by Tom Clancy
“I see a car and a delivery truck,” the officer told his station chief, a captain. “No movement. Nothing else to be seen at the moment.”
“Very well,” the captain replied. “Take no action of any kind, and report any new developments to me at once. I will be there in a few minutes.”
“Understood. Ende.”
The captain replaced the microphone. He was driving to the scene himself, alone in his Audi radio car. He’d met Ostermann once, at some official function in Vienna. Just a shake of the hand and a few cursory words, but he knew what the man looked like, and knew his reputation as a wealthy, civic-minded individual who was an especially faithful supporter of the opera . . . and the children’s hospital, wasn’t he? . . . Yes, that had been the reason for the reception at the city hall. Ostermann was a widower, had lost his first wife to ovarian cancer five years earlier. Now, it was said, he had a new interest in his life named Ursel von Prinze, a lovely dark-haired woman from an old family. That was the odd thing about Ostermann. He lived like a member of the nobility, but he’d come from humble roots. His father had been . . . an engineer, engine-driver actually, in the state railway, wasn’t it? Yes, that was right. And so some of the old noble families had looked down on him, and to take care of that he’d bought social respectability with his charity work and his attendance at the opera. Despite the grandeur of his home, he lived fairly modestly. Little in the way of lavish entertaining. A quiet, modestly dignified man, and a very intelligent one, so they said of him. But now, his alarm company said, he had intruders in the house, Captain Willi Altmark told himself, taking the last turn and seeing the schloss. As often as he’d noticed it in passing, he had to remind himself now of the physical circumstances. A huge structure . . . perhaps four hundred meters of clear grass lawn between it and the nearest trees. Not good. Approaching the house covertly would be extremely difficult. He pulled his Audi close to the marked police car on the scene, and got out carrying a pair of binoculars.
“Captain,” the first officer said by way of greeting.
“Have you seen anything?”
“No movement of any kind. Not even a curtain.”
Altmark took a minute to sweep his binoculars over the building, then lifted the radio mike to tell all units en route to come quietly and slowly so as not to alert the criminals inside. Then he got a radio call from his superior, asking for his assessment of the situation.
“This may be a job for the military,” Captain Altmark responded. “We know nothing at the moment. I can see an automobile and a truck. Nothing else. No gardeners out. Nothing. But I can only see two walls, and nothing behind the main house. I will get a perimeter set up as soon as additional units arrive.”
“Ja. Make certain that no one can see us,” the commissioner told the captain, quite unnecessarily.
“Yes, of course.”
Inside, Ostermann had yet to rise from his chair. He took a moment to close his eyes, thanking God that Ursel was in London at the moment, having flown there in the private jet to do some shopping and meet with English friends. He’d hoped to join her there the following day, and now he wondered if he’d ever see his fiancée again. Twice he’d been approached by security consultants, an Austrian and a Brit. Both had lectured him on the implicit dangers of being so publicly rich, and told him how for a modest sum, less than £500,000 per year, he could greatly improve his personal security. The Britisher had explained that his people were all veterans of the SAS; the Austrian had employed Germans formerly of GSG-9. But he hadn’t seen the need for employing gun-carrying commandos who would hover over him everywhere he went as though he were a chief of state, taking up space and just sitting there like—like bodyguards, Ostermann told himself. As a trader in stocks, commodities, and international currencies he’d had his share of missed opportunities, but this one . . .
“What do you want of me?”
“We want your personal access codes to the international trading network,” Fürchtner told him. Hans was surprised to see the look of puzzlement on Ostermann’s face.
“What do you mean?”
“The computer-access codes which tell you what is going on.”
“But those are public already. Anyone can have them,” Ostermann objected.
“Yes, certainly they are. That is why everyone has a house like this one.” Petra managed an amused sneer.
“Herr Ostermann,” Fürchtner said patiently. “We know there is a special network for people such as you, so that you can take advantage of special market conditions and profit by them. You think us fools?”
The fear that transformed the trader’s face amused his two office guests. Yes, they knew what they weren’t supposed to know, and they knew they could force him to give over the information. His thoughts were plain on his face.
Oh, my God, they think I have access to something that does not exist, and I will never be able to persuade them otherwise.
“We know how people like you operate,” Petra assured him, immediately confirming his fear. “How you capitalists share information and manipulate your ‘free’ markets for your own greedy ends. Well, you will share that with us—or you will die, along with your lackeys.” She waved her pistol at the outer office.
“I see.” Ostermann’s face was now as pale as his white Turnbull and Asser shirt. He looked out to the anteroom. He could see Gerhardt Dengler there, his hands on the top of his desk. Wasn’t there an alarm system there? Ostermann couldn’t remember now, so rapidly was his mind running through the data-avalanche that had so brutally interrupted his day.
