The Diaries - 01 (32 page)

Monika felt two
heavy thuds, but with her back being against the headboard, her body had
nowhere to go.
 
Consciousness left her
fifteen seconds after the rounds struck, but in those fifteen seconds, many
thoughts flashed through her mind.
 
She
thought about the pneumonia she’d had as a girl, and how it was the only time
her now-deceased father had ever seemed to care about her.
 
She remembered Toto, her first dog, and how
he had to be euthanized at age eight due to cancer.
 
Then her mind went to Gage, and she wondered
where they might have gone, and if they would have made it.
 
She had always wanted to visit San Francisco,
and it pleased her to think that’s where they might have lived, walking the
hills, enjoying the cool weather, buying bad art from doper hippies.
 

Monika Brink’s final
thought was about these men.
 
As she
locked eyes with the cold gaze of Bruno Florence, who was pulling up his pants
as he stared at her, the corners of her mouth ticked ever so slightly
upward.
 
Bruno pried Jean’s
Manurhin
revolver from her hand, staring down at her.
Monika could no longer speak, but as life escaped her, her eyes sent him a
message.

You’re next.

Monika Brink, from
a lack of blood to the brain, fell unconscious.
 
Two minutes later, her heart stopped and she died in a pool of blood and
cheap brown linen.

***

Fresh from the
toilet, the desk clerk had just sat back down in his chair and resumed his
reading of a German
fussbol
magazine.
 
Minutes earlier he had heard a
muffled thud, not really thinking anything of it.
 
Unless the polizei showed up, the hotel’s
policy—especially in their location on the edge of Frankfurt’s red light district—was
to live and let live.
 
Just as he started
perusing an article about the wildly popular
FC Bayern
München
, he heard someone thundering
down the stairs and rolled his eyes; it was probably the normal group of tattooed
and pierced teenagers screwing around again.
 
He’d caught them, more than once, smoking hash and making out, using the
hotel’s storage rooms and stairwells as their own private playground.

He dropped the
magazine and stood, freezing with surprise when two ominous men came into view
as they completed their descent.
 
They
froze.
 
One of the two, very large and
with a bruised gash on his forehead, turned to look at the pudgy one.

The pudgy man
nodded once.

The battered man
raised a silenced pistol and shot the desk clerk square in the face, the bullet
actually going through the man’s upper lip and teeth.
 
The single shot killed him instantly as his
brains and skull spattered onto the computer screen and keyboard behind the
desk.

The two men cursed
one another in French as they headed out the door and down the wet street.
 
Their mission had not been a success.

 
 
***

As Gage ran,
covering the two kilometers in less than ten minutes, he passed
Elbestrasse
and saw the blue and red strobe lights banging
off the buildings.
 
His immediate fear was
that Monika was dead.
 
The rain was
heavier and, as Gage neared the chaotic scene outside the hotel, he saw an
ambulance with a covered body resting inside the rear section.
 
Water ran off Gage’s face as he did his best
to control his breathing.
 
There was a
police line set up, yellow tape, just like back in the states.
 
Official cars and vans skidded to a halt
every ten seconds. Men and women in uniform filed in and out of the hotel, each
on a specific mission.
 
Murder in Germany
is very rare and, when it does happen, the Uzi-carrying polizei take it very
seriously.
 

Forcing himself to
remain calm, Gage swallowed several times, then stepped to the cordoned-off
area and spoke in his best German accent to a low-ranking
schupo
.
 
“What happened?”

“Please move
along,” the policeman said without even looking at him.

“I live in the
neighborhood,” Gage said, his voice pained.
 
He feared the cop could hear the pounding of his heart over the din of
the assembled crowd.

The young,
splotchy-cheeked officer turned and frowned.
 
Water had pooled in his hat, cascading over
his face as he spoke the tragically beautiful words to Gage. “The hotel worker,
a desk clerk, was shot and killed.
 
Looks
like a robbery.”

Gage’s eyes went
wide, and he couldn’t help but let out a long sigh, even though he certainly
wouldn’t wish such an awful fate on anyone.
 
He wondered if the clerk had been the one he’d met earlier.
 
Wait...

Something wasn’t
right.

Unless the clerk
had provided some sort of glorious resistance, there was only one reason a
contract team—looking for Gage Hartline—would kill him in cold blood.
 
And that was to prevent witnesses.

“No,” Gage
whispered, moving laterally around the taped-off area.
 
Perhaps she was still in the room.
 
Maybe…just maybe the clerk copped an attitude
and didn’t give out the room number, getting himself killed in the
process.
 
