Private Berlin (2 page)

THE COUNTESS VON Mühlen was off like a shot.

She dodged by a girl with shocking pink hair, and started accelerating.

Mattie cursed, released Montenegro, and took off after the countess.

But it was almost impossible to keep up with her. Despite the drugs and alcohol in her system, Sophia proved nimble as she
twisted and spun her way through the crowd.

“Stop that girl!” Mattie shouted, holding up her badge.

Instead, one wasted guy in his early twenties tried to block Mattie’s way. But she slid her right foot behind his leg, popped
him in the chest, and sent him sprawling on his back.

Other people started yelling after Mattie just as she spotted Sophia running past Axel, who stood at the doors to the side
exit.

The countess disappeared outside.

Somebody grabbed Mattie’s jean jacket from behind.

She twisted. It was Montenegro. She let her arms go limp and let the jacket slip off her. Then she kicked the polo player
in the shin.

He screamed and fell.

Mattie scrambled after the countess, snapping at Axel, who watched in amusement, “You could have grabbed her or something.”

“And miss this fun?”

“Stop the crazy lover for me at least!” Mattie shouted over her shoulder.

She ran out onto the street without listening for the bouncer’s reply.

The sidewalk was lined with people still waiting to get into the club.

Mattie flashed her badge at them. “A girl just came out a minute ago. Where’d she go?”

The guy closest to her was sucking on a joint. He shrugged.

The girl behind him said, “I didn’t see her.”

Oh, for Christ’s sake, I lost her, Mattie groaned to herself. Damn it! She could just hear Sophia’s imperious grandmother
ripping her apart for the blunder.

But then Mattie heard a groan and violent retching coming from behind a large Dumpster parked across the street.

“There goes the hundred euros she promised us,” the joint smoker said, sighing.

Mattie flipped him the finger and crossed the street. She looked behind the Dumpster, finding the Countess von Mühlen hunched
over, and vomiting everything she’d churned up making her escape.

“C’mon now, Sophia,” Mattie said, helping her to stand after she’d finished and was just panting. “Let’s get you somewhere
I can wash you up.”

For a moment the countess seemed not to know where she was, or who Mattie was, but then she started crying, “Where’s Raul?”

“He’s going to be lying low for a while,” Mattie said, taking gentler hold of her arm and steering her away from the club
toward her car.

“I’ll get away,” Sophia vowed. “I’ll find him. We’ll be married.”

“When you’re eighteen you can do what you want. Until then there is someone who wants to talk some sense into you.”

“My father?” the countess replied with open contempt. “All he cares about is himself and his career.”

“Actually, it’s your grandmother who hired us.”

Mattie saw fear surface in Sophia, who said, “But I want to see my father.”

“I bet you do, but Oma’s calling the shots now.”

Something seemed to go out of the countess right then, all the hostility and fight certainly. She trudged along in a submissive
posture until they reached the car, a BMW 335i from the Private Berlin pool.

When Mattie went to open the passenger side door, Sophia fell into her arms, blubbering, “I just wanted someone for myself.
What’s so wrong with that?”

Mattie’s heart melted. “Nothing, Sophia, but…”

Mattie’s cell phone rang. She couldn’t do a thing about it. She held on to the young countess and let her sob her heart out.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Mattie was driving the young countess through the streets of Berlin toward Tegel Airport. She checked her phone at last,
seeing that the call had come from Katharina Doruk, her best friend as well as the managing investigator at Private Berlin.

At four in the morning?

She got Katharina’s voice mail and left a message: “Kat, it’s Mattie. Don’t worry. Got the package. Heading to the jet. Get
some sleep.”

When Mattie hung up she heard snoring. Sophia was lights-out, face against the window, drooling from the corner of her mouth.
Mattie prayed she wouldn’t get sick in the brand-new car. It still had that sweet leather smell.

Fortunately she reached the private air terminal at Tegel International without another accident. She roused Sophia, who looked
around blearily, got out, and followed her as if in a trance.

The pilot was inside, filing his flight plan, and told Mattie to get Sophia aboard the jet.

They were entering the jet’s cabin when Mattie’s cell phone rang again.

“Mattie Engel,” she answered.

“It’s Kat.”

Mattie heard weight in her friend’s voice. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

There was a long hesitation before Katharina replied, “Chris is missing.”

Sophia went to a high-backed leather chair and plopped into it. “I need a Coke or something,” she said. “Maybe some rum in
it.”

But Mattie ignored her and listened intently to her phone.

“He took personal leave early last week,” Katharina was saying. “He was supposed to be back the day before yesterday, but
he never checked in. He still hasn’t. I’ve tried his cell, the house, e-mail, text. Nothing.”

This wasn’t like Chris Schneider at all, Mattie agreed. He was a careful, methodical detective, and a stickler for following
the agency’s rules and procedures, which included checking in when you were supposed to.

“You try the chip?” Mattie asked at last.

The year before, Private employees around the world had been offered a small locator chip that could be embedded under the
skin of the upper back so they could be found in case of emergencies. Mattie had balked at the idea, thinking that if it was
misused it could turn totalitarian in nature.

