The Solomon Effect (16 page)

The Heckler and Koch was a massive model 23. The mustachioed
man in the light blue windbreaker squeezed off three rounds, one after the other. The big hollow-point through-and-throughs tore through Erkan and blew out his back. Blood splattered the white marble column behind him as shattered shards of stone exploded into the air.

The man in the windbreaker shoved the H&K beneath his jacket again and kept walking.

For one suspended moment, Erkan wavered, still on his feet, his white shirt blooming a charred scarlet. He opened his mouth to speak and a torrent of blood spilled down his chin. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed.

He fell backward in an ungainly sprawl, arms flung out at his sides, his exquisitely tailored gray suit falling open to reveal a small Walther PPK in a holster clipped inside the waistband of his slacks. Jax snatched it up.

Walking quickly, the killer had almost reached the gate. Jax shoved Erkan’s Walther under his shirt and followed him, also at a walk. It was never a good idea to run away from a dead body. It tended to attract attention.

Other people were running—running
toward
Erkan. Jax kept walking. At the gate, the man in the pale blue windbreaker threw a quick glance over his shoulder. He saw Jax and began to run.

“Shit,” said Jax, and sprinted after him.

They pelted down a crooked lane between narrow whitewashed houses that loomed up to cast the worn paving stones into shadow. This was an old part of town, one of the few areas that had escaped the Great Fire of 1922. Jax dodged café tables, scarlet geraniums spilling out of clay pots, a sleeping gray cat.

The killer hung a quick left, into a shady, stone-paved passageway so steep it soon gave up and became steps. Jax tore after him, the soles of their shoes clattering on the broad ancient stairs, the scent of damp stone and ancient decay wafting up around him.

The steps emptied into a winding street filled with market stalls hung with baskets and brass pots that glinted like gold in a shaft of early-evening sunlight. The driver of a green van laid on his horn, its brakes screeching as the man in the blue windbreaker darted across in front of him.

Jax ducked around behind the van, his gaze on the dark mouth of an alley opening up on the far side of the street. The killer bolted down it, Jax twenty steps behind. The air here was cool and dank, the houses shuttered, silent, the only sounds the pounding of their feet and the rasp of their breath and the swish of traffic from the street ahead.

As he cleared the alley, the man seemed to come to some kind of a decision. He whirled, his hand reaching beneath his jacket to close on the handle of his gun. But the sidewalk here was narrow, his momentum so great that he took a step back off the curb into the street as he brought up the big H&K.

Jax heard a squeal of brakes, saw the man’s head turn, his eyes widen the instant before a battered white delivery truck slammed into him with a heavy, fatal thud.

Tucking Erkan’s Walther out of sight beneath his sweat-soaked
shirt, Jax pushed his way through the excited, jabbering crowd of shoppers gathered around the front of the truck. Jax took one look at the man’s blood-smeared face, the wide and sightless eyes, and turned away.

A couple of blocks down the hill, he paused long enough to wipe down Erkan’s gun and drop it into a convenient trash receptacle. Then he turned his steps toward the blue waters of the bay below. From somewhere to his left came the low, melodic notes of the afternoon call to prayer.
Allah Akbar…

One after the other, the muezzins of the city’s mosques joined in, until their voices rose up in a wave of sound that rolled across the bay.
Allah Akbar. Ash-hadu alla ilaha illal-lah. God is Great. There is no God but God.

Captain Lowenstein was not going to be happy.

Jax called Matt from the shade of a plane tree overlooking the Gulf of Izmir. His truncated conversation with Erkan had raised some serious questions, and Jax had doubts about
Langley’s ability—or maybe its willingness—to give him straight answers.

“Where are the German military archives from World War II kept?” Jax asked.

“The military archives?” There was a pause while Matt digested this. “I think they’re still in Freiburg im Breisgau. Why?”

“Then that’s where I’m going.”

“You know, we do have people in Freiberg. I could ask them to—”

“No. I want to find out for myself exactly what was on that damned sub.”

“Did something happen I need to know about?”

“Kemal Erkan is dead.”

“Shit. Listen, Jax. I’ve got a contact in Freiberg I can set you up with. A historian by the name of Walter Herbolt, at the university.”

Jax stared across the broad avenue, toward the water. From here he could see Tobie and Captain Lowenstein. Tobie was calmly sipping a bottle of Evian at a shady table overlooking Pasaport Quay. But Lowenstein was pacing up and down, his cell phone plastered to his ear with one hand, his other hand gesturing wildly through the air as he talked. Jax said, “Thanks, but I’m getting kinda tired of these station people.”

“Herbolt isn’t part of the Company. He’s a personal friend. I’ll tell him to expect you.” There was a pause. Matt said, “It doesn’t sound like that U-boat was carrying gold, does it?”

