The bullet struck the brown plaster wall just to the left of the door, sending a puff of white dust into the air before lodging itself into the wooden support hidden nine inches behind the wall. Monika’s elevation had been perfect. Had she aimed three feet to the right, Luc Florence would have taken a lead slug in the chest and no doubt died a painful death. But such is the case when lack of experience plays a role in critical situations, and Luc, being an experienced combatant, reacted predictably.
Bruno yelled, rolling off of Monika, turning her body in the process. She was moving the pistol to him as he fell onto the floor, but she was too late. Luc unleashed two rounds from his silenced nine-millimeter, hitting Monika Brink, fatally, in the upper chest and the throat, the force of the two slugs even dislodging the blood-soaked gag that had covered her mouth.
Monika felt two heavy thuds, but with her back being against the headboard, her body had nowhere to go. Consciousness left her fifteen seconds after the rounds struck, but in those fifteen seconds, many thoughts flashed through her mind. She thought about the pneumonia she’d had as a girl, and how it was the only time her now-deceased father had ever seemed to care about her. She remembered Toto, her first dog, and how he had to be euthanized at age eight due to cancer. Then her mind went to Gage, and she wondered where they might have gone, and if they would have made it. She had always wanted to visit San Francisco, and it pleased her to think that’s where they might have lived, walking the hills, enjoying the cool weather, buying bad art from doper hippies.
Monika Brink’s final thought was about these men. As she locked eyes with the cold gaze of Bruno Florence, who was pulling up his pants as he stared at her, the corners of her mouth ticked ever so slightly upward. Bruno pried Jean’s Manurhin revolver from her hand, staring down at her. Monika could no longer speak, but as life escaped her, her eyes sent him a message.
You’re next.
Monika Brink, from a lack of blood to the brain, fell unconscious. Two minutes later, her heart stopped and she died in a pool of blood and cheap brown linen.
***
Fresh from the toilet, the desk clerk had just sat back down in his chair and resumed his reading of a German fussbol magazine. Minutes earlier he had heard a muffled thud, not really thinking anything of it. Unless the polizei showed up, the hotel’s policy—especially in their location on the edge of Frankfurt’s red light district—was to live and let live. Just as he started perusing an article about the wildly popular FC Bayern München, he heard someone thundering down the stairs and rolled his eyes; it was probably the normal group of tattooed and pierced teenagers screwing around again. He’d caught them, more than once, smoking hash and making out, using the hotel’s storage rooms and stairwells as their own private playground.
He dropped the magazine and stood, freezing with surprise when two ominous men came into view as they completed their descent. They froze. One of the two, very large and with a bruised gash on his forehead, turned to look at the pudgy one.
The pudgy man nodded once.
The battered man raised a silenced pistol and shot the desk clerk square in the face, the bullet actually going through the man’s upper lip and teeth. The single shot killed him instantly as his brains and skull spattered onto the computer screen and keyboard behind the desk.
The two men cursed one another in French as they headed out the door and down the wet street. Their mission had not been a success.
***
As Gage ran, covering the two kilometers in less than ten minutes, he passed Elbestrasse and saw the blue and red strobe lights banging off the buildings. His immediate fear was that Monika was dead. The rain was heavier and, as Gage neared the chaotic scene outside the hotel, he saw an ambulance with a covered body resting inside the rear section. Water ran off Gage’s face as he did his best to control his breathing. There was a police line set up, yellow tape, just like back in the states. Official cars and vans skidded to a halt every ten seconds. Men and women in uniform filed in and out of the hotel, each on a specific mission. Murder in Germany is very rare and, when it does happen, the Uzi-carrying polizei take it very seriously.
Forcing himself to remain calm, Gage swallowed several times, then stepped to the cordoned-off area and spoke in his best German accent to a low-ranking schupo. “What happened?”
“Please move along,” the policeman said without even looking at him.
“I live in the neighborhood,” Gage said, his voice pained. He feared the cop could hear the pounding of his heart over the din of the assembled crowd.