The first order of police business was to check the license-plate numbers of the vehicles parked close to the house. The automobile, they learned at once, was a rental. The truck tags had been stolen two days before. A detective team would go to the car-rental agency immediately to see what they might learn there. The next call was made to one of Herr Ostermann’s business associates. The police needed to know how many domestic and clerical employees might be in the building along with the owner. That, Captain Altmark imagined, would take about an hour. He now had three additional police cars under his command. One of these looped around the property so that the two officers could park and approach from the rear on foot. Twenty minutes after arriving on the scene, he had a perimeter forming. The first thing he learned was that Ostermann owned a helicopter, sitting there behind the house. It was an American-made Sikorsky S-76B, capable of carrying a crew of two and a maximum of thirteen passengers—that information gave him the maximum number of hostages to be moved and criminals to move them. The helicopter landing pad was two hundred meters from the house. Altmark fixed on that. The criminals would almost certainly want to use the helicopter as their getaway vehicle. Unfortunately, the landing pad was a good three hundred meters from the treeline. This meant that some really good riflemen were needed, but his preset response team had them.
Soon after getting the information on the helicopter, one of his people turned up the flight crew, one at home, one at Schwechat International Airport doing some paperwork with the manufacturer’s representative for an aircraft modification. Good, Willi Altmark thought, the helicopter wasn’t going anywhere just yet. But by then the fact that Erwin Ostermann’s house had been attacked had perked up to the senior levels of government, and then he received a very surprising radio call from the head of the Staatspolizei.
They barely made the flight—more precisely, the flight hadn’t been delayed on their account. Chavez tightened his seat belt as the 737 pulled back from the jetway, and went over the preliminary briefing documents with Eddie Price. They’d just rolled off the tarmac when Price mated his portable computer with the aircraft’s phone system. That brought up a diagram on his screen, with the caption “Schloss Ostermann.”
“So, who is this guy?” Chavez asked.
“Coming in now, sir,” Price replied. “A money-lender, it would appear, rather a wealthy one, friend of the prime minister of his country. I guess that explains matte
rs so far as we are concerned.”
“Yeah,” Chavez agreed. Two in a row for Team-2 was what he thought. A little over an hour’s flight time to Vienna, he thought next, checking his watch. One such incident was happenstance, Chavez told himself, but terrorist incidents weren’t supposed to happen so closely together, were they? Not that there was a rulebook out there, of course, and even if there were such a thing, these people would have violated it. Still . . . but there was no time for such thoughts. Instead, Chavez examined the information coming into Price’s laptop and started wondering how he’d deal with this new situation. Farther aft, his team occupied a block of economy seats and spent their time reading paperback books, hardly talking at all about the upcoming job, since they knew nothing to talk about except where they were going.
“Bloody large perimeter for us to cover,” Price observed, after a few minutes.
“Any information on the opposition?” Ding asked, then wondered how it was that he was adopting Brit-speak. Opposition? He should have said bad guys.
“None,” Eddie replied. “No identification, no word on their numbers.”
“Great,” the leader of Team-2 observed, still staring sideways at the screen.
The phones were trapped. Altmark had seen to that early on. Incoming calls were given busy signals, and outgoing calls would be recorded at the central telephone exchange—but there had been none, which suggested to Captain Altmark that the criminals were all inside, since they were not seeking external help. That could have meant they were using cellular phones, of course, and he didn’t have the equipment to intercept those, though he did have similar traps on Ostermann’s three known cellular accounts.
The Staatspolizei now had thirty officers on the scene and a tight perimeter fully formed and punctuated by a four-wheel armored vehicle, hidden in the trees. They’d stopped one delivery truck from coming in with some overnight express mail, but no other vehicles had attempted to enter the property. For one so wealthy, Ostermann did indeed lead a quiet and unassuming life, the captain thought. He’d expected a constant parade of vehicles.
“Hans?”
“Yes, Petra?”
“The phones have not rung. We’ve been here for some time, but the phones have not rung.”
“Most of my work is on computer,” Ostermann said, having noted the same discrepancy himself. Had Gerhardt gotten the word out? If he had done so, was that good? He had no way of knowing. Ostermann had long joked about how cutthroat his profession was, how every step he took had danger, because others out there would try to rob him blind if they ever got the chance . . . but not one of them had ever threatened his life, nor had any ever pointed a loaded gun at him or a member of his staff. Ostermann used his remaining capacity for objectivity to realize that this was a new and dangerous aspect to the world that he’d never seriously considered, about which he knew very little, and against which he had nothing in the way of defenses. His only useful talent at the moment was his ability to read faces and the minds behind them, and though he’d never encountered anyone even vaguely close to the man and woman in his office now, he saw enough to be more afraid than he’d ever been before. The man, and even more the woman, were willing to kill him without any pangs of conscience whatsoever, no more emotion than he showed when picking up a million dollars of American T-bills. Didn’t they know that his life had worth? Didn’t they know that—
—no, Erwin Ostermann realized, they did not. They didn’t know, and they didn’t care. Worst of all, what they thought they did know wasn’t true, and he would be hard-pressed indeed to persuade them otherwise.
Then, finally, a phone rang. The woman gestured for him to answer it.
“Hier ist Ostermann,” he said on picking up the receiver. His male visitor did the same on another extension.
“Herr Ostermann, I am Captain Wilhelm Altmark of the Staatspolizei. You have guests there, I understand.”
