The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  “Peter,” the cop said quietly. “The apartment belongs to a guy named Peter. I can’t give you any more than that without making trouble for myself.”

  “Scheiss,” Fleischer said. “Not our guy.”

  “You sure he’s not living under an alias? He seems like he might be that kind of guy. He skipped out on an interview yesterday and we’re looking for him. And you don’t run with the best crowd, either, Gunther.”

  Fleischer laughed. “Good point, but I don’t think so. Thanks anyway, and I’ll let you know if I learn anything that might be useful to you.” It was very interesting that the apartment resident had gone missing. Fleischer wondered, was this guy a bystander, a perpetrator, or a victim in the whole thing?

  They hung up after a little more cordial small talk, and Fleischer got back to work. There were undoubtedly hundreds of residents in the Neustadt Wohnplatz building, but Fleischer had no doubt that there would be a manageably small number of Peters.

  It felt great to have a way forward, and Fleischer kept working with renewed zeal.

  Three phone calls and two hours later, Gunther Fleischer had a last name and an address. He planned an afternoon reconnoitering trip in advance of another midnight outing. It would be fun. It was the kind of excitement that still got him going after all those years.

  45

  Peter Kittredge opened his eyes. For the fifth time in as many days, he found himself in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. Unlike the previous two mornings, he found himself without the company of the lovely and talented Nora Jane Martin. Their parting had occurred twenty-four hours earlier, under inauspicious circumstances: Kittredge had been caught red-handed in a lie, and also with his hand stuffed in Nora’s purse, searching for anything that might indicate whether she was somehow involved in all of the nastiness that had entered his life since Thursday night’s glorious flesh party at his flat.

  Nora had been pissed off, and not in a good way, and after she summarily declared Kittredge persona non grata — I don’t do dishonesty, she said, or something equally diva — a quiet anger had settled over her that led Kittredge to believe she was entirely serious.

  Hence, the morning wood that tented his boxers was left unattended by Nora’s more than capable ministrations, and he had begun to accept it as fact that even if Nora’s mind were theoretically changeable, his having offed a CIA agent had placed a sizable obstacle to his exploring the possibility. He was afraid even of calling her, because he assumed, given the Agency involvement and the thoroughness with which they infested and decimated their victims’ lives, that her telephone would be tapped.

  As for his telephone, it was doing its part to fill the void inside a trash can somewhere between where he used to be and where he was now, which was a hostel whose name he couldn’t quite conjure at the moment.

  All of these thoughts suddenly reminded Kittredge that his mind hadn’t been completely preoccupied by another thought, namely where the hell to get another drink. Was it possible that he had — quite accidentally, of course — administered sufficiently little self-medication of the liquid variety as to have left himself capable of unaided, normal morning activity? His hands shook, but only a little, and there was no lightning zinging back and forth inside his brain.

  He had indeed self-medicated, but he had administered only the sleeping pills he had stolen from Nora’s medicine cabinet. Perhaps that accounted for the lack of a debilitating hangover. Perhaps he had slept right through it, which was highly unusual, since it was usually the onset of the shakes that awakened him.

  The room was dark, and he couldn’t immediately tell what time it was. He maneuvered to place the face of the digital clock in view. Jesus. It was noon. He had slept for fourteen hours. He had gone entire weeks on less than fourteen hours of cumulative shuteye. Even accounting for the sleeping pills, he felt as though he had achieved an unprecedented soporific victory over the self-inflicted illness that characterized every morning. Sobriety wasn’t without its redeeming characteristics. Perhaps he was onto something.

  That unspoken phrase — maybe he was onto something — reminded him of a fact that triggered an uncomfortable rush of fear and adrenaline: Clearly something was onto him. Or someone. His mind expanded to consider things beyond the comfortable, dark, quiet, and insular confines of the hostel room, and he found his thoughts to be decidedly unsettling.

