The Diaries - 01 (38 page)

Marcel stared at
the floor.

Nicky retrieved
the pistol again, ramming the clip in, raking the slide.
 
“Over here, Jean.
 
Look at me, not him!”

Jean could barely
breathe.
 
He had known this could
possibly be a troublesome meeting since he hadn’t been able to deliver Gage.
 
He hadn’t expected to be killed.
 
But now, deep below the mansion, if Nicky
killed him, even the DGSE might never know what happened.
 
If they scrutinized Jean’s actions, they
would likely find the relationship with the Glaives and Nicky Arnaud.
 
Jean had always planned to term the
association as strategic, but if he were dead, that wouldn’t be possible.
 
The boys from Paris would simply shake their
collective heads.
 
The connection to the
Glaives would be bad publicity.
 
They
would probably bury everything, write Jean
Jenois
off
as a loss, and move on.
 
Even in the cold
of the basement, Jean felt a trickle of sweat dangling from his neatly waxed
eyebrow.
 
Nicky stepped closer.

“What do you think,
Marcel?
 
If I shoot this crass, pompous
Parisienne
in the
neck, would it take his head off clean?”

Marcel snorted.
 
“Depends what your definition of clean
is.
 
The safe wouldn’t be clean, and I
can guess who would be tasked with cleaning it up.”

Jean’s pulse began
to redline.
 
Nicky was serious.
 
He turned his head back to the diminutive mob
boss.

Like a gunfighter,
Nicky shifted the pistol to his left hand, then back to his right.
 
“This bitch is heavy.
 
They tell me the kickback is so bad that’s
it’s been known to knock the shooter out if he doesn’t have strong arms.”

Jean blinked
rapidly, afraid to talk.

“Get on your
knees,” Nicky commanded as his eyes blackened.

“Nicky,” Jean
protested.

“Now, you
bourgeois-wannabe cocksucker!”

Marcel stepped to
Jean and pressed downward on his shoulders.
 
From behind, Jean heard Marcel whisper for him to, “Just do it.”
 
His tone was odd but reassuring.
 
Jean knelt.

Nicky instructed
him to put his hands on his head and, when Jean complied, Marcel clamped his
strong hands over them to hold them in place.
 
Nicky pointed the large pistol at Jean’s forehead.
 
Somewhere in the recesses of Jean’s mind, he
found it comical that the hollow-point bullet, if used, could easily kill
Marcel as well, even if he wasn’t standing behind him.
 
Hollow-points are highly unpredictable as
they travel through flesh and bone, sometimes turning as much as ninety degrees
before exiting their target.

“Last chance, Jean
Jenois
.
 
Where’s
Hartline?
 
Did you kill him?” Nicky’s restrained
voice quavered on another explosion.

“No, Nicky, I
didn’t!
 
If you’ll let me up I’ll tell
you everything.”

“How do I know
you’re not lying again, motherfucker?
 
That’s all you do for a living!”

Jean swallowed
thickly.
 
“You won’t, but I have
information for you that you’re going to find interesting.
 
Very interesting.”

Nicky cut his eyes
to Marcel, who shrugged.
 
”Why wouldn’t
you have told us when you got here?” Nicky growled.

“It’s hot.
 
I was saving it as leverage.”

“So why now?”

“Well, I’d say right
now I
need
some leverage.”
 

Nicky licked his
lips, his eyes searching Jean’s face.
 
The pistol changed angles slightly.
 
“Let him up.”
 

Jean stood and
straightened his suit with his long fingers.
 
“It’s about Hartline.
 
I originally
told you he was ex-Army and just a civilian contractor.”

“Yeah?” Nicky
asked.

“Not true, and
even I didn’t know it until just today.”

“So what is he?”
Marcel asked, his interest growing.

“He’s American all
right.
 
He’s in the CIA, or at least
working for them.”

“Horseshit,” Nicky
said flatly.
 
“This is a bluff to divert
the attention from you.”

“You’ve got
sources in Germany.
 
Call any one of them
that might be on the Hartline case because of that girl your foolhardy thugs
killed.
 
See what they have on his
background.”
 
Nicky snapped his finger
and pointed upstairs.
 
Marcel hustled
through the wine cellar as he pulled his cell phone from his coat pocket.
 
Jean could hear him ascending the knotty-pine
stairs, and then he heard the murmur of his voice echoing through the stone
basement.

