Black Wolf: A Dreamland Thriller

by Dale Brown

  This wasn’t particularly adventurous stuff in other genres, but it was a revolution in classical music. The young man’s shows were always sold out, and generally attracted a much wider ranging audience than the typical symphony concert.

  Wolf found his seat in the balcony just as the lights dimmed. He listened impassively as the program started. A Mozart selection warmed up the audience. The notes darted back and forth in an intricate web, echoing themes, underlining them, then taking them apart. If many had come for the show, it was the music that transported them. The young man with the shaved head and tattoos played as artfully as anyone who had graced the stage since it was built. In his hands, the music became immortal.

  The Black Wolf wasn’t interested in transcendence. He scanned the audience, looking for Helmut Dalitz. For Dalitz was scheduled to have his own reckoning with mortality before the program ended.

  Helmut Dalitz was a wealthy international businessman. Once a banker, he now made his money by buying distressed properties across the world, fixing them or otherwise making them viable, and then selling them. He did this most often with apartment buildings, though he also did it on occasion with commercial properties.

  It was one of the commercial properties that had brought Wolf here. For Helmut Dalitz, through a company that he owned, had bought a large, nondescript building in Rome, Italy, the previous year. The building, on Via Nazionale not far from the Termini train station, was a nondescript twelve story structure badly in need of maintenance.

  There were many ways that maintenance could be done; since there were a number of vacant stores and offices, workers could have started with the vacant spaces, then gradually moved on, shuffling the existing tenants in and out of the different units like a game of musical chairs. Doing things piecemeal like that was common in Italy, where work tended to progress at a very leisurely pace, and disrupting old traditions for the sake of some new paint and a few daubs of plaster was antithetical to the national psyche.

  But Helmut Dalitz was not Italian. More importantly, he disliked disorder, and the idea of slowly renovating his building did not sit well with him. It smacked of chaos and conflicted with his timetable for turning a profit. And so he had the building closed entirely, kicking out all of the existing tenants, something he was allowed to do by the terms of the sale and the tenants’ leases, even if these terms conflicted with the spirit by which most of the tenants had held their property.

  Among the tenants he had kicked out was Giuseppe DeFrancisco, an eighty-year-old man who ran a small tobacco shop on the side street. The shop had not turned a profit in several years, and in fact the rent was paid now entirely by the man’s grandson. Unfortunately, the grandson had been concentrating on his business affairs in southern Italy when the first notice of the pending eviction came. By the time he realized his grandfather was going to be kicked out, it was too late to stop it—not that Helmut Dalitz or his minions would have listened to reason.

  The thugs his minions hired were deaf as well. They hadn’t listened to the old man’s pleas, who begged them right up to the moment they placed him on the curb. They didn’t listen to his complaints, or even to his cry for help a few moments later, when he began suffering from a heart attack. A passerby called an ambulance when he found the old man on the ground a few minutes later; by the time the ambulance fought its way through the morning traffic, Giuseppe DeFrancisco was dead.

  The men who had put him out wouldn’t be listening to anyone now. Wolf had taken care of them two weeks before on a trip to Rome. Now it was their employer’s turn.

  Wolf cared little for the justifications of the murder, though they had been important to the old man’s grandson. While he could have used his own organization to extract revenge, the grandson considered this a matter of the heart rather than business, and deemed it wiser to keep the two separate. And besides, the Wolf and his employers were said to be even more efficient than the mafia.

  Helmut Dalitz was sitting in the third box on the right of the stage. He was seated very close to the rail, listening intently to the music. Behind him sat two bodyguards, dressed as impeccably as he was; they were a sharp contrast to his daughter, who though not slovenly, could easily have afforded something more stylish than the plain black polyester pants and print silk shirt she wore.

  She was alone. The Black Wolf had expected her boyfriend to be with her. This was not necessarily a problem for him—one less potential obstruction, perhaps—but he noted it nonetheless.

