State of the Union (25 page)

“There’s got to be something,” replied Scot. “Keep looking.”

“There isn’t anything.”

“So you’re telling me the man who was shooting at us just disappeared? I don’t buy it.”

“Well if we don’t get out of here soon, we’re both going to
buy
it.”

DeWolfe was right. Harvath bent down, with his hands upon his knees, to get a clean breath of oxygen and that’s when he saw it. Bathed in the brilliant beam of his flashlight was the almost imperceptible outline of a small trap door. Harvath glanced around at the heavy displaced furniture and understood why the shooter had been so frantically moving things around.
He was trying to find this trapdoor.

Harvath waved DeWolfe over and silently instructed him to lift the door, while he readied his weapon. When the communications expert sprung the hatch, Scot swung his pistol and flashlight back and forth across the small opening, but nothing was there. Carefully, Harvath slid into the crawlspace with his H&K ready to take out anything that moved. The entire space looked like some sort of labyrinth in miniature. As Harvath wriggled his way along, he found side passages on the left and right, branching off at regular intervals, just like the bedrooms on the second and third floors.

Following one of the junctures off to his right, Harvath’s suspicions about the purpose of the crawl space was confirmed when five feet in, he found a large monocle attached to a braided cable mounted to the floor in front of him. Harvath peered into the monocle and was granted a perfect, albeit relatively dark view of the bedroom beneath. Apparently, Madame Putzkammer was not above spying on her customers.

As Harvath looked around at the relatively outdated, yet still highly effective surveillance equipment, he realized that the King George was not only set up to take still pictures of their customers in action, but audio and video as well. And from the looks of it, Frau Putzkammer had probably been up to it for a very long time.

“Harvath!” yelled DeWolfe from the main passage behind him. “I think I found the Madame.”

Harvath crawled back out of his side tunnel and backtracked to DeWolfe. Inside one of the other side tunnels was the body of a woman shot once in the head. It had to be Nixie’s mother. The resemblance was unmistakable.

“What do you want to do with her?” asked DeWolfe.

“There’s nothing we can do,” replied Harvath. “The tunnels are too tight to drag her with us.” After turning around, he began leading the way forward again. Thirty feet later, the choking smell of smoke mingled with ripples of something else—
fresh air
.

The main passageway opened up onto a large ventilation shaft that looked to run the full height of the building. Glancing up, Harvath could see the night sky between the blades of the slowly oscillating fan. He climbed into the shaft, followed by DeWolfe and they carefully made their way up and out onto the roof.

Looking over the intricately molded parapet onto the street below, Harvath could see the pile of mattresses that had been used to evacuate the building’s occupants. A crowd of onlookers had formed, and knowing Herman the way he did, Scot expected he had helped the wounded as best he could and then had faded a safe distance away from the scene. No doubt he was somewhere nearby, trying to ascertain his fate as well as DeWolfe’s.

By the close proximity of the other buildings, it wasn’t hard to figure out the route their attacker had taken in his escape. Harvath couldn’t ignore the dull but insistent throbbing deep in the pit of his stomach. It was telling him the name of the person who had attacked them, but he didn’t want to believe it. It was all too impossible. Or was it?

T
hree blocks away, Helmut Draegar stumbled into his newly rented Volkswagen, closed the door, and started the engine so he could get the heat going.
How could I have been so stupid?
he asked himself as he unbuttoned his shirt to look at the wound. Thankfully, the bullet had only nicked the upper part of his left arm, just below the shoulder. It hadn’t entered. Yes, the wound was bleeding, but the bleeding would eventually stop. There was always the chance of infection, as with any bullet wound, but that too was easily handled. He would drive until he found one of Berlin’s all-night pharmacies where he could purchase some antibiotics. At this point, an infection was the least of his concerns.

The triage of his injuries complete, Draegar fashioned a makeshift bandage around his arm and pulled away from the curb, his mind a tempest of self-loathing over the string of failures he ultimately could blame on no one other than himself.

In the beginning, Überhof had seemed to Draegar an inspired choice. During the Cold War, Überhof had been based in East Berlin and attached to one of the Soviets’ highly secretive Spetsnaz details. The Spetsnaz were Russian Special Forces units charged with wreaking maximum havoc upon the enemy in the days just prior to a war by destroying infrastructure, command and control centers, and weapons systems, as well as assassinating or snatching high ranking military and diplomatic officials. When the East Berlin team wasn’t training, they often took “freelance” jobs working for the KGB, or in Überhof’s case, the
Ministerium für Statessicherheit
.

It was while working for the Stasi that Überhof had first come to Helmut Draegar’s attention. The man was an exceptional operative, and on assignment after assignment had never let Draegar down. In fact, it was Überhof who had saved Draegar’s life.

Even though it was fifteen years ago when one of Draegar’s former contacts had popped up, claiming to have “valuable” information for him, it still felt like yesterday. Because Draegar had been suspicious, they chose to meet at the remains of an old monastery on the outskirts of the city. It was raining that night and there were a million other places Draegar would have rather been, but again, his contact had always been reliable and had always been able to get his hands on extremely sensitive material. If nothing else, Draegar at least needed to see what he had.