“No. No, it doesn’t.”

“You’re feeling pretty cocky, aren’t you?” Jax said to Lowenstein as the captain escorted them through Izmir’s crowded, gleaming airport toward their concourse.

So far, news of the shooting in the agora had yet to wend its way through Turkish police channels to the base, and from
there to field personnel. Pausing at the sign that warned in four languages, T
ICKETED
P
ASSENGERS
O
NLY
B
EYOND
T
HIS
P
OINT,
the Captain rocked back on his heels and grinned. “You may have given me the slip there for a while, but I think I made a pretty good recovery. And in another forty-five minutes, you’ll be gone.”

“And without a single international incident.” Jax slapped the big Air Force captain on the back and turned to leave. “You did a heckuva job, Lowie.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” whispered October as she put her carry-on bag on the conveyer belt at security. “Who did you kill?”

“Not here, October.” Jax kept a smile on his face as he glanced back at Lowenstein. As he watched, the Captain answered his cell phone, his expression changing ludicrously as he listened to the voice at the other end. Across the crowded security area, the two men’s gazes met. Jax brought one hand to his forehead in a wry salute and turned away.

He gave October a full briefing as they sat by the gate, waiting for their flight to Istanbul to board.

“What I don’t understand is why that gunman in the agora didn’t shoot you, too,” she said when he finished. “I mean at first, when he had the chance.”

“Probably because no one paid him to kill me. He looked like he came from the local rent-a-thug crowd, which means that whoever hired him to kill Kemal Erkan had no way of knowing I’d be there when he made the hit. And guys like that don’t do freebies.”

“You think he was hired by our friends in Kaliningrad?”

“Or at least by the same outfit that hired our friends in Kaliningrad.”

A rustle of movement wafted through the waiting crowd as a uniformed attendant appeared at the gate. “Now it’s your turn,” said Jax, studying her through narrowed eyes.

“What?” she said with a half laugh. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“When we were at Pasaport Quay, how did you know I wanted you to distract Lowenstein?”

She leaned into him teasingly as a droning voice began to announce their flight’s boarding pattern. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid I read your mind or something?”

“The thought did occur to me.”

Still smiling, she sat back and shook her head. “Just because I’m good at remote viewing doesn’t mean I’m psychic, Jax. I saw the waiter hand you the note.”

He continued to stare at her, unsure whether to believe her or not. She said, “Do you think Lowenstein will ever connect you to what happened at the agora?”

“Officially? Not if he’s smart.”

Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Wednesday 28 October
7:10
A.M.
local time

By the time their connecting flight from Munich swooped down
over the mountains of the Black Forest to land at Freiburg im Breisgau, it was early the following morning.

“These overnight flights are going to kill me,” said October as they caught a cab directly from the airport to the philosophy faculty of the university. “I must look like shit.”

“Lowenstein obviously didn’t think so.”

“Enough about that, already.” Settling into the cab’s backseat, she rummaged around in her bag for a brush and used it to draw her hair back into a clip. “I don’t even know what day it is anymore.”

“It’s Wednesday.”

She looked up at him, her arms stilling at her task. “The twenty-eighth?”

“That’s right.”

“Christ,” she whispered. Halloween was three days away.

“Be thankful for overnight flights.”

They drove past undulating renaissance facades of red sand
stone and white plaster, past gently flowing canals that gurgled with the fresh waters of the Dreisam River. By the end of the Second World War, Jax knew, American and British carpet-bombing had reduced this elegant university city to a burned-out shell. But there was no sign of that now. The historic heart of the city had been painstakingly and lovingly restored.

They found Professor Herbolt stuffing papers into a battered brown-leather briefcase in his office. He looked up, his straight, pale blond hair falling forward to frame a soft, plump-cheeked face.

“Ah. There you are,” he said. Somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, he had gentle gray eyes and the slightly stooped shoulders of a man who’d spent too many years of his life hunched over books. “I’m on my way to a meeting at the Historisches Kaufhaus.” He buckled the straps of his briefcase and swung it off his desk. “Walk with me.”

The briefcase in one hand and a lumpy paper-wrapped package tucked under his arm, the professor led the way through a warren of restored university buildings to the Bertoldstrasse. “Matt told me something of what you’re looking for. How much do you know about Germany’s military records?”

Jax shook his head. “Nothing, really.”

The professor nodded, as if he’d been expecting as much. “The Allies seized all the German military and government archives they could find after the war,” he said, ushering them up the noisy, crowded street. “At first, the archives were held in Washington and London. But eventually most of the material was microfilmed and the originals were returned to us in the fifties. Since Germany was still an occupied, partitioned state, there was a reluctance to create a central archives at Bonn, so various archives were established in different parts of the country. The Bundesarchiv-Militararchiv was set up here, in Freiburg.”