But to her surprise, Schneider had agreed to the procedure.

“That’s why I was calling,” Katharina replied before hesitating again. “I’m lying in bed, couldn’t sleep after some voodoo
tea my mother made me drink. And I was thinking that you could authorize it.”

“I don’t have that authority, Kat,” Mattie said.

“You’re the closest to it, Mattie.”

“Not anymore I’m not. Are you ready to report Chris missing to Kripo?”

“I don’t know. I’m confused. You know…he could be off with someone.”

Mattie hesitated, and then sighed. “I can’t control that.”

“I’d hate to send in a rescue team in that sort of situation.”

“I can see your dilemma, but I can’t help you. Look, you’re going to have to call Jack Morgan to get authorization.”

Morgan owned Private and ran its famous Los Angeles office.

“I put in a call to him an hour ago. He hasn’t gotten back to me.”

Mattie chewed on her lip, then said, “I’m sure he’s okay. But if he hasn’t checked in by noon, say, or if Jack hasn’t called
in, we’ll activate the chip.”

“Unless you hear from me, I’ll be at the office at noon,” Katharina said.

“I’ll be there too,” Mattie promised, and hung up.

Outside, thunder boomed and through a porthole window she saw lightning split the sky. Rain began to drum on the roof of the
aircraft. Mattie looked over at Sophia, who was watching her with genuine concern.

“Who’s Chris?” Sophia asked softly.

Mattie swallowed at a sick taste seeping into her throat, and then replied, “Until six weeks ago, countess, he was my fiancé.”

AS DAWN APPROACHES, I find myself standing in a room with mirrors for walls and ceiling, and a big round bed with red sheets.

I am naked in this room of mirrors, stripped of all disguises save one—the reconstructed face a surgeon in the Ivory Coast
gave me twenty-three years ago.

I look at my face, this ultimate mask, and smile because no one would ever know that behind it is me, and because a rare beauty
has agreed to join me here in this room of reflection and pleasure.

Except for the snakeskin stiletto heels, the stunning brown woman shutting the door is naked too. She’s from Guadeloupe, or
so she says. Her name is Genevieve. Or so she says.

Whoever she
really
is, she smiles weakly as I set the canvas bag I carry on the bed.

“I have seen you around before,” she says in an uncertain French accent.

I don’t even blink. “Have you now?”

“I think.” She looks at my case and tenses. “What’s in there?”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s something rare and beautiful.”

She nods, but there’s no conviction in the gesture.

“You seem concerned,” I say.

She rubs her hands together. “Just nerves. One of my friends here, Ilse? She disappeared last week. You might have seen her.
A spinner? German?”

I wave my hand dismissively. “I don’t remember names, my dear. They’re artificial. Made up. I mean, do you use your real name
here, Genevieve?”

She hesitates, but then shakes her head.

“There you go now,” I say in a teasing, friendly manner. “It’s all a fantasy. You can be whatever person you want to be. Or
anything you want to be. I am comfortable with that. Are you?”

Her eyes shift, pause, and then she nods the tiniest of nods.

“Good,” I say, but part of me feels a twinge of anxiety. Did she see me with Ilse? No. That’s impossible. I’m certain we were
alone at all times.

And so I open the bag, revealing a primitive ivory and black leather mask crafted as a leering monster. The stain and lacquer
finish is cracked with time, and burnished in places. But the lips have retained their deep henna color. So have the areas
around the slits cut for the wearer’s eyes.

“A Chokwe tribesman in the Congo made it a hundred years ago,” I tell Genevieve. “It’s very rare. It cost me a small fortune.”

I put the mask on, hooking the hemp straps that hold it to my face so I can see clearly through the eye slits.

The mask smells of Africa, of moldering wood and nutmeg and roasting peppers. My breath echoes inside the mask, slow and languid,
like a leopard contemplating prey.

I gesture for Genevieve to lie down on her back on the bed. She’s staring at me, and at my mask, and there’s enough fear in
her eyes that I feel myself stir and harden.

That, my friends, is just perfect. Her mind is playing games, inventing scenarios far worse than what I have in mind for a
late, late-night delight.

Isn’t it interesting how that works, that the mere suggestion of threat stirs the darkest regions of the mind?

Sensing her fear, indeed feeding on it, I kneel next to Genevieve, caressing her soft cocoa breasts, and then slide my fingers
into her bare mystery, all the time glancing around at the mirrors that surround me, admiring my newest mask from an array
of perspectives.

I am not a young man, but I tell you one and all that my manhood stands like a spear when Genevieve begins to writhe under
my insistent touch. It’s an anxious writhing, and that only fuels me more until it’s simply impossible to keep my desires
at bay any longer.

Pulling her around and throwing back her legs, I poise to enter her, my hips cocked. The breath of the beast I’m becoming
rasps from my throat in sharp, cutting bursts.

Genevieve looks up, clearly frightened by the monster crouched above her, which only excites me more.

“What is your name,
chéri?
” she asks in a quivering voice. “What should I call you while we have sex?”

