The Nearest Exit (23 page)

She’d brought the information to Wartmüller immediately, and his initial reaction had been the same as hers: disbelief, followed by outrage. She’d even been impressed that a man like him could still feel outrage. He praised her work and told her she would be a crucial part of the nasty job they were going to pull on the cretins at Langley.

A week passed, then two, and she finally got another appointment with him—his schedule had suddenly become full. The outrage was gone, replaced by the stoic pragmatism that she’d expected in the first place. Yes, they were all outraged, he explained, but it had been decided that the greater good needed to be served. In this case, the greater good constituted the reams of excellent intelligence the CIA shared with them as it battled terror around the world. “It’s a matter of keeping your head, Erika.”

Maybe Erika had been at fault—two years later she still couldn’t be sure. In her own estimation, she had kept her head, even as she arranged a slim package of evidence and, in a London pub, handed it off to a representative of Senator Harlan Pleasance, a Republican who was running a committee investigating CIA finances. Pleasance, she knew, was eager for the national spotlight and would squeeze the maximum use out of it. Which was what he did. The story spread like a pandemic, and in the face of protests Berlin had no choice but to condemn the CIA and sever many of its joint operations. Which was why Room S had never been used for its intended purpose.

Wartmüller figured it out, of course. Though no physical evidence could convict her of leaking classified information, she was the only possible source. Evidence has only a slight advantage over rumor, and Wartmüller had spread the story around the intelligence community: Watch out for Erika Schwartz. She’s corrosively anti-American.

Now here she was again. She had a CIA employee on tape kidnapping a Moldovan girl who had spent an unimaginable period suffering nightly multiple rapes in a foreign land that later became her home.

“I’ve talked to Dieter,” Wartmüller told her. “He’s happy to take over the case.”

Dieter Reich was one year away from retirement, with an undistinguished history that had earned him a basement office. “Sir, I don’t think Dieter can—”

“It’s done,” said Brigit, and Franz nodded to remove all doubt.

She looked at Berndt, who seemed to be avoiding her face. “Well, Berndt? Is there a reason you’re here to witness this?”

He swallowed and stared at his hands, still clutching his coffee cup. “I’m the one who brought the order, Erika. It’s direct from Berlin. No one wants you mixing with the Americans anymore. They wouldn’t stand for it.”

“They? The CIA, you mean?” It came out louder than she had planned, and she felt sweat collecting on the back of her neck. “Well?”

“Yes,” he said while the others just stared. “We can’t afford to piss off the Americans any more than we already have.”

“And Reich?”

“Their suggestion,” he said, an involuntary twitch playing around his left eye. “They feel like he’s someone they can work with.”

She spent the rest of the morning in her office, researching Milo Weaver, once of the Central Intelligence Agency. As of last year, according to what information they had, he had been dismissed from his supervisory position in a New York office (the purpose of which was murky) under suspicion of financial misconduct. For this, he’d spent a month and a half in prison until his name was, also according to the file, cleared. Since then, Milo Weaver had been unemployed, living in Newark, New Jersey. He was separated from his wife and daughter, who lived in Brooklyn.

None of this was familiar, but she still felt a pang of something like familiarity. Had she met this man before? She didn’t know the face, though something in those heavy eyes nagged at her. The name? Milo was not so uncommon in the East, but this man was a westerner . . .

There was only one record of him being in Europe recently—Budapest. She found this not from his file but by cross-referencing reports from various European sources. In December, Johann Thüringer, a German journalist who made occasional reports to the military’s intelligence office, the ANBw, from his home base in Hungary, reported that a stringer for the Associated Press, Milo Weaver, had arrived looking for Henry Gray, another journalist, American, who had disappeared. Interesting, but of little use to her now.

At noon, the BND operator forwarded a call to her. It was Andrei Stanescu, Adriana’s father. He’d said so little in Berlin that at first she didn’t recognize his soupy accent, but she did recognize the desperation in the gasps between his labored German words. “What I like to know is the name, please. The name of this man what kill Adriana.”

She lied. She said that they still didn’t have anything on the man. When he asked why his face wasn’t in the world’s newspapers, as his daughter’s face had once been, she began to stutter. Literally. She couldn’t quite get the lies out in a convincing manner. So she pushed responsibility away entirely. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stanescu, but I’m no longer heading the investigation. You’ll have to take that up with Mr. Dieter Reich.”

After getting rid of the Moldovan, she called on Oskar, who had been sipping coffee in the break room, chatting up the girls from the second floor for information. “Anything?” she asked.

“Wall of silence.”

“I want to know where Milo Weaver has been during the last few months, and where he is now. Can you do that?”

Oskar had the energy of youth and the temerity to think all doors were open to him. In this case, he would have to reach the basement-level room that tapped into U.S. satellite communication, which kept real-time track of border stations across the world and the passports that crossed them. “Sure,” he said, “but Teddi will know. An hour, maybe two—but he’ll know. Is it really worth it?”

“How do you mean?”

He frowned at her desk, perhaps wondering if he was overstepping some line.

“Go ahead,” she told him.

“Why not just let it go? It’s barely even our jurisdiction. Let Dieter have it.”

She considered that, because it was a good point. Erika had enough to deal with. Why fight for a case no one wanted her on? Perhaps it was this, finding out it had to do with the Americans. She was living up to the role they had all imposed on her, of the slavering anti-American.

No. It was Adriana. It was knowing all she’d been through.

“The way I see it,” she said, “I can either do my job, or I can retire. I’m not quite decrepit yet.”

The answer didn’t seem to satisfy him, but he shrugged. “Well, in an hour or two he’ll know.”

