Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  Calmly, I reached down, frisked her, searching for but not finding any documentation, any papers or wallets of any kind except a small billfold that contained a small amount of Swiss currency, probably just enough to get her through her morning’s assignment, and then I ran.

  * * *

  For a long, awful, excruciating moment, as I searched for Molly in the Grillroom at the Baur-au-Lac, I knew she was dead. I knew they had gotten to her. As had happened once before, I had survived their onslaught but the others had gotten my wife.

  The Grillroom is a clubby, comfortable place with an American-style bar, a large stone fireplace, and businessmen sitting at tables lunching on their émincé de turbot. I was decidedly out of place there, bedraggled and blood-spattered as I was, and I drew a number of hostile, disapproving looks.

  And as I turned to leave, a young woman in the uniform of a waitress hurried up to me, and asked, “Are you Mr. Osborne?”

  It took me a moment to remember that that was my cover. “Why do you ask?”

  She nodded shyly, handed me a folded note. “From Mrs. Osborne, sir,” she said, and stood there expectantly as I opened it. I gave her a ten-franc note, and she hurried off.

  The blue Ford Granada in front, the note said in Molly’s handwriting.

  FORTY-NINE

  Munich was dark by the time we arrived, a clear and crisp evening twinkling with city lights. We had retrieved our bags from the left-luggage depot in the Hauptbahnhof in Zurich, and got the 15:39 train, which arrived at 20:09 in Munich’s Hauptbahnhof. There was a momentary fright aboard the train when we crossed the German border, and I braced myself for passport control. There had been plenty of time for our false passports to be faxed to the German authorities, particularly if the CIA put a priority on it, which I would bet it did.

  But times have changed. The old days, when you would be startled awake in the middle of the night, your train compartment door violently slid open, a German voice barking: “Deutsche Passkontrolle!”—those days were ancient history now. Europe was unifying. Passport checks were seldom.

  Exhausted yet tense, anxious, wired, I tried to sleep on the train, but could not.

  We changed some money at the Deutsche Verkehrs-Bank office at the train station, and then I made hotel reservations for the night. The Metropol, with the unique advantage of its location directly across from the Hauptbahnhof, was booked solid. But I was able to book us a room at the Bayerischer Hof und Palais Montgelas, on Promenadeplatz, in the city center—inordinately expensive, but any port in a storm and all that.

  From a pay phone I placed a call to Kent Atkins, Deputy Chief of Station, CIA, in Munich. Atkins, an old drinking buddy of mine from Paris days, was, as I’ve said, a friend of Edmund Moore’s—and, more important, was the one who had given Ed Moore documents warning of something “ominous” in the works.

  It was about nine-thirty by the time I called Atkins at home. He answered on the first ring.

  “Yes?”

  “Kent?”

  “Yes?” His voice was sharp, alert, but it sounded as if he had been asleep. One of the vital skills you acquire in the business is the ability to snap awake, be perfectly attentive in a split second.

  “Boy, you’re asleep early. It’s barely nine at night.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Father John.”

  “Who?”

  “Père Jean.” An old, inside joke; a reference I hoped he would remember.

  Long silence. “Who is—oh, God. Where are you?”

  “Can we meet for a drink or something?”

  “Can it wait?”

  “No. Hofbraühaus in half an hour?”

  Atkins replied quickly and sarcastically: “Why don’t we just meet in the lobby of the American embassy?”

  I got it, and smiled to myself. Molly looked at me with concern; I nodded reassurance.

  “See you at Leopold,” he said, and hung up. He sounded distraught.

  Leopold, I knew—and he knew that I knew—meant Leopoldstrasse, in Schwabing, the section to the north of the city. That meant the Englishcher Garten, a logical meeting place, and specifically, the Monopteros, the classical temple built in the early part of the nineteenth century, on a bluff in the park. A good place for a “blind date,” as we spooks call it.