The young, splotchy-cheeked officer turned and frowned. Water had pooled in his hat, cascading over his face as he spoke the tragically beautiful words to Gage. “The hotel worker, a desk clerk, was shot and killed. Looks like a robbery.”
Gage’s eyes went wide, and he couldn’t help but let out a long sigh, even though he certainly wouldn’t wish such an awful fate on anyone. He wondered if the clerk had been the one he’d met earlier. Wait...
Something wasn’t right.
Unless the clerk had provided some sort of glorious resistance, there was only one reason a contract team—looking for Gage Hartline—would kill him in cold blood. And that was to prevent witnesses.
“No,” Gage whispered, moving laterally around the taped-off area. Perhaps she was still in the room. Maybe…just maybe the clerk copped an attitude and didn’t give out the room number, getting himself killed in the process. Maybe Monika was out here on the street since they had surely evacuated the hotel.
Gage paced the area, staring at the faces of the crowd, squeezing the rain from his hair as he pondered how to determine Monika’s status. Just then, a commotion occurred inside, and two men in rumpled suits halted under cover of the awning. One of them covered his mouth and yelled at a balding man who was huddled with a group of other officers. There was a cigarette clamped between his teeth, fighting to stay alive in the rain. He was a classic specimen of a senior policeman.
“Captain!” one of the men under the awning yelled. “We’ve got another body!”
Gage went ice cold, feeling his knees buckle.
“Who and where?” the captain yelled, pitching his cigarette as he marched toward the door.
Gage strained to hear the answer, knowing exactly what the reply would be. He leaned on one of the police line saw-horses, fighting back nausea, trying to stay conscious under the mother of all migraines.
No. No. No!
Time stood still as he watched the man who had yelled, mid-thirties with a pointy greyhound face, blink his eyes twice as he prepared to answer. The other rumpled suits studied their captain’s face, awaiting his response of such heavy news. Greyhound-face cupped his mouth again, his lips moving at a crawl before time came back to real speed. The reply hit Gage like a punch in the chest.
“It’s a girl! Dead in her room! Third floor! Two shots!” he yelled, holding up the German signal for two: thumb and index finger.
Gage staggered backward. He stood behind the growing crowd, struggling to keep himself together as he waited to confirm what he hoped was a case of mistaken identity by the assassin. Maybe they killed the wrong woman? Despite his own imminent danger, Gage stayed on the scene for a miserable, torturous half-hour. He moved to the left as a group of police officers talked to what must have been a senior officer who had just arrived in nice clothes that were not yet damp. Gage pressed close, ignoring his pressing nausea, listening as each man briefed their senior.
After two officers spoke about the clerk’s death, the third began the briefing about the dead girl. “Attractive,” he said, shaking his head. “Possibly raped due to some genital abrasions and her position on the bed.” He glanced at his notepad. “Third floor, room F. Checked in with a man, most likely our suspect—they’re lifting prints now. Bastard shot her twice, and then must have gone down and killed the hapless desk clerk. The two guests’ names appear to be an alias, but we’re looking into it.”
Gage felt himself beginning t
o hyperventilate. He spun around, reeling as he staggered into the dark. Upon reaching a blackened stoop, he leaned in and vomited.
PART TWO
November 5th
The Chase
Chapter 9
Thursday, November 5
It took the polizei only an hour to lift the fingerprints of Gage Hartline, American citizen, and to communicate his identity to every police force in Germany and the European Union. Peter Ernst, the man who was Gage’s “employer”—owner of the shell company—was found half-drunk in an exclusive club in nearby Mainz. After being manhandled back to the polizei station, a ranking captain openly threatened to blow the lid off of Ernst’s operation with extreme prejudice if Ernst didn’t go and get every shred of information he had on the American. The threat from the captain effectively halted all of Ernst’s complaints about police brutality. Seeing a way out of this mess, Ernst complied with alacrity, rushing to his office and producing a picture, two forms with Gage’s signature, and photocopies of Gage’s U.S. passport and New York driver’s license.
