Tom Clancy Duty and Honor (20 page)

The interior was dark save for a thin strip of sunlight coming through the blackout curtains. Jack turned on his
cell phone’s camera flash and panned it across the ten-by-fourteen-foot room. Schrader’s living space was spartan, with a cot and sleeping bag against one wall, a milk crate containing a neatly folded stack of clothes, a writing desk beneath the window, a kitchenette, and a bathroom that consisted of a sink and a toilet.

The place reminded Jack of enlisted bachelor quarters on a military base. Schrader was on the road a lot, Jack guessed, and didn’t make enough money to afford a better place. Wouldn’t an employee of Jürgen Rostock’s be paid better? Maybe Schrader had been freelance, his mission to kill Jack an audition of sorts?

Jack walked to the curtains, closed them fully, then told Effrem to flip the light switch. An overhead fluorescent bulb flickered to life.

Jack said, “I take it the place Schrader stayed in Zurich was a step up?”

“Night and day,” replied Effrem. “Champagne versus Merkel Punch. Okay, so do we toss the place?” He said this with a trace of glee in his voice.

Jack pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, passed them to Effrem, then put on his own pair. “Let’s start with drawers. You take the kitchen. Look for mail, notebooks, scraps of paper . . . anything with writing on it. Try to leave everything as you found it. Watch out for booby traps.”

“Pardon me?”

“Kidding.”

While Effrem started in the kitchen, Jack searched the cot, then sorted through the clothes in the milk crate before checking the desk drawers. All were empty. This place was less an apartment and more a bivouac.

“Got something,” Effrem called. He was on his hands and knees, half his torso inside the under-sink cabinet. “Looks like a planner or something. It’s jammed between the drainpipe and the basin.”

“Check for trip wires, then pull it out,” Jack said.

“Funny.”

Head still in the cabinet, Effrem reached back and handed Jack the black leatherette notebook. On its cover in fake gold leaf letters was “2016.” Jack paged through it. Many of the pages showed curt handwritten notations. He flipped ahead to the previous two weeks and his eye caught an entry: “U.S./VA.”

United States, Virginia.

He checked the current day and found nothing, then paged ahead. An entry on the following day read “S.M./Friedenstr. 8/2100.”

Effrem, having climbed out of the cabinet, was standing at Jack’s shoulder. He said, “‘Friedenstr.’ could be Friedenstrasse, the first number a building number. As for the other number—”

“Military time,” Jack replied.

S.M.

Stephan Möller?

—

E
ffrem had Jack head in the general direction of their hotel, then directed him south onto Highway 9, parallel to the Isar River, into the Schwabing district. They were in an upscale part of Munich now, near the Englischer Garten, a 910-acre swath of lush forest, nature trails, pavilions, and outdoor eateries that abutted the river’s west bank. Jack had spent his fair share of time here too, mostly on morning runs. The Englischer Garten was Munich’s version of New York’s Central Park, but much larger. An oasis in an already green city. Having seen the kind of houses that dominated this area of Schwabing, Jack doubted there was a sub-million-dollar house within a quarter-mile of the Englischer Garten’s border.

“Your guy lives here?” Jack asked.

“What were you expecting?” replied Effrem.

Jack realized his vision of private hackers was stereotypical: pasty-faced introverts in dark basements surrounded by a crescent of glowing computer monitors. “Not this, I guess.”

“Mitch has done well for himself. He’s a transplant, an expat American. Used to work in IT at a Fortune 500. He retired a few years ago.”

“And he does what now?” asked Jack. “Helps budding journalists?”

“Budding journalists with famous mothers,” Effrem replied. “Actually, Mitch was the one and only contact she gave me when I graduated.”

That said a lot, Jack decided, given how many sources Marie Likkel had probably accrued over her career.

“You trust him?” asked Jack.

“She did. He never let her down.”

—

M
itch’s house wasn’t adjacent to the Englischer Garten but butted up against Schwabinger Bach, the creek that forms the park’s western edge.

