by Tom Clancy
That she locked herself out purposely so that he would pay attention to her only annoyed him further. He could not be bothered with the old woman. She was a pest of the highest order, only slightly less annoying than her yapping Hünd-chen Fifi. Still, Manfred Kromm did not let on that he knew her wd woman. eekly lockouts were a ruse. He was a loner and a social hermit, he would no more insinuate to people that they were interested in him than he would sprout wings and fly, so he smiled outwardly, groaned inwardly, and unlocked the old bitch’s gottverdammt door each time she knocked.
He climbed up from his chair, shuffled to the door, and lifted his picks off of the table in the entryway of his flat. The aged German put his hand on his door latch to step into the hall. Only the old force of habit made him look through the peephole. He went through the motions of glancing into the hallway, had begun to remove his eye after looking so he could open the door, but then his eye widened in surprise and it rushed back to the tiny lens in the door. There, on the other side, he saw a man in a raincoat.
And in the man’s hand a stainless-steel automatic pistol with a suppressor attached was pointed directly at Manfred Kromm’s door.
The man spoke in English, loud enough to be heard through the woodwork. “Unless your door is ballistic steel, or you can move faster than a bullet, you’d better let me in.”
“Wer is denn da?” Who the hell is it? Kromm croaked. He spoke English, he’d understood the man with the gun, but he had not used the language himself in many years. The right words would not pass his lips.
“Someone from your past.”
And then Kromm knew. He knew exactly who this man was.
And he knew he was about to die.
He opened the door.
I know your face. It’s older. But I remember you,” Kromm said. As instructed by Clark, he had moved to his chair in front of the television. His hands were on his knees, kneading the swollen joints slowly.
Clark stood above him, his weapon still pointing at the German.
“Are you alone?” Clark asked the question but searched the tiny flat without waiting for a response.
Manfred Kromm nodded. “Selbsverständlich.” Of course.
Clark kept looking around, keeping the SIG pointed at the old man’s chest. He said, “Keep perfectly still. I’ve had a lot of coffee today, you don’t want to see how jumpy I am.”
“I will not move,” the old German said. Then he shrugged. “That gun in your hand is the only weapon in this flat.”
Clark checked over the rest of the tiny apartment. It did not take long. It could not have been four hundred square feet, including the bathroom and the kitchen. He found a door to a fire escape in the kitchen, but nothing whatsoever as far as luxuries. “What, thirty-five years in the Stasi, and this is all you get?”
Now the German in the chair smiled a little. “From the comments of your government regarding you, Herr Clark, it does not look like your organization has rewarded your efforts much more than my organization has rewarded mine.”
Clark cracked a sour grin himself as he used his legs to push a small table flush against the front door. It might slow someone coming in from the hall for a moment, but not much more than that. Clark stood next to the door, kept the SIG trained on the burly man sitting uncomfortably on the recliner.
“You have been telling tales.”
“I have said nothing.”
“I don’t believe you. And thaten telli is a problem.” Clark kept his weapon trained as he moved sideways along the front wall of the room into the corner. On the adjoining wall sat a tall antique china cabinet. He pushed it toward the open doorway to the tiny kitchen, in order to block the entrance to the flat from the rear fire escape. Inside, dishes rocked and a few tipped over as the big wooden piece came to rest, covering the doorway. Now the only entrance to the room was the bedroom behind Manfred.
“Tell me what you told them. Everything.”
“Mr. Clark, I have no idea what you—”
“Thirty years ago, three people went into the Geister-bahnhof. Two of those people came out alive. You were working for the Stasi, as was your partner, but you two fellows were not playing by Stasi rules, which means you extorted that money for yourself. I was ordered to let you two walk away, but your partner, Lukas Schuman, tried to kill me after you got the money.
“I killed Lukas Schuman, and you got away, and I know you did not run back to Markus Wolf and tell him about how your illegal moonlighting job turned ugly. You would have kept your mouth shut to everyone so you didn’t have to turn over the cash.”
Kromm did not speak, but only squeezed his hands into his knees as if he were kneading fat Brötchen before putting them in the oven.
Clark said, “And I was under orders to keep the affair out of the official record of my agency. The only person, other than you, me, and poor dead Lukas Schuman, who knew about what happened in the ghost station that night was my superior, and he died fifteen years ago without breathing a word of it to anyone.”
“I don’t have the money anymore. I spent it,” Kromm said.
Clark sighed as if disappointed with the German’s comment. “Right, Manfred, I came back thirty years later to retrieve a messenger bag full of worthless deutschmarks.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want to know who you talked to.”
Kromm nodded. He said, “I think this is an American movie cliché, but it is the truth. If I tell you, they will kill me.”
“Who, Manfred?”
“I did not go to them. They came to me. I had no interest in digging up the buried bones of our mutual past.”
Clark lifted the pistol and looked down its tritium sights.
“Who, Manfred? Who did you tell about ’eighty-one?”
“Obtshak!” Manfred blurted it out in panic.
Clark’s head cocked to the side. He lowered the weapon. “Who is Obtshak?”
“Obtshak is not a who! It’s a what! It’s an Estonian criminal organization. A foreign office of the Russian mob, so to speak.”
