Kappel turned and noticed that his deputy was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It looked like he had just come from the bar down the street. By contrast, Kappel was still wearing his gray suit, although he had loosened his red tie somewhat.
“Please, s…sit,” Kappel said. He took his seat and Garcia followed his lead, sitting down across from him. “Now, what could not wait until m…morning?”
“We have a problem in France,” Garcia said, tapping his tablet.
“Explain.”
“It’s Anica Senka,” Garcia said.
“The Austrian woman.”
“Yes, sir. She was undercover in Innsbruck infiltrating a Serbian-run criminal operation.”
Kappel had already been briefed on this as it happened. “Yes, I know. She was off the grid for a while.”
“The other Austrian we sent to back her up has reported in,” Garcia said.
“Rolf Fischer from Vienna.”
“That’s correct. Rolf said there was a shoot-out in Strasbourg tonight in an apartment complex between the Serbs and a couple of unknown assailants. He said he was nearly shot.”
“Did anyone get hurt?” Kappel asked.
“One Serb was killed,” Garcia said. “But we have another problem. Rolf said the Serbs were meeting at the time with an American. A former intelligence officer.”
“CIA?”
“Yes, sir. He spent a lot of time in Germany, so I thought you might have come across him in the past. His name is Jake Adams.”
Kappel shook his head, and tried his best to control his speech. “Never heard of him.”
“After leaving the CIA, he was a prominent security consultant in Austria. He lectured at nearly every major security conference in Europe.”
“Now that sounds familiar,” Kappel said. “What was this man doing there?”
“Apparently, he’s old friends with Anica Senka. Known her since she was a child. Somehow, he got wind that she was missing, and he started tracking her down. He’s with an Israeli woman. Rolf thinks she was former Mossad.”
Mother of God, Kappel thought. That’s all they needed. “Has Anica checked in?”
“Yes, sir. She wasn’t at the apartment during the shoot-out. By then, she had already gone to Riquewihr.”
“Why Alsace? Other than good wine.”
“To meet up with a wine merchant,” Garcia said. “Anica thinks they might be smuggling migrants through wine routes. One more thing, sir.”
Great. “What’s that?”
“Well, two more things. First, the former intelligence officers also had a current Austrian Polizei officer with them. He’s also affiliated with Europol.”
“How is he involved?” Kappel asked.
“He’s a former partner of Anica’s. He also thought something might have happened to her.”
“And, I’m guessing you saved the best for last,” Kappel said mockingly.
“That’s a matter of perspective, sir,” Garcia said. “Anica got word that the French wine man was going to rape and kill her.”
“What?” Kappel slammed his hands down on his desk.
“It’s all right, sir. She got the upper hand and has the man in custody for interrogation.”
Under normal circumstances of law enforcement, that was perfectly logical. But Europol was not a traditional police organization. They were mostly a coordinating agency with a building full of analysts connecting the dots among the EU member states. Kappel had made changes to that structure, though. Now, Europol officers were in the field gathering first-hand knowledge, instead of only sitting back and collecting the crumbs from state police. He wanted to make Europol more like INTERPOL. Even better.
“We do not have facilities for interrogation,” Kappel explained to his deputy. “Did you ask Anica how she would accomplish this?”
“No, sir.” Garcia shifted nervously in his chair, his right knee tapping up and down. “I thought it would be best if we both had plausible deniability.”
Kappel had met Anica Senka only a couple of times. She always had an intense look in her eyes, as if she could choke him out for saying the wrong thing.
“Alright,” Kappel said. “Tell her to carry on and report back with what she discovers.”
Garcia nodded and realized he was being dismissed, so he got up and headed toward the door.
“Hang on,” Kappel said. “Make sure you do a thorough background on those intel officers and the Austrian Polizei officer.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll get back with you as soon as I can.”
Once his deputy was gone, Kappel got back up and glanced out the window again. Yeah, he didn’t need this anymore. The European Union had no good reason to have a law enforcement agency. It was simply another level of oversight. Everything they did could simply be done by the member states, if they would simply talk with each other. That was the rub, he knew. On a personal level, he was proud of how he had been able to control his stammer.
11
Riquewihr, France
Jake rounded up his crew at dark thirty. Then they took two cars toward the south, making it to this small tourist town in the Alsace hills just as the sun was rising over Germany to the east.
Jake and Sirena got out of their rental BMW and walked back toward Johann and Rolf in their car.
Johann powered down the driver’s side window. “It should be just two blocks down the side street and then left on the main tourist walk platz.”
“Okay. We’ll go in first. You guys hang back and watch our back out on the street.”
“Will do. Is she answering her phone yet?”
Jake shook his head. “She must have turned it off again.”
“Why would she do that?” Johann asked.
Grasping the side of the car, Jake glared in at Rolf. “I don’t know. Do you have any idea, Shaggy?”
“Why does he keep calling me that?” Rolf asked Johann.
“It’s obviously a term of endearment,” Johann explained.
“I have no idea,” Rolf said.
Somehow, Jake didn’t believe the man. Despite that, he shifted his head for Sirena to move down the street with him toward the Frenchman’s apartment.
