The Eagle's Covenant (11 page)

“We have a data base on computer file of all registered practitioners,” she informed a bewildered Breggie. “I’ll get the phone number for you and you can ring his practice. Or if you like, you can ring the hospital where the baby was born. It will be in the best interests of the baby if you contact someone.”

Breggie was shaking her head even before the woman had finished. “No. I haven’t got time. It doesn’t matter anyway; we’re going back tomorrow.”

The woman put an admonishing finger up at her. “That may be too late. A baby that young must be treated as soon as possible. He simply must.”

Suddenly Breggie had enough. She muttered a disgruntled remark to the poor woman and walked away from the counter.

The pharmacist watched her go and continued watching until Breggie was no longer in sight.

“Strange woman,” she said to the assistant who had been beside her all the time, “such silly behaviour. Still, what can you expect from a foreigner?”

“Was she foreign?” the girl asked.

The woman nodded, quite smug. “Oh yes. She was South African.”

*

At six o’clock that morning, Franz Molke was being woken in the usual way with a cup of coffee. By six thirty he had showered and dressed and was sitting at his breakfast table with the early editions of the morning press. It was his habit to read the sports pages first before getting down to the headier contents of the newspapers, suitably highlighted by his press secretary.

Molke’s private residence was situated on the outskirts of Bonn. He had started the Volkspartei from a room in that house, but now the party headquarters were in the old capital itself. It was Molke’s intention to transfer party HQ to Berlin as soon as the Volkspartei’s
rise to power had been completed. He was also having a splendid residence built in Berlin on a prime piece of land in the old, eastern sector.

Molke would normally breakfast alone, unless some pressing government business needed his immediate attention. Then he would usually have his press secretary at the table briefing him along with his ministerial private secretary. That morning he was alone, and the phone rang.

He picked it up from the table, still reading of Borussia Dortmund’s exploits in the League cup.

“Molke,” he said abruptly.

“Morning, Franz. I thought you should know the Covenant may no longer be in Germany.”

Doctor Aaron Kistler never introduced himself on the phone when talking to Molke. There was no need because his booming, bass voice was so distinctive.

Molke stopped reading. “What makes you think that?”

“I cannot be too sure, but my sources believe the covenant is complete. It’s my supposition that it would be unwise to keep the document in Germany.”

“Do you think it has been signed?”

“No, but Eshkol left the country yesterday after his meeting with the others, and we are not sure which of them has it, but we do know they have all left Germany.”

Molke felt his heart sink. Losing sight of the Covenant was a blow, but not insurmountable. They had expected difficulty in tracking down the document and had only learned of Eshkol’s group at the eleventh hour. In fact, kidnapping Schiller’s grandson had been a last resort for Molke’s people. Had they been able to identify Eshkol and the others in time, they would have taken the Covenant from them. Molke had little doubt that the Covenant would not be brought back into the country until Schiller was ready to sign.

“Do you have people working on it?”

“Yes.”

“We must find out where it is whatever the cost.”

“I know. I’ll be in touch.”

The phone went dead and left Molke staring into space. He switched his phone off and put it on the table. The exploits of Borussia Dortmund Football Club were no longer of any interest to him and he pushed the paper angrily to one side.

The flaw in Molke’s plan was Schiller’s grandson. The great man might view his personal empire and its future stewardship more important than the life of an infant barely a few weeks old. He could still sign the Covenant and live with the consequences; in which case Molke’s vision of a mighty Volkspartei at the head of a new super state would be little more than a pipe dream.

The key now was to apply pressure to Schiller. And Molke knew a way that disturbed even his own sensibilities.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Conor parked the BMW a couple of blocks away from Oscar’s house, and walked the rest of the way. Before approaching the house, he did a complete survey of the immediate area and the house itself as inconspicuously as possible. When he was satisfied it was reasonably safe to do so, he let himself in but exercised a great deal of caution. Jurgen’s submission that Oscar lived alone did not necessarily mean there would be no-one else in the house.

He slipped in through the front door, using Oscar’s key and closed it behind him, pausing first to listen carefully for any sounds that might tell him that somebody was in the house. He remained still and quiet for about five minutes before venturing forward to carry out a thorough search of the likely places he would find Oscar’s personal documents and anything that could lead him further into the heart of the organisation. To that end he was to be disappointed. There was no obvious evidence of any links Oscar might have had to any subversive group or extreme political party.

Conor wasn’t really surprised; most people involved in such a criminal activity would take great care in concealing any incriminating documents. It was likely that Oscar had a safe or some other secure place to put anything sensitive. Conor could find no safe in the house so he assumed that there might be something on computer file, but not being much more than a personal computer man, and not a hacker, he felt it would be a waste of time even looking.

