The Solomon Effect

by C. S. Graham

  As he cleared the alley, the man seemed to come to some kind of a decision. He whirled, his hand reaching beneath his jacket to close on the handle of his gun. But the sidewalk here was narrow, his momentum so great that he took a step back off the curb into the street as he brought up the big H&K.

  Jax heard a squeal of brakes, saw the man’s head turn, his eyes widen the instant before a battered white delivery truck slammed into him with a heavy, fatal thud.

  36

  Tucking Erkan’s Walther out of sight beneath his sweat-soaked shirt, Jax pushed his way through the excited, jabbering crowd of shoppers gathered around the front of the truck. Jax took one look at the man’s blood-smeared face, the wide and sightless eyes, and turned away.

  A couple of blocks down the hill, he paused long enough to wipe down Erkan’s gun and drop it into a convenient trash receptacle. Then he turned his steps toward the blue waters of the bay below. From somewhere to his left came the low, melodic notes of the afternoon call to prayer. Allah Akbar…

  One after the other, the muezzins of the city’s mosques joined in, until their voices rose up in a wave of sound that rolled across the bay. Allah Akbar. Ash-hadu alla ilaha illal-lah. God is Great. There is no God but God.

  Captain Lowenstein was not going to be happy.

  Jax called Matt from the shade of a plane tree overlooking the Gulf of Izmir. His truncated conversation with Erkan had raised some serious questions, and Jax had doubts about Langley’s ability—or maybe its willingness—to give him straight answers.

  “Where are the German military archives from World War II kept?” Jax asked.

  “The military archives?” There was a pause while Matt digested this. “I think they’re still in Freiburg im Breisgau. Why?”

  “Then that’s where I’m going.”

  “You know, we do have people in Freiberg. I could ask them to—”

  “No. I want to find out for myself exactly what was on that damned sub.”

  “Did something happen I need to know about?”

  “Kemal Erkan is dead.”

  “Shit. Listen, Jax. I’ve got a contact in Freiberg I can set you up with. A historian by the name of Walter Herbolt, at the university.”

  Jax stared across the broad avenue, toward the water. From here he could see Tobie and Captain Lowenstein. Tobie was calmly sipping a bottle of Evian at a shady table overlooking Pasaport Quay. But Lowenstein was pacing up and down, his cell phone plastered to his ear with one hand, his other hand gesturing wildly through the air as he talked. Jax said, “Thanks, but I’m getting kinda tired of these station people.”

  “Herbolt isn’t part of the Company. He’s a personal friend. I’ll tell him to expect you.” There was a pause. Matt said, “It doesn’t sound like that U-boat was carrying gold, does it?”

  “No. No, it doesn’t.”

  “You’re feeling pretty cocky, aren’t you?” Jax said to Lowenstein as the captain escorted them through Izmir’s crowded, gleaming airport toward their concourse.

  So far, news of the shooting in the agora had yet to wend its way through Turkish police channels to the base, and from there to field personnel. Pausing at the sign that warned in four languages, TICKETED PASSENGERS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, the Captain rocked back on his heels and grinned. “You may have given me the slip there for a while, but I think I made a pretty good recovery. And in another forty-five minutes, you’ll be gone.”

  “And without a single international incident.” Jax slapped the big Air Force captain on the back and turned to leave. “You did a heckuva job, Lowie.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” whispered October as she put her carry-on bag on the conveyer belt at security. “Who did you kill?”

  “Not here, October.” Jax kept a smile on his face as he glanced back at Lowenstein. As he watched, the Captain answered his cell phone, his expression changing ludicrously as he listened to the voice at the other end. Across the crowded security area, the two men’s gazes met. Jax brought one hand to his forehead in a wry salute and turned away.

  He gave October a full briefing as they sat by the gate, waiting for their flight to Istanbul to board.

  “What I don’t understand is why that gunman in the agora didn’t shoot you, too,” she said when he finished. “I mean at first, when he had the chance.”

