gutter.
Jack muttered, “Hello, future Mrs. Jack Ryan.”
As Effrem had described, Optimolwerke sat directly beside the Kultfabrik construction site, the border a twelve-foot-tall, barbed-wire fence that abutted a line of Bavarian-style structures housing Optimolwerke’s pubs and arcades. It reminded Jack of a satellite view of North and South Korea at night: pitch blackness to one side, a sea of lights on the other.
As if reading Jack’s mind, Effrem radioed, “It’s like a boozy, half-naked Iron Curtain.”
In his rearview mirror Jack saw a little person in a Fred Flintstone costume wave at Effrem’s Audi and shout, “Wie geht’s, Schweinhund!”
Effrem said, “I think he just called me a pig-dog.”
“Sounds about right,” Jack replied. “Keep moving. We’re turning right at the next intersection.”
Jack and Effrem had spent hours studying the Google Earth view of Kultfabrik and its environs, but as with all satellite imagery, this gave them only half the picture. On the ground everything looked different and felt different. Especially at night. The first order of business was for them to start connecting the landmark dots.
Jack drove slowly past the gated and chain-locked entrance of Kultfabrik itself, then made the turn onto Grafinger Strasse. Like its shared border with Optimolwerke, the construction site’s northern and eastern sides were ringed by a high barbed-wire fence, but here they were partially obscured by tall trees so thick Jack’s view of the site was obstructed.
Jack spent the next few minutes circumnavigating Kultfabrik before turning back onto Friedenstrasse and repeating the process, this time lingering at the alleys and driveways of the nearby office parks and apartment buildings as he reconciled the area’s overhead image with his ground view. Satisfied with his reconnoiter, he met Effrem in the parking lot of a closed auto body shop down Grafinger Strasse.
Effrem slowed to a hood-to-trunk stop beside Jack’s Citroën and said out his window, “Well? What do you think?”
Jack thought: I’d like to have three more shooters, a pair of L1 GPNVG-18 ground panoramic night-vision goggles, and a 3D-printed mockup of the place, but if wishes were horses . . . Instead, he replied simply, “The sooner I get in there, the better.”
It was eight-thirty, thirty minutes before the meeting time. If this was a trap, Möller and his people would probably be doing what Jack was trying to do: set up early and choose his ground. Möller’s purpose would be clear, Jack knew: kill him and Effrem. But Jack’s end goal was fuzzier. All he knew was, if Möller was going to be there, it was an opportunity he wasn’t going to miss.
“Wish you’d change your mind,” Effrem said. “You should have somebody watching your six. Did I say that right?”
“Perfect.” Jack had decided to post Effrem outside the construction site as a quick-response backup, but this was only partially true. Jack couldn’t afford the distraction of having to worry about the young journalist. “I’ll feel better knowing you’ve got the perimeter.”
Jack opened the backpack they’d collected from the Ostbahnhof and unzipped it. Inside were two handguns, one an HK USP45 with Gemtech Blackside noise suppressor, the other a snub-nosed .38 revolver. Better to keep it simple for Effrem. He passed the revolver to Effrem, along with three spare speed loaders.
“What’s rule one?” Jack asked.
“Never point this thing at anything I don’t want to kill.”
“Including yourself.”
Effrem gave him a withering gaze. “I have fired a gun before, you know.”
“Was anyone shooting back?”
“No.”
“Big difference,” Jack replied. “Post yourself on the corner and we’ll get started.”
“Good luck.”
Effrem pulled away, as did Jack, who paused at the lot’s exit until he saw Effrem’s Audi pull to the curb at Grafinger Strasse and Friedenstrasse and douse the headlights. From there Effrem would be able to see two of the three likely approaches to the construction site.
Jack turned left, headed south a hundred yards, then turned into the apartment complex’s parking lot. The front was well lit by streetlamps, but as Jack proceeded around the building they faded and darkness enveloped the car. When he reached the back of the property he turned right and pulled beneath a squat oak tree. He turned off the car, climbed out, then eased shut the car door and locked it.
