Duel of Assassins (30 page)

At five o’clock, Taras was pacing back and forth beside the
ornate Gothic gateway to the
Neue Garten
, watching the passing traffic
and incoming cars, repeatedly conjuring an Opel Omega, but to no effect. He had
hiked the half kilometer of winding blacktop from the palace, needing to be in
motion, unable to remain impotently rooted in one spot. Suddenly Bob Strotkamp
drove out, pulled over to the curb and got out.

He had an ashen expression.

“What happened?” Taras said, bracing for the worst.

“Charlie’s credentials are gone. Her name’s crossed off the
fucking list! The idiot
Fräulein
at the T to Z table doesn’t remember
who picked them up, even after the goddamn briefing we gave!”

“I can’t believe it! Jesus, Bob, Charlotte couldn’t have
gotten by us.”

“No. She must have sent somebody else in with her ID and a
letter of authorization. “

Taras swore again and again, and slammed his fist into his
palm till it ached. So fucking close, then she’d slid through the net through a
fluke of incompetence. He got in beside Strotkamp, who swung around and headed
back through the park to the palace. As they pulled up, Strotkamp turned to
him:

“You know, there’s a good side to it.”

“What?”

“At least it means she’s alive and planning to attend.”

“Yeah, I guess it does.” That was a comfort, and he needed
one desperately.

But where was she?

Seventy kilometers south and slightly west of Potsdam, on
the river Elbe, is the little market town of Wittenberg, made famous by Martin
Luther, who, one day in 1517 nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the
Schlosskirche
,
the Castle Church. Wittenberg’s picturesque, cobblestoned Old Town, in fact, is
today called Lutherstadt, and a bronze statue of the great reformer,
ornamentally sheltered from pigeons, stands before the broad town hall in the
market square. On all sides of the little square, cheek by jowl, are the
dignified faces of Gothic buildings. And one of these along the south side, a
four-story jade-green facade, is the Goldener Adler Hotel. It was here, in a
second-story room overlooking the Marktplatz, that Charlotte Walsh had gone to
ground with Jack Sanderson. But she was getting increasingly restless,
surfeited with him and eager to return to her work and her world.

Jack was slumped in an armchair by the window, watching a
televised tennis match, while Charlotte was reading an
International Herald
Tribune
that featured columns by several of her colleagues, when there came
a knock at the door.

Christ, what if it’s Taras?
she thought as she
hurried to open it. But it was only Frank, back from Potsdam. The spike-blond,
leather-jacketed teenager grinned as he handed her the packet of press
credentials. She foraged in her purse, handed him some deutschmarks and smiled
back.

“Danke schön, Frank.”

“You need anything else, remember, I’m your dude,” he said
in his best Americanese.

“I’ll do that.”

She closed the door on the sound of his motorcycle boots
crashing down the narrow hotel stairs.

“Cocky little bastard, isn’t he?” Jack commented.

“Now, now, don’t be jealous of a mere child, even if he is
quite fetching. And if I remember correctly, you’re the one who suggested I
didn’t need to pick these up in person.”

“Only because you’re so afraid your old boyfriend might be
hanging around. Anyway, let’s see them.”

She perched on the wooden frame of the German-style double
bed, opened the packet, dumped the credentials out on the eiderdown coverlet.

“You need two passes just to get in?” Sanderson said, moving
beside her.

“Apparently.” She looped one round her neck with the
attached string. It looked like an elaborate baggage tag, with the conference
dates imprinted below a stylized European Community logo that prismed in the
light. “Pretty fancy. This seems to be a perimeter pass. Probably gets you into
the grounds to park your car. Now this one, you see, even fancier. Because your
little
Liebchen
happens to be one of the elite who gets right into the
palace for the reception. They don’t give these out to just anybody, only your
way-above-average newshens.”

“And that’s it? Two pieces of paper and you’re in?”

“I guess. After they x-ray my handbag and walk me through a
metal detector.”

“No strip searches?”

“No, but you’re welcome to conduct one now if you’d like.”

“In a minute.” He smiled. “Honeymoon’s winding down, huh?”