  Instead of taking the U-bahn directly from the train station, which had certain risks, we exited the station and strolled a bit, circuitously, to Marienplatz, the always-crowded central square of the city, overpowered by the Gothic monstrosity of the New Town Hall, its gray gingerbread façade illuminated frighteningly at night, and on the southwest corner a rather barbarous modern department store building, which utterly destroyed the kitsch-Gothic unity of the square, awful though it was.

  In some ways Germany hadn’t changed since last I saw it. I was reassured to see a crowd waiting bovinely at a flashing red Don’t Walk sign on Maxburgstrasse, where not a single automobile was in sight and the whole bunch could have crossed without anyone noticing, but laws were laws. One young man hopped up and down on alternating feet, desperate with impatience, like a horse champing at the bit, but even he wouldn’t violate the social etiquette.

  Yet in significant ways Germany had changed drastically. The crowds in Marienplatz were louder and more threatening than the usually polite evening throngs there. Neo-Nazi skinheads lurked in spiteful little gangs, hurling racial epithets at passersby. Graffiti covered quite a few of the otherwise-tidy Gothic buildings. “Ausländer raus!” and “Kanacken raus!”—“Foreigners get out,” in varying degrees of derogation. “Tod allen Juden und dem Ausländerpack!”—“Death to the Jews and the foreign hordes.” “Deutschland ist stärker ohne Europa”—“Germany is stronger without Europe.” There were attacks on the former East Germans: “Ossis—Parasiten!” Inscribed in Day-Glo pink on the front of an otherwise elegant restaurant, an evocation of an earlier time: “Deutschland für Deutsche,” “Germany for the Germans.” And one plaintive cry: “Für mehr Menschlichkeit, gegen Gewalt!” meaning “For more humanity, against violence.”

  Dozens of homeless people slept on cardboard flats above grates. Many storefronts were boarded up, plate-glass windows were smashed and unrepaired, and many businesses seemed to be dying. “Wegen Geschäftsaufgabe alle Waren 30% billiger!” one sign read: GOING OUT OF BUSINESS ALL GOODS 30% OFF.

  Munich seemed a city out of control. I wondered whether the entire country, which was in its biggest economic crisis since the days before Hitler’s rise to power, was like this.

  Molly and I took the U-bahn from Marienplatz to Müncher Freiheit and made our way through the Englischer Garten’s asphalt tracks, by the artificial lake, the Chinese Tower. We quickly located the Monopteros, which has always reminded me of a bulimic Jefferson Memorial, all gawky columns and scrolled capitals. We circled it in silence. In the sixties the Monopteros was a hangout for street people and protesters and the like. Now it seemed to be a rendezvous point for teenage boys and girls in American college sweatshirts and black leather jackets.

  “Why do you think the money was wired to Munich?” Molly asked. “Isn’t Frankfurt the financial capital of Germany?”

  “Yes. But Munich is the manufacturing center. The industrial capital as well as the capital of Bavaria. The real city of money. Sometimes Munich’s called Germany’s secret capital.”

  We were early, or, rather, Atkins arrived late, in his antique Ford Fiesta, little more than sheaths of rust held together by duct tape. He had the radio blasting, or maybe it was a tape: Donna Summer doing the old post-disco classic “She Works Hard for the Money.” In Paris, I remembered, he’d had an embarrassing affinity for discothéques. The music died only when he keyed off the ignition and the car sputtered to a stop fifty feet from where we stood.

  “Nice car,” I called out as he approached. “Very gemütlich.”

  “Very crappy,” he returned unsmilingly. His face showed great strain, the same anxiety I had heard in his voice. Atkins was in
his mid-forties, lithe, with a mane of prematurely white hair contrasting with heavy dark brows. He had a long, thin face and virtually no lips, but he was good-looking all the same. He was also gay, which for a long while made career advancement difficult for him (the upper echelons in Langley have become enlightened only very recently).

  Atkins had aged quite a bit since I had last seen him in Paris. He had deep circles under his eyes, which told of nights of insomnia. He hadn’t been a worrier when I knew him in Paris, but something was obsessing him now, and I knew what it was.

