I pushed, giving the revolving door a hefty shove. It didn’t react to my pressure (considerable), which told me the whole apparatus was hydraulically controlled. I pushed again, and the door slowly moved forward a few inches. At the precise instant when I was trapped halfway, the hydraulic mechanism shut down, and it became impossible to move. After a two-second pause, there was another click, I pushed once again, the door moved, and I emerged into a lowceilinged foyer about eight feet wide by twelve feet long, with a single steel door at the far end. Here, the walls were carpeted, and the floor was marble. A long sofa sat along one wall, a chrome and glass coffee table piled with magazines centered in front of it. Six chairs (two ranks of three), sat adjacent to the low table. The whole place was very . . . Spartan. Twelve seconds later, Boomerang’s lean frame emerged. His eyes told me he’d seen the same thing I had, which is that the revolving door was built so as to be able to trap someone inside.
The steel door opened, and two young men in blue blazers, gray trousers, white shirts, maroon ties, and sensible black shoes emerged. They were wearing photo IDs on chains around their necks and carrying handheld metal detectors. The first of the security guards, whose blazer bore a metal name tag on its pocket, looked at me as if he knew me and said, “Guten Tag, Captain Marcinko.”
I eyeballed his nameplate. “Guten Tag, Otto.” I allowed Otto to run his detector over my body. It worked well enough, because it picked up the Heckler & Koch P7-M13 that sat in an inside-the-pants holster just behind my wallet pocket, as well as the Spyderco folder clipped to my right-hand trouser pocket. As he gave me the once-over, his compadre, whose nameplate bore the legend FRITZ, worked Boomerang stem to stern.
“You must give me the weapons, Captain,” Otto said politely. “They are not allowed in the offices.”
I snapped back at him in rapid German. “But of course. And you will give everything back to me when we leave. That is correct, is it not, Otto?”
“Jawohl,” he said, snapping to attention.
I handed over my pistol and knife. Boomerang surrendered his long, serrated Benchmark folder and the stainless little Sig Sauer P-230 he invariably carries as a backup weapon. Otto and Fritz had missed a total of five other weapons on our bodies, but I wasn’t about to clue them in. Instead, we followed as Fritz ran his ID card through an electronic reader and we were passed through the door at the end of the foyer, and into BeckIndustrie’s headquarters building itself.
It was like being transported into another world. We emerged into an expansive, three-story atrium, all faced in black, green-veined marble. There were three banks of elevators to our left, and another three to our right. Sunlight cascaded through the lightly tinted windows, reflecting off the marble walls and floor. It was all very impressive.
We took one of the starboard-side elevators, whooshing up to the twenty-eighth floor—the very top of the building, judging from the push buttons. There, the elevator went bing, the doors opened, and we emerged into a lushly carpeted receiving area. An attractive young woman in a short-skirted black wool Chanel suit, and the klunky, high-heeled, inch-and-a-half-thick soled shoes so fashionable in Europe today, was waiting as the elevator doors opened. She nodded in the general direction of Otto and Fritz, dismissing them with a haughty glance. “Follow me, please, Captain Marcinko,” she said with the impersonal tone of an automaton. She turned on her well-turned four-inch heel without waiting for an answer and started down the wide corridor, her pantyhose making an interesting sound as she walked. Boomerang, who was drooling, and I, who was not, followed in her Chanel No. 5 wake.
First of all, fantasies are for the young. More to the point, I had Warrior work to do. I perused as we padded behind on thick, floral-patterned carpet, the kind of stuff that sells for a hundred bucks a square yard, my feet probing for pressure sensors in the thick wool. Hey, since Ms. Chanel was obviously too preoccupied to keep an eye on me, I’d use the time to do a little target assessing. For example, there had been two video cameras by the elevators, but I saw none as we started down the corridor.