“Sort of.” She glanced around the room. “I’m sorry our place
is so little. The Kempinski would have been a hoot, and we could have gone
strolling on the Ku-damm. But I just couldn’t risk it. Forgive me?”

“It’s not so bad. At least we have our own bath.”

“It’s damn intimate, and I guess that’s what matters most
for our last couple days together. Jack, would you mind terribly switching
channels for a while? CNN should have some background stuff on the conference,
and it’ll help me jump-start my poor lifeless brain. I’m supposed to hash out a
column by tomorrow, telling my scads of devoted readers exactly what I think
this big powwow will mean for the future of the world.”

“Sure. I’ll watch too. Maybe I’ll learn something.”

While he turned the dial, she unpacked and plugged in her
laptop to charge the batteries, then sat down, keeping one eye on the little
screen while she continued to scan the newspaper. Jack settled at her feet, his
back propped against her shins, also watching the TV, where a map of Europe was
gradually changing its colors to illustrate past and proposed changes in
borders and strategic alliances.

So, Jack was aware of her distraction, her restlessness, she
thought. It must be damned obvious, even though she’d tried to conceal it. She
reached down absently and tousled his sandy hair as she watched the screen.
He’d seemed a little sad just now, a little wistful. And he’d been such a
wonderfully attentive lover. He deserved at least a good last couple of
days—and her full romantic response. But surely he was under no illusions that
there could be a future for them? No matter how fantastic the sex had been,
there was more to life. And she couldn’t even begin to picture Jack Sanderson
as her husband or as the father of her children.

Much later, in the early morning hours, she found herself
suddenly quite awake, staring up at coruscating darkness. To divert herself,
she began to replay in her mind the most flagrantly erotic images of their last
lovemaking. But an odd thing happened. After a few minutes her mind began to
wander instead to issues of collective European security.

Charlotte Walsh, you are absolutely hopeless!
she
scolded herself.
But dammit, why not?
She threw back the coverlet,
padded over to the desk, unplugged her recharged laptop, took it back to bed
with her, flipped the screen up and settled herself against the pillows. Then,
while Jack snored softly beside her, she began to peck, watching a series of
liquid crystal characters dance rapidly across the backlit screen. It was a
column for John Tully, the one she’d file tomorrow:

FOR RELEASE
FRIDAY, JULY 16

POTSDAM—The
Schloss Cecilienhof seemed to many observers a peculiar choice for an
international conference in 1945, and so it still seems to some of us all these
dramatic decades later. But in a grand bit of diplomatic déjà-vu, the world is
once again turning its manic attention on this rambling mock-Tudor manor house
built by Kaiser Bill for his brother on the watery outskirts of Berlin.

Here, Messrs.
Ackerman, Rybkin et al. can deposit their respective backsides in the exact
wickerwork garden chairs where Messrs. Stalin, Truman and Churchill once sat
surveying a quite different Europe, one still smoldering from the long
firestorm of World War II. And, like those Big Three, our statesmen will also
be overlooking, at somewhat nearer focus, the ...???

[Note to John
Tully: please have someone check the name of the body of water behind the
palace; I can’t recall it, and I don’t have any maps handy. PS. I don’t mean the
lake beside it.]

I mention
this because, in one of those frequent ironies of history, sixteen years after
the division of Germany was sketched on maps spread over the Cecilienhof
conference table, the Berlin Wall began its obscene march across the city and
countryside, following the Potsdamers careful tracings—and eventually marched
right across the back lawn of the Cecilienhof itself, blocking that prized
lakeside view that so delighted the diplomats.

Potsdam, you
see, was placed on the frontier of the Eastern Zone, and just across the .....
[John, again, name of body of water, please.] lay the West, and freedom. If
only the Big Three could have glanced out over the greensward and seen their
monstrous handiwork-to-be before they adjourned—a twelve-foot-high concrete
barrier complete with barbed wire and floodlights. Might it not have altered
their minds a wee bit and saved us all a world of suffering?

In our time,
of course, a great deal of the damage has been undone. That Wall has been torn
down and the lovely view restored, not only to the back garden of the Schloss
Cecilienhof, but clear across Eastern Europe. And the statesmen who glance up
from their deliberations here this week and look out the garden windows will
also be confronting a far more beckoning vista—that of a brave new, brand new
Europe.

