Retribution (9781429922593) (6 page)

“I spent a couple of years at UC Berkeley a while back.”

“Party time?”

Wolf had to smile, remembering how different it was there than at Kaiserslautern or even Heidelberg. “Yes.”

“I've never been anywhere except a couple of cruises to the Caribbean with my wife.”

“Come to Berlin and my wife and I will show you around. Professional courtesy.”

“Sounds good,” Fischer said. “Your embassy wants you in D.C. They've booked a flight for you on American Airlines, leaves a little after five. Someone will meet you at the gate.”

“This wasn't what I expected,” Wolf said, glancing up the dune toward the museum.

“You didn't pull the trigger.”

“No, but if I had got here a little quicker, I might have prevented the woman's death. No reason for her.”

“We might need you for the coroner's inquest,” Fischer said. “Anyway, good hunting.”

 

EIGHT

The flight was early, around quarter to seven when they arrived at the terminal. Walking down the Jetway, Wolf was struck by the fact that Washington was even hotter and more humid than Florida. He could never live here.

A trim attractive woman in her early twenties with short dark hair met him just beyond the counter in the arrivals gate. She introduced herself as Lise Meitner, his BND embassy contact.

“Do you have a checked bag, sir?” she asked.

“Just one. My weapon.”

“Yes, sir.”

He followed her through the busy terminal down to the baggage arrival hall, where they didn't talk while they waited. Five minutes later his leather overnight bag showed up, once again sealed with diplomatic tape, and they went across to the parking garage and up to the third floor.

“Lenz is not very happy with you,” she said, as they get into a plain gray Ford Taurus four-door. She was grinning. “He even raised hell with the
Fremdenverkehr
girl who gave you directions.”

“I'll see if I can make it up to her.”

“Herr Ritter was informed, and he had a little chat with Lenz.” Hans Ritter was the ambassador.

“He won't like what I'm going to tell him either,” Wolf said.

“I'm not taking you to the embassy. Colonel Mueller set up a meeting for you at the CIA. Apparently he's been working with someone over there ever since the thing in Atlanta, and they're interested in what happened this time in Florida.”

Wolf looked at her. Traffic was heavy leaving the airport, and on the parkway heading north to Langley, but she was a good driver, easily pacing her movements. “What's your position here?”

“Scientific liaison. My namesake was my great-grandmother, the Austrian nuclear physicist, and the knack runs in the family. I'm the only one in three generations who hasn't become a scientist or a science teacher, and no one is happy I ended up with the BND.”

Scientific liaison was intel-speak for industrial spying. “How's it going?”

She shrugged. “I don't have to shoot anybody, if that's what you mean.”

“Right,” Wolf said, and he suddenly realized how tired he was. He'd been on the go for thirty-six hours. He'd never been able to sleep on airplanes, especially not heading into a situation.

Lise glanced over at him. “I didn't mean it like that. It's just that I don't like spying on a friendly country, and I know I sure as hell would never want to face someone with a pistol.”

“No one in their right mind wants to, trust me.”

“I suppose not,” she said after a beat.

They drove again for a while in silence, and Wolf tried to piece together something that would make sense to whomever he was supposed to meet with at the CIA. He hadn't been involved in the Atlanta operation, so he hadn't been required to work with the agency—that had fallen to Mueller who had friends over here. But he had worked with a number of their field officers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on the one mission inside Iran. The ones he'd met had seemed steady, if a little arrogant around the edges, though not as cocky as some of the Mossad officers he'd known.

Zimmer's last words had been bothersome, and Wolf had thought about them on the plane all the way up. The man hadn't been the least concerned that he'd killed an innocent woman, and that he'd come all the way from Germany simply to murder an American who'd served in the U.S. Navy.
You can't guess the half of it
, he'd said.

Half of what?

The only connection Wolf was making was the bin Laden raid, which continued to make no sense.

