by Ward Larsen
He returned to the reception area where clusters of men and women stood with cocktails. DeBolt picked a small group and studied each face. Two men and a woman. He did his research, and was happy to get results from facial recognition inputs. By the time he made his approach there was no need to look at nametags.
“Annette Chu?” he said. “Stanford?”
A petite Asian woman in her forties pulled a glass of white wine away from her lips. “Yes, that’s right. Have we met?”
“Yes, years ago. My name’s Trey Smith. I was a grad student at UCLA when you were teaching there.”
She smiled, put out her hand for a tentative shake. DeBolt could see her trying valiantly to make an association.
“I’m sure you don’t remember me,” he said. “I finished the year after you moved to Palo Alto.”
“What did you study?” she asked politely.
“Network architecture.” DeBolt shifted his gaze to the two men and introduced himself, before saying, “I went on to work at Cal under Dr. Patel. I understand he’s here at the conference, but I haven’t been able to find him.” He let that hang.
“I haven’t seen him,” Chu said.
One of the men offered, “I went to his talk on day two. Very good—Patel’s at the forefront of wireless integration.”
“I think I may have him beat,” said DeBolt with a smile.
“You should come tomorrow morning,” the man continued, “he’s the featured speaker.”
“I’d like to look him up tonight—I wish I knew where he was staying.” This was met with blank looks all around.
And so it went. DeBolt worked the room nonstop. He talked to dozens of professors and PhD candidates, took a pocketful of business cards from corporate sales reps. Most had seen Dr. Atif Patel at some point during the conference. Many had attended his first presentation, and there was universal anticipation for his second talk tomorrow. Yet no one knew where he was at that moment. Indeed, no one had seen him all day. A former student of Patel’s thought he might he staying at the InterContinental Wien. A Google rep swore she’d seen him walk into the Hotel Sans Souci. DeBolt took the time to investigate each claim. The InterContinental’s electronic guest book was apparently easily breached, and he discovered in less than a minute that Dr. Atif Patel was not among its registered guests. The Sans Souci took nearly ten minutes, but the result was the same.
Try as he might, DeBolt could not locate the one man who he hoped could set him free.
* * *
Delta drove his rented car through the heart of Vienna, more a quest for inspiration than a means of conveyance. The evening rush was fast approaching, the bustling arteries below the Danube building to their daily crest. As he regarded the sea of blinking brake lights around him, it struck him that he might be the only driver on Martinstraße not annoyed by the traffic. When it came to handling a vehicle, Delta had long been subjected to different levels of concern, having spent too many years in places where roadbeds were inlaid with explosives, where overpasses spoke of snipers, and where every oncoming car had to be thought of as a bomb. The throng of urban mechanization around him now? It was practically soothing.
He rather enjoyed driving, a vestige he supposed of his first, and very brief, posting in the Corps with a logistics battalion. Even the recent accident in Iraq, which had nearly taken his life, had done nothing to dampen his enthusiasm. Delta liked the vibration of an engine, the feedback of steering in his hands. The paradoxical sensations of freedom and control. He’d often thought that driving was the nearest he came to relaxation.
In that moment, however, it simply allowed him to think.
It had been a frustrating day—this too a reminder of his years in the Corps. He remembered on one occasion waiting five hours for an ammo shipment, only to see the truck arrive empty. He remembered standing in a chow line for an hour to find nothing left but MREs—beef stroganoff, his most despised—because a herd of Air Force weenies had cleaned out the serving trays. Frustration. It was to be expected, a part of any mission.
His bad day had begun long before he’d arrived in Vienna, but now that he was here it was time for damage control. In the most literal sense, he had been honest with Patel—he didn’t know where Bravo was at that moment. Almost certainly the Coastie had come to Vienna, and if so, Delta was sure he could find him. Lund was proving the more difficult target to track, and so she became his priority.
She’d readily taken the bait he had put out, deciding, based on his fraudulent text, to travel to Vienna in search of DeBolt. Unfortunately, she’d surprised him by being quick enough to get on last night’s flight. Lund had arrived a full day earlier than planned—hours before Delta himself was scheduled to reach Vienna. With that one cock-up, his strategy to tail her from the airport tomorrow morning was shot full of holes.
Having at least been forewarned, he’d tried to be proactive. While tracking her United Airlines flight across the ocean, he had sent a tip to the U.S. Coast Guard, ostensibly from the Department of Homeland Security, regarding the international departure of a civilian employee who was wanted as a witness in a homicide investigation in Kodiak. Using Wi-Fi during the course of his own flight, Delta had sat back and monitored the situation via META. In the early hours this morning, he’d watched a stream of back-and-forth messages between the Coast Guard, U.S. State Department, and ultimately the Austrian government. It worked just as he’d hoped—Lund had been detained the moment she landed in Vienna. In effect, the Bundespolizei were holding her in custody for him.
Then a new problem arose—once Delta landed, he couldn’t figure out where she’d been taken.