When the man arrived, he led Draegar deep into the ruined church where he claimed to have hidden a very special package. Draegar was reluctant, but proceeded nevertheless and followed the man down a set of worn stone steps into a rotted and moldy crypt. When Draegar ducked beneath the mortised archway and entered the decayed undercroft, he knew that his premonition had been correct. It was an ambush. Standing in the center of the burial chamber, with his gun pointed at him, was Gary Lawlor.

Draegar knew why he was there. He had killed Lawlor’s wife, and the man had come for revenge. There was no use even asking his would-be executioner how he had uncovered him as the driver in the hit and run. Someone had given him up; who, though, he had no idea. He turned to look at his once reliable contact, but the man refused to look him in the eye. There were no allegiances when it came to the information trade. Lawlor handed the man an envelope and after checking its contents, the man turned and disappeared up the crumbling crypt stairs.

Draegar did not even attempt to beg for his life. He may have entered the monastery alone, but he did so wearing a wire. He chose his words carefully, deliberately, conveying his exact position and situation in such a way that Lawlor would not take notice, but his team would. Hearing the exchange, it was only a matter of time before his backup would arrive.

What Draegar didn’t know was that the thick walls of the underground burial vault were impeding the signal from his wireless transmitter. That was precisely why Lawlor had chosen it. He had thought that Draegar might bring backup, but had given the professional operative credit enough to know that he would keep them out of sight. The only way he would have been able to communicate with them was via radio. By obstructing his transmission, Gary was given enough time to do what he had to do—and he didn’t waste a single minute of it.

After instructing Draegar to remove his gun, drop it on the ground, and kick it over to him, Lawlor ordered him to strip. That was when he found the wire. There was no time to go through Draegar’s pockets, and Lawlor didn’t want to risk frisking him. Almost instantly, Draegar began shaking from the cold.

Gary steered him to the far end of the vault, past door after rusted ancient iron door protecting small burial alcoves that had long since been looted, to a stone wall beneath a large iron ring where he made him sit. Though Lawlor had tested the ring to make sure it absolutely could not be pulled loose, he had underestimated the bulk of his prisoner’s thick arms and shoulders. It would be impossible to run the handcuffs through the ring and secure both of the man’s wrists. He’d only be able to secure one. With time running out, Gary decided to improvise.

Throwing the handcuffs to Draegar, he instructed the man to attach one of the bracelets to his left wrist and then hold his left arm above his head.

“Fuck you. Just shoot me and get it over with,” Draegar had responded.

Lawlor was tempted, but it wasn’t the type of ending he had envisioned. Carefully, he approached and with his pistol cocked and pressed against Draegar’s forehead, he shackled the man’s left wrist and attached it to the iron ring. Though he would have liked nothing more than to pistol whip his wife’s killer, Lawlor restrained himself. He didn’t want to risk Draegar losing consciousness. He needed him awake for the revenge he had planned.

With his free hand, Lawlor removed a roll of duct tape from his coat and used his teeth to unravel a long section, which he wrapped several times tightly around the Draegar’s mouth, completely gagging him.

His prisoner now secure, Gary set his pistol down on a nearby sarcophagus and picked up a large piece of dislodged masonry. It was about the size of a concrete cinder block and he brought it down in one crushing blow upon Draegar’s left ankle. The Stasi agent howled in pain as his bones splintered and popped, but his cries were effectively muffled by the layers of duct tape.

Though he would have loved to have savored the moment further, Lawlor had no time. He quickly picked the block back up and repeated the hobbling treatment on Draegar’s right side. There was no way the man could stand at this point, so escape was futile. All he could do was watch the last minutes of his life, quite literally tick away until he died.

“My wife,” said Gary, as he emptied the contents of three duffle bags and assembled them in piles just out of Draegar’s reach, “had no idea her life was about to end. I guess in that respect, she was fortunate. You, on the other hand, are not going to be granted that sort of mercy.”

Draegar stared at the brick sized parcels wrapped in what looked like brown wax paper and knew exactly what they were—cakes of C4.
Where the fuck is the backup team? Did Lawlor actually manage to take them out?
Draegar began to panic.

Gary was pleased to see the look of fear in the man’s eyes. He’d been prepared for his wife’s killer to maintain an icy calm all the way to the end and not grant him any added satisfaction. This sudden change in his demeanor was a pleasant bonus.

Lawlor rigged the charges and in front of each neat little stack of plastique placed glass jars of road tacks, essentially overgrown children’s jacks with their points filed down into razor-sharp spikes. Though the explosion alone was enough to kill the man, Gary wanted to add a little something extra for Draegar. Hopefully, the thought of the shrapnel tearing through his body would add another layer to the man’s fear.

His work complete, Lawlor activated the timer and placed a large, red LED display on top of one of the piles so Draegar could watch the last minutes and seconds of his life melt away.

