The Julian Secret (Lang Reilly Thrillers) (12 page)

The memory was weighted with sadness. Dawn, bright and cheerful, had been only too happy to work while Lang attended law school after leaving government service. After all, the law practice would mean she would have her husband home at night instead of excuses phoned from undisclosed places. He would succeed, she was certain.

And he had.

An unexplained gap in his résumé between college and law school had made him less than attractive to the big law firms, but he had no intention of spending the rest of his life in stuffy boardrooms, toadying to corporate clients. Instead, he had relied on his Agency contacts for a steady flow of the less reputable part of the practice. Seedy, but able to pay their legal bills. A member of an ambassador’s staff involved in a scheme to bribe an official of a foreign government, a national floral chain importing more than roses from Colombia.

His practice had become profitable, and Lang and Dawn had taken the first of a planned series of trips to Europe before beginning a family. Instead, their lives were commandeered by the silver spider, the name he gave the arachnid-like form that appeared in X-rays of his wife’s reproductive system. The spider grew while Dawn seemed to shrink, until she was little more than a
near-lifeless bag of skin and bone. At her bedside, they planned trips both knew they would never take. Away from the hospital room and the stench of certain death, Lang cursed a god whose eyes might have been on the sparrow but whose back was turned to Dawn.

The end had been anticlimactic and merciful. He had missed her long before.

The empty months spent in an empty house made for an empty life. At first, he dated tentatively, more to please friends than from any desire of his own. The women all had one defect or another, defects he realized were more in his eyes than real. What was missing was that they were not Dawn. He finally sold the house and most of the furnishings and moved to his present high-rise condo.

Even the new place seemed empty. He took on more cases than he could effectively handle, hoping to leave no time for sorrow. That didn’t work, either.

In the search for his sister’s killers, he had renewed his acquaintance with Gurt, a coworker he had bedded on an irregular basis until he met Dawn. At first he had felt guilty, as though betraying his wife with another woman. The priest, Francis, wise in the way only a man who had never had woman problems could be, had pointed out that Lang did not have to stop loving Dawn to love Gurt, too.

And he had.

The only problem was Gurt’s systematic refusal to even discuss a more permanent arrangement. Sooner or later, Lang supposed, she would go back to Germany, back to the Agency, leaving him as bereft of children and family as before. Until then, though, he had intended to savor every moment.

He had almost managed to doze off when the flight attendant announced an imminent landing.

Gurt was bright-eyed and eager for whatever the day held. As always, she had slept soundly from the moment the 757’s wheels retracted into their wells.

Lang felt it was one of her most unattractive attributes.

Both retrieved their single bags from the overhead bin. Checked luggage meant a predictable stop at baggage claim as well as the possibility that the suitcases might well take off on an excursion of their own.

Modern travel: breakfast in New York, dinner in Paris, and baggage in Istanbul.

More important, a person standing at a baggage carousel was a fixed target, vulnerable to a point-blank shot or the stab of a knife. The Agency had discouraged any bag that could not be carried aboard.

He had never been in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle air terminal when it was not mobbed. Africans in bright-colored cotton robes mixed with the pastel Hindi saris, while mustachioed men in caftans herded their wives and children along. Overhead speakers kept up a stream of unintelligible announcements that blended with a hundred different languages in a re-creation of Babel.

Little had changed since his last visit.

Without further communication, Gurt ducked into the ladies’ toilet, leaving Lang to guard her bag. When she reappeared, he headed for the men’s while Gurt strained to recognize anyone from their flight. When Lang emerged, he feigned interest in a magazine rack while Gurt disappeared into the crowded exits. Lang kept an unobtrusive surveillance of reflections of passengers scurrying by the glass of the newsstand. He noticed no one purposely hovering nearby. In exactly five minutes, he hurried after Gurt.

At the bottom of a steep escalator, he fed coins into a machine, took a ticket, and boarded a train headed into the city. En route, he changed cars twice and trains
once, disembarking just across the Seine from the Ille St. Louis. He was fairly certain he had not been followed, but the sparse foot traffic across the nearby bridge would reveal any tail he had missed.