In the distance he could hear the thump-umph-umph of a band at Optimolwerke. Through the boughs of the tree the night sky pulsed red, yellow, and purple in time with the pumping music.
Jack took off his jacket, donned the HK’s shoulder rig, then put his jacket back on and adjusted the rig so the noise suppressor wouldn’t poke out the bottom of his jacket. Next he donned the last piece of gear he’d purchased from Conrad, an off-brand set of night-vision goggles that looked more like a seventies-era View-Master with a head strap than it did a military-grade pair of NVGs. Jack mounted the goggles on his head, powered up the unit, and looked around. The muted gray-green view was grainy and blurred at the edges but clear enough to keep him from bumping into bad guys. How long the batteries would last Jack didn’t know. He took off the goggles.
He radioed Effrem: “You set?”
“Set. A few cars have passed down Friedenstrasse, but nobody’s turned. Quiet down Grafinger Strasse, too.”
“Good. I’m moving.”
MUNICH, GERMANY
Jack ducked beneath the tree boughs and walked until he reached the construction site’s outer fence, then followed it until he reached the sidewalk along Grafinger Strasse, where he headed in Effrem’s direction. He could see the Audi a hundred yards ahead and across the street.
“Can you see me?” Jack radioed.
“No.”
“Good.”
Halfway down the block, Jack stopped and looked around for landmarks. Almost there. He proceeded another fifty feet, stopped again to check his location, then slipped into the trees to his left and picked his way through the foliage till his outstretched hand touched the hurricane fence. His early reconnoiter had shown what looked like a gap in the fence. He donned the NVGs and powered them on.
He’d found the spot. A triangular section of fencing had been cut away; the tool marks were old and a cluster of vines had already pushed their way through the opening. Through the gap Jack saw a pair of backhoe scoops, and beyond these a row of construction trailers. This was the site’s heavy equipment parking area and site offices. He crawled through the gap, then crept to the nearest backhoe scoop and ducked inside.
Though closed and vacant, Kultfabrik’s buildings were too many to search, and the ground was too open for Jack’s liking. Aside from the long, north-south line of abandoned arcades, pubs, and pool halls on the site’s far side, only two buildings had survived the demolition: to Jack’s left, in the center of the site, a clamshell open-air amphitheater; to his right, sitting just inside the fence at the corner of Friedenstrasse and Grafinger Strasse, an L-shaped office
building. The walls of the first four floors were finished, sans windows, but the fifth floor was still mostly skeletal, with iron beams and girders backlit by the night sky. Overlapping blue plastic tarps formed the building’s temporary roof. Aluminum scaffolding enclosed the building’s first three floors.
This was his destination. If he were laying a trap, he’d want the high ground. At the very least it was the ideal observation post. As a sniper perch, it was serviceable.
Jack checked his watch: eight forty-five.
He scanned the office building with his NVG, left to right and bottom to top. In his monochrome view the walls appeared gray; the window openings were charcoal rectangles. He saw no shadows, no movement. He picked up a rock and hurled it over the bulldozer. As the rock thunked against the nearest trailer’s roof, Jack watched the building. Again, he saw no movement. Twice more he repeated the process with the same result, then once more but this time pelting the side of the building itself. Nothing.
Either Möller’s men were not set up in there, or they were too disciplined to overtly react to Jack’s stone-throwing. Either way, it was time to move.
Jack slipped back to the fence and turned left, using the low-hanging tree branches to cover his movement. When he reached the building, he paused to look and listen, then continued to the corner of the fence. He looked right; through the foliage he could just make out Effrem’s shadowed form sitting in the Audi’s driver’s seat.
“I’m at your nine o’clock.”
Effrem’s head turned. In the NVG glow Effrem’s eyes narrowed and darted. “Yeah, I don’t see you. Nothing to report. All quiet. Maybe we’ve got it wrong.”
A small part of Jack hoped Effrem was right. Getting into a firefight on foreign soil was something best avoided. Trading bullets with bad guys in a major city was downright stupid. The cacophony coming from Optimolwerke would obscure the sounds of gunfire but that was little comfort. You never fight the war you want, Jack knew. You fight the war you have.