His improvised scheme was further undone by a series of misfortunes. Lund’s phone had briefly come to life when she arrived at the airport, but within minutes it was turned off, probably by the police when they arrested her. Then came the truly maddening breakdown. META, for all its technological wizardry, had been stymied by the most ordinary of afflictions—the Bundespolizei computer system that tracked inmates and detainees had crashed. Delta was furious, but left with little recourse. He simply had to buy time in order to locate Lund.
He knew from message traffic that she was to be handed over to U.S. embassy staff, and subsequently transported back to Alaska under military escort. Not wanting that exchange to take place, he’d inserted a number of disruptions on the State Department end regarding the escort’s authorizing paperwork. A chain of phone calls ensued between the escort officer, Marine Captain Jose Morales, and the local police. Soon the embassy and the State Department became involved, further levels of bureaucracy crosshatched. The channels of communication, and resultant confusion, grew exponentially.
Altogether, Delta knew he had created a window, albeit a very narrow one. His inspired idea of bringing Lund to Vienna was on the verge of going down in flames. Like so many ops, a promising blueprint had been defeated by the most common of enemies—complexity.
Driving wasn’t giving Delta the clarity he needed. He sat rigid and seething, gripping the wheel hard as he weaved amid traffic and circled the same city blocks. He tried to think tactically, bending to the facts as he knew them. He considered going to the airport, waiting near the Air Force jet that was to transport Lund to Germany. When she arrived, he could kill her on the spot, although it would likely entail removing her escort as well. Delta had reservations about killing another Marine—even if he was an officer.
He tried to compose his thoughts. Where would they take her?
Given the circumstances—police involvement, immigration, and diplomatic channels—a large city like Vienna presented any number of possibilities. Was she being held at one of the many police stations? In a secure government ministry building? Had she already been transferred to the U.S. embassy? He tried to leverage META, but the responses came at a glacial pace. Embassy information—daily sign-in logs, message traffic, personnel files—all arrived as if through quicksand. Austrian government data welled up from an even thicker bog, a
delay that he suspected was due to the translation from German to English. Or perhaps the delays were only a reflection of his outlook—his frustration level peaking.
He drove aimless circles around Alsergrund, the ninth district in central Vienna. He cruised streets once frequented by Freud, never giving a thought to how the father of psychoanalysis might have marveled over the processes of his META-Marine mind. At one point Delta was so distracted in composing a mental inquiry that he nearly caused an accident outside Schwarzspanierstraße 15, the apartment in which Ludwig van Beethoven had died. It was soon after this near miss, with a taxi driver raising his fist in Delta’s rearview mirror, that the distant voice of a drill sergeant from basic training invaded his thoughts. When things go to hell, simplify.
And that was what he did. He ignored everything that had happened that day, all the hunting gone wrong. Delta backtracked, past the Vienna airport, over an ocean, and settled on something far more basic—his last solid point of orientation. He had discounted the prospect for hours now, but decided it was worth another try. From the window in his eye, he dispatched a request to locate Shannon Lund’s mobile phone.
50
Lund was slumped forward with her head on the folding table. She was nearly asleep. They’d brought her dinner an hour ago, a nice wienerschnitzel with potatoes and a salad that convinced her the Golden Anchor’s cook could learn a lot from a prison chef in Austria. The heavy meal, not to mention a day of unadulterated boredom, had made her nearly catatonic.
She was stirred to consciousness when the door opened abruptly. It was Blake Winston.
“All right, I think everything is in order. We’ll be leaving for the airport shortly.”
Lund stood up and stretched. “What about my stuff?”
“We’ll stop by the evidence room on our way out to collect it.”
Lund gave a sigh of resignation. She’d come to Austria to help Trey, and now her failure was all but complete. Ahead of her was a two-day trek involving airplanes and escorts, followed by a grilling from her boss—at least she had two days to come up with a story that would sound more believable than the truth. She realized at that moment how little she cared about any of it.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”
They were met in the hallway by a female police officer who led them two floors down to an evidence storage facility. At least that was what Lund took it for—the sign on the door was labeled with a German compound at least twenty letters long. The policewoman escorting them said in thickly accented English, “Neither of you are permitted inside. Stay here, please.” She pushed a button on a cipher lock near the door, then looked up at an overhead camera. There were three lights on the lock, and the bottom one turned green. She walked inside.
Lund said to Winston, “You don’t smoke, do you?”
He frowned.
“Never mind. So is my escort here?”
“Yes, he and I arrived together. As I mentioned earlier, Captain Morales will take you as far as—”
A huge crash reverberated from inside the evidence room. Lund looked at Winston, then they both looked at the door. It was a solid item in a metal frame, no inset window. The light on the cipher lock was red.
“That didn’t sound good,” said Lund. “Maybe we should have a look.”
Winston said uncertainly, “No, she told us to stay here. Besides, the door is locked.”
Lund reached for the call button on the lock pad, but before she could sink it the bottom light went green.
She reached for the door handle, but Winston shouldered in front of her. “Wait … let me.” He opened the door and started to go inside. He paused at the threshold. “What the hell…”
Lund looked past him into the evidence room and saw a giant set of shelves resting against a wall at a forty-five-degree angle. Between the wall and the heavy shelf was the body of a man in a police uniform—he was crushed and clearly dead. Lund noticed the look of horror on Winston’s face, and she followed his gaze to the right. There she saw another body—the woman who’d escorted them here, lying glass-eyed across the counter.