“By then,” she told him, “I’ll be back on the case.”

Her self-confidence was more than delusion. Before her fall from grace, Erika had devoted numerous hours to investigations directed at members of the BND itself. Occasionally, when rumors became too prevalent, she was called in to assess their factual basis—a position that had earned her no new friends. Twice her investigations had ended in dismissals, once in jail time, and once in suicide—yet in that last case her research finally cleared the man in question.

In 1998, Dieter Reich had ended up under her microscope, and now, ten years later, she pulled up that file—or the copy she had kept for her personal records—and refreshed her memory.

BND minders had noticed weekend purchases on Reich’s credit card in Aalsmeer, just south of Amsterdam. There were dinners and clothes and, most importantly, hotel rooms with double beds. Reich had been married for fifteen years, and during those weekends his wife, a Czech named Dana, had remained at home.

That he was having an affair was not the issue. The issue was that he had not reported his mistress’s name for vetting. So Erika took care of it herself.

Haqikah Badawi was a thirty-year-old Egyptian graduate student of economics at the University of Amsterdam. She had met Reich during one of his trips to Brussels in 1996, when she was interning with the EU public affairs office, and by the next year he was visiting her whenever he could come up with a work-related cover to fool his wife.

Badawi came from a respectable and progressive Cairo family that had made its money in that indefinable industry called import/export. Her student friends, though politically active, showed no real sign of radicalism, and she wrote occasional articles for the weekly
European Voice
, where a friend was associate editor. Bright, erudite,
and attractive—the only question, which Reich himself was psychologically unable to ask, was why she opened her legs to an unexceptional German bureaucrat who was twenty-five years her senior.

It took three weeks and a hated trip into the field for Erika to realize that the impossible had happened: This Egyptian girl was in love with Dieter Reich. Though no real explanations could answer this paradox, from their conversation she inferred that Reich reminded her of a beloved uncle back in Cairo. Erika returned to Pullach bewildered but satisfied that while Reich should be reprimanded for his secrecy, nothing should be done to get in the way of his liaisons.

However, the damage had been done. Two weeks later Badawi herself broke off the affair, explaining that she’d realized (Erika got this from an intercepted e-mail) that there was something infantilizing about her role in the relationship, and she didn’t want to live through her thirties pining over a father figure. It was time for her to grow up.

Erika didn’t know if Reich knew about her visit, or suspected (as she did) that her conversation with Badawi was the catalyst for her to reconsider their relationship. Reich showed no sign of animosity in the office, even as his life shrank suddenly, his international affair dead. As far as she knew, he and his wife were getting along wonderfully.

There was no joy in this, but in the present situation it felt necessary. The Americans had suggested Reich because they knew he would cut off his own hand before doing anything to risk his pension. Berlin also knew this but was too scared to dispute the suggestion. So she would have a talk with Dieter Reich. He would continue to head the case—she didn’t care who got credit—but he would allow her to assist. If he refused . . .

It was all here in the Badawi file, because what Reich could never have predicted was that on September 11, 2001, the world would change, dragging a variety of ambivalent people into the extremes. Badawi had been one such convert who, like Erika, felt the Americans had too much of a hand in things that didn’t concern them. Badawi, however, lacking any real power to effect change, returned
to Cairo just after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and became a member of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, considered a terrorist group by the Egyptian government, the European Union, and the United States—which since 1993 had held its blind leader, Omar Abdel-Rahman, in a federal prison. There was no telling what pieces of German intelligence had crossed their pillow and made it eventually to ears in Egypt.

By one, when Oskar returned from the basement, she had settled on her plan of attack. He closed the door behind himself, and she noticed a folded sheet of paper in his hand, and that, below his puffy eye, his cheeks were very red. “Did one of the secretaries slap you again?”

Oskar leaned so that the edge of the desk cut into the meat of his palms, the paper held tight between two fingers. “Three things. One: Milo Weaver—or, at least, his passport—wasn’t in Europe when Adriana was kidnapped. As far as we can tell, his passport hasn’t left America since last summer.”

It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it was still disappointing. “What about Budapest?”

“No record of it,” he said with a dismissive wave of his free hand. Then he grinned the way he did when he hoped he might shatter Erika’s cool exterior. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I can see you’re burning to put me in my place. Number two?”

“Milo Weaver hasn’t been in Europe recently. But Sebastian Hall—he’s been around for months.”

“Who?”

He unfolded the page to display a police sketch of a man who looked for all the world like Milo Weaver.

“That’s . . . ?”

“Exactly. As Sebastian Hall, Milo Weaver robbed the Bührle Museum a few weeks ago.”

“The Bührle? How did this come in?”

“Face popped up on the Interpol list fifteen minutes ago, and I was downstairs to see it. Sebastian Hall, American. Seems he made the mistake of adding a Serb to his crew.”

“No need to be racist, Oskar.”

“Sorry,” he said through a smile. “But I thought you might like to know the third thing.”

“I think I would.”

“Mr. Hall just arrived in Warsaw, from London, an hour ago. Another couple hours, and we’ll have the hotel and room number.”

Erika blinked at him. It was excellent work, but Oskar was too easily charmed by his successes. “You’re going there, of course.”

“Of course,” he said. “As soon as my boss is put back on the case.”

“Right.” She groaned to her feet. “Give me a minute.”

Once she reached Dieter Reich’s dusty basement office, it only took seven minutes—more time had been spent getting there. She made her case concisely. All it took was a suspicion of helping the enemy for not only this case but his career to slip from his hands. An early dismissal, and then his entire pension would be called into question. “It would certainly be hard on Dana. The loss of money, of course, but the details of the affair—it would crush her, I imagine.”