The Aggrieved

by Brett Battles

  Jar got to work on her laptop. “I am in,” she said after a couple of minutes. “But…”

  “But what?”

  “It is all in German. My translation software is having problems with a lot of terminology.”

  “Let me see.”

  Nate translated the phrases she didn’t understand, and soon she was able to find where the archived recent footage was located. The longer task was figuring out which cameras covered the area near the tailor shop.

  “That’s it!” Nate said, recognizing one of the shops he’d seen at the end of the alley. “You’re too far back, though. Try ten minutes later.”

  After a bit of jumping around, the Mercedes appeared onscreen. Sure enough, Dehler was sitting in the front passenger seat.

  “Who is that?” Jar asked, pointing at the driver.

  He was an older man, definitely not Reiser or Morgan.

  “Doesn’t matter right now. Let’s see where they go.”

  Hopping from camera feed to camera feed, Jar followed the van back to the A4.

  “Crap,” Nate said, as the van turned east onto the autobahn. He pulled back onto the road. “Find out where they’ve gone.”

  He got to the A4 as fast as he could, and joined the eastbound lanes ten minutes behind the van.

  “Do you have them yet?” he asked.

  “Yes. They’re still on the A1. About sixteen kilometers ahead.”

  Nate was already in the fast lane, driving at 135 kilometers per hour. He pressed down on the accelerator, and within seconds was hitting 150.

  Two minutes later, Jar sat up. “They just exited.”

  “Where?”

  “Highway…154.” She typed for a moment. “North.”

  “Keep on them.”

  For the next few minutes all he could hear was the clacking of the laptop’s keys. When he saw a sign for the turnoff indicating the highway was a kilometer away, he slowed and transitioned into the right lane.

  “I need an update,” he said.

  “I realize that. But there are no cameras on this highway. I have had to inpro, um—”

  “Improvise.”

  “Yes, improvise. Where the road passes small towns, I can usually find a camera at a petrol station or something like that. The van has already passed Zell am Moos. But they have not reached the next town yet. They should have, though.”

  “Maybe they slowed down.”

  “Perhaps, but they would have had to be going very slow for me not to have seen them yet.”

  “All right. Tell me about what’s between the towns.”

  “Several small roads. Farms. No villages.”

  “What about satellites? Are there any you can tap into and see what’s going on?”

  Jar leaned forward and looked up at the sky. “Even if there were, it is too cloudy for any visible light images.”

  Nate took the exit and turned left onto Highway 154. Unlike the autobahn, the highway was only a two-lane road, and there was little opportunity to get around slower traffic.

  “How many farms are we talking about?” he asked.

  “At least a dozen, and another fifteen to twenty homes scattered among them.”

  Not exactly a small number, but it was more manageable than he’d feared. The problem was, it would require diving into more Austrian databases. God knew how long it would take for him and Jar to go back and forth figuring out all the German.

  Seeing no other choice, he pulled to the side of the road and grabbed his phone.

  IT WASN’T SO much the freezing water thrown in Daeng’s face that woke him, or the ice cubes that came with it. It was more the splitting headache, brought on by what he guessed was at least a low-grade concussion, maybe even a fractured skull.

  Someone nearby said something in German, but his mind was too muddled to work it out.

  Water and ice hit him again, the cubes smacking into his face like gravel kicked up from a road. He turned his head, wincing, but stifled the groan that wanted to leap from his throat.

  “Are you back with us?” The same female voice, but in English this time.

  He pried his eyelids apart enough to see Dehler smirking down at him. He blinked and looked around. He was in a large room, light seeping through many of the cracks between the boards on the wall. A shack? Cabin? There was a couple of other chairs besides the one he was in, but that was it for standard furniture. He spotted boxes scattered throughout, and a few wooden shelves. There was a humming noise he hadn’t noticed earlier. It was coming from near the concrete floor. He spotted the source a second later—a space heater, which unfortunately was not pointing at him.