Lund instinctively grabbed a fistful of Winston’s finely tailored jacket, and in the next instant, as she began to pull, her eyes were drawn to a flash of motion. She made sense of it milliseconds later, as she was dropping to the floor—a hulking figure in a shooting stance, a silenced weapon extended. Two sounds seemed to arrive simultaneously—the spit from a silenced gun, and a muted slap. Lund hit the floor amid a spray of blood and tissue, and yelled, “Gun! Gun! Gun!” wishing she knew the German word.
She took one look at Winston, then wished she hadn’t. His face was unrecognizable. Lund knew she could only save herself. She skated to her feet on the polished floor and ran down the hall, searching for an open door or a stairwell—any kind of cover from the open door behind her. Her heart soared when she saw a policeman emerge from a side office with his hand on a holstered sidearm.
It might have been the look on her face, or that she’d called out a gun. Maybe it was the desperate way she was running toward him. Whatever the source, his expression was stone serious, his eyes alert. Then the officer’s gaze locked on something behind her, and he began to draw his weapon. She never heard the spits of the silencer, but the policeman’s gun blasted a round into the floor as he went down. Lund threw herself toward the opening as the hallway behind her exploded in a shower of plaster and chipped wood. She careened off a wall and got to her feet. What she saw in the room was wonderful—six, maybe eight officers in uniform, every one tugging at a holster or reaching into a drawer for a weapon.
“To the left down the hall!” she shouted. “Officers down!”
There was shouting in German among the policemen, and the one with the most stripes on his shoulders apparently decided Lund was not part of the problem. He asked in English, “How many attackers?”
“I only saw one!”
More commands in German.
Lund kept moving, and someone shoved her toward the back of the room where two doors connected to a parallel hallway. She kept moving as shouting echoed all around. None of the words made sense to her, but she recognized the tones: commands, urgency, distress. An alarm sounded, and she saw a man shrugging on body armor, a shotgun in his hands. The cavalry was arriving.
Ahead she saw a green sign labeled: NOTAUSGANG. More intuitively, next to it was a pictogram of a person running and an arrow. Exit.
A young woman in civilian clothes was in front of her, head ducked low as she ran in the direction of the arrow. She disappeared into an alcove, and Lund followed. Two fire doors later, she burst out onto the streets of Vienna. She turned right because there were more people in that direction, and ran at top speed. Her head was on a swivel checking every door and sidewalk. The brooding Bundespolizei building soon fell behind, and she eased to a purposeful walk, her heart racing and her lungs heaving. Lund checked the sidewalks at every intersection, searching for the big bald man, listening for the sounds of World War III behind her. She didn’t see or hear either.
Night was falling, the temperature dropping. Lund wasn’t cold at all. She’d brought a light jacket. It was in her roller bag. Which was in an evidence room littered with bodies. How many? Winston, the female officer who’d gone inside, the evidence room clerk. The officer who’d put his head into the hallway.
Four victims.
Four at least.
But that was only here, only tonight. Lund knew there were more. She knew because two images now stood side by side in her mind, pinned there like twin Polaroids. Pictures that would stay with her forever. One was the massive man she had just seen holding a silenced gun. The other was the captured CCTV photo Jim Kalata had sent. The latter image had disappeared from her phone’s memory, but it was permanently etched in her own. Two portraits of the same lethal subject, a man who’d been spanning the globe. He’d killed in Alaska, killed in Boston. Now he’d come to Vienna.
And he had come
for her.
* * *
The body count at the Bundespolizei station grew quickly. The duty corporal in the evidence storeroom was obvious enough, as was the much-liked female deputy inspector. Both had broken necks. The American embassy official had suffered one catastrophic round to the face, while the sergeant in the hallway had taken two bullets, one to his neck and one to the chest, either of which would have been singularly fatal. It took thirty minutes to discover the final victim, who was stuffed into the trunk of a car in the parking garage. That casualty wore the uniform of a United States Marine Corps captain, and the car belonged to the motor pool of the American embassy in Vienna.
The station was locked down in a posture of highest internal alert, and the “all clear” took nearly an hour as every room, air duct, and closet was searched thoroughly. Strangely, amid an entire precinct of policemen, no one seemed to have seen the shooter. An administrative clerk thought she might have seen a stranger momentarily—a very wide, bald man who turned the corner down a hallway—as she emerged from the second-floor ladies’ room. Detectives also soon realized that, amid the chaos, the American woman who’d been in custody, awaiting transfer on an expedited diplomatic request, had also gone missing. They were forced to consider, given the death of the American soldier who was to have been her escort, that the armed assailant had come to facilitate her escape.
With the police facing five murders, not to mention the escape of a detainee right under their noses, the mood fell decidedly grim. An all-out effort was made to secure evidence, and it was here that the final professional indignity was imparted. In the building’s security center, a flummoxed technician reported to the chief inspector that all surveillance video for that day had somehow disappeared.