Across the river, he waited patiently on the narrow Rue St. Louis until he succeeded in getting a cab. The driver mumbled unhappily when Lang gave him the destination, less than a mile away. No one got into the following taxi, and Lang finally gave a sigh of relief despite the cabbie’s continuing expression of displeasure at so short a fare.

Oh well, the French were always displeased about something: the wine, the food, or lesser things such as politics or the economy. Lang’s pronunciation of the destination must have revealed him as an American, for the cabbie turned to complaints of U.S. involvement in Iraq, although Lang was unable to see why a French citizen would be concerned. France had, after all, opted out.

The French: Our national flag is the tricolor; our battle flag a single color: white.

Minutes later, he was paying the still-protesting driver in front of a pizzeria on the Left Bank along the Quai d’Orsay, one with a view of both Notre Dame and the statue of St. Michael. Gurt was sipping a cup of coffee at one of the tables lining the curb.

Lang took the one other chair at the table. “All clear?”

Gurt looked at him over the rim of her cup. “I saw no one.”

In minutes, they were descending another escalator, this one to the St. Germain station. They went directly to Orly, the airport for most of Paris’s European flights. Lang used a credit card to buy two one-way tickets on different flights to Frankfurt and used the time before the first to arrange for a car.

“The card is traceable,” Gurt said as they sank into seats at his departure gate.

Lang shrugged. “I know, but all my bogus IDs expired years ago. We’ll just have to hope if someone’s tracking us, they’re still looking in Paris or they won’t have the resources to meet both Paris–Frankfurt flights.”

“They won’t have to look, just check the files of your card company.”

“Maybe the Agency office in Frankfurt can help, give us some ID we can use.”

Gurt shook her head slowly. “Neither of us are actively employed there now.”

She was right. Ever fearful of one more wave of unfavorable publicity, the Agency wasn’t likely to furnish bogus papers to a former employee and one on an indefinite leave. Lang mentally kicked himself. In an age when teenage hackers were capable of multimillion-dollar identity thefts, it would have been a simple matter to create his own false persona. In spite of the ease of access to information, few government agencies ever bothered to cross-check. The death of someone around the desirable age appeared in the obituaries and, with the readily available date of birth, a request in that name could be made for replacement of a lost Social Security card. The card could be used to obtain a driver’s license, and both to obtain a certified copy of a birth certificate to be parlayed into a passport. Assuming the deceased had even modest credit, the banks were only too happy to ship their plastic, one and a half percent interest for the first six months.

Lang consoled himself with the speed at which the bureaucratic wheels turned. Establishing a good false identity with real documents took months. How many more attempts on his and Gurt’s lives could be mounted in that time? Lang didn’t want to even guess.

They would have to go with what they had.

Frankfurt Flughof
Three hours later

Miraculously, Lang had napped on the short flight, the first sleep he had gotten on an aircraft since his days with the Agency. He had watched water bead against the adjacent window as the plane descended through clouds dirty with moisture. The runway and taxiway were shiny with rain. Before deplaning the 717, he checked his watch. Gurt should be landing in the next forty-five minutes.

As an arrival from a fellow European Union country, Lang bypassed a line of Japanese tourists at the immigration stations and walked through the nothing-to-declare gate into the terminal. The main area was nowhere as large, mutinational, nor loud as de Gaulle, a fact for which Lang was thankful. It would have been pure luck to find Gurt in the crowded main terminal.

Not that he had to. Knowing the tenuous relation between schedule and reality in the world of the airlines,
they had agreed to meet in the city at a small
bierstube
near the Agency’s location. Lang was already anticipating a liter of truly fine beer served with the fattest bratwurst he had ever had.

The thought of epicurean delights may have been what momentarily distracted him. He had not noticed the man in the rain-splotched coat who seemed unusually interested in shop displays a regular ten feet from wherever Lang paused.