Having completed his cursory and not too thorough search, Conor left the house, and the car, and walked back towards the city. It was a cloudy night and dawn was struggling to put some light into the eastern sky. There was no rain and just a slight breeze so the walk was not a problem. There were people about; early starters, road cleaners and the like. He found an early morning taxi rank and had one take him back to Jurgen’s place. He paid the taxi off and walked up the street to where he had left his own car. Thirty minutes later he was back in the bed-sit, thankful to have avoided the early morning prowling of Frau Lindbergh.

Before settling down for the night, he bundled all his outer clothing, including his shoes into a large bin bag. His intention was to dispose of it the following day because Conor was only too aware of the forensic evidence on his clothing that could link him to the deaths of Krabbe and Oscar. Within thirty minutes of arriving back at the bed-sit, he was tucked up in bed and was soon sound asleep.

*

Joanna flew back to Bad Godesberg that morning. Schiller was sorry to see her go, but understood her reasons. The helicopter took her from Schiller’s residence to a private airfield near Godesberg. She completed the remainder of the journey by chauffeur driven car.

She was welcomed at the house by her own staff. Most of the security guards had been removed but some remained at Schiller’s insistence. It made sense too because they all knew it wouldn’t be long before the press were camped outside the gates.

Joanna had wondered if returning home to the house she had shared with Hansi would be too painful. She had so many happy memories of their time there together. Now, however, the pain of Hansi’s death and the pain of little Manny’s kidnap were coupled together and she found herself walking round the rooms recalling some of the moments they had shared together.

She ate a light lunch and watched the midday news on television. Then she went through a short work-out in the private gym, showered and changed into a pair of jogging bottoms and sweatshirt. By the middle of the afternoon, Joanna was feeling in a relatively better frame of mind and set about the task she had come home to do.

As a young girl at school, Joanna had always kept a diary. It became so much a part of her adolescent life that she took her diary keeping habit to University. The problem there, of course, was that keeping a diary seriously interfered with studying and socialising; so the diary took a back seat. Although some entries did appear they were so short they hardly merited their own appearance in the pages.

After leaving University, Joanna took up her diary again, but because she spent a great deal of her time working with a computer, progress made her pen redundant and all her entries found their way on to computer file.

The advent of photo scanners for computers revolutionised Joanna’s records and she began working back through her past, lifting those special moments and editing in scanned photographs for each of those occasions.

She brought this hobby with her to Germany while working for the giant Siemens Company and found it extremely useful; many of her business presentations included scanned photographs and, while not unusual, it always added an element of pragmatism to her style.

When she and Hansi became serious about each other, Joanna encouraged him to adopt her way of keeping personal records. Although Hansi was not particularly interested in keeping a diary, in fact he was quite happy to let Joanna do that, he did endeavour to use some of her ideas when compiling his own files and references.

It was her own records, and those of Hansi’s, that Joanna wanted to look at, for she was convinced that somewhere in those records, she would find the woman who had kidnapped her beloved Manny.

She worked steadily on her own files, searching back through her own happy memories. At times she would find herself remembering those memories and dwelling on them. It was almost a pleasure to sit and reminisce.

Then suddenly, Joanna’s heart skipped. Hansi was on the screen. She was still going through her University stage and hadn’t expected to see her dead husband so soon. He looked so young and happy. Tears came into her eyes as she looked at the images before her. It was a Christmas party. There were others in the scene too, but she really only had eyes for her husband.

Reluctantly, Joanna moved on. When the light began to fade and hunger prevailed she was forced to break off for a while. She had dismissed most of the staff earlier that afternoon so decided to find something to eat herself. An hour later, after a micro-waved meal for two (she was that hungry), she had made a pot of tea and was back in the study and in front of the computer.

She resumed her trawl through the memories and found that her entries were getting less and less frequent. And the less frequent they became, the more she could recall people and faces she had met. And she was satisfied there was no South African woman among them.

She turned then to Hansi’s records, but to get those meant going to his safe. Nobody had been in that safe since Hansi had died because she had expressly forbidden it. There had been talk of legal moves to gain access to the safe by his business colleagues, but her father-in-law had blocked them. So Hansi’s secrets, if there were any, remained locked away, and Joanna had promised that those secrets would remain so until a year after his death.

Hansi had always believed he was the only one who knew the combination to his safe. What he didn’t know was that, one evening when he was very drunk, he had taken Joanna into his study to give her a present and had opened the safe while she was there. In his drunken state he had dialled the combination while speaking the letters out loud. The numbers had stuck in Joanna’s brain and she had never forgotten them. Not that she ever needed to know because she had never wanted to go into Hansi’s safe.

Until now.