  Really, he found his life circumstances to be that way. He was, it was safe to say without hesitation, officially a fugitive. He had promised to stop by for a chat with his friend Strauss, a promise he found impossible to keep, on account of the maniacal way he had stabbed and dismembered a man recently, a fact which Kittredge wholeheartedly desired to keep from coming to the attention of Herr Polizeikommissar Jürgen Strauss.

  It wasn’t like the quaint little police operation in quaint little Cologne would have been any match for the CIA, if it came down to it, so Kittredge didn’t feel as if his killing the agent had removed the option of finding a truly safe harbor with the Cologne cop shop against an Agency effort of any size. Even at their best, the cops were bound by the law, something that seemed to have little bearing on the CIA’s actions, a significant disadvantage that would probably have resulted in Kittredge’s untimely demise.

  He sensed that he could take one of a couple of different approaches. The first option was to simply disappear. He had tried it once before, which was what had brought him from Caracas to Cologne. He had traded one of the world’s most violent cities for one of its most well behaved, yet violence like he’d never before experienced had somehow caught up with him in Germany.

  So lying low seemed like a low-odds play, Kittredge imagined. But then it dawned on him that heretofore, his attempts at hiding had really been half-assed at best. He had opened a new email account and gotten a new phone, but he still traveled as Peter Kittredge, did his banking as Peter Kittredge, and lived in a highly predictable manner. Hell, the bartender at his favorite breakfast joint had his bloody mary mixed almost before Kittredge had a chance to sit down. He was like Norm on Cheers. Everybody knew him as the friendly lush. Which was to say, everybody knew him, which made him stupidly easy to find. He had also made the assumption that the CIA didn’t care enough about him to expend the resources to track him down. As it turned out, he mused darkly, that particular assumption hadn’t been entirely correct.

  It then occurred to him that if he really went on the lam, if he hid as if his life depended on it, which it evidently did, he might be able to get good enough at it to keep from waking up dead one morning.

  It was a horrible way to live, though. He recalled the way he felt several mornings earlier, the surety with which he had hatched the thought that he would rather be dead than to live his entire life with an ever-present fear of being caught and killed. Really, those two states were equivalent in his mind, but one required much more energy than the other, and he wasn’t one for wasted effort.

  Which led him to ponder the second option, which was to stick around and try to unravel what was going on. If he knew what the Agency bastards wanted, there was a chance he could provide it. Maybe he could come in from the cold, as the old spy novel title suggested might be an option in certain circumstances, though he wasn’t entirely certain what those circumstances might be. He wasn’t sure how he could be useful to the CIA, now that he wasn’t having sex with a member of a rival intelligence agency, as he was in Venezuela. And it wasn’t as if they needed economic advice, so he couldn’t exactly offer them his services as a veteran voodoo economist skilled in the arcane discipline of ascribing ex-post-facto explanations to market events that could never have been predicted.

  To boot, he was pretty sure that no State Department outpost was remote enough to serve as sufficient punishment for the mess he had left in the Venezuelan embassy. So he couldn’t really see them putting him to work as a low-level grunt agent someplace, in one of those secret-but-everybody-knows-about-it arrangements between CIA and State.

&nb
sp; But still, there had to be some motivation for what the Agency was up to recently, and if that motivation was anything other than the demise of little old Peter Kittredge, perhaps there was some room to work together.

  Of course, it was entirely possible that the Agency’s agenda was precisely the untimely end to all things Kittredge. That would make a win-win solution a very difficult proposition indeed.

  Given all of that, Kittredge became convinced that he needed to arm himself. It was a familiar line of thinking, because it was the same line of thinking that had prompted him to go to the trouble of buying a gun in the first place. It had taken no small amount of doing, because the German government had learned through its Hitler experience that the populace was much more docile and compliant when it was unarmed, and so German gun control laws were among the most stringent in Europe, which itself wasn’t exactly the wild west where bearing arms was concerned. He had risked doing serious time for buying and keeping an illegal weapon in his apartment.