Lang moved a few feet away, intent on duty-free tobacco products. The man acquired an interest in the ladies’ shoes in the window of the adjoining shop. As Lang inspected confectionery, his companion was checking out the spirits and wine next door.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s
not
out to get you.

It had taken less time than Lang had hoped for someone to find the credit-card transaction.

Lang made it a point to gaze around randomly, a tourist overawed by one of Europe’s least interesting air terminals. He could go to the rental counter, claim his car, and let the man follow as best he could until the opportunity to take action arose. Or he could take evasive action and, unless the guy was a real pro, lose him.

Neither option was satisfactory.

If the man was simply following Lang to learn what he might have stumbled onto in Spain, fine. But blowing up the Porsche was hardly the act of someone merely inquisitive. Besides, there could well be someone waiting for Gurt, too. Lang was not particularly worried at the possibility. Not only was Gurt far more current than he in the more deadly aspects of hand-to-hand combat, she had been the Agency’s female champion in four straight women’s target competitions, rifle as well as pistol. Not satisfied with this accolade, she had nagged her
way into competition with the men. She had beaten them, too. The word around the station was that pissing Gurt Fuchs off was both unwise and unhealthy.

Lang was also certain she would be wary of possible followers. No one who had been with the Agency ever completely forgot to be aware of their surroundings at all times, to know how to reach the nearest exit and where it led, to use available storefront glass to look behind you, to have clearly in mind what fields of fire were usable if gunplay became necessary. Lang used to fantasize the peculiar behavior all that might engender at family gatherings, cocktail parties, or other social events.

Gurt would be fine. The question was, what was Lang going to do?

He looked around with purpose, no longer simply rubbernecking. Across the terminal he spotted what he was looking for, large signs with male and female stick figures,
Damen
and
Herren
, the restrooms. He fought the urge to look over his shoulder as he picked up his gait, the pace of a man uncertain he is going to find relief in time.

He reached the men’s room at a near dash. He was not surprised to find it as immaculate as any operating room. He was in Germany, where spotless was the norm and grandmothers on hands and knees scrubbed sidewalks in front of their houses.

He had no time to admire hygiene taken to the max.

He hurried past the rows of crowded urinals to the section with stalls, noting that the area appeared empty. He opened the nearest door, locking it as he set down his bag where it would easily be seen underneath the door. Placing one foot on the commode, he stair-stepped to the tank, reached both arms to the dividing partition, and pulled himself up into the shadows of the low ceiling. Straddling the divider wasn’t comfortable, but he
didn’t intend to be there long. He was pulling his belt from his pants’ loops when he heard steps on the ceramic tiles. He flattened himself against the narrow top of the partition.

As Lang had anticipated, the eyes of the man in the raincoat went to the spaces between the floor and door of each stall. He saw Lang’s bag immediately. The man in the raincoat bent over to look under the door of each of the other stalls, verifying they were empty, that there was no one other than he and Lang in this part of the facility, before approaching the stall where the bag was visible.

Lang slipped his belt over his head, making a loop. He felt the familiar prickle of neck hair, the familiar sensation of anticipated action. Paranoia or not, that man did not intend him well. Raincoat was gently pushing against the door of the stall with one hand while reaching into a pocket with the other.

Lang moved.

Dropping the loop of the belt over the other man’s head, Lang rolled off the partition and into the stall, letting his weight snatch the man up against the other side of the door with a thudding impact. Lang gave a violent tug on the belt and was rewarded with a gurgling, choking sound from the other side of the door. Lang unlatched the door and kicked it outward as hard as he could, sending the nearly strangled stranger sprawling beneath the sinks along the far wall.

Lang was on him before he could recover. He cupped the man’s head by the chin and slammed it into a drainpipe under a sink repeatedly, while his other hand patted the raincoat until it found the pocket with the gun in it. A slim-model .28 Beretta automatic, easy to conceal in a suit or coat pocket, even with the bulbous silencer. The
weapon of choice of an assassin who intended to fire only one or two shots.