  The night’s performance was grouped into three sections. As the first came to an end, Helmut Dalitz rose with the rest of the audience and applauded. And then, being a man of habit, he kissed his daughter on the cheek and told her he was going home.

  Even with his superior hearing, the Black Wolf couldn’t hear the conversation. But he saw the girl shaking her head, and guessed what her father was saying. Helmut Dalitz habitually left the concert hall before the last intermission, and obviously he had decided to leave now.

  Habits were a bad thing, especially when someone was aiming to kill you.

  The girl would be pleading with him not to leave her alone. And he would suggest that she come with him.

  She was torn. What would she decide?

  To stay. She turned away abruptly.

  Easier for him.

  The Black Wolf waited to make sure that Helmut Dalitz was actually leaving, then turned and walked swiftly to the exit. He slipped easily between the people making their way down to the restroom and the large hall at the front of the orchestra house to stretch their legs. He moved quickly, almost lithely, despite the bulk of his legs and shoulders. His body had the fluidity of a much lighter and, it had to be admitted, younger man. While Wolf thought of himself as barely into his early twenties, he was in fact over fifty.

  Not that anyone seeing him would have guessed that. On the contrary, he looked exactly as if he were in his twenties, just reaching his physical peak, with a bright future yet to come.

  The Black Wolf reached the marble hallway at the front of the building, pausing near one of the elaborate columns. Helmut Dalitz would approach from the right, accompanied by his bodyguards; a third man would be waiting just outside, alerted by radio.

  Taking him in the concert hall was tempting—there were so many people present that he could sidle right up to Dalitz and shoot him with the silenced gun. But getting away would be problematic. He wasn’t so much worried about witnesses as simply being able to slip quickly through the crowd. Outside would be easier.

  A surge of people blocked his vision, and he lost Dalitz momentarily. The Black Wolf took a step in the direction he knew Dalitz would take, then stopped. He scanned the faces, looking.

  One of the bodyguards was walking at the far end of the hall. Wolfe realized Dalitz must be in front of the man, though he couldn’t see him.

  Why was he that far away? Had he changed his mind—was he going back to his daughter?

  No. His escorts were simply trying to avoid the worst of the crowd.

  It was too late to cut him off. Wolf took a step back, sliding toward the door on his left.

  The worst thing to do was to rush. He had to move slowly and deliberately. If he did not kill Helmut Dalitz now, he would kill him later, or tomorrow, or the next day. Success was the only thing that mattered in this assignment, not timing.

  The crisp Berlin air invigorated Wolf as he came through the doors. The square in front of the theater was yellow, lit by clusters of old-fashioned lamps at each of the corners. He paused, getting his bearings. Dalitz turned right, toward the Gendarmenmarkt. If he followed his usual practice—and being a man of habit, he surely would—he would walk up Markgrafenstrausse toward Französische.

  Wolf started down the steps. The light in the square was dim, but he could see as well in the dark as most people could see during the day. He quickened his pace, turning parallel to his quarry.

  Dalitz’s two bodyguards moved closer. Did they sense the danger?

>   No. They were just doing their job, closing up ranks, anxious to get to the next waypoint.

  The Black Wolf put his hand into the pocket of his overcoat, gripping his pistol. The gun and its bullets were made completely of carbon composites. They wouldn’t trip the most finicky metal detector, yet the bullets were as fatal as Magnums at a hundred yards. The long, boxy barrel had a noise suppresser; the bullet sounded like a metal slug dropping through a vending machine, and was only a little louder.

  The Black Wolf picked up his pace, moving closer.

  He liked to be close, not just to ensure that he hit the target, but to viscerally feel the kill. It touched something inside, some primitive emotion. Nothing else he felt came close to that feeling. It was the feeling of life, as paradoxical as it seemed: only in someone else’s death could he actually live.

  Helmut Dalitz turned the corner. Wolf notched up his pace even higher, careful not to break into a run.