Six hours after Monika Brink’s death, plainclothes detectives armed with a warrant swarmed on Gage’s modest Bad Homburg flat, combing the sparse apartment for anything useful. To say the flat was spartan was an understatement: a case of energy bars, basic cooking utensils, a few technical books and saved articles, one small rack of uninteresting clothes, old train tickets, and an empty writing tablet. That was it. Other than the trappings of a bland life, Gage Hartline’s apartment revealed no other clues about who he was. There was no computer, no letters, no pictures of family back home, no evidence of anything other than the fact he had been there. The flat was merely a shelter from the elements, containing only the most basic items of modern existence.
But it wasn’t until after 4 a.m. that the Hartline investigation took a real twist.
Willi Kreutzer, a senior police analyst, had been pulling Gage’s background information, focusing on his schooling and prior work experience. Hartline was said to have been born and raised in Schenectady, New York, attending school there, and then his records showed that he had enrolled for one year at Syracuse University prior to his joining the Army. That was all well and good, but when Kreutzer, through the FBI and the Syracuse Police, managed to get an official from the registrar’s office out of bed and in front of her computer, the background began to crumble. Kreutzer was met by a long pause as he heard the personality-free American woman tapping on her keyboard.
“Hmmm,” she mused.
“Problem?” asked Willi. He had attended two years at William & Mary in Virginia while his father worked at nearby Fort McLean. His command of the English language was a source of great pride for him.
“I’ve got a Gage Nils Hartline listed as a student. No biggie. But when I go to pull his transcripts, I get nothing.”
“A mistake in the system?”
“Doubtful. He was here in the early nineties, long after we had computerized. Maybe his information was removed for some reason. Can I have your number and I’ll call you back after I pull the records manually.”
“Will it take long? This is of the utmost importance.”
“There’s a deputy sheriff staring at me and it’s almost midnight,” she answered. “I figured it was important. Give me ten minutes.”
Willi Kreutzer sipped a cup of coffee and stretched at his desk as he stared at the phone. For some strange reason he had a feeling this was not going to be a standard investigation. Something about the elements of the suspect’s background seemed too simple to be normal. Five minutes later, when the woman returned his call, his suspicions were confirmed.
“There’s nothing on Gage Hartline. He didn’t go to school here.”
“What?”
“That’s right. I checked the printouts and the hand-written rolls of classes he was supposed to have taken. There was nothing. So then I called and woke a professor, one who is legendary for never forgetting anyone’s name. Hartline was supposed to have been in his econ class. The professor was adamant he had never heard of anyone by that name. He never went to school here.”
“Name change?” Willi asked hopefully.
“You can change a name, not a social security number,” the woman answered confidently.
“But you said he was in your system. How could you make a mistake like that?”
Her tone turned icy. “It was not me who made the mistake because I wasn’t here then. I make no excuses for something that was obviously out of my control.”
Willi closed his eyes. “But what could have happened?”
“I’ll have our I.T. people look into it, but he had to have been hacked in. He’s listed as having attended, but he did not go to school here.” She enunciated each word clearly, pissing Willi off since he felt she should have been the one on the defensive, especially for working at a place with such poor security.
After hanging up, the investigator studied the little information he had on Gage Hartline. He would have to dig even deeper.
After further research and coming up with more dead ends, Willi Kreutzer turned over his information to his superior, Marta Tischer; she in turn handed the items to Commandant Michael Lentz of the Frankfurt Chief Directorate. Kreutzer and his boss stood in front of Lentz’s desk as he stirred hot tea, patiently going through the sparse reports, one by one.
Lentz nudged the file back with his finger and took his first sip of tea before lacing his fingers together. “Do we have any other leads?”
Kreutzer’s boss cleared her throat. “Not as of yet. They’re running backgrounds in Saarbrücken, where the girl is from. We tracked her down from her prints.”