  “Probably because no one paid him to kill me. He looked like he came from the local rent-a-thug crowd, which means that whoever hired him to kill Kemal Erkan had no way of knowing I’d be there when he made the hit. And guys like that don’t do freebies.”

  “You think he was hired by our friends in Kaliningrad?”

  “Or at least by the same outfit that hired our friends in Kaliningrad.”

  A rustle of movement wafted through the waiting crowd as a uniformed attendant appeared at the gate. “Now it’s your turn,” said Jax, studying her through narrowed eyes.

  “What?” she said with a half laugh. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “When we were at Pasaport Quay, how did you know I wanted you to distract Lowenstein?”

  She leaned into him teasingly as a droning voice began to announce their flight’s boarding pattern. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid I read your mind or something?”

  “The thought did occur to me.”

  Still smiling, she sat back and shook her head. “Just because I’m good at remote viewing doesn’t mean I’m psychic, Jax. I saw the waiter hand you the note.”

  He continued to stare at her, unsure whether to believe her or not. She said, “Do you think Lowenstein will ever connect you to what happened at the agora?”

  “Officially? Not if he’s smart.”

  37

  Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Wednesday 28 October

  7:10 A.M. local time

  By the time their connecting flight from Munich swooped down over the mountains of the Black Forest to land at Freiburg im Breisgau, it was early the following morning.

  “These overnight flights are going to kill me,” said October as they caught a cab directly from the airport to the philosophy faculty of the university. “I must look like shit.”

  “Lowenstein obviously didn’t think so.”

  “Enough about that, already.” Settling into the cab’s backseat, she rummaged around in her bag for a brush and used it to draw her hair back into a clip. “I don’t even know what day it is anymore.”

  “It’s Wednesday.”

  She looked up at him, her arms stilling at her task. “The twenty-eighth?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Christ,” she whispered. Halloween was three days away.

  “Be thankful for overnight flights.”

  They drove past undulating renaissance facades of red sandstone and white plaster, past gently flowing canals that gurgled with the fresh waters of the Dreisam River. By the end of the Second World War, Jax knew, American and British carpet-bombing had reduced this elegant university city to a burned-out shell. But there was no sign of that now. The historic heart of the city had been painstakingly and lovingly restored.

  They found Professor Herbolt stuffing papers into a battered brown-leather briefcase in his office. He looked up, his straight, pale blond hair falling forward to frame a soft, plump-cheeked face.

  “Ah. There you are,” he said. Somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, he had gentle gray eyes and the slightly stooped shoulders of a man who’d spent too many years of his life hunched over books. “I’m on my way to a meeting at the Historisches Kaufhaus.” He buckled the straps of his briefcase and swung it off his desk. “Walk with me.”

  The briefcase in one hand and a lumpy paper-wrapped package tucked under his arm, the professor led the way through a warren of restored university buildings to the Bertoldstrasse. “Matt told me something of what you’re looking for. How much do you know about Germany’s military records?”

  Jax shook his head. “Nothing, really.”

  The professo
r nodded, as if he’d been expecting as much. “The Allies seized all the German military and government archives they could find after the war,” he said, ushering them up the noisy, crowded street. “At first, the archives were held in Washington and London. But eventually most of the material was microfilmed and the originals were returned to us in the fifties. Since Germany was still an occupied, partitioned state, there was a reluctance to create a central archives at Bonn, so various archives were established in different parts of the country. The Bundesarchiv-Militararchiv was set up here, in Freiburg.”

  “All the Naval records were sent here?”

  “Most of them. The U-boat war journals weren’t declassified and returned to us until the late seventies. But then they came here, yes. The Naval records are by far the most complete. The Army, less so. The Air Force holdings were heavily destroyed and are very fragmentary.”

  “So how complete are the U-boat records?”