Maybe Monika was out here on
the street since they had surely evacuated the hotel.
 

Gage paced the
area, staring at the faces of the crowd, squeezing the rain from his hair as he
pondered how to determine Monika’s status.
 
Just then, a commotion occurred inside, and two men in rumpled suits halted
under cover of the awning.
 
One of them
covered his mouth and yelled at a balding man who was huddled with a group of
other officers.
 
There was a cigarette
clamped between his teeth, fighting to stay alive in the rain.
 
He was a classic specimen of a senior
policeman.

“Captain!” one of
the men under the awning yelled.
 
“We’ve
got
another
body!”

Gage went ice cold,
feeling his knees buckle.

“Who and where?” the
captain yelled, pitching his cigarette as he marched toward the door.

Gage strained to
hear the answer, knowing exactly what the reply would be.
 
He leaned on one of the police line
saw-horses, fighting back nausea, trying to stay conscious under the mother of
all migraines.

No.
 
No.
 
No!

Time stood still
as he watched the man who had yelled, mid-thirties with a pointy greyhound face,
blink his eyes twice as he prepared to answer.
 
The other rumpled suits studied their captain’s face, awaiting his response
of such heavy news.
 
Greyhound-face
cupped his mouth again, his lips moving at a crawl before time came back to
real speed.
 
The reply hit Gage like a
punch in the chest.

“It’s a girl!
 
Dead in her room!
 
Third floor!
 
Two shots!” he yelled, holding up the German signal for two: thumb and
index finger.

Gage staggered backward.
 
He stood behind the growing crowd,
struggling to keep himself together as he waited to confirm what he hoped was a
case of mistaken identity by the assassin.
 
Maybe they killed the wrong woman?
 
Despite his own imminent danger, Gage stayed on the scene for a
miserable, torturous half-hour.
 
He moved
to the left as a group of police officers talked to what must have been a
senior officer who had just arrived in nice clothes that were not yet damp.
 
Gage pressed close, ignoring his pressing nausea,
listening as each man briefed their senior.

After two officers
spoke about the clerk’s death, the third began the briefing about the dead
girl.
 
“Attractive,” he said, shaking his
head. “Possibly raped due to some genital abrasions and her position on the bed.”
 
He glanced at his notepad.
 
“Third floor, room F.
 
Checked in with a man, most likely our
suspect—they’re lifting prints now.
 
Bastard shot her twice, and then must have gone down and killed the
hapless desk clerk.
 
The two guests’ names
appear to be an alias, but we’re looking into it.”
 

Gage felt himself
beginning to hyperventilate.
 
He spun
around, reeling as he staggered into the dark.
 
Upon reaching a blackened stoop, he leaned in and vomited.
 

PART TWO

November 5th

The Chase

Chapter 9

Thursday, November 5

It
took the polizei only an hour
to lift the fingerprints of Gage Hartline, American citizen, and to communicate
his identity to every police force in Germany and the European Union.
 
Peter Ernst, the man who was Gage’s “employer”—owner
of the shell company—was found half-drunk in an exclusive club in nearby
Mainz.
 
After being manhandled back to
the polizei station, a ranking captain openly threatened to blow the lid off of
Ernst’s operation with extreme prejudice if Ernst didn’t go and get every shred
of information he had on the American.
 
The
threat from the captain effectively halted all of Ernst’s complaints about
police brutality.
 
Seeing a way out of
this mess, Ernst complied with alacrity, rushing to his office and producing a
picture, two forms with Gage’s signature, and photocopies of Gage’s U.S.
passport and New York driver’s license.

Six hours after Monika
Brink’s death, plainclothes detectives armed with a warrant swarmed on Gage’s modest
Bad Homburg flat, combing the sparse apartment for anything useful.
 
To say the flat was
spartan
was an understatement: a case of energy bars, basic cooking utensils, a few
technical books and saved articles, one small rack of uninteresting clothes,
old train tickets, and an empty writing tablet.
 
That was it.
 
Other than the
trappings of a bland life, Gage Hartline’s apartment revealed no other clues
about who he was.
 
There was no computer,
no letters, no pictures of family back home, no evidence of anything other than
the fact he had been there.
 
The flat was
merely a shelter from the elements, containing only the most basic items of
modern existence.

But it wasn’t until
after 4 a.m. that the Hartline investigation took a real twist.

Willi
Kreutzer, a senior police analyst, had been pulling Gage’s
background information, focusing on his schooling and prior work
experience.
 