“And the clerk, did he know the girl, or the American?”
“Not that we have been able to ascertain,” she answered. “The general opinion, on-site, was that he happened to be the unfortunate victim of whoever decided to kill Ms. Brink, most likely Gage Nils Hartline.”
Lentz took another loud sip of his tea, frowning in thought. “So Kreutzer here digs up the background on Hartline, and comes back with a shallow history based off of the man’s fingerprints. A manufactured history?”
Willi took a half a step forward. “Yes sir. Every place I checked, including his childhood schools and the health department had no hard records of a Gage Nils Hartline ever existing.” His mouth moved to continue, but he decided to zip it.
Lentz seemed unimpressed and unconvinced. “So the man might be a shadow. What else?”
“The forensics team found smudges, some over top of Hartline’s fingerprints, on the door handle and also on the stair railing by the front desk,” Marta added.
Lentz nodded. “Possible gloves from someone acting covertly.” His mouth broke into a wry smirk. “Or one of the first cops on the scene just being careless.”
“But it could have been Hartline who was wearing them,” Willi offered.
Lentz shifted in his chair. “Cameras?”
“None, sir,” answered Marta. “Low-rent hotel whose owner, a real sleazebag, probably wants no records, especially of cash paid in. We’re still looking for more eyewitnesses.” She could see Lentz’s blank look. “We do have one, though.”
Kreutzer looked up, as did Lentz. Marta continued. “A beggar, a real head case, said he saw a dark car—a big one, make unknown, pull up and park in the alley two blocks away. Said two intimidating-looking men ran in the direction of the hotel, and were back in ten or fifteen minutes later where they spun their tires upon leaving.”
Lentz’s eyes went wide. “What else?”
Marta made him wait a moment, finally patiently responding. “He said one had a gash on his forehead and ran with a heavy limp. Said they were yelling at one another. He said they spoke French but when pressed admitted it could have been something else. So we pulled the traffic cameras, and unfortunately never found a shot of the men, but we did get the car, an Opel, racing away.”
Lentz gulped the rest of his tea, transfixed. “And were you able t
o get a plate, or track the car?”
“We did get the plate, but we lost the car as it went south. We’re looking for it now.”
Willi broke with protocol by interrupting the flow of conversation between his two superiors, engulfed in the story himself. “Well, did you run the plates?” he asked, nearly frantically.
Marta blanched at her charge’s unprofessional zeal, throwing an apologetic glance to Lentz. “The plates were stolen. Our luck. They’re canvassing the area from where they were swiped, but it appears they got them cleanly in the past day.”
Lentz, typically a composed man, pounded the desk, sending his teaspoon clattering to the floor, surprising both Willi and Marta. “What the hell is going on in my city? This is the glaring work of professional assassins, whether it was the two intimidators or this Hartline asshole, killing the two in the hotel. What about the U.S. State Department and FBI, did they report back yet?”
Willi cleared his throat. “Only with what we already have. They said it could be several days before they have more.”
Lentz ran his hands through his wiry gray hair. “This Hartline is probably their damned man,” he whispered. “They’ll be about as helpful as a case of the crabs.” Without looking down, his big hand went automatically into his drawer and removed an antacid tablet, sitting loose in a pile, depositing it directly onto his tongue. He crunched it, wincing as he spun his chair to stare out at the gray city of Frankfurt on the gloomy, late autumn morning. His office was afforded a nice, if distant, view of the modern skyline. He spoke to the window. “I want a hard push for backgrounds of the desk clerk and the dead girl. We’re liable to learn more through them, and I would lean to her more than the clerk. I’ll get to work on some pressure on the U.S. State, and hopefully they won’t play stupid.” He paused. “And Tischer, you find the two men in that car, or determine where the hell they came from. This American is going to be tough to find, given his lack of background.” Lentz spun his chair around and leaned forward, picking up the passport picture of Gage.
The Diaries - A Gage Hartline Espionage Thriller (#1) Page 22