John did not hide his confusion. “And they asked you about me? By name?”
“Nein, they weren’t asking in the regular sense. They hit me. They broke a bottle of beer, put the broken bottle up to my throat, and then they asked me.”
“And you told them about Berlin.”
“Natürlich!” Of course. “Kill me for it if you must, but why should I protect you?”
Something occurred to Clark. “How did y">
Kromm shrugged. “They were Estonian. They spoke Estonian. If someone is a thug and they are Estonian, then I presume them to be in Obtshak.”
“And they came here?”
“To my house? Nein. They had me meet them at a warehouse in Deutz. They told me there was money for me. Security work.”
“Security work? Don’t bullshit me, Kromm. No one is going to hire you to do security work.”
The German’s hands rose quickly as he began to argue, but the barrel of Clark’s SIG was trained again on Kromm’s chest in the space of a heartbeat. Kromm lowered his hands.
“I have done some… some work for members of the Eastern European immigrant community in the past.”
“What? Like forgery?”
Kromm shook his head. He was too proud to keep quiet. “Locks. Lock picking.”
“Cars?”
Now the old German smiled. “Cars? No. Car lots. Dealerships. It helps to add to my tiny pension. Anyway, I knew some Estonians. I knew the man who asked me to go to the warehouse, otherwise I would never have agreed to go.”
Clark reached into the pocket of his raincoat, pulled out a notepad and a pen, and tossed it to the old man. “I want his name, his address, any other names you know, Estonians working in Obtshak.”
Kromm deflated in his chair. “They will kill me.”
“Leave. Leave right now. Trust me, whoever questioned you about me is long gone. That’s who I’m after. The men who set it up are just the local t
hugs. Get out of Cologne and they won’t pester you.”
Kromm did not move. He only looked up at Clark.
“I will kill you, right here, right now, if you do not do as I say.”
Kromm slowly began to write, but then he looked up, past the gun barrel, as if he had something to say.
“Write or talk,” Clark said, “but do it now or I put a bullet in one of those sore knees of yours.”
The German pensioner said, “After they took me, I spent a day in the hospital. I told the doctor I was mugged. And then I came home, angry and determined to retaliate against the men. The leader, the man who asked the questions, he was not a local. I could tell this because he spoke no German. Only Estonian and Russian.”
“Keep talking.”
“I have a friend still in Moscow, he knows his way around.”
“Around the Mafia, you mean?”
Kromm shrugged. “He is an entrepreneur. Anyway, I called him up and asked him for information on Obtshak. I did not tell him the real reason. I am certain he assumed I had business. I described the man who interrogated me. Fifty years old, but with hair dyed like he was a twenty-year-old singer in a punk-rock band.”
“And your friend gave you a name?”
“He did.”
“And what did you do?”
Kromm shrugged. He looked at the floor in humiliation. “What could I do? I was drunk when I thought I could get revenge. I sobered up.”
“Give me thoor ie man’s name.”
“If I do that, if I tell you about the man in Tallinn who came here and ordered the others to beat me, will you bypass the men here in Cologne? Maybe if you go directly to Tallinn they will not know that I informed.”
“That suits me just fine, Manfred.”
“Sehr gut,” said Kromm, and he gave Clark a name as the last of the afternoon’s light left the sky outside.
52
Unlike the government agencies searching for international fugitive John Clark, Fabrice Bertrand-Morel Investigations billed by the man-hour, so they used a lot of men working a lot of hours.
And it was only this intense canvassing of choke points across Europe that helped them locate their quarry. Bertrand-Morel had concentrated his hunt in Europe because Alden had, through Laska, passed the Frenchman a copy of the dossier on the ex — CIA man. FBM decided Clark’s recent work in Europe with NATO’s Rainbow organization would mean he would have sympathetic contacts on the continent.
So a single FBM man had been placed in each of sixty-four train stations across Europe, working fourteen-hour shifts, passing out fliers and showing photos of Clark to station employees. They had turned up nothing in days of waiting and watching. But finally a man working a pretzel stand at the Cologne Hauptbahnhof had caught a glimpse of a figure in a crowd passing by. He looked at the photo on the small card he’d been handed three days earlier by a bald Frenchman, and then he quickly dialed the number on the back of the card.
The Frenchman had offered him a large reward, paid in cash.
Twenty minutes later the first FBM man arrived at the Cologne Hauptbahnhof to interview the pretzel salesman. The middle-aged man was clearheaded and convincing; he was certain John Clark had passed him heading for the front entrance of the Hauptbahnhof.
Soon three more FBM men, the entire force within an hour’s drive, were in the station working on a plan of action. They had little to go on save for the report that their man had entered the city; they could not very well just spread out, sending four men out into the fourth-largest metropolis in Germany.
So they left a man at the station while the other three checked the nearby hotels and guesthouses.