  I began introducing him to Molly, but he would have no social pleasantries. He reached out a hand and gripped my shoulder.

  “Ben,” he said, alarm in his eyes. “Get the hell out of here. Get the hell out of Germany. I can’t afford to be seen with you.

  “Where are you staying?” he asked.

  “Vier Jahreszeiten,” I lied.

  “Too public, too vulnerable. I wouldn’t even stay in the city if I were you.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re PNG.” Persona non grata.

  “Here?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “So what?”

  “You’re on the watch list.”

  “Meaning?”

  Atkins hesitated, glanced at Molly and then at me, as if asking for permission to proceed. I nodded.

  “Cauterization.”

  “What?” In Agency lingo, a compromised or identified agent is “cauterized” for his own protection by being swiftly yanked out of a hostile situation and taken into safety. But more and more often the term is used with irony—meaning the apprehension of an agent by his own employers when he’s deemed to be dangerous to the organization.

  Atkins was telling me that orders had been disseminated throughout the world that I was to be brought in by any Agency official who chanced to encounter me.

  “It’s a D-Sid.” A DCID, or Director of Central Intelligence Directive. “Orders cut by some muckety-muck at the Agency named Rossi. What are you doing here?” Atkins was moving quickly now, probably an unconscious fear reflex. We kept up with him; Molly was forced into a kind of half-walk, half-sprint. She only listened, allowing me to do all the talking.

  “I need your help, Kent.”

  “I said, what are you doing here? Are you out of your mind?”

  “How much do you know?”

  “They warned me you might surface here. Have you gone private or something?”

  “I went private when I quit and went to law school.”

  “But you’re back in the game,” he prodded. “Why?”

  “I was forced into it.”

  “So they all say. You can never quit.”

  “Bullshit. For a while, I did.”

  “You were put through some sort of superclassified experimental program, they say. Some sort of research program designed to enhance your usefulness. I don’t know what that means. The rumors are vague.”

  “The rumors are barium,” I said. He got my reference: “barium” is a KGB-inspired term for false information that’s given to suspected leaks in order to detect them, much the same way barium is used in gastroenterology.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But you’ve got to go to ground, Ben. Both of you. Disappear. Your lives are in jeopardy.”

  When we had gotten to a deserted spot, a copse of trees by a dirt path, I stopped. “You know Ed Moore’s dead.”

  He blinked. “I know. I talked to him the night before he was killed.”

  “He told me you were scared to death.”

  “Moore exaggerated.”

  “But you are scared, Kent. You’ve got to tell me what you know. You gave Moore documents—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Molly, sensing his reticence, announced: “I’m going to take a stroll. I badly need some fresh air.” Her hand grazed the back of my neck as she walked off.

  “He told me, Kent,” I continued. “It never went any further than me, I promise. We don’t have the time for this. What do you know?”

  He bit his thin lower lip, frowned. His mouth was a straight line, an arc tilted downward. He consulted his watch, a fake Rolex. “The documents I gave Ed were far from conclusive.”

  “But you know more now, don’t you?”

  “I have nothing in writing. No documents. Everything I’ve learned is ears-only stuff.”

  “That’s often the most valuable intelligence. Kent, Ed Moore was killed over this. I have some information that might be useful—”

  “I don’t want your goddamned information!”

  “Listen to me!”

  “No,” he said. “You listen to me. I talked to Ed a few hours before the fuckers made him commit suicide. He warned me about an assassination conspiracy.”

  “Yes,” I said, my stomach tensing. “Against whom?”

  “Ed had only bits and pieces. Speculation.”

  “Who?”

  “Against the only guy who can clean the Agency out.”

  “Alex Truslow.”

  “You got it.”

  “I’m working for him.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. For his sake and the sake of the Company.”

  “I’m flattered. Now, I need some information. Recently, a large sum of money was wired to a corporate account in Munich. The Commerzbank.”

  “Whose account?”

  Could I trust him or not? I had to rely on Ed Moore’s good judgment. I plunged ahead. “Are you with me or not?”