[Note to
John: Please verify that the Germans have in fact torn down that awful eyesore
behind the Cecilienhof. I assume they have, but, as you know, I’m still in the
boondocks over here.]

Charlotte paused, coming up for air. Well, it was definitely
what John Tully called her Radcliffe style, too full of collegiate conceits.
But it wasn’t bad for a backgrounder. And by the time she plugged in a few
specifics, it would damn well run the right number of column inches and be
filed on time. Which was, after all, the most critical thing.

Let John fiddle with it.

*

The next day, Wednesday, two days before the conference,
Taras spent the morning making phone calls from his room in the Hotel Potsdam,
a high-rise on the Havel near the
Lange Brucke
, the main bridge to
Berlin.

There was, however, nothing new from any quarter. It was
still predawn in Washington, and there was no need to disturb John Tully’s
sleep, but Taras had talked to the newspaper switchboard and the overnight
attendant in the wire room, and neither one could find any trace of a recent
communication from Charlie—no messages, computer downloads, telexes, faxes or
direct dictation. She was due to file, but thus far it didn’t look like she
had.

German police still had no leads to her or the rental Opel.
The search radius had widened dramatically—to the northernmost suburbs of
Berlin, east to the Polish border, south to Leipzig and Dresden, west to
Magdeburg—but the net was wide-meshed, and a slippery fish like Marcus would
not likely turn up in it. Taras was convinced Charlotte and Marcus were near to
hand. What was needed was a task force to go from hotel to hotel and
gasthof
to
gasthof
, circulating photographs of them. Unfortunately, the manpower
was not available; police and security forces were already stretched
dangerously thin meeting the imperatives of the Potsdam Conference.

Taras put down the phone, stared north along the riverside,
his eye drawn to the burnished sunlight on an old copper church  dome in
Potsdam’s Alten Markt. He was ready to do something decisive, dammit, but what?
It was pointless to go rushing off, or even to proceed one step away from the
phone, without some rationale. He sensed that the duel between himself and
Marcus was reaching its finale, yet Taras was unable either to strike or
properly defend. He could only wait for the Cowboy to make his final thrust—a
thrust that could come at any instant, and from any direction.

At one-thirty John Tully called. A faxed column from Charlie
had been on his desk when he’d arrived at 8:15; it had arrived in the newspaper
wire room a few minutes before. The fax cover sheet indicated it had been sent
from the post office in Dessau.

“That’s just south of here!” Taras said.

“Yeah, about eighty kilometers southwest of you. I just
looked it up. It’s an industrial city on the river Mulde, a tributary of the
Elbe.”

“John, did she leave any number for you to call her back?”

“No. And she usually does, that’s the damn thing. It’s just
not like her.”

“What’s the column say?”

“I’ll fax you a copy at your hotel. It’s one of her cotton
candy pieces, spun out of air. There are some nifty turns of phrase, but she’s
obviously not done any real homework or even been to Potsdam. She couldn’t even
think of the name of the Havel, or the
Jungfern See
behind the
Cecilienhof, and she says she’s out in the boondocks, whatever the hell that
means. I’m worried, Taras. Find her for me, will you? And make sure nothing
happens to my girl. I want to be able to give her a damn good scolding.”

Taras swallowed hard, promised—and rang off. Then he
immediately dialed Strotkamp, who was his liaison with various German security
services, and passed along the information.

“I’ll get right on it, Taras. Meanwhile, I suggest you hang
right where you are. Who knows? Ten minutes from now she’ll probably walk into
some journalistic watering hole in Berlin and buy everybody a drink.”

“I can’t hang in any longer, Bob. I’m going crazy here, and
Dessau’s right off the Autobahn. I can be there in forty minutes.”

Dessau still seemed to be struggling to wake itself from its
decades-long Stalinist nightmare. Like Berlin, it had a bombed-out church, but
this rubbled relic didn’t seem to be a conscious memorial; it looked more like
the downtrodden Dessauers just hadn’t gotten around to repairing it. Amid the
post-euphoric realities of reunification, the industrial city still lay under a
gray pall of pollution. Old diesels and lawnmower-engine Trabants still
grumbled through its streets, belching noxious fumes; superannuated trams that
should have gone to the scrap heap instead went grinding and shrieking around
the squares; and, driving in from the Autobahn, Taras had noticed a jaundiced
froth clotting the margins of the river Mulde.