Nicky made Jean turn
and resume his kneeling position, burrowing the barrel of the pistol into the
back of his neck.
 
As they waited, the
high boss of the Glaives peppered the DGSE agent with insults, ranging from
distaste over Jean’s height to his presumably small penis size.
 
Jean listened to each one with narrowed eyes,
his psychological education at work in trying to diagnose Nicky Arnaud.
 
Just before Marcel rushed down the stairs, the
diagnosis came in:

Psychopath.
 
Pure and simple.

“Nicky!
 
He’s not lying.
 
Hartline’s a real shadow, a true spook.”
 
Marcel appeared from the curved hallway,
breathing heavily.
 
The dog was with him,
appearing happy to be involved.

Nicky eased the
pressure of the gun.
 
“Who told you
this?”

“I checked two of
our assets.
 
The one in Bonn and the one
in Frankfurt.
 
The polizei and BKA have
scaled back their search.
 
The guy was a
false front.
 
No one knows anything about
him.”

“So why me?” Nicky
asked in a challenging voice, turning his attention back to Jean.
 
“Why would a CIA agent be dicking around with
me?
 
Aren’t they concerned with their own
national security?
 
What the
fuck
would they want with me?”

Jean’s mind
danced.
 
He turned his head enough to see
him from one eye.
 
“Hartline killed Leon,
didn’t he?
 
Was he mixed up in anything,
perhaps doing something that could be perceived as a threat to the U.S. or its
allies?”

“Maybe,” Nicky
said shrugging.
 
“We do business with all
types.”
 
His head shook as he appeared to
be considering everyone they worked with.
 
Finally he shook his head.
 
“I
don’t think so.”

“Just be glad it
was him and not you,” Jean answered solemnly.
 

“So they’re done?
 
They killed Leon and that’s it?” Nicky asked,
sounding dubious.

“Probably,” Jean
answered.
 
“Trust me, if the CIA wanted
you dead, you would already be producing maggots.”

Marcel narrowed
his eyes but said nothing.

“What about the books?”
Nicky asked.

“The diaries?
 
Props, most likely.
 
Just a way to get to Leon through the man who
owed him money,” Jean answered coolly.
 
“The
CIA is visionary in its inventiveness.
 
Think about it…using a gay book dealer to get to a mobster.
 
Leon would have never expected a threat to
develop there.”
 
Jean’s voice trailed off
as he shook his head in a mist of reverie over the plot.
 
He risked standing.
 
“Hartline is most assuredly long gone.
 
I’d forget about him and move on.”

Marcel was
frowning, shaking his head, an almost amused look on his face.
 
“Okay, so according to you this guy Hartline
is CIA, right?”

“Yes,” Jean
answered cautiously.
 

“So if that’s the
case, who the hell was the girl that Luc and Bruno killed?”

Jean forced a
regretful look.
 
“Probably some poor
bimbo that Hartline used as a pigeon.
 
I
saw her picture.
 
Beautiful.
 
An absolute shame.
 
You probably did Hartline a favor by wiping
her out.”
 

The two mobsters
were silent, their minds processing what they had both just learned.
 
Jean tapped out a cigarette, not offering one
to either man.
 
“And this is how the CIA
operates, gentlemen.
 
Death, to them, is
only a means to an end.
 
Their end.”
 
He lit the cigarette, the streams of smoke
from his Romanic nose dual wisps of curving ribbon in the still, cold air.
 

“What a story,”
Marcel said, eyeing Jean.
 
Napoleon
trotted into the safe, sitting by Marcel, leaning against his leg.
 

Nicky was
oblivious to Marcel’s tone.
 
He walked
from the safe, standing between the wine racks, rubbing his head.
 
“So this entire deal, the whole production of
sucking in Leon and Bruno with valuable books, was all bullshit just so the CIA
could eliminate Leon?”

Jean looked at
Marcel.
 
He nodded almost imperceptibly.
 

Jean took the
cue.
 
“Yes, Nicky, it’s over.”

Nicky gathered
himself, taking great breaths of the cool cellar air.
 
He looked at Jean through slit eyes.
 
“You still here?”

“Do you need
anything else?” Jean asked.

Nicky spat at
him.
 
“Get the fuck out of my house.”

***

Frankfurt, Germany

It was nearly
eleven p.m. when Captain Ellis exited Colonel Barron’s office.
 
Jim Sorgi was waiting on him in the staff
room, sipping a cup of scorched coffee in an effort to stay awake.
 