  Atkins took a deep breath. “I’m with you, Ben.”

  “The recipient’s name was Gerhard Stoessel. The corporate account belongs to Krafft A.G. Tell me everything you know.”

  He shook his head. “You got that wrong. Boy, you got something all screwed up.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you know who Stoessel is?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Christ! Haven’t you been reading the papers? Gerhard Stoessel is the chairman of Neue Welt, an enormous real estate concern. Believed to own and/or control most of the commercial real estate in unified Germany. More to the point, Stoessel is the economic adviser to Wilhelm Vogel, the chancellor-elect. Vogel’s already named him finance minister in the Vogel government. Wants Stoessel to rebuild the shattered German economy. He’s known as Vogel’s Svengali, sort of a financial genius. But as I said, you got something really screwed up.”

  “How?”

  “Vogel’s real estate company has no links whatsoever to Krafft A.G. Do you know much about Krafft?”

  “That’s part of the reason I’m here,” I said. “I know it’s a huge arms manufacturer.”

  “Only the biggest arms manufacturer in Europe. Headquartered in Stuttgart. Way bigger than the other German defense companies—Krupp, Dornier, Krauss-Maffei, Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm, Siemens, and let’s not forget the Bayerische Motorenwerke. Bigger than Ingenieurkontor Lübeck, the submarine makers; or Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg, AEG, MTU, Messerschmitt, Daimler-Benz, Rheinmetall…”

  “How do you know Stoessel has no links with Krafft?”

  “It’s the law. There was a ruling some years back by the Federal Cartel Office, when Neue Welt tried to acquire Krafft. The cartel office decided the two companies can’t have anything to do with one another, that a merger would create an uncontrollable giant. Did you know the word cartel comes from the German Kartell? It’s a German concept.”

  “My information is right,” I said.

  All this time I had been straining, while talking and listening, to pick up what I could of Kent’s thoughts. Here and there something would come through. Each time it confirmed for me what I already knew, that he was telling me the truth, at least as he knew it.

  “If—if your information is right, and I won’t ask where you got it, I don’t want to know—that’s damned convincing proof that Stoessel’s company has somehow, secretly, acquired Krafft!”

  I turned to make sure Molly was within view; she was: she was pacing back and forth
.

  What this all meant, I thought but didn’t say, was that the Bank of Zurich had funneled billions of dollars to a German corporation, the largest real estate firm combined with the largest munitions manufacturer … which was behind Wilhelm Vogel, the next chancellor of Germany … the next leader, functionally, of Europe.

  I shuddered, not wanting to consider the ramifications of this, but not able to stop myself. The consequences, I knew at once, were even worse than I had suspected.

  FIFTY

  “Could it have been a bribe?” I asked. “Stoessel’s known as a Mr. Clean type,” Atkins replied. “Those are the types who most often take bribes.”

  “All right, I’m not saying he wouldn’t take a bribe. But the fact is that all campaign financing in Germany is scrutinized incredibly closely these days. That’s to keep these industrial giants from controlling the politics. There are any number of ways to secretly channel money, but there isn’t a corporation that would dare. German intelligence keeps a close watch. So if you have proof—documentary proof—of this, that’s political dynamite.”

  What was I to say? I had no documents. All I had was the thoughts in Eisler’s head that I’d received. But tell that to Atkins!

  “All the more reason,” I said, “why billions of dollars or deutsche marks surreptitiously channeled into the country would be enormously valuable to a candidate. But I don’t get it. I thought Vogel was a moderate, sort of a populist.”

  “Let’s walk,” he said. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Molly. We began to walk, and, keeping her distance, she followed.

  “All right,” Atkins said, bowing his head as he walked. “The German economy is in a disarray it hasn’t seen since the 1920s, right? Riots in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, Bonn—all the major cities, and in many of the smaller ones as well. Neo-Nazis are all over the place. There’s a wave of violence sweeping the country. You with me?”

  “Go ahead.”