Ring of Lies (8 page)

“You're questioning me as if I were a suspect,” Jane said, not without resentment.

“The search team should be arriving at Justus's house soon,” he said.

She gripped the steering wheel of the Mercedes, taking a curve without slowing down. The tires screeched and the rear wheels skidded.

“Answer me. Am I a suspect?”

Yes.
Alex kept silent.

She braked violently opposite the gate to the Erlichmann house and got out, not waiting for him and not looking back. He followed her into the warm house.

Jane threw herself onto the sofa, sticking her legs out in front of her and crossing her arms over her chest. Alex watched her from the kitchen. She'd had time to steal a vehicle and she'd known exactly where to go.

“Just stop it, okay?” she called out to him.

“Stop what?”

“You're wrong.”

“Someone in the restaurant was watching Berlin and followed him into the forest, probably on a motorcycle. They got to Teufelsberg before me.”

“It wasn't me!” she said angrily.

The doorbell rang. They both froze.

Alex walked to the front door. The hall was brightly lit by an antique crystal chandelier. Just inside the entrance stood the ancient marble torso of a soldier, minus the arms.

Justus had lived on a different planet.

Outside was a scrawny man with gigantic elephant ears and huge black eyes in a small face. The lenses of his glasses were thick like the crystal prisms in the chandelier. His head was covered in silvery fuzz and his features were almost swallowed up by a broad smile. In a rich voice he said, “I brought you a dozen voles.” Grabbing Alex around the waist, he burst out laughing.

It was Akiva Ancona, a little man with great talent. Brussels's chief operative, he was a tough, experienced investigator and an unparalleled master at organizing a search. “I saw a doghouse in the yard. Where's the dog?”

“Not here.”

Twelve men filed in with black gym bags and aluminum cases on wheels. Not one of them smiled in greeting.

“What are we looking for?” Ancona asked.

“A list with a few dozen names or phone numbers or bank accounts. Maybe a code.”

“Format?”

“Unknown.”

“Show me around. I want to get started right away.”

The searchers took off their jackets and got into their gear: white nylon coveralls, surgeons' caps, and overshoes. They pulled latex gloves from their wrappers, stretched them on, and let go with a snap.

Then they covered the front and side windows with black plastic.

“Start praying, Alex,” Ancona said, rubbing his hand over the
fuzz on the top of his head. “If it's for daily use, that means it's hidden someplace where you can get at it quickly and easily, and that means it'll be a piece of cake. But if it's just for backup, that means three whole days of mega digging and aggro.”

Alex grinned. They went up the three wide steps into the living room.

“Wow,” Ancona exclaimed when he saw the screen of glass facing the forest.

Ancona swiveled around and gawked like a cartoon character. Then he eyeballed the bookshelves, doing calculations in his head. His black eyes flashed. “Good God! Four thousand books . . . twenty-five seconds apiece—twenty-eight hours—six men—four hours and forty minutes.” He chose the men and gave them whispered instructions, and they went to work.

Next he checked out the open cabinets in Justus's study.

“About eight feet of documents . . . a hundred and eighty pages an inch . . . two pages a second . . . ten hours.” He gestured to two searchers, who immediately set a digital camera on a tripod and connected it to a satellite modem.

A pale, thin youngster was already typing furiously at Justus's computer, connecting it to the network that would enable Mossad specialists to suck it dry.

“How are you going to get into the safe?” Alex asked.

“Have you seen the tick?”

A short, chubby man was affixing a device to the safe door. It consisted of six thin carbon-fiber legs, an earpiece, and a silicone suction plate that fit over the combination lock. The computerized safecracking tool worked on a lithium battery.

“It's new,” Ancona said. “The tick picks up the sounds of the locking gears when you turn the dial and computes the code.”

“Wouldn't a drill be easier?”

“It's a Breitenbach, pal. The mechanism is booby-trapped.”

Ancona gave the rest of the team their assignments and went through the house, making sure they were all doing their jobs.

“Now we can get some air,” he said, pulling out a crushed pack of Gitanes. “Let's go outside. Twenty-six plus sixteen times two . . .”

“Fifty-eight,” Alex said.

“Times forty-five seconds . . .”

“Forty-four minutes?”

“You're good! Together we can get it done in twenty-two minutes. You ever fondle a wall?”

“Not since high school.”

It was cold outside. Ancona grinned, the cigarette nearly falling from his lips. Squinting through the smoke, he felt along the exterior wall of the house, starting at the ground and reaching as far as he could above his head. He held his ear to the wall as he tapped at it randomly with the knuckle of his index finger.

Nothing there.

“Who's the lady in the living room?” Ancona whispered to Alex.

“A friend.”

“One of us?”

“Not exactly,” Alex answered.

“Can she be trusted?”

Good question.

They hurried back inside and Ancona went down to the cellar. Alex stared out at the forest, uneasy. He couldn't get the events at Teufelsberg out of his head. What was Jane hiding?