They turned off the parkway and followed a road through the woods to a visitors center with two lanes, one on the left for credentialed employees and the other for nonemployees. They had to show their passports and were given a visitor's pass for the dashboard.

“You may drive Mr. Weisse to the drop-off point in front of the OHB, after which you will return here. Do not go beyond that point, ma'am. You will be timed.”

“May I wait for him?”

“Back here once you have turned in your visitor's pass.”

On the way up the winding road the seven-story original headquarters building appeared through the woods. The parking lot in front was full this afternoon.

“I've never been out here before,” Lise said. “But it looks just like in the movies.”

“I don't know how long I'll be, so there's no need for you to wait.”

“Lenz told me to stick with you.”

“Well, you can't come inside, so tell him that,” Wolf said. She was a sharp girl, but naïve. “Tell him I gave you a direct order.”

She pulled up in front. “Are you going to come to the embassy afterward?”

He had to laugh. “No, but don't tell him that. He'll probably have a heart attack.”

“I wish,” she said.

“Drop my bag off at the gatehouse, if you would,” Wolf said, and he went up the broad stairs and into the big marble lobby, the CIA's logo in the floor.

A very attractive woman in her mid- to late thirties, short dark hair, blue eyes, and a voluptuous movie-star figure came across to him. She was dressed in khaki slacks, a white blouse, and a dark blue blazer. “I'm Pete Boylan. You must be Wolfhardt Weisse.”

“I am,” Wolf said and they shook hands. Hers was tiny compared to his, but it was cool and her grip was firm. High marks in his estimation.

She handed him a visitor's pass on a lanyard. “You look like you could use some sleep.”

“I don't get much on airplanes.”

“I'll make this as brief as possible, but there might be someone else who wants to have a word with you.”

They went through the security arches, past the Starbucks and down the broad corridor that served as the agency's museum, with displays of equipment starting with the OSS during World War II. Radios, weapons, explosives, hidden cameras, and miniature tape recorders, as well as insects about the size of a man's thumb that were actually remote-controlled drones equipped with tiny cameras.

“Makes us think that we're actually James Bonds around here,” she said.

They took an elevator up to the sixth floor and walked down to a small conference room pleasantly furnished with a table for a half dozen people, some pretty pictures on the walls of places like the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House, Niagara Falls.

Pete flipped a wall switch. “We're recording audio and video—is that okay with you?”

“Fine.”

“You were involved in a shooting in Florida. Walk me through it.”

“We've been monitoring an organization that we think may be an assassination-for-hire operation specifically targeting high-profile people.”

“We have the summary from Colonel Mueller. But the thing in Fort Pierce doesn't seem to fit the profile.”

“No. And the only way it makes even remote sense to me would be if the SEAL Team Six guy he took out had been on the bin Laden operation.”

“He was,” Pete said.

“Anything special about him?”

“Nothing except that he was one of the men up the stairs who actually fired shots to make sure of the kill. But the group the BND is investigating hardly seems the type to be working with al-Qaeda.”

“No,” Wolf said.

“But?”

“Something Zimmer said to me just before I shot him. I asked why the guy and his wife? He said I'd never guess the half of it.”

Pete picked up the phone and made a call. “Otto, I want to bring Captain Weisse down to have a chat. Are you decent?” She nodded. “We're on our way.”

 

NINE

Pete's key card wasn't programmed for Otto Rencke's security lock, so she had to buzz. Very few key cards other than the director's and deputy director's gained entrance to what most people on campus considered the holiest of computer inner sanctums. Fact was that most people who even knew about Otto and his “darlings,” as he called his search and analysis programs, were frightened out of their wits thinking what harm he could do to the entire U.S. cyberstructure if he had a mind to.

Wolf had heard stories about the CIA's resident computer genius and the man's long-term friendship with Kirk McGarvey, a former DCI and a legend in the intel business himself, but he was not prepared for the tall, somewhat ascetic-looking man who opened the door for them.