Jack pulled down the long tree-lined driveway until it opened into a clearing of brown and tan paving stones. The house itself was a whitewashed two-story box with an all-glass vaulted gambrel roof. A large Japanese maple shaded the front yard. Jack parked beside the walkway, got out, and followed Effrem to the front door, a chunk of wood bracketed by vertical glass slits. Effrem pushed the buzzer.

The door swung open, revealing a man in his late forties in black gym shorts and a light blue polo shirt. His face was very tan. “In, in,” he said, then turned and walked away.

Effrem asked, “Did we wake you?”

“No, my bladder did. I heard your voice mail and decided to ignore it. No offense, Effrem’s friend, whoever you are. I was up late playing cyber tag with some idiot in Belarus.”

“None taken,” said Jack.

The interior of Mitch’s house was what Jack had expected: white walls, white furniture, light wood floors, and a second floor looking down on the main level. They followed Mitch into a kitchen full of white appliances. Jack’s eyes began to ache.

“Anyone care for a virgin mimosa?” Mitch asked.

“Isn’t that just orange juice?” Effrem said.

“Ding, ding. Momma Likkel didn’t raise no dummy. Seriously, though, help yourself. Coffee, orange juice, bagels, whatever strikes you. So, do you have a name?” he asked Jack.

“Yes.”

When it was clear Jack was going to add nothing further, Mitch nodded thoughtfully. “Works for me. What can I do for you guys?”

Effrem said, “A few e-mail headers and a dicey-looking hyperlink.”

“Roger. Send it to me: [email protected].”

Jack got on his cell phone and forwarded Mitch a Dropbox link containing the e-mail headers from Belinda and the suspicious link Jack had lifted from Peter Hahn’s computer. Mitch walked over to a laptop sitting on the counter, checked his e-mail, clicked on Jack’s link. He studied the material,
then said, “Okay, well, nothing suspicious about these headers. Let’s have a look at the link. Interesting.”

From there Mitch fell into a stream-of-consciousness conversation with himself that sounded only vaguely like English to Jack:

“Have to hide my IP . . . Let’s go with a proxy from Ecuador. Boot up the VM, get you sandboxed . . . Let’s see how good you are. Oh, trace route, how I love you . . .”

After another two minutes of this Mitch straightened up and said, “So, Effrem’s friend, did you click on this link?”

“No.”

“Smart. I’ve got good news and bad news. Good news is I can do something with this. Bad news is it’s going to take a few hours, maybe the day. I’ll call
you.”

MUNICH, GERMANY

M
itch called Effrem’s cell phone mid-morning the next day. Effrem put him on speaker. “Is Mr. X there, too?” asked Mitch.

“I’m here,” Jack replied.

“Okay, so the computer you got this hyperlink from . . . Did you happen to check the Web browser history? Anything odd about it?”

“You could say that.”

“I figured. You’re right. The site it links to is down, but I was able to root out some interesting stuff. This is malware—a bot, actually—designed to insert Web history into the target computer. It’s also designed to sign up the user at some discussion forums, do some troll posting, and so forth.”

“What kind of forums?”

“Political crap, conspiracy stuff.”

This matched what Jack had seen on Hahn’s computer. “Anything else?” he asked. “Was it monitoring him?”

“Nope,” said Mitch. “Just playing grab-ass with his browser history. Cleverly designed bot, too.”

Effrem asked, “Any idea who created it?”

“I know exactly who created it. All the servers he used were anagrams for
Game of Thrones
characters: storkbarb, hotboarbanterer, tinylionsranter.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Nope. This guy’s good, but everybody’s got their peccadilloes. This is his.”

“What’s his name and where can we find him?” Jack asked.

“The name part is easy,” Mitch replied. “Gerhard Klugmann. As for where, that’s a bit trickier. Gerhard ain’t exactly somebody you Google. I can do some digging, but he’s skittish. If I don’t pin him down without him realizing it, he’ll pull up stakes and move on.”

“Digitally or physically?” asked Effrem.

“Both, maybe. Guys like him can work anywhere.”

“Find him,” Jack ordered.