The restaurant owner recognized her. She was close to Justus. Too close? And Justus had been killed.

Was she a threat?

Horrified by the idea, he shook his head.

Were Justus, Istanbul, and Lisbon all slaughtered with the same brute force?

It took massive arms to cut a man's throat open with a bicycle brake cable.

He was chasing a ghost. It was time to bring in the heavy artillery.

A spoon scraped the last of the Nutella from the bottom of the jar. In a dimly lit room opposite four huge screens lived a 365-pound creature. His fans said he was worth his weight in gold. The eight-core processor in his brain ran on sugar, chocolate, and junk food.

“What the fuck? The Coke is salty!” He moved the red can away from his round face and belched.

Tufts of bleached blond hair rose from his head like a cockscomb. He pushed himself out of his reinforced chair. His baggy rapper jeans hung off his enormous butt like a sack, revealing boxer shorts covered with images of Tweety Bird.

The name of the man who ran Mossad's IT division was Ethan Pinchas, but everyone called him Butthead.

The phone on the desk chirped. He reached out an arm that weighed as much as the average leg, nearly crushing the cupcakes waiting their turn like a line of condemned prisoners.

“Hello?”

“It's two in the morning, Butthead. Don't you have a home to go to?”

“Hey, man. I heard you're living the wild life in Berlin.”

“Not quite. Are you writing this down?”

“Typing.”

“Justus Erlichmann. Grunewald, Berlin.”

“Who's Prince Charming?”

“That's what I want to find out. They tell me you can access his computer now. Do some digging. Fast.”

“What do I get in return?”

“Your salary.”

“We're on overtime.”

“A pound of Leonidas?”

“You don't trust me,” Jane said.

Alex remained standing at the foot of the steps.

He lowered his eyes.

“Say something.”

“I almost shot you.”

“Are you crazy? You think I killed Berlin?”

“You took me by surprise,” he said. Maybe he was wrong.

Her stomach rumbled. She rubbed it.

“I'm confused, more than anything else,” he said.

“Tactfully put.”

“What would you think in my place?”

“I'd concentrate on what's important. Nibelungs are being killed, right now, in the middle of the night. We can put a stop to it. We may be the only people who can.”

She had come as soon as he called, just like she had three months ago in London.

“Let's go down to the cellar, Alex. They're turning the rest of the house upside down. We can search Nelli's boxes.”

“Nelli?”

“His wife.”

He remembered the odor of his empty apartment.

“I can't.”

Jane started down the stairs, stopping a moment to breathe him in. Then she descended to the cellar alone.

Naomi once said that the cellar is the house's subconscious. That's where you store the things you want to forget but can't abandon completely.

Ancona appeared out of nowhere. “The house is plastered with microphones. The system's connected to the Internet, but it's not on. The only security cameras we found are outside. They're top-of-the-line.”

Alex nodded.

“There's a pile of books beside the bed,” Ancona said. “They all have bookmarks stuck in the first few pages. Your man was troubled.”

Alex gazed at Ancona. Straightforward and efficient; no crises, no drama.

Reuven called.

“I just got back from a meeting with the PM. He doesn't want us to dig into Erlichmann. It could do more harm than good.”

Too late.

“Anything new on the crisis in Turkey?” Alex asked.

“With Galia dead and nobody to confess to being responsible for the Iranian's death, there's a good chance the whole incident will die down and be forgotten, unless the Istanbul Nibelung suddenly turns up and ruins everything. But that's not likely to happen. The foreign press is losing interest. Did you find anything in the house?”

“Not yet.”

Reuven hung up.

It was after three in the morning in Israel. He brought the phone back to his ear.

“Reuven Hetz's office, shalom,” came a chirpy female voice he knew well.

“It's me, Alex. Did the chief just meet with the prime minister?”

“The prime minister is in secret meetings in Paris. He's expected back soon.”

“How long has he been in Paris?”

“Since yesterday.”

She was born in Cambridge, England. When she was twenty-two she moved to Israel, and joined Mossad. After special field training, she was attached to the elite cadre of assassins known as Kidon. After she was seriously injured, her life as a field agent was over.

Exodus belonged to Mossad's Economics Division, where she'd served as director for the past seven months. Tough and fearless, she didn't pull any punches.

Her division was responsible for creating fictitious companies and other business entities to support Mossad operations. It was also capable of stripping targets of all their assets within minutes, as well as tracing covert financial activity anywhere in the world.

Justus Erlichmann would be easy prey for her.

Alex told her what he knew about him and asked for her help.

“I just got a memo from the head of Mossad telling me not to investigate a man by the name of Justus Erlichmann or to provide you with any information regarding said gentleman,” Exodus informed him.

“He's connected to the fuckup in Bolu,” Alex said.

“How?”

“And the murder of Galia.”

Exodus had grown close to Galia during her time in the field.

“And you want me to ignore a direct order from the chief?”
There was a trace of irony in her voice. She wasn't one of Reuven Hetz's biggest fans.

“Affirmative.”

