by S L Shelton
On the video display, we could clearly see the yard tractor as it towed the trailer to the base of the crane scaffolding. To the casual observer, they would appear to be workmen loading cargo on a railcar. No weapons were visible, no one was acting suspiciously—it was just another day of work in Dusseldorf.
“They aren’t acting nervous,” I said, moving the tablet over to share it more comfortably. “They aren’t even looking around to see if anyone has noticed them.”
“They look like dock workers,” she added. “I don’t think they are worried at all.”
I shook my head. “Bold as balls,” I muttered.
“Balls?”
I grinned and was about to explain the origin of the phrase when a small scuffle seemed to break out next to the crane.
“Look!” I said, pointing at the apparent conflict that was brewing.
One man was shouting, his arms flailing in dramatic gestures and short stabbing motions accompanied by finger pointing. He was smaller than the man he was yelling at, who stepped forward threateningly. For a split second, I thought it would come to blows, but the larger man was quickly restrained by three others standing near him.
The smaller man stepped forward and poked his finger in the other man’s chest, prompting the larger man to spit in his face. The small man slapped the larger man with the back of his hand, sending the larger man into a rage, but the other three pulled him back roughly, preventing him from lashing out.
“Damn!” I said. “That big guy looks like he could crush the smaller one.”
The smaller man turned and walked away before the three released their grip on the big one. He began kicking at the ground and shouting at the others who reached out, but not to strike—they appeared to be trying to calm the big fella down.
“Russians,” I said aloud.
“What?”
“Elvis said the Russians were being treated disrespectfully by the Serbs. Something that was difficult for them to accept,” I said. “Those four there… I bet those are Russians. That’s the only reason I can think of for the big one not crushing the little one when he slapped him.”
She grunted her understanding.
While the men had been arguing, the remaining handful had been attaching cables and hooks to the cargo box and preparing to move it to the flatbed railcar. By the time the four Russians had calmed down, the cargo box had been placed gently on the bed of the car.
Two of the four men stepped up onto the bed of the railcar and ratcheted down the chain ‘dogs’ to hold the box securely to the bed. Two of them stayed on the bed of the railcar as it started moving down the track, while the rest piled into the SUV and drove away.
I pulled out my phone and sent a secure text to Storc. It read: “Have found Barb. Haven’t got her yet but working on it. Need GPS tracking this number.” Then I sent him the phone number of the prepaid phone I had duct taped to the container.
He sent a reply almost immediately: “Tracking is on. First ping should be up in a few minutes. Re: Barb. Bonbon almost wet herself. Stay safe.”
“We have to find out where that container is going,” I said matter-of-factly as we watched the railcar move away from us in the video feed.
“We could follow the signal to the rail yard and see which train it’s hooked to,” she offered.
“That’s a plan. Let’s go get our stuff and then head for the yard,” I said as I shoved the iPad into my shoulder bag.
We left our hiding place just as the railcar was pulling around the long curve on the opposite side of the bend. Back down the path and across the bridge, we left at a trot.
**
2:10 p.m.—US Consulate in Amsterdam
BEVERLY MARTIN’s phone rang while she was in the middle of a meeting. She looked down at the screen on her phone to see it was John Temple before she answered in a quiet voice. “Yeah. Just a second,” she said, and then she excused herself from her meeting before disappearing into her office and closing the door. “What’s up?” she asked.
“I just wanted you to know that our amateur isn’t in Paris.” John said plainly. “Our team found his phone on the train—just his phone.”
The consul general chuckled. “I guess your tag isn’t working either if you had the Paris team check the train.”
She knew it would annoy John that she would assume he had tagged the boy after she forbade it. But of course she was right—she had been in the game long enough to know how things worked. She was certain that made it sting John all that much more.
She took the long pause as his admission without an admission. She would not force him to lie to her, knowing he was under orders. “Any clue at all as to his whereabouts?” she asked.
“None. He’s evaporated.” John replied.
“Where are we then?” she asked, frustrated by the dead end.
“We still have our feelers out in Prague. Everything went quiet there with the Serb network just before the explosion. We’re trying to scare up enough assets to get a picture, but so far almost all of them have disappeared. The ones who haven’t are turning up dead. Two just turned up in the Vltava with bullets in the backs of their heads.”
She let that digest. “Okay, John. Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.
“I wish there was. We’re just treading water at the moment,” he replied.
“Okay. Thanks for the update. Keep me posted when you can,” she said, her exhaustion clear in her voice, and then she added, “And John... Thanks for keeping me in the loop on this. I know you don’t have to.”
“My pleasure, ma’am,” he responded before ending the call.
**
JOHN TEMPLE sat down hard on the bank of the Vltava River after stuffing his phone back into his pocket. He looked over at the Czech police and emergency crews as they hauled the second of the two bodies from the water and then up the bank on stretchers. Nick Horiatis walked up to John with a thermos of coffee and handed it to him. “What did the old lady have to say about the punk?”
