Jack knew he had to take the initiative now, while the stranger was on his knees with his head down and facing away.
Jack stepped out of the closet and started across the little room. He’d made it only halfway when the floorboards under his feet gave him away.
The stranger launched up and spun around. In the blue light, Jack saw a hand reach into a coat pocket, and then reemerge quickly, wrapped around something small and black. Jack didn’t know if it was a gun or a knife, but it didn’t matter. He had the momentum, and continued rushing forward with his eyes on the weapon, then balled his fist and reached back.
He saw the pointed steel at the same time he heard the click of the switchblade. The stranger slashed with the knife as Ryan fired out a right jab. His fist slammed into the man’s jaw, connecting near perfectly, and the head snapped back.
The knife flew through the air as the body fell backward on the bed and lay there, unconscious.
Jack felt a pain in his forearm, and he realized he’d been cut by the switchblade; he couldn’t see how bad it was in the poor light, but he felt through the tear in his jacket, then pulled his hand back and rubbed the wet blood with his fingertips. He didn’t think it was too severe, but it stung like hell.
“Son of a bitch!” he shouted, as he pulled off his scarf and wrapped it around the wound.
It took a moment to tie it off, and while he did this he kept his eyes on the figure on the bed in front of him. He couldn’t see the face, so he stepped forward, leaning over the unconscious form. He leaned closer still, reaching down and pushing the hood of the coat back, then moving wet hair out of the way so he could see the face.
He stood up quickly, stunned.
This was a woman.
He looked down at his own fist; his knuckles throbbed after the vicious blow he’d delivered to her face. “Oh, Christ.”
—
It took the woman five minutes to come around. In that time Jack tied her hands behind her back with the bra from the laundry basket in the corner and placed her on the floor, sitting her up against the bed. He’d also searched her thoroughly. She had no more weapons, and she carried no identification, only a key chain with a few keys on it and two small wads of currency. Ryan thought it was interesting she was in possession of both West German deutschmarks and East German ostmarks, but this was hardly the most interesting thing about her.
As he sat on the floor in front of her, the lava lamp between the two of them, he studied her face. The lighting was bad, her blond bangs hung low over her eyes with her head slumped forward, and there was a red-and-purple bruise on her jaw from Ryan’s fist, so it was difficult to get a great look at her, but he started to suspect he knew who she was.
And when she woke, when her eyes opened and she slowly began looking around the room, Jack was certain.
He said, “I can gag you. If you scream, I will do just that. Do you understand me?”
He could hear her breath quicken. She looked at him, and her eyes widened in fear and tears dripped down her face.
“You speak English, don’t you?”
After a moment, she asked, “Who are you?” Her German accent was strong, but Ryan had no trouble understanding her.
In the soft blue lighting, he looked into her eyes. He saw the terror, but he could also see exhaustion. Her wet hair hung on her forehead.
He said, “You can call me John. And how about I call you Marta? Marta Scheuring.”
76
Jack had no idea how it was so, but sitting before him was the Red Army Faction member whose body had been identified at the scene of the firebombing in Rotkreuz, Switzerland.
“That is not my name,” she said.
Ryan wished that Nick Eastling were here. The counterintelligence officer had his faults, but he had a knack for getting people to talk.
“There is no use in denying it,” Jack said, while looking around the room for any pictures of her. He couldn’t find anything, but he wondered if the BfV men might have taken them away as evidence.
“Fucking pig,” she said. She turned away, looking at the far wall. “You are American?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“FBI? CIA?”
“How about I ask the questions?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to listen to your shit questions. You are a fool. You all are. You think we were in Switzerland, you think we were involved in the attacks there. But it wasn’t us. None of us were. You pigs killed everyone here for nothing.”
Jack shook his head. “Not for nothing. Your friends were killed because you are RAF, and your identification was found at the location where fourteen people were burned to death. When GSG Nine came to raid this place, someone started shooting from your hotel room up the street.”
She shook her head. Her wet bangs drooped into her eyes and she blew them back up. “Was meinst du denn?” What the hell do you mean? “What hotel room?”
“Did you rent a room in a guest worker hotel two blocks up on Sprengelstrasse?”
“Why would I do that?” Her voice was laced with derision, but there was a definite tone to her words that told Jack she was telling the truth.
Jack figured as much. He said, “I don’t know you, Marta, but for your sake, I hope you are smart enough to realize that you have been set up. Your entire organization has been set up.”
The German woman cocked her head, and again the bangs drooped. She let them hang. “You believe me? You believe that I didn’t kill anyone?”
“I believe you, yes. But right now I am the only one who believes the Red Army Faction is just a pawn in this. As soon as the BfV finds out you are still alive, you will be the most wanted person in Germany.”
Jack thought the girl looked like she would start crying again, but instead she just muttered, “Fucking bourgeois pigs. All of you.”
“Who was the dead girl in Switzerland with your ID?”
She did not answer.