“Me?” I say, and then thrust savagely into her. “I am the Invisible Man.”

PRIVATE BERLIN OCCUPIED the penthouse suite atop a green glass and exposed-steel Bauhaus-style building on the south side of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin’s
Mitte district.

Clutching a cup of strong coffee, increasingly worried about her ex-fiancé, and still groggy after less than five hours of
sleep, Mattie Engel stepped out of the elevator into the agency’s lobby at a little before noon.

Three days late was not like Chris at all, she thought for what seemed the hundredth time.

Unless he went off with someone.

To Greece. Or to Portugal.

Like we did when we first fell in love.

Private Berlin’s lobby featured polished steel sculptures that depicted milestones in the history of cryptography. She passed
one of an Enigma machine, and another that included the death mask of Blaise de Vigenère, the sixteenth-century French secret
code genius, whose blank eyes seemed to follow her as she crossed to a retina scan on a black pedestal next to pneumatic doors
made of bulletproof glass.

Before she could look into the scanner, Katharina Doruk appeared on the screen above the doors. Olive-skinned with long, wild
ringlets of hair, Katharina was one of the most exotically beautiful women Mattie had ever known. She was also one of the
toughest—a second-generation Turkish-German who’d grown up in Wedding, a rugged immigrant neighborhood, and the only daughter
among six sons.

Katharina peered through her reading glasses. “We’re in the briefing room.”

“Any word?” Mattie asked.

“No, but we’ve got a video conference with Jack in five minutes.”

Mattie tried to suppress the anxiety that firmly took root in her after the screen went dark. She pressed her right eye to
the scan, seeing a soft blue light pass left to right. The glass doors opened with a hydraulic sigh.

Mattie trudged down a hallway that overlooked a long, linear park where the ground had been shaped into two huge triangles,
one facing west and the other east.

Until the fall of the communist German Democratic Republic, or GDR, the park had been an infamous stretch of the Berlin Wall’s
no-man’s-land, a garishly lit, wide, and sandy stretch between the inner and outer cement barriers and the barbed wire and
gun towers that had divided the city in two back in 1961.

Ordinarily, Mattie would have paused to look down at the park because, no matter what her mood, it usually made her feel better.
The park represented a terrible time in her family’s life, and in her city’s life.

But it was also a powerful symbol of new beginnings, and she believed in new beginnings. New beginnings were the only way
to survive.

That morning, however, Mattie could not get herself to look at the park. Deep in her gut, no matter how much she tried to
quash it, she feared that Chris’s disappearance hinted at the end of something.

But I wanted us to stop, didn’t I? Didn’t I?

Before Mattie could drown in those questions she ducked into an amphitheater with rising tiers of desks that faced a curved
wall of screens glowing flat blue, waiting for a feed.

Katharina sat at a desk on the highest tier beside a man who looked like an aging hippie, with long silver hair, round wire-rimmed
glasses, a scruffy beard, and a Grateful Dead tie-dye sweatshirt.

His name was Ernst Gabriel, Dr. Ernst Gabriel, and he was the smartest person Mattie had ever known, a polymath with five
advanced degrees, including an MD, a PhD in computer science, and master’s degrees in physics and cultural anthropology.

Gabriel was also a forensics expert and ran Private Berlin’s investigative support system. He’d be the one turning on the
tracking system and operating it.

Mattie was climbing the stairs toward Gabriel and Katharina when a tall, muscular, bald man in his late thirties appeared
behind them. Tom Burkhart was Private Berlin’s newest hire. Until recently he’d been a top operator with GSG 9, Germany’s
elite counterterror unit. He usually ran security details.

Mattie frowned, wondering why Katharina had called him in.

“Hi, Burkhart, Doc,” Mattie said, before kissing Katharina on both cheeks.

She took a seat between Burkhart and Gabriel just as the big screen at the front of the amphitheater blinked and then lit
up with the handsome and very tanned face of Jack Morgan, owner and president of Private.

Morgan peered at them and said, “I just got in. I was sailing over from Catalina and don’t have coverage out there. Is he
still missing?”

“He is, Jack, going on three days now,” Katharina replied in English. “I’d like permission to activate his chip.”

Morgan winced slightly. “The chip? You’re sure? I wouldn’t want to invade his privacy unnecessarily.” His eyes shifted. “Mattie?
What do you think? Shouldn’t this be your call?”

Mattie flushed. “Jack, uh, I don’t know if you heard, but we broke off the engagement.”

Morgan looked greatly surprised. “I didn’t. I’m sorry. When?”

“Six weeks ago,” she said. “So it’s entirely your call, Jack.”

Morgan digested that, and then said, “Gabriel, have you had a chance to look at his credit card receipts? His cell phone records?”

“I just got in, myself, but I did manage a quick search,” Gabriel replied. “I’ve got a steady trail of purchases in and around
Berlin and Frankfurt, all on his Private card, until this past Thursday evening. And then nothing. And I’ve got a long list
of phone calls that ended about the same time. Nothing since. I haven’t dug into the particulars yet.”

Morgan put his hands in a prayer pose. “What was he working on?”