He heard the door down the hall slam shut before
Ellis walked in, his face telling nothing.

“Well?” Sorgi
asked, standing with open hands.

Ellis stared at
him for a long moment, finally allowing the hint of a smile.
 
“He gave us the go-ahead and a short rope.
 
A very thin, brittle, ultra-short rope.”

“What’s that
mean?
 
We can investigate?”

“On a low
profile,” Ellis answered, making a lowering gesture with his hands.
 
“That means nothing public.”

Sorgi was
confused.
 
“So what do we do?”

Ellis walked to
the computer and logged on.
 
He opened
the U.S. Army’s Personnel and Records access program, pointing to the
green-and-black screen as the cursor blinked.
 
“First, we dig into the background of Mister Gage Nils Hartline.
 
No one has been able to figure out who he is,
so that’s what we’re tasked with.”

Sorgi’s
face was a mask of incredulity.
 
“The German government can’t figure it out…so
how will we?”

“I have no idea,”
Ellis replied with an open face.
 
The
computer’s hard-drive whirred as it came up to speed and Ellis sipped his hot
coffee.
 
“There’s something amiss, here,
obviously.
 
And it’s always been my
experience that in situations like this, even with a simple mystery such as
missing car keys, the best thing to do is to slow down and move very carefully
through the problem.”

“The problem being
a man with no background.”

“Correct.”

“So what do we
do?”

“Let’s begin with
what we do know.”
 
He tapped in several
keys, bringing up the alleged military file of Gage Nils Hartline, hovering the
mouse over the picture and clicking it.
 
He
printed the picture on the color printer out in the hall.
 
“Get a thumbtack and tack that picture on the
board over there.”

Sorgi left for a
moment, doing what he was told, posting the headshot of Gage at eye level in
the center of the blank corkboard.
 
“Now
what?”
 

Ellis finished his
coffee before he moved his chair to a position ten feet away from the picture,
lacing his hands behind his head, leaning back and staring at the photo.

“What are you
doing?”

Ellis didn’t turn
from the image.
 
“Bring a chair next to
me.”

Sorgi complied,
sitting to Ellis’s left.
 
“Now what?”

“Just look at
him.”

With an
exasperated breath, Sorgi laced his hands behind his head and mimicked Ellis’s
pose.
 
After a few minutes, Ellis
whispered, “Where you at, Gage Hartline?”
 

Chapter
10

Friday,
November 6
-
Böblingen
, Germany

It
was
frigid in the southwest German town of
Böblingen
.
 
Having arrived in the late afternoon on
Thursday, Gage drove the motorcycle directly into a protected forest and spent
the evening huddled on the ground.
 
He
wore the polizei leathers and his own clothes, and covered himself with the
driest leaves he could find.
 
He might
have dozed off once or twice, but he never really enjoyed any meaningful sleep.
 
He had been unable to use a hotel since,
typically, they were the first businesses who would receive a man-wanted
report—with a picture—from the polizei or the BKA.
 
At sunup, Gage weighted the polizei leathers
with stones and threw them into the same pond he had sunk the motorcycle in the
night before.
 
Afterward, he stared at the
pond, searching for any telltale traces of gasoline or oil.
 
The night before, after finding electrical
tape in the small toolbox in the side-bag, he had carefully wrapped the intake
as well as the muffler, sealing the holes with rubber gloves from the
motorcycle’s first-aid kit.
 
Theoretically, the bike should be watertight for some time.
 
Seeing no evidence of the BMW, Gage began to
feel better about his chances of avoiding detection.

He emerged well
after sunup, when most people had started their Fridays, blissfully ignorant of
the wanted fugitive walking among them.
 
If
someone had seen the stolen BMW when he had driven into
Böblingen
,
it wouldn’t take long for Gage to find out.
 
But as soon as Gage entered the town, wearing the filthy pants and flannel
shirt he had stolen the morning before, he correctly diagnosed the population as
going about its business as usual.
 
Böblingen
is a small city with mostly new buildings.
 
Gage had never before been there and, like
many other German cities, it had obviously been wiped out by Allied bombs in
World War II.
 
Even the beautiful
Evangelist Parish Church, located in the town center, had a new feel, and Gage
guessed that it—like many historical sites—had been rebuilt after being leveled.
 

As Gage passed
through the town, he allowed himself time to stop for a quick bite at an
imbiss
, afterward going by memory to
Offenburger
Strasse
.
 