“Marta, nobody in the world knows I am here right now. If you want, I can go downstairs and tell the cops out front that you’re here. Or you can talk to me a little, and then both of us can slip away, safe and sound.”
Marta mumbled something.
“What’s that?”
“Ingrid Bretz. Her name was Ingrid Bretz.”
“Was she Red Army Faction?”
Marta just shook her head. “She was a waitress at a bar in Alexanderplatz, in East Berlin.”
“EastBerlin? She is from the East?”
“Ja.”
“What was she doing with your identification?”
“I gave it to her. A week ago, I went over to the East. She said she needed to come to the West for a few days. She needed an Ausweis, an identification. We looked enough alike, so I gave her mine.”
“You were friends?”
Marta hesitated. “Yes, but she paid me. She paid me to go to the East, to give her my Ausweis, and to wait a few days for her to return.”
“Who arranged this?”
“No one. It was just an idea she had.”
Jack didn’t believe her for a second. “If you didn’t have any identification, how did you get back into West Berlin?”
Marta shrugged. “There are ways.”
“What ways? Like a tunnel?”
“Ha. A tunnel? You are a fool.”
Jack didn’t press the question. Instead he asked, “Why didn’t Ingrid sneak over like you did?”
Marta glared at Ryan. It was a look that a left-wing terrorist might give an employee of the CIA. Full of sanctimony and intellectual superiority. “She was going to Switzerland. There is no tunnel to Switzerland.”
Jack realized Marta was saying Ingrid would have needed the identification to get out of East Berlin and into West Germany, and then to get from Germany to Switzerland.
“Do you know why she was going to Switzerland?”
“She told me she had a boyfriend who immigrated there.”
“And you believed her?”
“Why not? She showed me a necklace he sent her. It was a big diamond. She didn’t even wear it. Not many East German girls wear a diamond necklace around.”
“Did she give you the name of her boyfriend?”
“No.”
“But you were friends?” Jack asked incredulously. He wasn’t trained to interrogate. He wondered if his inquisitive nature was pushing things too fast. Before he could think of another, softer line of questioning, Marta spoke on her own.
“Ingrid had never even been to Switzerland. So how is she going to go there, on her own, and start machine-gunning people and blowing up buildings? Das ist verrückt.” She translated for herself. “That is crazy.”
“They will say she did not do it alone. They will say others in the RAF were working with her. Even you, maybe?”
Marta shook her head. “Ingrid was not RAF. And anyway, what do we care about bankers in Switzerland? There are bankers here. Industrialists here. NATO here.” She looked up at Jack, still seated above her on her little bed. “Capitalist spies . . . here.”
“How did the briefcase end up under the bed?”
Marta went quiet. This time, Jack answered for her.
He said, “Here’s what I think. I don’t believe you loaned your identification to this waitress for a few East German marks. I think you were ordered to give it to her by the same people who planted the evidence under your bed.”
Her laugh seemed fake, forced. “Ordered by who?”
Jack shrugged. “Stasi, maybe? Or was it KGB? I don’t know. I do know your organization works with both of them. Whoever it was told you they needed to stash something here. You must have told them about the false floor under the bed. Once you found out your place had been raided, you realized you’d been framed.”
She shook her head again. “Typical lie of the CIA.”
Ryan squeezed the scarf wrapped on his forearm; he felt the wetness from where the blood soaked through. He said, “Listen, Marta, whoever did this used Ingrid because they couldn’t get a real RAF member to go to Switzerland and plant the bomb. They got your identification and gave it to her so that your group would be blamed for the killings. Your friends died as a result of it.
“You obviously know you have been set up, because you came back over here, hoping against hope that the evidence was still under the bed and you could get it the hell out of here before you and your group of left-wing losers were implicated even deeper.”
“I have nothing more to say to you.”
“Don’t you want the world to know Red Army Faction had nothing to do with the death of all those innocent people in Switzerland? This is the worst possible thing that could have happened to your organization.”
She said nothing. She only shook her head.
“You won’t talk, so how about you just listen for a moment? In case you don’t know, your friends died because of money. This is all about a bank account. An account with two hundred million dollars in it in a Swiss bank. To hide the money, some people had to die, so the Russians decided they would use you and your friends to take the blame for killing them.”
Ryan smiled at her. “It’s nothing more than money, my dear. Your socialist ideals, your struggle for the rights of the worker, none of that bullshit has one goddamned thing to do with any of this. The Russians wanted to keep their money hidden, and the RAF made a useful stooge.”
Jack continued, “They are all dead, Marta. All your friends. There is no one to protect except the man who did this to you. If you protect him . . .” Jack motioned to the empty flat around him. “Then you are even more a part of what happened to them all.”
She wept openly now, her head hung, tears dripped onto the floor in front of her. But she did not say anything.
“You don’t want to talk. That’s fine. I respect that. I tell you what. If you can answer one more thing, I’ll untie you and let you go.”