  The white Mercedes was waiting just ahead.

  The two bodyguards were spaced three and a half meters apart, trailing their client by a half pace each.

  Wolf was ten meters behind them.

  Seven.

  Five.

  He pulled the gun from his pocket. The man on the right started to turn.

  A single shot took him down. Wolf swiveled, his left hand grabbing his forearm to steady the gun. He caught the second bodyguard in the temple.

  And then it was Helmut Dalitz’s turn.

  The businessman turned, his face an expression of utter surprise.

  The Black Wolf grinned, and squeezed the trigger.

  3

  Room 4, CIA Headquarters Campus (Langley)

  McLean, Virginia

  “Good morning, Colonel Freah. How would you like your coffee?”

  Danny Freah turned to the ceiling as the elevator car plunged down toward its destination. “How do you know I want coffee?” he asked.

  “You always want coffee,” responded the voice.

  “I can’t break the pattern?”

  “Breaking the pattern would be unexpected.”

  The elevator stopped and the door opened.

  “Colonel Freah, you did not answer my question,” said the voice.

  “Surprise me,” said Danny, stepping out into the wide hall in front of the elevator. The space looked like the bottom level of a mall parking garage. A spider work of girders, beams, and pipes ran through it.

  They weren’t for show, exactly, but the overall look was definitely intentional. The insides of the nondescript building—known only as Room 4—had an ambiance that mixed high-tech functional and blow-your-mind weirdness.

  Case in point was the gray wall facing Danny at the far end of the room. He walked toward it, then straight through it.

  Danny Freah was still so new to Room 4 and the high-tech gizmos associated with it that it felt eerily cool to do that. But he was too professional to admit it—or give in to the temptation to do it a few more times for fun.

  The wall was not an optical illusion, exactly. It could keep someone out if the security system didn’t want them in. The barrier was a physical manifestation of an energy array—a kind of force field in layman’s terms, though the man responsible for inventing it, Dr. Ray Rubeo, hated the term force field.

  Absolutely hated it.

  Danny knew, however, that Rubeo did have a sense of humor, which apparently he’d programmed into the automated assistant that had questioned him about coffee in the elevator. Sitting in the beverage center at the left of the desk as he entered was a steaming cup of cinnamon herbal tea.

  Pretty much the last thing Danny would ever drink.

  “Very funny,” he told the computer. “Coffee. The usual.”

  “The system still has some kinks to be worked out,” said Danny’s boss, Breanna Stockard, who was standing over a nearby desk.

  “No—it’s my fault,” said Danny. “I should have known better than to try to outsmart something Rubeo rigged up.”

  The coffee, very strong and hot, spurted through the dispenser into a fresh cup. While the automated assistant and the beverage center were a brand new addition to Room 4, their presence in the high-tech control area wasn’t a surprise. Back at Dreamland, one of the technology section’s proudest achievements was a zero-gravity coffeemaker, which could keep the crews aboard Megafortresses and other large aircraft pleasantly caffeinated no matter what the combat conditions were.

  “I’ll meet you inside,” said Breanna, waving a hand to dismiss the computer screen that had been floating in front of her. “Everyone else is here.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Danny waited for the last drops of coffee to settle into the cup, then raised it slowly to his lips, cooling it with a gentle breath. He’d only been working for Whiplash—the new Whiplash—for two months, and things still felt a bit… different.

  A full-bird colonel, Freah had recently been assigned to the Office of Technology, a special direct-report agency that answered to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On paper, he looked like just another pencil-pushing staff officer, paid for his advice and experience. In reality, he headed Whiplash, one of the most exciting commands in the military.

  A joint venture with the CIA, Whiplash aimed to combine up-to-the nanosecond intelligence capabilities with a covert action team. It was modeled on the Air Force’s Dreamland program that had so much success a decade and a half earlier, under Breanna’s father, Lt. Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian. Breanna had recruited Danny specifically to head the military end of the program.