  He kept it in a zip-lock bag at the bottom of a giant can of American pre-ground coffee, which no European would be caught dead sipping, and neither would Kittredge, truth be told. He had bought the can purely for its dimensions, which were suitable to hide a snub-nosed .45 revolver and a box of ammunition. He had chosen hollow point rounds, because he remembered the term hollow point from a movie, and thought it sounded tough. He had every confidence that were he to aim the pistol at the earth, he would have even odds of missing.

  Still, he had felt better after buying it, and that dastardly old part of him, the part that loved to be on the wrong side of The Man, the very same part that had landed him in such incredibly hot water with the CIA and the Venezuelans, had gotten a thrill out of owning an illegal gun and hiding it in a coffee can.

  He had no idea whether the cops had finished processing his apartment for evidence. It had been five full days since Sergio’s head had been bashed in, so Kittredge couldn’t imagine they were still combing for clues. Not even the Germans were likely to be that thorough. So, he figured, there probably wouldn’t be a gaggle of cops still at his apartment.

  It was pretty clear what had to happen next. He had to sneak back into his apartment and get the gun. He couldn’t waste the time and energy to get another illegal gun, and he couldn’t continue to blunder about the city without some sort of personal protection. The Agency had found him twice already. He wanted to be prepared for their next meeting, whenever it might occur.

  Kittredge was also vaguely aware that the adoption of a short-term goal had substituted for a strategy, which he still sorely lacked. But it had at least given him someplace to focus his attention, something to work on, and a specific, measurable, and possibly even attainable objective to which he could aspire.

  As far as what to do after he retrieved his gun, Kittredge had no clue. He was hoping the bright idea fairy would pinch his ass and whisper something brilliant in his ear.

  46

  Khalil Ahmed al Wahdi disembarked the posh business jet into the unlikely coldness of February in Washington, DC. Paris wasn’t exactly balmy in the winter, but something about the way the cold air in America’s capital city picked up moisture from the Potomac and the ocean, then mixed it with the pure soul-sucking evil that hung permanently but invisibly above the edifices of the Infidel’s Empire, that made the DC chill bone-deep. Al Wahdi shivered against the ill breeze, shook off the strangeness of the VIP treatment he’d just received aboard what was his first and undoubtedly his last private charter trip across the Atlantic, slung the large backpack across his shoulders, and moped toward customs.

  Someone intercepted him along the way. “Khalil,” the man said. “I’m Jim Firth.”

  It was a name that Khalil recognized, of course. They hadn’t told him much about what awaited, but they had told him of the in-place agent on American turf who would help him accomplish his holy mission.

  “Customs is already taken care of,” Firth said, extending his arm toward the parking lot to the south and west of the private terminal at Ronald Reagan National Airport. Al Wahdi changed the direction of his saunter and headed toward the transportation Firth had arranged.

  Firth pushed a button on the key fob, and the rental car’s trunk opened. Inside, al Wahdi found a pair of grease-stained overalls and a battered toolbox. The young man unshouldered his backpack and set it on the floor of the open car trunk, unzipped the largest of the many compartments, and removed three aerosol cans. The cans were marked in English. Al Wahdi couldn’t read English, but he imagined the labels declared the cans’ contents to be a sealant for heat pipes. This is what he expected them to say, anyway, because it’s what they had told him to expect.

  Al Wahdi placed the canisters in the bottom of the toolbox, which was otherwise equipped with the standard trappings: hammer, plumber’s wrenches, pliers, electrical and plumbing tape, even some solder and a handheld torch for soldering copper tubing together. And there was a small battery-powered CD player with a set of diminutive speakers attached. It all looked exactly like al Wahdi imagined a furnace repairman’s toolbox would look.

  This pleased him. He did not relish working with infidels, but he was assured by his handlers, who were devout and pious men, that it was a necessary evil in the service of Allah, and it would help ensure the success of al Wahdi’s mission. So far, the tall, overly-well-groomed white man they had sent to make ready his path had not disappointed. All was in order.