  “Do you need a little more help waking up?” Dehler asked.

  Daeng heard the crunch of ice and water being poured into a container.

  “Up to you,” he said, his voice calm.

  “Then I say yes.”

  Water and ice doused him again. He waited until the bulk of it had dribbled off his face before reopening his eyes.

  “More?” she asked.

  “Up to you.”

  “You like this kind of thing? Is that it?”

  He made no response, his face impassive.

  Dehler barked something in German, and a moment later an older guy Daeng had never seen before walked into view, carrying what looked like the handle of a broom.

  Dehler took the stick from him, and the man disappeared.

  The woman began pacing in front of Daeng, her eyes never leaving his. If she thought her glare would intimidate him, she’d picked the wrong man to kidnap. Daeng’s monk past had long ago helped him develop a core of inner calm that rendered him immune to situations like this.

  She stopped in front of him. “Let’s start with your name.”

  “My pleasure. You can call me Daeng.”

  “Daeng? What kind of name is that?”

  “The kind that is mine.”

  Looking unimpressed, she said, “Playing the Asian mystic isn’t going to help you.”

  “I’m obliged to point out that’s racist. And that I’m not playing anything.”

  She rolled her eyes and resumed pacing. “You work for Jonathan Quinn?”

  “I’m sure your friend has already told you that.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  “Are you working for him now?”

  “I’m not working for anyone now.” It was true. At the moment, he was only helping Quinn and Nate as their friend.

  Apparently, it wasn’t the answer Dehler wanted to hear. The broom handle snapped forward and slapped Daeng in the stomach.

  He grunted as air rushed out of his lungs, and he fell forward against the restraints holding him to his chair. He let himself hang there for the pain to pass, and then sat back up, his demeanor unchanged.

  “I know you’re working for him, so don’t lie to me again,” she said.

  Daeng remained silent.

  “Who’s his client? And why do they want me?”

  He gave it a second before saying, “Which answer do you want first?”

  The handle lashed out again, but while the impact stung like hell, it didn’t double him over.

  “Answer me,” she ordered.

  “All right, but you’d better be ready with your stick.”

  She almost hit him again, but held back.

  “The answer to your first question is no one, which nullifies the second.”

  He could see her start to shake in rage, and knew it was taking all of her will not to send the handle sailing at his solar plexus. But suddenly she relaxed, the handle lowering to her side.

  “I get it,” she said. “He was hired to protect that girl, and I screwed that up by killing her. So now Quinn wants some revenge. He is much more vindictive than his reputation would lead one to believe. It was just a job. Mine was successful and his wasn’t. Protocol is that everyone moves on. How does he not know that?”

  “Is that another question I’m supposed to
answer?”

  The handle hit him again.

  “What’s his plan?” she asked. “If you were going to kill me, your friend could have shot me last night.”

  Daeng said nothing.

  She leaned down so her face was directly in front of his. “Tell me what his plan is.”

  He parted his lips as if intending to speak, but then rammed his head forward, knocking his forehead hard against hers.

  He remained conscious long enough to see her collapse in a daze, and then his low-grade concussion—which was probably not so low-grade anymore—pulled him into darkness.

  Chapter Fifteen

  EAST COAST, USA

  QUINN AND ORLANDO arrived at the Ashville, North Carolina regional airport right after sunup, seventeen minutes before their chartered Learjet arrived from Atlanta. Soon they were on their way northeast to Washington, DC, where another private jet would take them to Germany.

  Ten minutes into the first flight, Orlando’s phone rang. She gave Quinn a shake, waking him from his nap. “It’s Nate.” As he sat up, she accepted the call and put it on speaker. “Hello?”

  “Things have gotten a little complicated here and I need your help,” Nate said.

  “What’s going on?”

  He told them about what had happened in Salzburg.

  Whatever sleep that had been clinging to Quinn vanished. “They have Daeng? What the hell is happening over there?”