—

A
fter running a few errands, they spent the afternoon waiting in Jack’s room at the Hotel München Palace. Waiting for a call from Mitch; waiting for a call from Belinda;
waiting for a call from one of Jack’s own contacts, a gun guy he had met a year earlier during a routine mission for The Campus. Given the penalties for a foreigner carrying a weapon on German soil, Jack had wanted to avoid doing so, but Effrem’s search for 8 Friedenstrasse led to something called Kultfabrik. In Jack’s eyes, urban ambush points didn’t come any better.

A popular hangout that catered to what one website described as Munich’s “bacchanalian night people,” Kultfabrik was a noodle factory turned warren of pubs, discos, a skate park, gambling pavilions, game arcades, and flea markets. The twenty-acre complex was in an industrial area of Munich just east of the Ostbahnhof rail complex. Kultfabrik was closed, Effrem told him, and in the middle of conversion to Werksviertel, an office park/cultural center/apartment complex. In short, Kultfabrik was a construction zone.

This alone put Jack on guard, but in perusing Eric Schrader’s day planner, Effrem had discovered a disturbing discrepancy: Over the last four months Schrader had met with S.M.—Stephan Möller—six times in Munich. However, for three of these meetings Schrader hadn’t even been in the city, but rather in Lyon or Zurich. This left two possibilities: one, Schrader was bad with dates; or two, the day planner was a plant and they were being lured to Kultfabrik. By whom? The most obvious answer was Möller, but that meant either Möller had known about their pursuit of him
or he’d learned of their arrival in Munich and assumed they would find Schrader’s apartment.

—

A
t seven o’clock Jack’s gun guy called and the meeting was set: one hour, at the Ostbahnhof.

Jack called Belinda’s cell phone and got her voice mail. He left no message.

“Let’s go,” Jack told Effrem.

—

T
hey left moments later, Jack in his Citroën, Effrem in his recently rented Audi, and found a pair of parking spots just east of the Orleansplatz, a crescent-shaped public park across from the rail station.

With night falling, the lights of food vendors’ stalls were coming on, casting colorful stripes across the pathways and on through the trees. The afternoon crowds, made up mostly of parents and children, were thinning out and being slowly replaced by an early-twenties crowd of singles.

Jack stopped at one of the vendor stalls and got a small soda and a napkin, and he and Effrem sat down on a nearby bench. Jack gulped half of the soda, gave the rest to Effrem, then used the napkin to dry the cup’s interior before stuffing six hundred-euro notes inside and replacing the lid.

At seven-forty they crossed Orleansstrasse to the
Ostbahnhof, a wide, flat-fronted building just east of the rail hub. In the distance Jack could hear the rumble and screech of incoming and outgoing trains, accompanied by a woman’s voice over the station’s public address system. The station buzzed with commuters.

Once inside, they picked their way through the throngs to a coffee kiosk counter on the north side of the station. Jack’s contact—actually, Ding Chavez’s contact—a man he knew only as Freddy, spotted Jack and waved a rolled-up newspaper at him.

“Wait here,” Jack told Effrem, and walked over.

He and Freddy shook hands. “Who’s that?” Freddy asked in heavily accented English.

“My intern. How’ve you been?”

“
Ja
, good. I could not get exactly what you asked for, but close. They’re clean.” Freddy placed a brass key with a red plastic dongle on the counter. “Locker twenty-six.”

This had multiple meanings, Jack knew. The guns hadn’t been used in a crime, weren’t stolen, and weren’t traceable; the first two were easy enough to manage, but the third was trickier. Most likely Freddy simply meant the weapons weren’t traceable to him.

Freddy asked, “Anything else I can do for you?”

“Maybe. I’ll let you know.” Jack placed his soda cup on the counter before Freddy, then palmed the key. “How’re you set outside Munich?”

“I have a few friends. Depends on what kind of help you need,” replied Freddy.

“Thanks. See you.”

Jack walked away, nodded at Effrem to follow, then walked across the station to a bank of temporary lockers. He found number 26, inserted the key, removed the blue backpack inside, then left.