  Al Wahdi felt his left front pants pocket, then slipped his hand inside to be doubly sure. Inside, he felt the crinkly smoothness of the plastic zip-lock bag containing what would become his deliverance from the nightmare he was about to unleash. It would immunize him against the effects of the holy wrath he was about to set loose on the children of the world’s greatest criminals, the people who worked inside the Great Satan’s government, the very bowels of the beast. Feeling the pill — a single dose, which, his handlers had assured him, would be more than enough to counteract any ill effects brought on by al Wahdi’s own exposure to the punishment he would shortly dole out — calmed al Wahdi’s knotted stomach, slowed his heart rate, and allowed him to regain an organized mental state. “We go,” he said to Firth, removing the overalls from the trunk and taking them with him to the back seat of the rental car.

  While Firth drove, al Wahdi wrestled with the overalls until he had squeezed himself inside of them. They were the right size, but overalls were difficult articles to don under the best of circumstances, and riding in a cramped compact car through midday DC traffic was not an ideal setting for such an exercise.

  Once settled in his costume, al Wahdi sat ramrod straight in the center seat. In this position, al Wahdi was told, it would be more difficult for the infidels’ security cameras to capture his face. Al Wahdi had mixed feelings about this, because the ambitious young zealot in him wanted the world to know which holy warrior had wrought such suffering and destruction.

  But there would be time for that, the clerics had assured him, after this operation had concluded. This was to be but the opening attack in al Wahdi’s personal holy war, and there would be plenty of opportunity for more dramatic personal involvement. Al Wahdi sighed heavily, a mixture of impatient, ambitious weltschmerz and jangling nervousness vying for prominence in his consciousness.

  “We’re here,” Firth said, stirring al Wahdi from his thoughts. “I’ll leave the keys in the car for you,” the white man said as he parked the cheap rental car in front of the Smiley Tot Day Care Center in Alexandria, Virginia. “There’s a map with the other two targets and your hotel in the glove compartment,” Firth said. “Don’t get pulled over, and don’t forget to dispose of the map properly. Good luck.”

  Al Wahdi heard the trunk pop open. His legs felt wooden, his feet far away, as he climbed from the backseat of the rented sedan and walked around to the open trunk. As he strained under the weight of the toolbox, he saw Firth walk away from the car and into the dry cleaner’s shop adjacent to the child care ce
nter.

  Al Wahdi was on his own now. He rehearsed his lines one more time, took a deep breath, and pulled open the door to the day care center.

  Immediately the smell of feces and baby powder hit his nostrils. It was a sickening combination, and his stomach wasn’t in the best shape to begin with. He forced a smile. “Heater inspection?” he said, aware of his thick Algerian-French accent, but also aware from the many hours spent with his imam that there were many of his Muslim brethren in this godforsaken city who were reduced to performing the shit labor that the infidel was too proud to do for himself.

  The girl behind the desk stared blankly at him, and he produced a work order written in the infidel’s tongue. “Furnace?” he said.

  The young lady, who exposed an embarrassingly impious amount of her skin to the world, looked over the work order with a frown on her face. Then she shrugged, set the piece of paper atop the desk, and buzzed him in.

  She came from behind the desk to escort him to the heater closet. “Now that you’re here,” she said, “I am reminded that it’s been acting up lately. Silly thing.”

  Al Wahdi nodded, silently irate at the brazenness with which this… woman… looked directly into his eyes. She was immodest and unabashed, in the way of the infidel harlot, and al Wahdi was glad she would suffer along with the children.

  She left him alone with the furnace. He removed the large metal cover and set a few tools on the concrete adjacent to the burner. Everything had to look right when the whore came back to check on him.

  Al Wahdi pulled the CD player and speakers from the toolbox and set them on the floor. He pressed the play button. Music poured from the tiny speakers, a familiar, comforting Raï tune that had become something of an anthem for al Wahdi. He smiled. It was a nice touch.