“You’re pretty hard on those men,” Sirena said.
He knew that. “They need to toughen up. The shadow game isn’t something you can play half-assed.”
“I know. Just quit going so Jake Adams on their asses. Think of them like you would your son, Karl.”
“I was pretty hard on Karl last time we were together,” Jake said. “If they don’t like how I’m treating them, they can go back to Austria and play with their Legos.”
She slapped his butt and then took his arm, the happy couple wandering up the lane to get coffee and crescents.
The wine store had a recessed front entrance with two doors. One was a long glass door into the shop, and the one to the left was wooden and led to the apartment. It was just as Anica had described.
“She might have left it open for us,” Sirena said.
Jake pushed down the lever and the door swung in. He shrugged and went inside, with Sirena right on his heels. When they got upstairs, another door was unlocked, so Jake simply went inside. The place was a small studio apartment with a kitchen area off to the right, a small living area just inside the door, and a bed up against the far wall. He saw immediately that Anica had been there, since there was a skinny man tied up and strapped to the bed. He was awake and struggling against his bindings. His mouth was taped shut over the top of a sock jammed down his throat.
The Frenchman’s eyes were wide when he saw Jake and Sirena. He had been beaten up significantly, with his left eye nearly swollen shut. Blood had caked up around his nostrils, his mouth, his eyes, and his ears. And these were only the man’s visible wounds.
“Check the bathroom,” Jake said to Sirena.
She went off and came back in a couple of seconds. “Nope.”
The man was trying to say something.
Jake sat on th
e edge of the bed and ripped the tape off the man’s face, nearly extracting the man’s skinny beard in the process. Then he pulled out the wet sock and dropped it on the man’s chest.
The man said something quickly in French. Although Jake could understand much of his words, he asked the man to use either German or English.
Catching his breath, the Frenchman said, “This crazy woman tried to kill me. She just left moments ago.”
“Seriously?” Jake asked. “That’s the story you want tell?”
“It’s the truth.”
From memory, Jake said, “Pierre Deval. Thirty-two. French citizen. Lowlife douche bag. Wanted by INTERPOL for too many crimes to innumerate. And now you’ve gotten involved with a group of Serbs and others who will slit your throat if you tell me what I want to know.”
Pulling out his Glock, Jake shoved the barrel into the man’s forehead and continued, “But what you don’t realize is that I don’t give a shit. I work with people in the organization.”
Pierre shook his head. “You are the police?”
Jake laughed. “You are Zoran Petrovic’s little bitch. I’m from way up the food chain higher than that. Now, you have only one way to survive today. You tell me everything you told that woman.”
Pierre tried to shake his head again. “I told her nothing.”
“Then why are you still alive?” Jake asked. “That woman is a brutal murderer. She has worked for the Russians as a hit woman, leaving a trail of bodies across Europe. And you’re telling me that she let you live?”
With this new information, Pierre started squealing like a wounded rabbit. He told Jake and Sirena everything he had told Anica.
“Are you sure that’s everything?” Jake asked, tapping his gun barrel against the man’s sweaty forehead.
“Yes, ja, si, oui,” Pierre said.
Jake put his gun away and started toward the door.
“Wait. You must untie me.”
Pulling Sirena aside, Jake whispered, “What should we do with this asshole?”
She looked over Jake’s shoulder at the guy. “If we leave him, he will eventually get free. Now, he thinks you work for their organization. And you have enhanced the criminal reputation of Anica.”
“But if we set him free and he talks with Zoran Petrovic, that could be a problem,” Jake reasoned.
“She beat this man to get information,” Sirena said. “If she was with the organization, she would already have this knowledge.”
As usual, Sirena had a damn good point. Although Jake had tried to cover his tracks here, it wasn’t clear if Anica had done the same for herself. “What if we have our Polizei friends take this man into custody? They could hold him for a while and keep him quiet.”
“Rolf and Johann don’t have jurisdiction in France.”
“Not exactly true,” Jake said. “Both are part of Europol, with authority to at least detain until the local police arrest the man.”
Sirena shook her head. “The locals will see Pierre as a victim.”
“Would you stop making so much sense?” Jake turned and studied the man for a moment. Turning back to Sirena, he said, “Alright. Find a new sock and bring the tape. We’re taking him with us.”
“To what end?”
“I’ll figure that out later,” Jake said. “We’ll take him across the border into Germany and drop him off.” Now, Jake turned to the Frenchman and said, “You’re going to come with us and verify the information you just gave us.”
“But I am telling you the truth,” Pierre said.
“We’ll see.” Another reason not to let Pierre go, of course, was that he could call the man he had given up to Anica and that would put her in danger.
They washed Pierre up a bit and taped his hands behind his back. Now they could escort him to the car without drawing too much attention. They would have to keep him quiet, though. So, Sirena taped his mouth shut and then Jake covered his head with a brown pillowcase.
When they got downstairs, the two Austrian Polizei officers were told to stay quiet as they escorted the man to the cars. Jake shoved the guy into the back seat of the rental BMW and drove off, with Rolf and Johann pulling out behind them.