I kept scanning as we walked. This was obviously the floor where all the top executives lived. The doors to the offices (or suites; I couldn’t tell) were costly wood, not utilitarian metal. There wasn’t a cubicle to be seen. Even the secretaries had expensive, Queen Anne desks, with inlaid wood and leather tops. Their chairs were leather, too. And except for one trio of scuff-shoed, baggy-pants, four-eyed dweebs in blue lab coats mit plastic penholders waiting while a nicely turned-out secretary scanned a credit-type I.D. card and pulled open the only door on the floor marked BUTRITT VERBOTTEN,52 all the men were dressed in the kinds of thirty-five-hundred-dollar slash four-grand Italian and English–cut suits whose jacket cuff buttons actually buttoned and unbuttoned; suits you don’t buy off the rack and wear sans alterations.
I had to hand it to Lothar Beck—or perhaps more accurately to the people who worked for him. The security at BeckIndustrie was pretty good. For example, as we proceeded to wherever we were going I noted that each of the office (or suite) doors was equipped with an electronic card-reader. To get in, you slid an ID card into a reader. Once it had been scanned and you’d been cleared, the door unlocked, you pulled it open, and voilà, you’re in.
They’re using the same kind of thing at the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon these days. But only on the perimeters. Here, every fucking door was wired, which made it possible for Lothar Beck to track every single employee as he/she/it moved around the building. I knew he could even get printouts that told him who was inside the HQ at any specific time, as well as when they’d come, and where they’d gone. Even the Herren and Damen bathroom doors had scanners. Oh, yeah, it was all very anal retentive. But then, this after all was Germany. And this place, in which Lothar worked? Think of it as LODAR: Land Of Der Anal Retentive.
That was all on the one hand. On the other hand, these scanner devices are not impenetrable. In fact, by the time we’d been quickmarched down the corridor, I’d already figured out how to bypass the fucking things. I especially wanted to get a peek behind the doorway with the “No Entry” sign, where the out-of-place dweebs had scurried.
And guess what? By the time we’d arrived in front of a huge set of wrought-iron banded, double-thick wood doors, each of which was emblazoned with the omnipresent BeckIndustrie crest in red, black, and gilt, I’d worked out a doable scenario for getting moi and one of my boys back into this place after hours for a quiet little sneak-and-peek.
But that would be later. This was now, and now we were being ushered into the holy of holies. The doors parted, Ms. Chanel departed, her thighs still making come-hither sounds, and we found ourselves in a huge, pentagon-shaped antechamber, with a vaulted ceiling supported by hand-carved stone ribs formed into the shapes of stars, or perhaps flower petals. Who cared: it was like going back in time about five hundred years.
I experienced an incredible, contrapuntal feeling when I juxtaposed the five-walled room in which we were standing against the austere, futuristic glass and steel building, and the contemporary design of the executive hallway. This room had been designed as the reception hall of a fucking castle. It was so authentic it was breathtaking.
Directly to my left, a pair of narrow, faux arched windows sat ten feet apart. The windows were framed by weathered beams and held ornate stained glass that pictured scenes from the Crusades. Between the windows was an inlaid wood-framed display table. Under its glass top, a dozen seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pistols were displayed atop green striated velvet. There were bulky matchlocks and elegant flintlocks, displayed muzzle to muzzle with Teutonic preciseness. In the middle of the display, two sets of ornately decorated eighteenth-century dueling flintlocks sat in opulent burl walnut boxes trimmed in gold.
I turned away from the weapons to drink in the rest of the room. Ornately carved and delicately painted wood rosettes were positioned at the centers of each of the ceiling vaults. Each wall of the pentagon was painted in a diff
erent and wonderful pattern. Mounted against the near right-hand wall, which was finished in a floral pattern, were two complete armor suits, mirror polished and bearing the broad-bladed swords common to the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. The adjacent wall was painted with coats of arms, each set into a trompe l’oeil “frame” of gold and faux wood. The far left-hand wall was covered by a well-restored tapestry depicting the founding of Rome; the wall next to it repeated the window design, but with different stained glass images, and a display of long-barreled muskets and blunderbusses.
There were tables thick with gilt and scrollwork; curved, heavy wood chairs; pikes and halberds displayed in racks. There were crossbows. It was a true Warrior’s haven, full of the instruments of death that mean so much of life to me.
Then, with an ominous creak, a thick, hidden doorway so cunningly cut into the coat of arms wall that I hadn’t been able to pick it out, swung out toward us. Lothar Beck emerged, strode in, and broke the mood.