She looked up. A glimmer of hope in her eyes now. “What?”
“One question only, Marta. I promise.”
Her nose ran; she couldn’t wipe it with her hands behind her back, so she just snorted loudly. “Okay. What question?”
“Why are you alive?”
She tilted her head slowly to the side. “Was meinst du?”
“These people have done an excellent job covering their tracks so far. They killed Ingrid, who was an East German girl and would not be missed over here. And they killed the men who knew about the money the Russians stashed in the bank. I am pretty sure they killed a friend of mine who was trying to expose their operation. And they made sure everyone in this apartment was dead so no one would be left to prove they weren’t involved in the attacks.”
Jack leaned closer. Not threatening but imploring.
“But you, Marta, you are the only loose end. You walking around West Berlin can cause their entire plan to fall to pieces. Do you think they are going to just sit back and let that happen?”
The muscles in her neck tightened. The look on her face melded perfectly with someone who had just lost a key tenet of her belief system.
Jack wanted to feel the schadenfreude of watching a terrorist realize her entire cause was built on a foundation of bullshit and supported by an organization of soulless killers. But instead he found himself feeling sorry for her.
The distant look in her wet eyes made her appear nearly catatonic. She said, “I am not supposed to be here. I was in the East. I came over early this morning when I heard about what happened.”
“Came over? How?”
“There is a tunnel. It is used by East German intelligence. I know of it because sometimes we help them bring things across.”
“No one knows you are here?”
She shook her head again.
He leaned closer, inches from her face, and he took a chance. “Not even your KGB control officer?”
Marta Scheuring shook her head slowly. Tears flowed. “I don’t have a control officer. The Russian who connected me to Ingrid was a stranger. I’d never met him before, but he knew others in my organization. They told me I could trust him. I assume he was KGB. I mean . . . how else could he know about us? He told me he would support us if I did what I was told. I could not refuse. We need the support.” She looked around, as if just remembering that all her fellow urban guerrillas were dead. “We needed the support.”
“What was his name?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t give me his name. Only a code name.”
“Which was?”
“Zenit.”
Jack said, “Zenith?”
“Do you know him?” she asked.
“No. But I think I know his work.”
The tears poured now, and mucus dripped from her nose. Her body shook. “He is going to kill me, isn’t he?”
Jack said, “If you had stayed in the East like you were supposed to, you would be dead already. This Zenith, and others like him, will be looking for you right now. You have to let us protect you.”
“But you are alone, aren’t you?”
“Right now I am, but I can take you to Clay Headquarters, and you will be protected by the entire Berlin Brigade. We’ll get you out of West Berlin and find someplace safe for you.”
“In return for what?”
Ryan realized his concern for the German woman was real. Even though she was misguided at the least, and most likely a dangerous terrorist, his instincts to protect the vulnerable were real enough.
He wasn’t thinking about quid pro quo now. He was just thinking about keeping the twenty-five-year-old woman alive.
He wondered if this meant that he wasn’t hard and cynical enough for real operational work.
He pushed the thought out of his mind and stood up. “That’s not for me to say. First, let’s get out of here, and get you some protection. Then we can worry about everything else.”
“You are lying. The American government is not going to help me.”
“Well, at least we’re not going to kill you. Think about i
t this way, Marta. We are capitalists. You give us something, and we will give you something in trade. You give us information, and we will give you the protection you need. This relationship doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.”
“Why should I trust you?”
Jack cracked a half-smile. “Because America works with people it doesn’t like all the goddamned time.”
That seemed to sink in. Jack could tell that Marta’s dire predicament was clear to her. She did not agree verbally, she still seemed to be on the verge of panic, but she nodded.
Ryan untied her. While doing so, he asked, “Why doesn’t the RAF release a statement saying they weren’t involved in this?”
She said, “I do not lead the RAF. If the KGB tricked us, used me to take responsibility for what happened in Switzerland, the RAF will not come out publicly against the Soviet Union. That would be the final nail in our coffin. We would get no more support from any Communist Party group in the world.”
That made sense to Ryan. They were, to some degree, a vassal of Russian intelligence. They might complain internally about the affair, but they couldn’t go public and admit they had been used by the KGB.
Ryan helped Marta to her feet. He said, “You go first, I’ll walk behind you.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not turning my back on you. You’ve already stabbed me once.”
77
Marta and Jack moved together slowly through the darkened building. On the first floor, Jack turned to go to the fire escape, but Marta said, “No. Follow me.”
Jack followed her down another flight of stairs, all the way to the automotive shop on the ground floor of the building. There were a few dim bulbs glowing here, enough for the two of them to easily make their way to a utility room on the northwest side of the building. A narrow wooden staircase led down to the basement. Marta pulled a cord in the center of the room and a bare lightbulb revealed a washer and dryer. Next to these was a metal hatch in the wall.
“What’s this?” Jack asked.
Command Authority Page 52