“All the Naval records were sent here?”

“Most of them. The U-boat war journals weren’t declassified and returned to us until the late seventies. But then they came here, yes. The Naval records are by far the most complete. The Army, less so. The Air Force holdings were heavily destroyed and are very fragmentary.”

“So how complete are the U-boat records?”

“Not as complete as one might wish, I’m afraid, especially with regard to the later period. The archives have no material at all on nearly three hundred U-boats that were commissioned into service at the end of the war. The last months of the war were very chaotic, you know. The Allies carpet-bombed our cities virtually every night, killing hundreds of thousands—some say millions. Many records were lost. Some U-boats were commissioned that we don’t even know existed.”

Jax stared down the length of the Kaiser-Joseph-Strasse, to where one of the old medieval gates of the city was still visible. “Let me guess: U-114 is one of those.”

“I’m afraid so. Until the wreckage was found off Denmark, we had nothing on it. Your government originally identified it as a Type XB submarine, but as far as we know, only eight Type XB submarines were built. Two survived to surrender at the end of the war, and six are known to have been sunk. Because they were so large, they were very useful for carrying cargo long distances. But their size also made them disastrously slow and difficult to maneuver.”

“What do you mean, the wreckage was ‘originally’ identified?”

The professor was silent as they cut between two tall, narrow buildings to emerge in the Münsterplatz, the open marketplace surrounding the ancient cathedral. “I’ve been studying the photographs Matt sent of U-114 on the seabed,” he said, “and I don’t believe it was a Type XB. They were originally designed as minelayers, you know; when they were used as transports, they carried most of their cargo in their mineshafts. The XB
was unique in that it only had two torpedo tubes, at the stern.”

Jax drew up short. “But U-114 definitely had a forward torpedo room.”

The German paused to look back at him. “You’re certain?”

“Yes.” He’d seen it himself.

Herbolt nodded. “Then I suspect we’re dealing with a Type XI-B U-cruiser.”

October said, “That’s significant?”

“Very,” said the professor, leading the way across the open square, “when you consider that there are no official records of any of the Type XI-Bs ever becoming operational. We know that four keels were laid down in the shipyards of Deschimag AG Weser, in Bremen. But it was assumed they were all scrapped prior to completion.”

Jax said, “They were big?”

“Oh, yes. Over one hundred sixteen meters long, and some nine and a half meters wide. They were quite large.”

“The XB class subs were—what? Three hundred feet long?”

“Eighty-nine meters, yes.”

Jax tried to picture the U-boat they’d seen resting on a barge in the shipyard in Kaliningrad. Had it been three hundred feet, or closer to four?

“There have been persistent rumors that at least one class XI-B was completed near the end of the war,” said the professor, “and sent out on a secret mission.”

“As part of Operation Caesar?”

Herbolt paused before a colorful renaissance hall with a ground-floor arcade and fancifully decorated gables. “It’s possible.”

“What kind of rumors are we talking about?”

“Reports from dockworkers, mainly.” The professor glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more.” He started to turn away, then hesitated. “There is one other place you might try. The official archives are here, in Freiburg. But
there is something called the Deutsches U-Boot Museum-Archiv, in Altenbruch. It began as a private collection held by a former submarine officer named Horst Bredow, but it eventually grew so large he turned it into a nonprofit foundation run by volunteers. They have gathered everything they can find on Germany’s U-boats, not just copies of the official records, but also things like letters, memoirs, transcriptions of firsthand accounts by survivors. If anything does exist on this U-114, that is where you’ll find it.”

Jax stared off across the old German square, filled that morning with market stalls piled with buckets of sunflowers and shiny pyramids of apples and trays of fresh pastries. “Do you think U-114 could have been carrying gold?”

Herbolt shrugged. “It is possible. After Stalingrad, many here in Germany knew the war was lost. Corporations such as I. G. Farber and Krupp Industries were converting their holdings into gold and sending it out of the country, to places like Portugal and Argentina. But if what I believe is true—that one of the XI-B class U-boats was rushed into commission and sent on a special mission—then I think it was carrying something more important than rich men’s gold.”

“Something like—what?”

The German shrugged again. “I’m not going to speculate. Talk to the people at the Deutsches U-Boot Museum-Archiv. I’ll tell them to expect you.”

October said, “Where is Altenbruch?”

“In Cuxhaven, on the North Sea.” Setting down his briefcase, he held out the bulky brown-paper-wrapped package. “I almost forgot. Matt wanted you to have this.”

“What is it?” said Jax, taking the parcel.

“Something he seems to think you may need.” The professor picked up his briefcase again and turned to leave. “Just be careful to open it in private. We have very strict rules on firearms here in Germany.”