  “Not as complete as one might wish, I’m afraid, especially with regard to the later period. The archives have no material at all on nearly three hundred U-boats that were commissioned into service at the end of the war. The last months of the war were very chaotic, you know. The Allies carpet-bombed our cities virtually every night, killing hundreds of thousands—some say millions. Many records were lost. Some U-boats were commissioned that we don’t even know existed.”

  Jax stared down the length of the Kaiser-Joseph-Strasse, to where one of the old medieval gates of the city was still visible. “Let me guess: U-114 is one of those.”

  “I’m afraid so. Until the wreckage was found off Denmark, we had nothing on it. Your government originally identified it as a Type XB submarine, but as far as we know, only eight Type XB submarines were built. Two survived to surrender at the end of the war, and six are known to have been sunk. Because they were so large, they were very useful for carrying cargo long distances. But their size also made them disastrously slow and difficult to maneuver.”

  “What do you mean, the wreckage was ‘originally’ identified?”

  The professor was silent as they cut between two tall, narrow buildings to emerge in the Münsterplatz, the open marketplace surrounding the ancient cathedral. “I’ve been studying the photographs Matt sent of U-114 on the seabed,” he said, “and I don’t believe it was a Type XB. They were originally designed as minelayers, you know; when they were used as transports, they carried most of their cargo in their mineshafts. The XB was unique in that it only had two torpedo tubes, at the stern.”

  Jax drew up short. “But U-114 definitely had a forward torpedo room.”

  The German paused to look back at him. “You’re certain?”

  “Yes.” He’d seen it himself.

  Herbolt nodded. “Then I suspect we’re dealing with a Type XI-B U-cruiser.”

  October said, “That’s significant?”

  “Very,” said the professor, leading the way across the open square, “when you consider that there are no official records of any of the Type XI-Bs ever becoming operational. We know that four keels were laid down in the shipyards of Deschimag AG Weser, in Bremen. But it was assumed they were all scrapped prior to completion.”

  Jax said, “They were big?”

  “Oh, yes. Over one hundred sixteen meters long, and some nine and a half meters wide. They were quite large.”

  “The XB class subs were—what? Three hundred feet long?”

  “Eighty-nine meters, yes.”

  Jax tried to picture the U-boat they’d seen resting on a barge in the shipyard in Kaliningrad. Had it been three hundred feet, or closer to four?

  “There have been persistent rumors that at least one class XI-B was completed near the end of the war,” said the professor, “and sent out on a secret mission.”

  “As part of Operation Caesar?”

  Herbolt paused before a colorful renaissance hall with a ground-floor arcade and fancifully decorated gables. “It’s possible.”

  “What kind of rumors are we talking about?”

  “Reports from dockworkers, mainly.” The professor glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more.” He started to turn away, then hesitated. “There is one other place you might try. The official archives are here, in Freiburg. But there is something called the Deutsches U-Boot Museum-Archiv, in Altenbruch. It began as a private collection held by a former submarine officer named Horst Bredow, but it eventually grew so large he turned it into a nonprofit foundation run by volunteers. They have gathered everything they can find on Germany’s U-boats, not just copies of the official records, but also things like letters, memoirs, transcriptions of firsthand accounts by survivors. If anything does exist on this U-114, that is where you’ll find it.”

  Jax stared off across the old German square, filled that morning with market stalls piled with buckets of sunflowers and shiny pyramids of apples and trays of fresh pastries. “Do you think U-114 could have been carrying gold?”

  Herbolt shrugged. “It is possible. After Stalingrad, many here in Germany knew the war was lost. Corporations such as I. G. Farber and Krupp Industries were converting their holdings into gold and sending it out of the country, to places like Portugal and Argentina. But if what I believe is true—that one of the XI-B class U-boats was rushed into commission and sent on a special mission—then I think it was carrying something more important than rich men’s gold.”

  “Something like—what?”