  “He was following them while I parked the car,” Nate explained. “I don’t know how they surprised him.”

  “Son of a…”

  “The good news is, we have a pretty good idea where Dehler took him. We just need a little help narrowing down the location.”

  He described the area, and said he hoped something about one of the farms or homes would stand out as a good place to start their physical search. “Jar doesn’t speak German, so it would take us a while to go through the records. I know you could do it faster.”

  “Of course,” Orlando said. “I’ll get right on it and call you as soon as I have anything.”

  She reached for the disconnect button, but Quinn snapped up the phone, switched off the speaker, and held it to his ear. With a lot more accusation than concern, he said, “Are you all right?”

  Though Orlando couldn’t hear Nate’s reply, she knew he wouldn’t be happy with the tone.

  After a pause, Quinn went on, “Your task was to find Dehler, not to scare her off. And definitely not to let her get her hands on one of you…. It doesn’t matter. Do not lose her again. Do you understand?…. Well, you’d better be right.”

  Quinn hung up.

  Orlando frowned. “Why are you being such a—”

  “Don’t,” he said, his tone as harsh as it was with Nate.

  “Hey! Do not take out your frustration on me.”

  He looked over, his jaw set, but it was only a moment before embarrassment set in. “I’m sorry.”

  “Good God, what would you have done if I was the one who died in Jakarta?”

  His eyes widened in horror. “I-I-I would have gone insane.”

  “Exactly, and I would have done the same if it was you. So how do you think Nate feels? The woman he loved more than anyone else in the world is dead. And because she had been helping him.”

  Quinn shifted in his chair uncomfortably.

  “It’s a wonder that he can even function at all,” she said. “You need to back off.”

  She could see he knew she was right, but his own despair and rage wouldn’t allow him to admit it. The best she could get out of him was a reluctant shrug before he leaned back and closed his eyes.

  Orlando wished there was a magic word she could say to make everyone chill out. Maybe one would come to her eventually. In the meantime, she focused on Nate’s request.

  She started with satellite images of the area in question. While there were several streets leading off the highway, all either circled back and reconnected with the road Nate and Jar were on, or dead-ended at a farmhouse.

  She searched ownership records and found thirty-four properties in the primary search zone. At first blush, none looked unusual. Several homes were owned by families with the same last names. Relatives, undoubtedly, probably there for generations. The others were owned by people who seemed to have been in residence for at least twenty years.

  She frowned. There had to be something she was missing. She looked out the window and let the information and all that Nate had told her swim in her mind, looking for connections.

  It seemed likely that wherever Dehler had taken Daeng was someplace known by her or one of the people with her—Reiser, or whomever they had met at the tailor shop. The latter made the most sense so Orlando focused on that.

  In a private corner of the darknet lived a database with information about the people who populated the world she and Quinn worked within. No one knew who had put it together, only that he or she was a greedy asshole. The database was more a tool of extortion than an information resource. If there was anything in there about you, the database master would be more than happy to remove it. For a reoccurring fee. Both Quinn and Orlando reluctantly paid a large yearly sum to make sure that anything about them, Nate, and anyone else who worked with them on a job was omitted from the records.

  If you wished to search the database, there was also a hefty fee for that. And if no pertinent records were found, too bad for you. Your ten thousand dollars were nonrefundable.

  Orlando knew it would be considerably cheaper to reach out to other operatives to find out what they might know about the operator of Vogel’s Tailor Shop in Salzburg, but that would take time. Daeng was family, and he was in danger.

  She bit the bullet and paid the fee, then entered her search terms into the appropriate box. In seconds, the results appeared.

  SCHNEIDEREI VOGEL/VOGEL’S TAILOR SHOP

  SALZBURG, AUSTRIA

  OWNED AND OPERATED BY KURT VOGEL, COVER IDENTITY FOR ERICH KELLER, FORMER STASI COMMANDER, LATER FREELANCE OPERATIONS SPECIALIST. CURRENTLY RETIRED.