She dialled in the combination and opened the heavy safe door. She could see several papers in there, but ignored them. What she was looking for was his box of computer discs. As she pulled the box out, she inadvertently dragged an envelope out which fell on to the floor. As it hit the parquet flooring, a computer disc slid out from inside the envelope. She put the box on the desk and picked the envelope and disc up from the floor. There was nothing in the envelope, but on the disc were the two initials VP.

Curious, she put the disc into the computer and asked for a file directory. The directory list came up on the screen. There were several but as soon as Joanna tried to access one, the screen went blank and an instruction appeared that she should enter a password. Joanna ejected the disc and checked the label to see if a password had been written on either side. Inevitably there was nothing other than those two initials. She put the disc back in the computer and tried again but each directory yielded the same result. They all needed passwords to access them. Joanna tried the obvious like family names, nicknames, birth dates etc., but all came up with a rejection.

Curious now, and determined to try gaining access to the files on Hansi’s disc, Joanna pulled her own box of disc files towards her. She ran her fingertips through them until she found the one she wanted. On the label was the title ‘Party Games’. She smiled at the memory.

When Joanna was in her final year at University, she and her undergraduate colleagues would write programmes and challenge the others to run them without knowing the passwords and defences that had been written in to each programme. Naturally each challenge became tougher as they all fought to outdo each other. Joanna cracked all the challenges with a programme she devised and called ‘Detective.’ She was now about to try it on Hansi’s files.

Joanna’s programme ran on a method of spinning groups of letters instead of just regurgitating endless words in a hope that the programme might find a match with the passwords locked into the target file. Because the password would more than likely be fairly short and not more than eight letters anyway, the groups of letters would be in pairs initially, then in threes and finally five letters.

The idea was to check the target file’s access parameters for matching blocks of two, three, and five letter groups. Whenever matching groups were found, and they could be in any order, the programme would begin to pair groups at random until it found a match or several matches.

Because passwords were often eccentric or personalised, they were not always found in any dictionary, so Joanna’s programme would come up with matches that could trigger a recognisable group of up to five letters and put these up on the screen. It would then be up to the operator to add either a prefix or suffix of their own. The programme avoided groups above five unless it came across a direct match in the file’s password dictionary because this would result in an unnecessarily long list of possible matches. The programme worked on the odds that passwords would more often than not be less than eight letters.

The advantage of Joanna’s programme was that it would run in any language that used the Roman alphabet but was kept to blocks of letters rather than complete matching to reduce the memory required. It could never do a direct comparison to passwords because they were always ‘fenced’ in such a way that the host computer would detect illegal interrogation and shut down.

She set the programme running and went off to make herself a cup of coffee.

*

Hoffman put the phone down and curled a finger at Jansch. The detective got up from his desk and came over. Hoffman was chewing the end of a pencil.

“That was Lechter,” he said, taking the pencil from his mouth and tossing it on to the desk. “He’s investigating the explosion at that house?”

Jansch nodded. Hoffman looked away, lifting his head to stare at some imaginary spot on the ceiling.

“They found some counterfeit money there, remember?” Jansch said he did. Hoffman lowered his gaze.

“Well, some of the bloody stuff has turned up in Cologne.”

Jansch stiffened. “Cologne?” He digested that for a moment, and then shrugged. “Must mean its being distributed then.”

Hoffman screwed his face up and shook his head, but not too emphatically.

“Well, Lechter has been on to Twenty-one, but they are not aware of any forgery operation going on.” He held his hands up in a gesture of submission. “Doesn’t mean there isn’t one going on, but....”

“So what’s that got to do with us?”

Hoffman swung back and forth on his swivel chair. He stopped and pointed a finger at Jansch. “Remember Lechter had a theory that it might have been a pay-off? We’ve identified Trucco as one of the victims of the bomb. So, if the kidnappers were paid off at that house, and their employers intended silencing them permanently, there would have been no point in handed over genuine bills.”

Jansch was ahead of him. “So someone is using the same counterfeit money as the kidnappers. Assuming it was the kidnappers.”

“And they are in Cologne.”

Jansch stood up. “I’ll get on to it. I’ll ring Lechter first, and then I’ll get some men out there asking questions.” He went to leave but Hoffman stopped him.

“Jansch, go yourself. But remember, this is Otto Lechter’s pitch; don’t queer it.”

Jansch smiled. “I’ll be diplomacy itself, sir.”

Hoffman grinned back at him. Then his expression changed. If it was the kidnap group, then this could be the single, oddest break they would get.

*

Breggie had got back from her disastrous trip that morning in a worse state than when she had left. She realised she had acted naively and stupidly. By letting the chemist question her about the baby, Breggie had virtually walked into a trap of her own making. She knew it would not have taken much more to have roused the woman’s suspicions and have her calling for the police. Not that Breggie thought the chemist would have connected her to the Schiller kidnap on such a flimsy display, but it would have provoked a great deal of thought from any policeman worth his salt.