It had taken him several minutes to locate the main post
office, which offered
Telefaxdienst
—fax service—and he was just in time
to catch the clerk who’d transmitted Charlie’s column to America over the
Fernkopierer
before he went off duty. But that was the extent of Taras’ luck.

The young man recalled only that the copy had been brought
in by a blond punker in a motorcycle jacket, obviously just a delivery person.
The postal clerk glanced over the pictures Taras showed him of Charlotte and
Marcus without a flicker of recognition.

Taras thanked him, then went outside to ingest raw
hydro-carbons while waiting for one of Strotkamp’s federal police contacts to
show up. Was the motorcycle punk a confederate of Marcus? Taras didn’t think
so. More likely he was just a kid hired to do an errand. But hired by Charlie
or Marcus? There was no way of knowing. All Taras could be sure of so far was
that Charlotte had definitely written the column; he and John Tully agreed the
style was hers. But that could have been days earlier. There was no internal
evidence to date it more recently.

She could already be dead.

Or trussed up in a closet.

And there was another alternative, one he prayed for, though
it was wretched enough—that she was just not ready to come out, still too
enamored of the Cowboy, a devilishly handsome man who had not yet revealed
himself as a homicidal maniac.

As Taras was forcing his mind to grapple with these grisly
scenarios, an Audi sedan pulled to the curb. Taras jumped in and gave a quick
briefing to the driver—a captain of GSG-9, the German hostage rescue unit—on
the short ride to Dessau’s main police station, where arrangements were made to
duplicate the photographs of the missing pair and distribute them to the city’s
hotels. The police, Taras was assured, would also comb the streets and garages
for the missing Opel.

Taras expected absolutely nothing to come of it, just like
the ongoing stakeout at the Cecilienhof and the journalistic hangouts of
Berlin. With an ever-increasing conviction of hopelessness, he got back in his
own rental Escort and headed back to the Autobahn and Potsdam.

*

At five-thirty the following afternoon, the day before the
conference, Marcus Jolly was shopping for a pair of shoes on Wittenberg’s main
thoroughfare, Schloss-strasse. He was looking for something plain, low-heeled
and very large.

After browsing several stores without success, he revised
his plan and selected some white, low-top Adidases in the
Modesalon
on
the Marktplatz. He had them wrapped, then walked east on Collegienstrasse to
the little bookstore where Charlotte had arranged to wait for him so he could
pick out a present for her.

She wasn’t there.

There were several other bookstores on the market square,
but she wasn’t in any of them. Marcus found this disturbing. He cut diagonally
across the square, scattering pigeons and deranging a semicircle of Asian
tourists who were pointing and clicking at Luther’s statue.

In front of the Goldener Adler a young man with spiky hair
was lounging indolently on his parked motorcycle, apparently watching the
passing parade. It was, of course, Frank, the local hoodlum who had haunted
this particular piece of sidewalk ever since he’d first laid eyes upon Charlee.
The sophisticated charms of the older Western woman had apparently affected the
primitive brain, as well as the heart, of the German youth. He now seemed to
consider himself her knight errant, and viewed Marcus with open hostility.
Infuriatingly, Charlotte not only tolerated but encouraged the adoration;
Marcus considered it sickening.

“Frank, did you see Charlotte?”

“You mean like today, dude?”

“Yeah, dude, like today. Like in the last five or ten minutes?”

“Hey, I guess I don’t remember.” Frank snickered.

Marcus permitted himself a fleeting vision of the damage he
could inflict on the cretinous cycle-Nazi, given about five seconds and no
witnesses. Then he pushed past him under the little hotel marquee with its
Golden Eagle plaque. Inside the low-vaulted lobby he nodded briefly to the desk
clerk, then hurried up the dark stairs beside the two ground-floor restaurants.
At the landing, he turned sharply, then deliberately slowed his steps along the
dingy corridor to their room, which he opened with his own key.