The
street was in a residential area with middle-class homes and apartment
buildings.
 
Gage located the address he
had long since memorized.
 
Upon seeing
it, he made a quick revolution, scanning the area for a proper reconnaissance
location, finally exiting the street the way he had come.
 
At the mouth of the
Strasse
, he made a right, walked
a block followed by another right.
 
After
half a kilometer down the adjacent street, Gage crossed a wooded lot and then made
his way under an enormous section of power lines.
 
He positioned himself in a stand of trees, on
a small hill, just above the modern-looking apartment building.
 
Without ever moving a muscle, he sat, hidden
by the trees and branches he had gathered, watching residents come and go.
 
The fall day turned from cold to cool; Gage
remained still.
 
Using a technique he had
learned years before, he created a vacuum in his mind, allowing it to focus
only on the task at hand.
 
Not the cold,
sadness for Monika, Crete, or the need to urinate could shatter Gage’s reverie.
 

It wasn’t until
after lunchtime that he finally saw a blue Explorer bump into the parking
lot.
 
The door opened and Kenny Mars stepped
out, his stride as confident and obvious as it had been so many years earlier.
 
He was wearing his standard Army ACUs.
 
On his head, cocked sideways in an almost
arrogant style, was his green beret.

Satisfied that he
was all alone and without a tail, Gage made his way into the breezeway, carefully
taking the stairs before knocking lightly on the door at the top landing.

“Yeah?” came the
voice from inside.

“Can we talk?”
Gage asked, stepping back so Kenny could see him.
 
There was a pause as Gage saw the security
peephole darken.

“I don’t know
you,” was the delayed reply.

“Actually, you do,
Kenny.
 
Please open the door.”
 
Gage put his hands up to show he meant no
harm.
 
A chain could be heard sliding off
the door, and then it opened.

“Who are you?” the
man asked with narrowed eyes.
 
He was
Gage’s age, if not a year or two older.
 
Kenny
Mars was African-American, with short hair marked by a single gray streak above
his left temple.
 
Though he was still
handsome, his eyes, like Gage’s, were now marked by early crow’s feet.
 
His face and forehead showed a few more lines
of stress, but overall, he’d aged well.

“You might
remember me as
Schoenfeld
,” Gage said flatly.

Kenny stared
blankly before his eyes went wide.
 
He
opened the door fully.
 
“Holy shit.”

“Mind if I come
in?”
 
Gage rubbed his hands together as
he stepped into the warmth, finally allowing himself to acknowledge the cold
that had penetrated deep in his bones for many hours.

An hour later,
Gage placed the empty bottle of water on the coffee table and leaned back, his
skin still tingling from the rapid warm-up.
 
“And that’s all I can tell you.
 
There were some gaps, obviously, for reasons I’m sure you
understand.
 
But everything I just told
you was truth and, as you know, until I can prove my innocence, helping me
could get you in a world of hurt.”

Kenny rubbed his
face with his hands, seemingly overwhelmed by the incredible story he had just
heard.
 
He was an 18-Echo, a special
operations communications specialist on an Alpha-team based at Panzer
Kaserne
.
 
The last
time he had seen Gage, then Matthew
Schoenfeld
, he had
been at language school during their Special Forces training.
 
Schoenfeld
had been
rumored dead the very next year, killed in Bosnia.
 
Kenny had not thought of him very often since
then, glancing around after a moment as if coming out of a trance and realizing
that a filthy man was sitting on his sofa.
 

“So what can I
help you do?”

“I need a place to
stay, just for a few days, maybe more.
 
Then, maybe you can help me determine the level of search they’ve got on
me.
 
I need to know that before I know
how to proceed from here.”

Kenny sipped his
water.
 
“And if I say no?”

“I’d understand,”
Gage answered, shrugging.
 
“I wouldn’t
blame you if you pulled a pistol out—because I know you have one stashed
somewhere close—and called the MPs or the polizei.
 
Honestly, it would probably be your smartest
move.”

The cautious
professional eyed Gage for a long moment; finally reaching into the folds of
the chair he sat on, jerking a flat-black nine-millimeter pistol out by the
barrel.
 
He laid it on the table, closer
to Gage than to himself before leaning back in his chair.
 
“I wouldn’t do that to you, brother.
 
Hell, it could easily be me sitting there
where you are.”