“You know, Short Bus, you should be careful about what you call other people,” John said, driving the point home with the nickname Nick hated.
When Nick had joined the agency, it leaked out that his mother had driven a handicap bus for the public school system and that Nick would ride to school with her each morning. That kind of information is just the sort of fodder the instructors loved to use to break the ego of a new candidate. And to Nick’s everlasting resentment, the moniker had stuck.
“Whatever,” he said absently. “I told you we should’ve kept that kid locked in the basement,” he continued, staring disapprovingly at his boss. His nose was blue and black where Scott had broken it two nights earlier. There were also four stitches in his scalp, just above the hairline, from where his head had smashed into the side of the van door.
“That ‘kid’ went to ground with us watching him with both eyes and appears to be the only one with any leads in this cluster fuck.” He paused to take a sip of coffee. “He might be the best hope we have of finding the hostages alive.”
Nick scoffed. “Wouldn’t that be something,” he said sarcastically.
“He confirmed the Jovanovich family connection when all we had were suspicions,” John reminded him.
“Yeah! Because he got captured and tortured!” Nick said incredulously.
John looked at Nick sideways. “Yeah... But he escaped, and Majmun is dead.”
Nick shook his head. “Well if he’s so on top of things, it would be nice if he’d clue us in a little bit.”
John turned and stared back out over the water, taking another sip of coffee.
“Yeah...that would be nice,” he said, more to himself than to Nick.
**
Afternoon — Hauptbahnhof, Dusseldorf
We arrived at the hotel and packed up our clothes and equipment into two small rolling suitcases before leaving the building and hailing a cab. While on the way to the train station, Hauptbahnhof Dusseldorf, I checked t
he signal on the cargo container. It was still on the main track line heading to the train station.
“It’s still moving,” I whispered to Kathrin.
“Is it to the station yet?” she asked, leaning over my arm to get a glimpse.
I shook my head. “They don’t appear to be in a rush.”
I sent a text to Storc with the car and cargo container numbers, hoping he’d be able to get into the system and discover a destination, but he informed me that the numbers weren’t in the system. He said he’d keep checking to see if they popped up.
Once we arrived at the station, we put our luggage in a locker and then started searching for the container. When we located it through a window, we saw that the two men who had ridden with the container were overseeing the connection with another car...a passenger car.
“A passenger car,” I muttered. “Damn it.”
“What? Why is that bad?” Kathrin asked as we watched the two cars bump together.
“It means they are going to be keeping a close eye on it…not just trusting the railroad to handle the transfer.”
“The passenger car was already here,” she replied. “That means they made arrangements ahead of time… Wouldn’t that mean there was paperwork for it?”
I nodded at her observation. “But it’s not in the computer system yet…that means we’ll need to find the hard copy.”
“How do we do that?”
“Down there,” I said to Kathrin. “Let’s see if we can get into the yard.”
We went down a flight of stairs and attempted to exit into the yard, but were blocked by a security door requiring a pass card. I was tired, and I was having a hard time keeping the panic at bay. Barb had only been feet away from me while I was planting the phone on the cargo container, and now she was further away than before—I couldn’t help but feel like the setback was my fault. A thought that was reinforced by Barb’s dream voice in my head. “This is your fault, Scott Wolfe.”
I know, I thought to myself as I pushed hopelessly on the door.
“Neine!” came a voice behind us, sending a jolt of panic through my chest.
A security guard.
Kathrin said something to the effect of, “Isn’t this the door to the platform?”
The guard shook his head as he replied, and then pointed up the stairs.
Kathrin nodded and smiled. “Danke,” she said and then pulled me back upstairs by the arm. My heart was pounding in my chest so hard, I could hear it in my ears. The locked door and the guard had only made it worse.
I was starting to feel like I was in over my head for the first time. The lack of sleep along with the constant pain in my chest and shoulder were making it exceedingly difficult to concentrate on forming a plan.
Barb is here, only yards away, I thought. Seriously, a locked door and a security guard are going to stop you now?
We went back upstairs, looking for an alternate way into the yard.
I stopped to think, Kathrin watching me expectantly… But nothing was coming to me.
Kathrin reached out, putting her hand on my shoulder. “I have an idea.”
She walked across the floor of the station to a food kiosk and ordered a sandwich, a soda, and a cup of coffee. She walked back to me, carrying the bagged meal in one hand and the coffee in the other.
She handed me the coffee with a “relax and enjoy your coffee” expression on her face.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, smiling confidently, and then she disappeared around the corner. A few moments later, I saw her through the window, out in the yard and walking toward a yard worker.
“She smiled upon them and the doors were opened,” I said to myself in a whisper.
She walked over to a gray-haired man in orange coveralls. He was rotund, to say the least, with a broad paint brush of a gray mustache hanging down over his lip. As she approached him, he turned and waved his hands, indicating she wasn’t supposed to be here, but she held out the bag and the soda while saying something to him.
He stopped motioning long enough to turn and look down the track before turning back to her and shrugging his big shoulders.