“And why should I do that?”

“Justus ran foreign operatives for us. In the past twenty-four hours they've started dying off.”

“He's not cooperating?” she asked.

“He's no longer among the living.”

After a long pause, Exodus said, “What do we want to know about him?”

“Everything.”

Nelli Erlichmann's study seemed frozen in time. There wasn't a speck of dust anywhere. On the wall were the diplomas of the noted professor of endocrinology at the Charité Campus Virchow-Klinikum, written in ornate Gothic script. An old laptop sat closed on the desk.

Alex felt as if he'd entered a shrine. The same deathly silence lay over Naomi's empty clinic. Time didn't move inside those four walls.

“You have to know how to grieve,” Naomi once said when they were going to pay their respects to a family in mourning. He'd buried her quickly. At least, he thought he had.

Jane was in the cellar, keeping her distance, still under suspicion. His life seemed hopeless and meaningless, and his breath was tight as if all his organs were out of place.

Alex went back out into the hall and tried to regain his composure, but he was struck by a wave of repulsion at the abhorrent German character of everything around him, the icy tone of the harsh language ringing in his ears.

“Those-Germans-may-they-rot-in-hell,” his mother called them, as if that were their full name, first and last. Would it help to splash some German water on his face?

The floor of Justus's luxurious bathroom was tiled in black and white marble. The room spun around him, the contrasting
squares on the floor making him dizzy. He leaned on the gleaming double sink to steady himself. He had to get a grip. He was covered in cold sweat.

The cold water on his face felt bracing. He stood there, leaning on the sink, and waited.

Then he went into the master bedroom. Two large dark wardrobes stood opposite each other at the far end of the room. The one on the right was empty. In the wardrobe on the left he found Justus's clothes arranged precisely. He felt in the pockets and cuffs, shook the shoes out, undid the neatly rolled-up socks, and rooted around in the drawers.

On the top shelf he found a pair of skinny jeans, two red thongs, and a box of sanitary napkins. Holding the jeans up in front of him, he looked in the mirror. The owner was about five inches shorter than he was. The box of napkins was eleven units short. The start of a routine.

He found Jane in the living room. She'd just returned from the cellar.

“It's so sad,” she said. “The boxes downstairs were once a living, breathing woman.”

Alex walked to the thin bronze figure of the
Walking Man
. The sculpture was deceptive. The man was leaning forward as if he was about to start moving, but his feet were welded in place.

“He had a girlfriend,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Slim, about six feet. Short visits.”

“There's nothing wrong with that.”

“Do you have any idea who she was?”

“No,” she lied.

After hours of
fruitless work, the search team took a break, spreading a black tarp on the floor of the pantry in front of a large cupboard.

Ancona handed out sandwiches. The pungent odor of plastic mixed with the smell of roast beef and mustard. They were all crammed into the small room, which filled with sounds of chewing. In their white nylon coveralls they looked like a hungry octopus.

Alex went back to the living room, to the view of the forest. At the far edge of the lawn, under the bare trees, he spotted a rabbit with long ears staring at a linden. Something startled it and it took off, hopping agilely between the bars of the fence and disappearing into the dark forest.

“Alex,” Ancona called from the study.

Alex was beside him in an instant.

The sight of an open safe always gets the blood flowing. Alex knelt down and examined the contents. Four thick bundles of five-hundred-euro notes.

“How much?” he asked.

“A hundred thousand,” Ancona declared.

There was also a Sig Sauer pistol gleaming with oil, and a BMW fob from which a key with circular indentations was hanging.

“What's it for?” Ancona asked a short man with a double chin beside him, handing him the key.

The man scrutinized its shape and size. “A large bank vault,” he stated finally in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice.

At the bottom of the safe was an olive-wood box. Alex opened it to find a medal resting in a depression in the red velvet lining. On the medal, beside a small image of a tree, was an inscription
in Hebrew and German: “In gratitude from the people of Israel.” It was accompanied by a document laminated in yellowing plastic: “On this day, 10 October 1963, a tree was planted at your request in the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, in honor of Herr Gunter Erlichmann, who risked his life to save thousands of Jews during the Nazi persecutions. Israel will never forget his noble spirit and courage.” At the bottom was the verse: “I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”

“Did you know about this?” Ancona asked.

Too shaken to speak, Alex merely shook his head.

Ancona put a hand on his shoulder and patted it gently before moving away.

Black-and-white photographs were
arranged on the low cabinet in the study. The attractive smiling face of a woman, presumably Nelli, her hair pulled back in a bun, was enclosed in a thick black frame. A smaller photo showed Justus with his arms around an elderly man with a dolphinlike forehead and a mane of white hair. His eyes seemed unfocused.

A tiny picture with frayed edges was encased in Perspex. A young man was standing proudly in front of an art-deco café. Paris? Alex turned it over. Written on the back in sinuous script was the year 1942. The man was grinning broadly.

If Alex had examined the face through a magnifying glass, he would have seen a wide gap between the front teeth.