Hartline was said to have
been born and raised in Schenectady, New York, attending school there, and then
his records showed that he had enrolled for one year at Syracuse University
prior to his joining the Army.
 
That was
all well and good, but when Kreutzer, through the FBI and the Syracuse Police,
managed to get an official from the registrar’s office out of bed and in front
of her computer, the background began to crumble.
 
Kreutzer was met by a long pause as he heard
the personality-free American woman tapping on her keyboard.

“Hmmm,” she mused.

“Problem?” asked
Willi
.
 
He had attended
two years at William & Mary in Virginia while his father worked at nearby
Fort McLean.
 
His command of the English
language was a source of great pride for him.

“I’ve got a Gage
Nils Hartline listed as a student.
 
No
biggie.
 
But when I go to pull his
transcripts, I get nothing.”

“A mistake in the
system?”

“Doubtful.
 
He was here in the early nineties, long after
we had computerized.
 
Maybe his information
was removed for some reason.
 
Can I have
your number and I’ll call you back after I pull the records manually.”

“Will it take
long?
 
This is of the utmost importance.”

“There’s a deputy
sheriff staring at me and it’s almost midnight,” she answered.
 
“I figured it was important.
 
Give me ten minutes.”

Willi
Kreutzer sipped a cup of coffee and stretched at his
desk as he stared at the phone.
 
For some
strange reason he had a feeling this was not going to be a standard
investigation.
 
Something about the
elements of the suspect’s background seemed too simple to be normal.
 
Five minutes later, when the woman returned
his call, his suspicions were confirmed.

“There’s nothing
on Gage Hartline.
 
He didn’t go to school
here.”

“What?”

“That’s
right.
 
I checked the printouts and the
hand-written rolls of classes he was supposed to have taken.
 
There was nothing.
 
So then I called and woke a professor, one
who is legendary for never forgetting anyone’s name.
 
Hartline was supposed to have been in his
econ class. The professor was adamant he had never heard of anyone by that name.
 
He
never
went to school here.”

“Name change?”
Willi
asked hopefully.

“You can change a
name, not a social security number,” the woman answered confidently.

“But you said he
was in your system.
 
How could you make a
mistake like that?”

Her tone turned
icy.
 
“It was not
me
who made the mistake because I wasn’t here then.
 
I make no excuses for something that was
obviously out of
my
control.”

Willi
closed his eyes.
 
“But what could have happened?”

“I’ll have our
I.T. people look into it, but he had to have been hacked in.
 
He’s listed as having attended, but he did
not
go to school here.”
 
She enunciated each word clearly, pissing
Willi
off since he felt she should have been the one on the
defensive, especially for working at a place with such poor security.

After hanging up, the
investigator studied the little information he had on Gage Hartline.
 
He would have to dig even deeper.

After further
research and coming up with more dead ends,
Willi
Kreutzer turned over his information to his superior, Marta
Tischer
;
she in turn handed the items to Commandant Michael Lentz of the Frankfurt Chief
Directorate.
 
Kreutzer and his boss stood
in front of Lentz’s desk as he stirred hot tea, patiently going through the
sparse reports, one by one.
 

Lentz nudged the
file back with his finger and took his first sip of tea before lacing his
fingers together.
 
“Do we have any other
leads?”

Kreutzer’s boss
cleared her throat.
 
“Not as of yet.
 
They’re running backgrounds in
Saarbrücken
, where the girl is from.
 
We tracked her down from her prints.”

“And the clerk,
did he know the girl, or the American?”

“Not that we have
been able to ascertain,” she answered.
 
“The
general opinion, on-site, was that he happened to be the unfortunate victim of whoever
decided to kill Ms. Brink, most likely Gage Nils Hartline.”

Lentz took another
loud sip of his tea, frowning in thought.
 
“So Kreutzer here digs up the background on Hartline, and comes back
with a shallow history based off of the man’s fingerprints.
 
A manufactured history?”

Willi
took a half a step forward.
 
“Yes sir.
 
Every place I checked, including his childhood schools and the health
department had no hard records of a Gage Nils Hartline ever existing.”
 
His mouth moved to continue, but he decided
to zip it.

Lentz seemed
unimpressed and unconvinced.
 
“So the man
might be a shadow.
 
What else?”
 

“The forensics
team found smudges, some over top of Hartline’s fingerprints, on the door
handle and also on the stair railing by the front desk,” Marta added.

Lentz nodded.
 
“Possible gloves from someone acting
covertly.”
 
His mouth broke into a wry
smirk.
 