Once they got to an isolated location on the outskirts of town, Jake pulled over and got out. As he opened the back door, the Frenchman tried to kick Jake, but he missed terribly. Jake hauled the guy out and brought him around the back of the car. Then he popped the trunk and shoved the man inside. But Pierre slashed around like a fish in the bottom of a boat. Jake shook his head and simply punched the man in the face. Blood instantly started to soak through the pillowcase, but the man didn’t move. Jake slammed the trunk and went back to speak with the Polizei officers.
“What are you going to do with this man?” Rolf asked.
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “Do you guys have a shovel.”
“We can’t kill him,” Rolf pled.
“I was kidding. We’ll take him into Germany and drop him off.”
“That’s kidnapping across borders,” Johann said.
“What? No. We’re just taking him for a ride.”
“But what about the mask?” Rolf asked.
“He’s sensitive to light.”
“And the punch in the face?” Johann wanted to know.
Jake hesitated. “He said something about my dead mother.”
“That wasn’t nice,” Johann concluded. “Where to now?”
“Germany. Follow me.”
Jake went back to the BMW and sat behind the wheel, contemplating what to do. He wasn’t sure keeping these two Austrian Polizei officer around was a smart play. He wasn’t used to trying to justify his actions. And he had no idea what kind of Boy Scouts these two would end up being.
“Everything alright, Jake,” Sirena asked.
“Yeah. I think so. You heard Pierre give up the information he had told Anica. Do you think he was telling me the truth?”
“About fifty percent chance,” she said. “After all, you did have a gun to his head.”
Jake turned over the engine and glanced back at the men in the car behind them. “I hate getting those two involved in this.”
“Because you do things a little unorthodox?”
“I have trust issues,” Jake said as he put the car in gear and pulled out onto the priority road.
“Really,” she said with a smirk. “I never noticed that.”
She noticed, he thought.
12
Konstanz, Germany
It took Anica Senka about three hours to travel from Riquewihr, France to this German city on the shore of Bodensee, or Lake Constance. Across the large lake was Switzerland. On a good, clear day, one could see the Alps to the south and east, but at mid-day on this day, Anica could barely see the lake, since heavy cloud cover enveloped the city and rain came down in a constant mist.
The Frenchman, Pierre Deval, had given her the name of a contact in the city. This was another Serb named Goran Goluža. After getting to Konstanz, she had turned her phone back on and used it to access the Europol criminal database to do a background on Goluža. Like many of the other Serbs she had come across, this man had once been in the military. But his records were sealed, which meant he had probably been in a special unit. Or, he had testified against those who had committed war crimes. As far as she could tell, Goluža owned a small trucking company. Which is how Pierre knew Goluža. He shipped the French Alsace wine for Pierre.
Late in the afternoon now, with no let-up in the relentless rain, Anica sat in her VW Passat and watched the small shipping platform that could accommodate four trucks. One truck sat idle and another was being unloaded into a small warehouse, which did not make sense to Anica. The Serb’s company was supposed to simply pick up shipments at one location and drop them off elsewhere. It was possible that Goluža used the warehouse for temporary storage before consolidating shipments.
Suddenly her phone buzzed, startling her. She had forgotten to turn it off after researching the
Serb. Looking at the phone, she saw that it was from a place called Easy Hands Massage Parlor. She shook her head at the ingenuity of Jake Adams.
Finally, she tapped on to the call and said, “Does this massage come with a happy ending?”
“Let’s just say that our customers always come first,” Jake said.
“You will have to teach me that phone trick,” Anica said.
“First,” Jake said, “you need to tell me why you didn’t wait for me in Riquewihr.”
“I thought about that,” she said. “I’m supposed to be undercover. We could not be together there. Did you find Pierre?”
“It was hard to miss him,” Jake said. “Especially the way you left him.”
“He was supposed to rape and kill me,” she said. “If he had tried that, I would have been justified to defend myself and finish him.”
“Understood,” Jake said. “What did he give you? And where are you now?”
She hesitated way too long as she came up with her lie. “He didn’t give me much.” Anica knew that Jake would have tracked her GPS, so it wasn’t like she could lie about her location.
“He must have given you something, Anica. Otherwise, why go to Germany?”
“Who did you tell Pierre you were?”
“I didn’t tell him shit about me, other than the lie that I was with his organization and wanted to know what he had divulged to you.”
Damn it. Now she could not lie to Jake. “What did you do with Pierre?”
“I should have put a bullet in his head,” Jake said. “Nobody messes with my Anica.”
She smiled with that sentiment. “I’m sorry I left, Uncle Jake. I didn’t want to get you involved.”
“It’s a little late for that, girl.”
Anica hesitated as she watched a man close the back of a large transport truck and lock it. Then she said, “You didn’t let Pierre go.”
Jake said, “Not exactly. He’s still a little tied up. I didn’t want him calling and warning anyone.”
“Thank you.”
“What are your plans?” he asked. “You can’t take on Goran Goluža and his men on your own.”
This man was incredible, she thought. Now he not only knew where she was, but he knew who she was currently tracking. “How?”
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