Gage tilted his
head upward, relieved that he may have found a temporary solution to his
immediate problem, thanks to a once-thought-dead friendship.
 
With a deep breath he finally spoke.
 
“You working this afternoon?
 
I’ve kept you too long.”

“We just got back
from Afghanistan.
 
Got about a month
before we roll again.
 
I’ll need to poke
my head in at the unit, but I’m pretty free to help.
 
Not much going on.”
 
Kenny raised a finger.
 
“One thing I wondered, though, while you were
telling your story: how did you know where I was?”

Gage’s eyes
smiled, though his mouth didn’t.
 
“In my
line of work, you always have a few outs in your head.
 
I have three, memorized—burned into my
brain.
 
When I got here, heck, I didn’t
know if you might be deployed.”

“Where would you
have gone if I was?”

“A long ways from
here to see someone I don’t think you know.”
 

Kenny nodded, his
eyes cutting away.
 
With a snort of
professional amusement he asked, “You really took down a German cop…took his
bike?”

Gage nodded,
showing no trace of pride.
 
“I didn’t hurt
him.”

Kenny made a
whistling sound.
 
“Heat is going to be
way up.”

“Like I said, you
can send me out now if you want.
 
I’d
never say a word.”

Kenny Mars joined
eyes with Gage.
 
“No chance.”

Gage slapped his
knees and stood.
 
“I need to grab some righteous
sleep, and then maybe tomorrow in the afternoon we can figure this thing out.”

The two men shook
hands before Gage bear-hugged him.
 
Kenny
gave him a sleeping pill and ten minutes later Gage was in the guest bed, sound
asleep with his filthy clothes still on.

***

Saturday, November 7

Gage
awoke at 11:30 a.m. after sleeping
for nearly twenty hours straight.
 
Kenny
had provided him a toothbrush and toiletries and, after brushing his furry
teeth, he emerged to find his old friend with the newspaper spread out before
him.

“Hey,” Gage
mumbled, still groggy from such a long slumber.

Kenny lifted the
paper, the
International Gazette
.
 
“It’s on the back page and not exactly
high-profile anymore.
 
Looks like they’ve
scaled down their search for you.
 
Reuters got it.
 
Kind of cryptic,
but it says they think you probably fled the country.
 
My guess is they realized your background was
a load of dead ends, found out the kind of work you do, and probably turned the
bulk of it over to their feds.
 
No
mention of you stealing the police bike.”

“Probably their
pride,” Gage muttered.

“Might be baiting
you, too.”

Gage rubbed the
emerging stubble on his head and pondered the situation.
 
Kenny told him that yesterday’s regional paper
had been the same, making Gage more confident that his manufactured background
must have taken hope away from the investigators.
 
He pondered the people who killed Monika; surely
it was the mobsters Jean told him about.
 
Les Glaives du
Peuple
.
 
They would most certainly still want him
dead.
 
And the polizei and the BKA would still
have a search running for the shadowy American with no past.
 
Their net worried him less and less with each
passing day, unless he was to make a stupid mistake.
 
He felt he knew better than that.
 
What did concern him, though, were the balance
of diaries hidden in the storage space.
 
Did he leave any sort of signature during his trips back and forth and,
if so, would they find it?
 
Now that
Monika was dead, Gage really had nothing left to live for other than a pile of
decaying books.

No.

The jumbled
thoughts in his mind ceased altogether, arrested by a piercing revelation.
 
The diaries weren’t just decaying books, they
were a window into the past, displaying an unprecedented account of one of the
world’s purest evils.
 
An evil that had,
for years, abused and raped a woman against her will.
 
An evil that had forced her to flee,
eventually losing her child as well as her life.
 
An evil not unlike the wickedness he and
Monika had experienced in the past twenty-four hours.

And just like
Greta Morgenstern, Monika was now gone.

The inspiration
seemed to leave him as quickly as it came, exacerbated by his depressive state.
 

“I’ll leave this
paper here for you,” Kenny said, stacking it neatly.
 
“I cooked eggs and bacon; a big, full
breakfast like my mama used to make.
 
Got
you a heaping plate in the microwave, and there’s juice in the fridge. I have
to go back to the unit and get some admin crap squared away.
 
I’ll be back late afternoon and you and I can
work on your out, roger?
 
Maybe I’ll pop
by the commissary and we grill a couple of tenderloins tonight on the George
Foreman.”

Gage nodded.
 
“Thanks, man.
 
You don’t know how much this means, really.”