  While Orlando was glad her money hadn’t been spent in vain, she now needed to find out more about this Erich Keller, which meant another ten thousand dollars.

  She clicked the button for an additional search, and typed ERICH KELLER into the box.

  KELLER, ERICH

  FORMER STASI COMMANDER TURNED FREELANCE OPERATIONS SPECIALIST. RETIRED 2015.

  RAN SPY NETWORKS FOR STASI WHILE UNDER THE GUISE OF ASSISTANT ATTACHÉ FOR TRADE AT DDR EMBASSIES IN ANKARA, TURKEY; BERN, SWITZERLAND; ROME, ITALY; AND VIENNA, AUSTRIA.

  SETTLED IN AUSTRIA AFTER REUNIFICATION OF GERMANY AND OFFERED HIS SERVICES AS AN OPERATIONS SPECIALIST. WORKED OUT OF VOGEL’S TAILOR SHOP IN SALZBURG (ALIAS: KURT VOGEL).

  RETIRED 2015. STILL RESIDES IN SALZBURG.

  ALIASES: KURT VOGEL, WEINNER SCHMIDT, DANIEL LANGE, AND MARTIN KÖNIG.

  OUTSTANDING ARREST ORDER IN GERMANY FOR MULTIPLE CRIMES COMMITTED WHILE A MEMBER OF THE STASI.

  He’d never been caught by the Germans. Interesting. Living as close to the border as he did, either someone was not looking for him hard enough, or he’d paid off the right people. The outstanding arrest order wasn’t the highlight, though. That award went to the list of aliases. Specifically one—Daniel Lange.

  Orlando switched back to the list of people who owned homes in that small slice of the Austrian countryside. She smiled.

  Chapter Sixteen

  NIGHT BLEW IN on a cold wind that made Nate feel like they had been transported to the Arctic Circle. He’d once spent three days on a job in Rovaniemi, Finland, up in Lapland in the dead of winter. That was a trip he hoped to never repeat.

  Out the windshield, he could see the roiling blanket of low, dark clouds. So far, though, the snow had yet to fall.

  Through his binoculars, he could see the glow of lights leaking around curtains that covered the ground-floor windows of the house. The two-story building was nestled among the trees on the other side of a snow-cov
ered field from where Nate had parked the Audi. According to Orlando, the home’s owner was listed as Daniel Lange, an alias used by the man who ran Vogel’s Tailor Shop.

  Three vehicles were parked out front, the van from Salzburg and two SUVs that had arrived not long after Nate and Jar had started their stakeout. Six men had climbed out of the SUVs.

  Reinforcements, apparently.

  This day was just getting better and better.

  Nate checked the sky again, and concluded it was as dark as it was going to get. “Ready?”

  “Why would I not be?”

  He really needed to figure out a way to better communicate with Jar. “Let’s go.”

  Between when they’d heard back from Orlando and sundown, Nate and Jar had made a side trip to Zell am Moos, where they bought outdoor gear. The jackets and gloves would keep them from freezing to death, but their most important purchases had been the snowshoes.

  They snapped them onto their boots, and then whisked along the top of the drift at the edge of the field. Their initial destination was an old storage shed Nate had spotted at the back of the property. It squatted among the trees, and judging from the buildup of snow around it, it hadn’t been used in some time.

  They stopped behind it and listened for any noise from the house, but the wind masked everything. Staying low, Nate peered around the shed. There were five windows along the back of the house—two on the second floor, and three at ground level. The upstairs windows were dark, while the bottom ones had the same rim of light peeking around curtains similar to those he’d noted before. No signs of sentries inside or out.

  He signaled for Jar to stay where she was, and then slid along the side of the shed to the front corner, where he rescanned the house.

  Cameras. Two of them.

  The devices were tucked away in the deep shadow of the eaves, and angled in a V formation to cover the entire area behind the house. Unsure if he was within their range or not, he held still for five minutes and waited for someone to exit the house and investigate.