  The German shrugged again. “I’m not going to speculate. Talk to the people at the Deutsches U-Boot Museum-Archiv. I’ll tell them to expect you.”

  October said, “Where is Altenbruch?”

  “In Cuxhaven, on the North Sea.” Setting down his briefcase, he held out the bulky brown-paper-wrapped package. “I almost forgot. Matt wanted you to have this.”

  “What is it?” said Jax, taking the parcel.

  “Something he seems to think you may need.” The professor picked up his briefcase again and turned to leave. “Just be careful to open it in private. We have very strict rules on firearms here in Germany.”

  38

  Yasnaya Polyana, Russia: Wednesday 28 October

  11:10 A.M. local time

  The farmhouse lay on the edge of a desolate glen, just beyond the outskirts of Yasnaya Polyana. Sturdily built of red brick and stout timbers by some long-vanished German, it now boasted a statue of Lenin that stood surrounded by flowerbeds like a Kaliningrad version of a garden gnome, thought Rodriguez. As he watched, a cold wind ruffled the surface of the nearby duck pond and rattled the yellowing leaves of the elms that sheltered an old black-and-white cow.

  They’d pulled off into a rutted track surrounded by a tangled growth of birch and oak in what might once have been a field, sixty years ago. Leaning against the trunk of a gnarled oak, he swept his field glasses across the farmyard to the ancient barn and henhouse, and then back. Stefan Baklanov’s mother was on the porch, a big basin clamped between her knees as she shelled a mound of peas with quick, practiced movements.

  Salinger said, “Looks like she’s alone. We can take over the place in a minute. She’ll never know what hit her.”

  “No. This kid knows we’re after him. We don’t do anything that might spook him. We leave the place alone and wait. Let him come to us.”

  Salinger watched, his eyes narrowing, as an old Lada crept down the nearby narrow road to disappear around a bend. “When’s Borz supposed to get here?”

  “Tonight.”

  Rodriguez watched the woman below stand up and stretch, the basin of peas balanced on one hip. She was built long and bony, with dark hair just beginning to go gray and a face lined by worry and hard work. She walked into the house, the door banging behind her. He said, “I want a tap put on her phone. Can you do that?”

  “Easy.”

  The woman reemerged. They watched her walk down the steps, a bucket in one hand.

  “Think the kid’ll be stupid enough to call her?”

  “He’ll call, o
r he’ll come. One way or the other, we nail him.”

  Freiburg, Germany: Wednesday 28 October

  10:35 A.M. local time

  They unwrapped Herr Herbolt’s package in a shadowy, out-of-the-way pew of the münster.

  “God bless Matt,” said Jax, quickly clipping the holstered Beretta inside the waistband of his chinos.

  “Somehow it doesn’t seem right to be fawning over guns in a church,” whispered Tobie, eyeing the compact Beretta 9000 Matt had sent for her.

  “I like guns a lot better than funerals—especially my own.” He picked up the small Beretta and held it out to her.

  She made no move to take it. “You’ve seen my marksmanship records, right?”

  He grinned and dropped the gun into her shoulder bag. “What marksmanship records? The military loves to hand out marksmanship medals. You’re the only person I’ve ever heard of who didn’t manage to score some kind of marksmanship commendation.”

  “There are a few of us.” She slipped the strap of her bag over her shoulder and stared up at the brilliant jewel-toned stained-glass window beside them. “So how do we get to Altenwhatever?”

  “Altenbruch. We take an InterCity Express train to Bremen, and then rent a car.”

  She turned to look at him. “I didn’t think Jason Aldrich could rent a car anyplace that has computers.”

  “He can’t. Which is why you’re renting the car.”

  “Me?” A nearby group of tourists turned to frown at them. She realized she was shouting, and dropped her voice again. “On my own credit card?”

  He pushed to his feet. “I’ll make sure the Company reimburses you.”

  “And if we run into a bunch of bad guys and wreck it?”

  “We won’t.”