She said something else to him and he nodded, taking the bag and soda from her. As they continued to talk, he gestured around the yard and then pointed off in one direction then another. Kathrin turned her attention toward our cargo container and gestured toward it with a curious expression on her face.
The man turned to look where she was pointing and then looked down at the clipboard he had tucked under his arm. He flipped a page before saying something back to her. She smiled at whatever his response had been before throwing her arms around his thick neck, kissing him on his cheek, and then walking back toward the terminal.
All I could do was shake my head. Any hesitation I might have had about dragging Kathrin along with me had just evaporated.
When she returned, she stopped in front of me, smiling.
“Who was lunch for?” I asked with a grin.
“Meine bruuder,” she said through a toothy grin. “It seems he is at another yard, but the nice man with the big mustache is going to make sure he gets it.”
I laughed. “What else did the nice man say?”
“He explained how difficult his job is and how he had to keep track of all the cars in the yard lest passengers or cargo end up in Greece instead of France or Switzerland instead of Turkey,” she replied. “I asked him about that strange box car with all gadgets hanging on it.”
“And?”
“There are two cars on that manifest...one passenger and one climate-controlled stable box for prize stallions—going to Prague on the night train,” she said, shifting herself around to my side. “Apparently they are a troop of equestrian performers.”
“How fortunate for us that we are on our way to Prague! We might catch a performance,” I said as the last little bit of tension in my chest melted away.
Kathrin’s eyes lit up and her smile widened—I thought her cheeks would burst from the pressure as she threw her arms around me. “I thought for sure you would send me on my way once we were done in Germany,” she said before looking up at my face.
“No way,” I said. “I’d never leave my German super spy behind.” Then I winked at her.
She hooked her arm through mine and pulled me forward. “Come! We must purchase tickets for the night train!” she said gleefully.
We purchased tickets for a sleeping berth. The night train departed from Frankfurt, so we also purchased tickets on a commuter train to take us there. Before boarding, we ordered a small meal of wurst and kraut at a terminal restaurant. I found it difficult to enjoy my meal while Barbara was locked inside that container, but I hadn’t eaten or slept for a while, so the change of pace did much to refresh me.
Once we finished our meal, we walked leisurely toward the platform to board the train—it was nice not to rush.
“So what do you do when you aren’t on crazy adventures with Americans?” I asked as the train pulled out of the station.
She grinned. “Oh. That is my job,” she said, trying to pull a straight face. “It’s a service I provide.”
“Really?” I replied ironically. “How’s the pay?”
“Wait until you get my bill,” she replied, her face breaking into a broad grin, making her eyes sparkle.
I chuckled.
“I’m a gopher, mostly,” she added finally, giving me a half-straight answer. “I deliver packages for a company, do some dispatching, some driving… Sometimes I just sit around and listen to the phones.”
“Oh, like for a delivery company?” I asked.
“They do lots of things, but yes, they do deliveries as well,” she said. “It’s sort of like a concierge service.”
“Okay,” I replied, not familiar with the concept, but I assumed it was a European thing.
“Do you do this much?” she asked.
“All the time,” I replied. “This is just a little side job I picked up for vacation. Usu
ally my assignments are much harder.”
It took her a second to realize I was joking, and then we both laughed.
The trip to Frankfurt was uneventful; both of us napped more than anything else. It was a short trip and it was nice to have a stress-free conversation with the chatty girl I had met at the hotel. But as soon as we were quiet again, I remembered that Barb was in a box on a different train, without comfortable seats, with no giggly conversation and no window to look out.
When we arrived in Frankfurt, we immediately made for the train to Prague. We located the correct platform and strolled along the edge, looking for the two target cars that the bad guys had put on the manifest.
Kathrin bumped my arm with her elbow and nodded toward the back of the train as we neared the end of the platform.
I looked down the track and saw the cargo container and the attached passenger car containing our hostages and their guards.
The back end of the passenger car was facing the container and had a glass-covered landing. One of the captors was sitting in a chair, watching the doors of the cargo container. No doubt they would be taking shifts watching the container.
“Damn,” I muttered.
The private passenger car the Serbs had obtained was situated between the rest of the passenger cars and the cargo container. There would be no way for me to access the container without going through the Serb’s car—or over it. But I had seen enough movies to know I wasn’t up to that sort of acrobatic spy work, especially knowing there were explosives lining the inside of the box doors. That wouldn’t do at all.
“Hi Barb! I’m here to pick up you and your friends.”
BOOM!
Though I was a quick study in most things, there was no way I was going to make an inaugural attempt at bomb defusing on a box containing my girlfriend—we would have to wait until Prague.
“Come on,” I said quietly as I tugged on her elbow. “We can’t get on that way…we’ll have to wait.”
We turned and went back, boarding the train closer to our own assigned cabin. The thought of sleep made us both ache to lie down even though there was some sunlight left. But after we settled into our compartment, we decided to explore the train instead.