*

Hearing the clatter on the stairs, Charlotte thought it must
be Frank. Earlier on the street she had bid the obviously enamored young tough
good-bye, since she and Jack were due to check out quite early in the morning.
Frank had immediately offered to take her to Potsdam on the back of his
motorcycle.

“And what about Jack?” she had laughed. “What will we do
with him?”

“Lose the dude, Charlie. He’s a bad mother.”

Again she’d laughed, then reached and brushed the spiky
hair. The tender gesture had seemed to devastate Frank. His face had started to
crumple. Then he’d turned and run off. She hoped he’d come back to say
good-bye.

But the pounding footsteps abruptly ceased. Puzzled, she
turned around to face the door just as it opened to reveal Jack Sanderson. He
hesitated a second on the threshold, watching her replace the telephone receiver
in its cradle, before coming in.

“You weren’t at the bookstore. I got worried.”

“I’m sorry, Jack. I had to make a call. You remember that
man who called me in Le Lavandou?”

“Your boyfriend Taras, sure. You been calling him?”

“I had to, Jack. I promised him I would. I’m sorry if it
looks like I’m sneaking off, but I didn’t want you to know about it. You’ve
been so...”

“That’s all right, I understand. I’m just not your soulmate.
I’ve been told that before. So what did he have to say?”

“Nothing. He’d checked out of his hotel. I’m sorry if I’ve
upset you. I... I wanted our last night to be special.”

“Well, there’s still time.”

“Of course there is. And we’ll make the most of every
minute. Oh, Jack, I forgot you went shopping for me. Can I open it?”

“Later.”

She went to him, kissed his cheek. “You’re really a
pussycat, you know? But I have one more favor to ask you. Would you mind
terribly if I made a couple more phone calls? Maybe you could prowl around
awhile longer.”

“Go ahead.” He settled on the bed, clasping his hands behind
his head. “Since you’re not talking to Taras, you don’t mind if I listen, do
you?”

“No. That’s fine.” She picked up the phone, asked the hotel
switchboard to dial another Washington number, hung up. “It’ll take a few
minutes. They’ll ring me back.”

She and Jack chatted about dinner plans. Since the afternoon
remained pleasantly warm, they decided to try an outdoor cafe on the square in
preference to either of the Adler’s gloomy ground-floor restaurants. Perhaps
they could find that Hungarian Riesling recommended by the desk clerk. Then the
phone rang. Her American call was ready.

Jack asked: “Is that your editor, then?”

“No, I’m calling the CIA. The Deputy Director of
Intelligence is a good friend of Taras, as well as one of his bosses. I’m sure
he’ll know how to reach him.”

“Oh.”

Charlotte was just saying hello to the DDI’s secretary, when
out of the corner of her eye she noticed that Jack was no longer on the bed but
moving swiftly toward her. She glanced up in surprise—just as his hand came
down on the cradle, cutting her connection.

Her puzzlement flared into anger. And then, as she found
herself staring into the blazing eyes of a man she did not know, anger was
swept aside by sudden and savage fear.

*

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Rhonda Hartnell,
executive secretary to the DDI, stared at her phone. She wasn’t accustomed to
callers hanging up, especially from overseas. They must have been disconnected.
She had been on her feet, ready to leave for lunch, when the phone rang. Now
she sat down, pressed the intercom and told her boss what had happened.

“From Germany, huh? But you didn’t catch the name of the
town, or who was calling?”

“No, but it’ll be in the computer. There was something funny
though. I only heard her voice for only a second, no more than ‘hello,’ but I
recognized it. I know I’ve heard it before.”

“Did you hear anything odd, before the cutoff?”

“No, nothing. What do you want me to do?”

“She’ll call back, whoever she is, but it may take awhile
for her to get through, depending on where she’s calling from. Don’t worry
about it, Ron. Leslie will put her through to me. You go on to lunch.”

“Thanks.”

Rhonda jotted the time on her pad, for reference in case she
should need to check the computer logs. Then she gathered up her purse and a
shopping bag with two blouses she wanted to exchange and headed off down the
corridor with a wave to Leslie to cover her phone.

But darn it! She couldn’t get her mind off the distinctive
sound of that voice. Maybe it would come to her.