Gary had run through his mind a million times what he was going to say at this moment, but as he retrieved his gun from the sarcophagus and turned to speak, somehow what he had prepared didn’t seem to matter anymore. He could have laughed, he could have simply smiled, but instead he cast one last look at the man who had killed his wife and his eyes said it all—
Now it’s your turn
. And with that, he turned and left the burial chamber.

For the first time in his life, despite all his intense training, Helmut Draegar was actually terrified. His restraints wouldn’t give, the LED readout was ticking down, and had he not seen the rusted iron hinge on the door of the alcove behind him, he didn’t know what he would have done. Knowing that the hinge would not be sharp enough to cut through bone, he first had to break his own wrist. Using a small stone about the size of a baseball, he snapped the radius, then the ulna of his shackled left wrist, and then with a primitive tourniquet in place, began the unthinkable.

Überhof, concerned with the prolonged radio silence, was the first of the backup team to break cover and investigate. He found Draegar, who had dragged himself up from the crypt, missing a hand, bleeding profusely and very near death on the rain-soaked ground of what was once the monastery’s church. He was able to get Draegar away from the ruins just as the piles of plastic explosive detonated in the undercroft and destroyed what remained of the old religious structure.

Fifteen years later, driving the streets of unified Berlin in search of an all-night pharmacy, it was still hard for Draegar to relive that night. The Russians had given him sanctuary in the days and years after the event. They had made sure East German police reported finding a horribly charred body in the rubble and that it was leaked to intelligence services that one of the Stasi’s best operatives had met with foul play.

After he had recovered, the Russians had used Draegar and his exceptional skills to train not only their agents, but also the espionage agents of governments they were friendly with. Until recent events had necessitated his evacuation, he had been in Iraq, training Iraqi intelligence officers and helping them to get visas so they could travel to western countries. He had also been providing despotic leaders in the region with lists of assassins that could facilitate “hits” for them in the West, as well as introductions to Russian companies willing to provide sensitive, banned military equipment such as satellite jamming systems intended to interfere with U.S. weapons.

As far as the world was concerned, Helmut Draegar was dead. And how did he thank his benefactors for giving him a renewed chance at life? He did it by screwing up one of the most important operations they had ever undertaken. Draegar had failed to get the information he needed from Gary Lawlor, which in turn had forced General Stavropol to come to Berlin. Überhof, as good as he once was, was Draegar’s choice, but he had not only missed his opportunity to take out the men who had appeared at the Goltzstrasse apartment, he had allowed himself to be followed to the
Geisterbahnhöfe
, compromising all of them, and getting himself killed in the process. Not only did they lose Gary Lawlor, and Draegar’s long-awaited opportunity for revenge, but in the fury of the takedown, Stavropol, who had come to Berlin to aid in the interrogation, had dropped his most prized possession, a specially engraved pistol given to him by the Russian High Command—something he valued above all else.

Stavropol was incredibly angry and blamed Draegar. Berlin was his operation after all, but he had been given a chance to redeem himself and now he had blown that. Fearing the security he assumed had been established at the hospital, Draegar decided to follow Agent Scot Harvath. When the young American operative, whom Stavropol had filled him in on, had driven to the King George, Draegar knew that the Americans had a better handle on the situation than any of them had expected. If you were going to unravel a series of threads, it made sense to begin where the first one started, but the question still remained,
what exactly was Harvath doing there
? How had he discovered the place where their entire plan had been hatched?

A small-time, petty blackmailer, Gerda Putzkammer had no idea that twenty years ago Draegar and his men had not only discovered where she had hidden the information she collected on her customers, but that many nights they were creeping through the crawlspaces themselves collecting as much intelligence as possible from the higher profile clientele that patronized the King George.

The smartest move of all was when one of Draegar’s men had suggested bugging Putzkammer’s penthouse apartment. For the longest time, they went without uncovering anything of value, but finally, their efforts yielded a particularly precious gem—an American operative by the name of John Parker.

While Parker never discussed anything in outright detail, the things he did say, along with surveillance of other team members proved extremely helpful in putting together the big picture. In fact, it was Heide Lawlor’s suspicions of her own husband that were the icing on the cake. Listening in on Heide and her caseworker provided the details the Russians needed. Had the woman not been so insistent to her caseworker that her husband was up to something, there might not have been such a need to kill her. But at the rate she was going, she was going to eventually blow her husband’s operation and the Russians couldn’t tolerate that. They had come too far. It was a plum too ripe to let spoil. Heide had to be removed and it had to look like it was done for other reasons. With her out of the picture, the Dark Night operation would be allowed to proceed and they would be able to keep their eye on it.

But why now was this Scot Harvath returning to the King George? What exactly was he looking for? Though Draegar didn’t get a chance to interrogate the man himself, hopefully by burning the building, he had prevented Harvath from getting whatever it was he was after.

It would have to be good enough. Berlin wasn’t safe for Draegar anymore. He needed to get back to Russia.