“Yes, I do, Captain,” Ostermann replied.
“Could I speak with them, please?” Ostermann merely looked at Hans Fürchtner.
“You took your time, Altmark,” Hans said. “Tell me, how did you find out?”
“I will not ask you about your secrets if you do not ask me about mine,” the captain replied cooly. “I would like to know who you are and what you wish.”
“I am Commander Wolfgang of the Red Workers’ Faction.”
“And what is it you want?”
“We want the release of several of our friends from various prisons, and transport to Schwechat International. We require an airliner with a range of more than five thousand kilometers and an international flight crew for a destination which we will make known when we board the aircraft. If we do not have these things by midnight, we will begin to kill some of our . . . our guests here in Schloss Ostermann.”
“I see. Do you have a list of the prisoners whose release you require?”
Hans put one hand over the receiver and held the other out. “Petra, the list.” She walked over and handed it to him. Neither seriously expected any cooperation on this issue, but it was part of the game, and the rules had to be followed. They’d decided on the way in that they’d have to kill one hostage certainly, more probably two, before they got the ride to the airport. The man, Gerhardt Dengler, would be killed first, Hans thought, then one of the women secretaries. Neither he nor Petra really wanted to kill any of the domestic help since they were genuine workers, not capitalist lackeys like the office staff. “Yes, here is the list, Captain Altmark . . .”
“Okay,” Price said, “we have a list of people we’re expected to liberate for our friends.” He turned the computer so that Chavez could see it.
“The usual suspects. Does this tell us anything, Eddie?”
Price shook his head. “Probably not. You can get these names from a newspaper.”
“So, why do they do it?”
“Dr. Bellow will explain that they have to, to show solidarity with their compatriots, when in fact they are all sociopaths who don’t care a rip for anyone but themselves.” Price shrugged. “Cricket has rules. So does terrorism and—” Just then the captain of the airliner interrupted the revelation, and told everyone to put the seat backs up and tray tables away in preparation for landing.
“Showtime soon, Eddie.”
“Indeed, Ding.”
“So, this is just solidarity bullshit?” Ding asked, tapping the screen.
“Most likely, yes.” With that, Price disconnected the phone line from his computer, saved his files, and shut the laptop down. Twelve rows aft, Tim Noonan did the same. All the Team-2 members started putting on their game faces as the British Airways 737 flared to land in Vienna. Someone had called ahead to someone else. The airliner taxied very rapidly indeed to its assigned jetway, and out his window Chavez could see a baggage truck with cops standing next to it waiting alongside the terminal.
It was not an invisible event. A tower controller noted the arrival, having already noted a few minutes before that a Sabena flight scheduled in a slot ahead of the British aircraft had been given an unnecessary go-around order, and that a very senior police officer was in the tower, expressing interest in the British Airways flight. Then there was a second and very unnecessary baggage train with two police cars close by the A-4 jetway. What was this? he wondered. It required no great effort on his part to keep watch to learn more. He even had a pair of Zeiss binoculars.
The stewardess hadn’t received instructions to get Team- 2 off more quickly than anyone else, but she suspected there was something odd about them. They’d arrived without having been on her computerized manifest, and they were politer than the average business travelers. Their appearances were unremarkable, except all looked very fit, and all had arrived together in a single bunch, and headed to their seats in an unusually organized way. She had a job to do, however, as she opened the door into the jetway where, she saw, a uniformed policeman was waiting. He didn’t smile or speak as she allowed the already-standing passengers to
make their way off. Three from first class stopped just outside the aircraft, conferred with the policeman, then went out the door to the service stairs, which led directly to the tarmac. Being a serious fan of thriller and mystery novels, it was worth a look, she thought, to see who else went that way. The total was thirteen, and the number included all of the late-arriving passengers. She looked at their faces, most of which gave her a smile on the way out. Handsome faces, for the most part . . . more than that, manly ones, with expressions that radiated confidence, and something else, something conservative and guarded.
“Au revoir, madam,” the last one said as he passed, with a very Gallic evaluative sweep of her figure and a charming smile.
“Christ, Louis,” an American voice observed on the way out the side door. “You don’t ever turn it off, do you?”
“Is it a crime to look at a pretty woman, George?” Loiselle asked, with a wink.
“Suppose not. Maybe we’ll catch her on the flip-side,” Sergeant Tomlinson conceded. She was pretty, but Tomlinson was married with four kids. Louis Loiselle never turned it off. Maybe it came along with being French, the American thought. At the bottom, the rest of the team was waiting. Noonan and Steve Lincoln were supervising the baggage transfer.
Three minutes later, Team-2 was in a pair of vans heading off the flight line with a police escort. This was noted by the tower controller, whose brother was a police reporter for a local paper. The cop who’d come to the tower departed without more than a danke to the controllers.
Twenty minutes later, the vans stopped outside the main entrance to Schloss Ostermann. Chavez walked over to the senior officer.
“Hello, I am Major Chavez. This is Dr. Bellow, and Sergeant Major Price,” he said, surprised to receive a salute from—
“Captain Wilhelm Altmark,” the man said.