  They’d had one success so far, on a mission that had stretched from Africa to Iran. For Danny, it felt good to be back in the mix again; most of his assignments since Dreamland had been administrative and supervisory. This post got him back on the front lines with gusto. But it was also a lot of work. He’d spent the weeks since returning home recruiting people and trying to smooth out differences between the two halves of the team—military and active CIA. He was still working on the training routines they needed and filling in his command structure. He was inventing, improvising, and even stealing as the need arose.

  He’d tapped another old Dreamland Whiplash hand—Ben “Boston” Rockland, now a chief master sergeant—as his main personnel guy, dealing with young bucks and their egos.

  Bucks and does; it was a coed force.

  Boston was in Florida at the moment, putting their recruits through their paces. They had twenty-four newbie “shooters” or Whiplash troopers, drawn mostly from active military commands, each with different specialties and strengths. Eventually Danny planned to have some forty-eight troopers to form the core of a covert strike force. They could be deployed as a group, or work in very small teams, depending on the assignment. Whiplash technology would increase their effectiveness exponentially.

  Danny took a sip of the coffee—it was perfect, naturally—then walked down the hall to the conference room.

  “Colonel, good morning,” said Jonathon Reid. Reid was the CIA director’s liaison to the project, Breanna’s equivalent in authority. As the lines of responsibility went, Reid was in charge of operations for the specific missions, while Breanna’s ultimate say was over strategic and funding issues. But as a practical matter, their responsibilities were shared. Reid had the immediate access to intelligence as well as the people who commissioned the ops. Breanna, as a member of the Pentagon, held sway over most of the personnel, and thus the means for completing the mission. Though in many respects they were opposites, they worked together remarkably well.

  Danny took a seat at the conference table across from Nuri Abaajmed Lupo, nodding at him as he sat down. Nuri was a CIA officer who’d preceded him into the program—the first and for a short time only member of Whiplash. He was young but extremely capable, as he’d shown in Africa and Iran. Nuri did, however, have some difficulty dealing with the fact that Danny was the one in charge. He was also used to working alone.

  “Now that we’re all here, we can beg
in,” said Reid. “Screen.”

  A screen appeared above the center of the table. It was another projection.

  “The man on the ground in a pool of blood is the deputy defense minister of Poland,” said Reid. His voice was dry and raspy. “You may remember seeing something about it in the daily intel briefings. That’s the ministry behind him. Yes, this murder was carried out in broad daylight, inside a secure facility.”

  Danny studied the images as the screen changed, showing first the surroundings, then the autopsy photos. Finally he had to look away—something about seeing death treated that clinically turned his stomach.

  “You’ll note that the deputy minister was shot in the forehead,” continued Reid. “That wasn’t a sniper shot. It was at close range, with a very distinctive bullet. Something like this.”

  Reid reached down to his briefcase and removed a manila envelope. Holding it upside down, he shook out what looked to Danny like a model of a bullet, with a rounded top and in an unusual shade of brown.

  “This is a bullet?” said Nuri, picking it up.

  “Carbon composite,” said Danny. “Right?”

  “Yes, Colonel,” said Reid. “There’s no metal. We imagine that it was fired from a weapon that also had no metal, as whoever fired it had to get past a metal detector.”

  Nuri passed the bullet over to Danny.

  “This killed him?”

  “That’s not the actual bullet, no,” said Reid. “That’s something one of our labs was working on. The actual bullet is in Poland. This is another murder, more recent,” Reid went on, changing the slide. “Yesterday as a matter of fact.”

  A new image appeared on the screen. A man lay on a sidewalk, blood around his face and mouth. This time Danny couldn’t see the bullet wound. The picture had been taken at night, and the flash glinted off an unseen window just to the right of the image area. Two other bodies lay on the ground nearby.

  “The dead man is named Helmut Dalitz,” continued Reid. “MY-PID, please display Herr Dalitz’s professional dossier.”