“Oh, wow, I've been working the problem all afternoon, and you guys aren't going to believe what shit I'm coming up with.”

“Otto Rencke, Captain Wolfhardt Weisse, BND,” Pete said, and the two men shook hands.

Rencke's long red hair was tied in a short pony tail. He was dressed in ragged jeans and an old KGB sweatshirt “Bad business down there, involving a man's wife—believe me, I could write the book on shit like that—but what'd you think Zimmer was up to?”

They went into Rencke's suite of offices, a space he shared with no one that was filled with wide-screen computer monitors, some of them as big as one hundred inches, hanging on the walls, other smaller ones at a dozen workstations, and in the middle of the innermost office a horizontal touch screen as long and as wide as a conference table for sixteen people.

“We had no idea,” Wolf admitted. “But I was assigned to keep track of him. Maybe he was meeting someone. We just didn't know.”

“Not even a glimmer when you got to the SEAL museum?”

“It wasn't making any sense to me, and whenever that happens I get nervous.”

“Good instincts,” Otto said.

Most of the monitors were blank, showing only colors: white, blue, red—even a couple of violets. Otto led Pete and Wolf to the tabletop, on which were displayed several dozen photographs of three men and one women.

“The name Pam Schlueter mean anything to you?”

“We think she may be either the director or the power broker for a group based in Munich that calls itself the Black October Revolution. Assassination for hire.”

Otto moved the two photographs of her to the center of the screen. One showed her sitting on a blanket on a beach, with what appeared to be an aircraft carrier in the distance.

“That's her in Virginia about fifteen years ago. Photo was taken by her husband, Dick Cole, who is now a captain, acting chief of staff with JSOC—Joint Special Operations Command in Virginia.”

“We weren't aware that she was married to an American naval officer.”

“Not now. They met twenty years ago in Munich when he was a youngish lieutenant commander and she was a poli-sci student at the Ludwig Maximilian University. She was doing a paper on military liaisons between Germany and other NATO countries, and at some point she ran into Cole, who even then was in JSOC. They apparently hit it off, because they got married within six months. A year after that he was rotated back to the Pentagon and she followed.”

“We knew none of this. Much of her background has been wiped clean.”

“In Germany,” Otto said. “But over here it's easy. Anyway, their marriage went bad, and about the time they moved to Virginia Beach they got a divorce. She took her maiden name and moved back to Germany. I came across a couple of civilian police reports of domestic violence. From what I could piece together he wasn't a very nice guy. Lots of physical violence, on both their parts. She broke his arm in one fight.”

“Tough lady,” Pete said.

“Apparently she's developed a thing for Americans,” Otto said.

“SEALs in particular?” Wolf asked.

Otto smiled and shrugged. “If she was calling the orders on this one, it would seem so.”

“Revenge against an ex-husband? How likely is that?”

“More likely than you might think, Captain,” Pete said.

“Friends call me Wolf.”

The other photograph of her, dressed in plain desert camos, showed her coming out of a building. The shot had been taken from across a busy street. “Pakistan's intelligence service headquarters in Islamabad,” Otto said.

Wolf was taken aback. As far as he knew the BND had none of this. “When?”

“September fifteenth, three years ago. It's the only shot of her, taken by chance because we were looking for someone else. We don't know why she was there, who she spoke to, or the subject of their meeting.”

“But you came up with her ID.”

Otto gazed at the photograph. “It's the stray bits that sometimes make the most sense.” He looked up. “I went searching for connections with SEAL Team Six after I was told about your shooter, and one of my darlings came up with her. And you know her name. Nails it, don't you think?”

“Nails what?” Wolf asked.

“Her group's target this time is the SEAL Team Six that took out bin Laden.”

“Al-Qaeda doesn't have the money.”

“Pakistan does. The three guys are Pakistani intel—ISI.”

“Definitely makes it our problem,” Pete said.

“If I'm right,” Otto said.