11
LOTHAR WAS AN IMPOSING MAN—AT FIRST GLANCE. HE stood six feet at least, maybe six one. And, although I hadn’t noted it in the clip file photos I’d perused with Fred, his body was dwarfed by a huge, out-of-proportion head with the kind of exaggerated features common to TV anchormen or movie stars. He had a wide, platycephalic forehead accentuated by thick dark hair combed straight back, massive, bushy, wild-haired black eyebrows in the Brezhnev style, and a broad nose that looked as if he’d been run into one or more walls at one point in his life. His lips were thick, like Mick Jagger’s. He had the kind of faux-tan complexion rich folks get from their own private tanning beds.
“I hope you like my . . . foyer,” he said in gently accented English. “It is an exact duplicate of my favorite antechamber at my country house. The weapons, there and here, are all real, and all operational.” He grinned, and paused to wipe a tear of spittle from the left-side corner of his mouth. “There is no use in owning a nonfunctional weapon, Captain, don’t you agree?”
I said nothing, and he continued his monologue. “I like to come here from time to time and meditate with my weapons; it is a way to interrupt the rigors of the day’s stress and renew my spiritual side.”
Those words struck me as odd, because Lothar Beck didn’t seem to be the sort of man who’d have a spiritual side. He didn’t look meditative, either, but rather sepulchral. He was dressed all in black. Black Bally boots, soft, black flannel trousers, a black-on-black jacquard silk short-point collared shirt buttoned all the way to his throat, and a black double-breasted cashmere jacket with narrow, peaked lapels. On his left wrist was a discreet solid gold Rolex Oyster Datejust. Cinched around his right was a gold chain fashioned of miniature links in the shape of those used in horse bridles. He wore tortoise-enamel framed, round-lensed glasses with rose-tinted lenses. The ensemble was cosmopolitan, urbane, sophisticated. It was absolutely bec-fin53 perfect.
But he wasn’t perfect—or even close. There was a distinct warped angularity to his frame, almost as if he had forgotten to take the hanger out of his jacket before he’d put it on. And then I realized that the lopsided motherfucker was as hunchbacked as Quasimodo, which was something none of the surveillance photos had indicated, and Fred (who says German generals don’t have a sense of humor?) hadn’t bothered to tell me.
I grabbed a second look at this Hunched Beck of Düsseldorf, because there was more: the sole of Lothar’s left Bally boot was three times the thickness of the right Bally’s sole. But that didn’t cause him any problems. He lurched across the expanse of the room at flank speed, like some caricaturing, dinner-theater actor playing Richard the Third, his platform sole stridently smacking the off-beat on the uncovered stone flooring, tha-wump, tha-wump, tha-wump. His right arm was outstretched, as if to take my hand.
“Kapitän Marcinko,” he trolled.
Olé. I fooled him with a pase that would have done credit to Manolete, then sidestepped, careful not to bump into Boomerang, and let Lothar’s speed and bulk carry him past me. He stopped, whirled like a dervish, and headed back in my direction: tha-wump, tha-wump, tha-wump.
This time I stopped him by stepping in front of him. He came to a Krameresque halt, and flailed his shoulder in my direction, his right hand still flapping, although I now realized it was flapping quite uselessly. He slapped the right hand down with his left, and gave me a TVE54 that was much less appreciated than the one I’d received from First Sergeant M. Walsh. Then, satisfied about whatever the fuck he had to be satisfied about, he offered me his south paw.
I took his hand and gave it a healthy squeeze. There’s a nasty technique to this: you grab the asshole’s fingers on the joints just north of the metacarpus before he can get a firm grip on your hand, and by doing so you can cause excruciating pain if you squeeze h-a-r-d, which is exactly what I planned to do.
But the sumbitch was too fast for me. He gave me a rose-tinted grin, those thick, Jagger-esque lips parting to display perfectly capped & bonded teeth. He gripped my hand squarely, and then he squoze back, exerting almost as many pounds per square centimeter as I am capable of. He caused me enough pain to make me impressed.
Here is a truth, folks: people with disabilities, be they physical or mental, often work hard to overcome their limitations, by stretching in new directions. And Lothar Beck was obviously one of those types.