It was the agent at the station who got the hit. Just after nine on the cold and rainy evening, forty-year-old Lyonnais private detective and employee of Fabrice Bertrand-Morel Investigations Luc Patin stood just at the entrance smoking a cigarette, his eyes occasionally drifting up to the incredible Cologne Cathedral just to the left of the train station, but his main focus remained on the foot traffic that streamed past him toward the tracks behind. There, in a large group of pedestrians, a man who bore a reasonable resemblance to his target shuffled by with the collar of his raincoat up high.
Luc Patin said softly, “Bonsoir, mon ami.” He reached into his pocket and retrieved his mobile phone.
Domingo Chavez had set up a more low-tech monitoring operation for Rehan’s Dubai safe house than that of the two younger operators with their robot cameras and microphones. One of the three bedrooms in the bungalow looked out over the lagoon, into the waterway between the crescent-shaped breakwater upon which the Kempinski sat and the palm-frond-shaped peninsulafea where Rehan’s safe house was located. The distance between the two locations was easily four hundred meters, but that was not too far away for Chavez to employ a toy he’d brought along on the flight in from the States.
He set up the variable-power Zeiss Victory FL spotting scope on its tripod, and he placed the tripod on a desk in the bedroom in front of the window. From his chair at the desk he could see the very back of Rehan’s walled-in compound, and several second-floor windows. The blinds had remained closed as had the back gate, but he hoped that the property might open up a little bit when it was actually being lived in by Rehan and an entourage from Islamabad.
When he realized that he had a fair line of sight on the compound, he also got another idea. If Rehan was truly as dangerous as their investigations were leading them to believe, might The Campus not decide, sooner rather than later, to take him out? And if they did make the call for the operators to assassinate the general, would it not be much easier to do it right here, with a long-range rifle and good optics, as opposed to having to find some other opportunity to get close to the man, either here in Dubai or, God forbid, in Islamabad?
Chavez determined he could make the shot on General Rehan if the man stepped out onto his second-floor balcony or even appeared in an upper-floor window of the safe house, and he ran his thoughts by Ryan and Caruso. Both men supported the idea of being ready for a termination order from Hendley and Granger, so Chavez called Sam Granger and asked to have some equipment flown in so that he would be ready, in the event something during their surveillance led to the green light to drop Rehan.
The Gulfstream would be flying in the equipment in two days’ time, which meant Ding would have a gun ready to make the shot well before he expected his potential target to arrive in the city.
Clark saw the watcher just after nine p.m. He had just finished his second dry-cleaning run of the evening before returning to the station; he hadn’t seen anyone following him at any point in his visit to Cologne, but when he stood in line at a kiosk to buy a couchette ticket to Berlin, a gentle sweep of his head in all directions revealed a single man watching him from thirty-five yards away. A second glance several seconds later confirmed it.
He’d been spotted.
John stepped out of the line at the kiosk. This would be conspicuous but a hell of a lot better than waiting around for the watcher’s backup to arrive. He strolled through the station toward the northern exit, and seconds later he realized that two new men had joined the hunt.
They were on him before he was out of the station and he knew it, because he’d been spotting tails since before these three goons were born. Two men with short beards and dark hair, the same approximate age, the same build, the same general style of raincoats. They were entering the station as he was exiting two minutes earlier, and now they were walking thirty yards behind and slightly to the right as John turned in front of the cathedral.
A wet sleet fell on them all as Clark headed south.
John did not get overly excited by having acquired a tail. He was not going to let a little surveillance shake him up. He could lose these men in the darkness and foot traffic of the city and then be on his way again in no time. He turned left at the southern edge of the cathedral and headed for the western bank of the Rhine River. After passing a section of road with worn stones laid
by the Romans, he tried to catch a glimpse of kness athe men behind him in the glass of the Dorint Hotel. The two men were there, together, not more than twenty-five yards back. He wondered if the third man was trying to get ahead of him now.
Clark turned south, walked along Mauthgasse, full of restaurants with tables spilling away from building façades toward the river’s edge, and with diners laughing and mingling with one another under heated canopies. He was as concerned about his status as an internationally sought criminal as he was afraid of the men tailing him. The locals and tourists were a definite danger. He assumed his face had been on the news in Europe as well as the States, though he himself had not watched any television in the past week. With an abundance of caution and a desire to avoid running into a do-gooding waiter with a black belt, he adjusted his watch cap lower on his forehead and made a turn up a quiet street.
John walked down the middle of the cobblestoned alleyway as it rose and turned to the left. His tail followed, still twenty-five yards back and on his right. He found himself in the Heumarkt, another open area full of people walking under umbrellas and electric lights, and he turned back to the north. All along he scanned reflections, judging the disposition of the men behind him whenever he could get a glimpse of them. He was beginning to think that maybe these guys were not waiting on backup before arresting him, though they had made no move to close their distance just yet.
He strolled through the Alter Markt, still heading north and parallel to the Rhine a few blocks away on his right. A quick glance in a traffic mirror on a blind street corner showed him that one of his followers had dropped out of the hunt, but the other had closed even more. This man was not fifteen yards behind him now. Picking his way through the pedestrians, John began to worry. There were two men who could right now be moving into position ahead of him, ready to try to snag him at the very next corner. He liked his chances in any one-on-one encounter, but the proximity of civilians and cops could easily allow any situation to grow unmanageable.