“Or one of the first cops on the
scene just being careless.”

“But it could have
been Hartline who was wearing them,”
Willi
offered.

Lentz shifted in
his chair.
 
“Cameras?”

“None, sir,”
answered Marta.
 
“Low-rent hotel whose
owner, a real sleazebag, probably wants no records, especially of cash paid in.
 
We’re still looking for more
eyewitnesses.”
 
She could see Lentz’s
blank look.
 
“We do have one, though.”

Kreutzer looked
up, as did Lentz.
 
Marta continued. “A
beggar, a real head case, said he saw a dark car—a big one, make unknown, pull
up and park in the alley two blocks away.
 
Said two intimidating-looking men ran in the direction of the hotel, and
were back in ten or fifteen minutes later where they spun their tires upon
leaving.”

Lentz’s eyes went
wide.
 
“What else?”

Marta made him
wait a moment, finally patiently responding.
 
“He said one had a gash on his forehead and ran with a heavy limp.
 
Said they were yelling at one another.
 
He said they spoke French but when pressed
admitted it could have been something else.
 
So we pulled the traffic cameras, and unfortunately never found a shot
of the men, but we did get the car, an Opel, racing away.”

Lentz gulped the
rest of his tea, transfixed.
 
“And were
you able to get a plate, or track the car?”

“We did get the
plate, but we lost the car as it went south.
 
We’re looking for it now.”

Willi
broke with protocol by interrupting the flow of
conversation between his two superiors, engulfed in the story himself.
 
“Well, did you run the plates?” he asked,
nearly frantically.

Marta blanched at
her charge’s unprofessional zeal, throwing an apologetic glance to Lentz.
 
“The plates were stolen.
 
Our luck.
 
They’re canvassing the area from where they were swiped, but it appears
they got them cleanly in the past day.”

Lentz, typically a
composed man, pounded the desk, sending his teaspoon clattering to the floor,
surprising both
Willi
and Marta.
 
“What the hell is going on in my city?
 
This is the glaring work of professional
assassins, whether it was the two intimidators or this Hartline asshole,
killing the two in the hotel. What about the U.S. State Department and FBI, did
they report back yet?”

Willi
cleared his throat.
 
“Only with what we already have.
 
They said it could be several days before they have more.”

Lentz ran his
hands through his wiry gray hair.
 
“This
Hartline is probably their damned man,” he whispered.
 
“They’ll be about as helpful as a case of the
crabs.”
 
Without looking down, his big
hand went automatically into his drawer and removed an antacid tablet, sitting
loose in a pile, depositing it directly onto his tongue.
 
He crunched it, wincing as he spun his chair
to stare out at the gray city of Frankfurt on the gloomy, late autumn morning.
 
His office was afforded a nice, if distant,
view of the modern skyline.
 
He spoke to
the window.
 
“I want a hard push for
backgrounds of the desk clerk and the dead girl.
 
We’re liable to learn more through them, and
I would lean to her more than the clerk.
 
I’ll get to work on some pressure on the U.S. State, and hopefully they won’t
play stupid.”
 
He paused.
 
“And
Tischer
, you
find the two men in that car, or determine where the hell they came from.
 
This American is going to be tough to find,
given his lack of background.”
 
Lentz
spun his chair around and leaned forward, picking up the passport picture of
Gage.

“But even still, I
want all of Deutschland looking for Gage Nils Hartline.”

***

Gage escaped
Frankfurt with his two feet.
 
After
learning of Monika’s death, he gathered himself enough to get on the move.
 
In training or in action, one principle that
was burned into his soldier’s brain was the age-old rule to get the hell out of
a hostile area if you have no other options.
 
So he put one foot in front of the other and headed out at a brisk pace of
somewhere between four and five miles per hour.
 
Rather than take the less beaten path, he linked up with the Main River,
using the walkway that wended straight through the handsome center of German
banking and industry.
 
Through all his
grief, Gage knew that walkers by the Main, even in the middle of the night,
weren’t all that unusual.
 
He followed
the trail until the lights of the city became sparse, and eventually the
blackness of the wet night enveloped him, punctuated occasionally by ascending airliners
on approach into Frankfurt’s airport, the busiest in all of Europe.
 

Gage kept a steady
pace, walking the path for seven straight hours to the southeast.
 
He passed through the cities of Offenbach and
Hanau, seeing many smaller cities come and go as he tried to put as much
distance as possible between himself and the scene of Monika’s murder.
 
Eventually, the rain stopped and the sun grudgingly
showed itself.