Well, good for him. And better for me. I am an EEO kind of Rogue, which means I treat everyone alike: i.e., JUST LIKE SHIT. And that’s the way I was going to deal with Lothar. I didn’t think of him as handicapped, crippled, or (as one might legally be forced to say in these politically correct days), spinally challenged. I’d deal with him just as if he was any other scumbag asshole cockbreath tango.
And so, I looked Lothar in the eye, grinned a Roguish grin, used the pain he was causing me as an energy multiplier, and then slowly, inexorably, began to apply my own gentle pressure on his sinistral appendage until he wrestled it back from my hand, tears of discomfort forming in the corners of his eyes.
My fun was interrupted by a vaguely familiar odor and a long-unheard voice, and a, “Long time no see, Dickie. When was it? That joint operation in the North Sea just before they removed you from command and threw you in jail, ja?”
I turned to see Franz Ulrich, his arms crossed, standing in the doorway, a smirk on his face. Now I remembered the smell, too: he wore a sweet, citrusy aftershave called 4711. A lot of it, too. The stuff was expensive. It was made in Köln, the city where (obviously) cologne originated.
Franz was backed up by two bulked-up hulks in badly tailored but expensive Italian suits. They weren’t wearing any 4711. No—the only fragrance these guys were sporting was Touch of Garlic. Obvious bandity. Now I knew at least part of Lothar’s Russkie connection: imported muscle.
Peculiar, isn’t it, that someone like Lothar, who bitched so publicly about foreign workers, had hired his own foreign workers—these Mafiyosi baklany55—as his personal goons. See, assholes like Lothar don’t believe the rules apply to them. And believe me, it’s not just assholes like Lothar who have this sort of blind spot. Our congressmen and senators do, too. Too many of ’em believe that rules you and I have to live by just don’t apply to them.
But I don’t have time to talk about that now. No—instead, I focused on Franz. Nothing had changed. He was still the same mean-looking motherfucker I’d known when he worked for Ricky Wegener at GSG-9. He wore his close-cropped steel gray hair in a kind of I, Claudius cut. His oblong, cruel face bore a nasty, jagged zipper of a scar that ran down the right cheek and disappeared into the soft collar of his cashmere turtleneck. He liked to brag that it was a dueling scar from his days at university.
I knew better: Franz had never gone to university, and the scar was the souvenir of a back-street brawl over a ragged-looking hooker in some Third, Fourth, or Fifth-World country. He shifted his weight on booted feet. The soft, pleated black slacks and double-breasted jacket were absolute doppelgängers56 for what his boss was wearing.
I took a good look. Guess what? Franz was obviously dilated to see me. I say that because if his pupils had been a camera lens, they would have been set at f-1.2. That kind of glassy, Victorian, Wilde-eyed look comes with drug use. Cocaine, to be precise. And even if he hadn’t been coked up, I wasn’t about to be impressed by his version of the killer stare. After all, I’d seen Franz operate. Oh, he could hop and pop and shoot and loot and snoop and poop; he could double-tap and fast-rope and do all that other operator shit. But he was careless, which had gotten some of his men killed. And he was impetuous, which meant he acted without thinking, a fatal flaw in SpecWar. He was arrogant, too. He was also needlessly cruel. Franz Ulrich took too much pleasure in inflicting pain.
My philosophy toward the enemy has always been like my old friend and comrade in arms Charlie Beckwith’s: kill ’em all and let God sort it out. Franz Ulrich liked to kneecap ’em, or gut-shoot ’em and let ’em flop around for a while before he finished ’em off. It always seemed like a waste of ammunition to me.
“Long time no see, Dickie,” Franz Ulrich said once again, his voice betraying impatience. “You vill tell me just how long has it been. The North Sea, ja?”
I told you he was arrogant. I didn’t even bother turning in his direction. “I heard you the first time, asshole,” I said over my shoulder.
I finished causing discomfort to Lothar’s hand, then raised my hand and gave Franz the finger. “Last time I laid eyes on you wasn’t more than four days ago, you worthless Kraut cockbreath. You know it, and I know it, so why bother to lie?”
Option Delta Page 19
