Without Options (17 page)

Now, just after ten p.m., Gustav sat in the main terminal at the Hauptbahnhof watching the big board click off arrivals and departures. When he finally saw the train he wanted coming into Berlin from Warsaw, Poland, he spoke softly into his mic to send his officers into action. Then he got up and with a casual gate went to the platform to wait. He saw Andreas on the far end of the track platform, making sure nobody would escape down that way. His other officers formed a barricade, their MP5s intimidating and ensuring everyone would stop and hand over their passports.

They’d gotten only a number on the passengers. No names. With over 150 onboard, it might take a while to check on all of them. But their men had a hand scanner, which would not only verify the identity of each passenger, it would also run the data into a computer inside the terminal and run a quick background check for any outstanding Interpol notices or even local warrants by law enforcement in their home countries. The process worked better than planned. Quick and efficient. However, they only found a few with traffic violations and one man wanted for rape in Warsaw, who his men took into custody. When each passenger was cleared, a sticker was slapped onto their passport.

Once all the passengers ran through their gauntlet, Andreas met Gustav on the platform.

“I was so sure we would find something,” Andreas said.

“We might have,” Gustav said, his eyes shifting toward the passengers who were now dispersing in all directions through the terminal.

“True. The RFID sticker in the passport was brilliant.”

“Well, that only works after the fact,” Gustav assured his partner. “It’s not like we can track all of them.”

“Why do you think the killer would be on this train tonight?”

While tracking mysterious murders in Europe, Andreas had come across the shooting death of an older man in Warsaw a day ago. That man had also been part of the old spy community, having worked for the Polish Foreign Intelligence Service. A check with German Intelligence confirmed that the Pole had also worked for quite some time in Berlin during the height of the Cold War.

Gustav wasn’t entirely sure of his answer, but he had a big hunch. “The timing seems right, Andreas. But we don’t know anything for sure. We’re flying blind here.”

“You’re right, boss. And we don’t know if the shooter just passed through here. We might assume the Warsaw killer would have a clean record.”

“Absolutely. It would help, though, if we could break into the website. Any word on how long that will take?”

Andreas shoved his hands into his pockets and said, “No, sir. We’re not even sure of the city where it’s hosted. They’re trying. I have a couple programmers working all night to break it.”

“Good.”

“Now what?”

Gustav thought about the rest of his evening and smiled ever so slightly.

“You have plans with a lady friend,” Andreas stated.

“Maybe. There’s nothing else we can do until morning when the next train from Warsaw comes in. You should go home to your wife.”

“Sounds like a plan. I’ll check on our computer friends before I go to bed and call you if they’ve found anything.”

Gustav checked his watch. “Give me a few hours of privacy.”

Andreas nodded and then left.

Shaking his head with wonder, Gustav wandered off to his car. It took him thirty minutes to drive from the main train terminal to his apartment on the west side of Berlin, a few blocks from the old Olympic stadium and just a block from the Spree River. He locked his car and walked with a spring in his step toward his row house apartment. He lived on the second story of the three story brick building, his apartment with a view of the Spree and a large park.

When he got to his door, he hesitated a moment, digging in his pocket for the keys. Something wasn’t right about this whole case, he thought. The deaths were quickly drifting to a realm that was not his.

Suddenly the door opened and the young woman stood before him in the silk robe he’d bought her for her birthday last month. Her blonde hair shot straight down over her shoulders. Her cheek bones became more pronounced when she smiled without showing him her imperfect teeth, which bothered her. Regardless, she was a stunning beauty. Her perfect body made up for any superficial imperfections, and might make a gay man question his decision to swing that way.

She opened her robe and exposed that nude, wondrous body to him. “I was hoping you would come soon.”

Gustav moved past her and closed and locked the door behind them. “Oh, I will.” Seeing her like that had brought a great rise to his evening.

They hurried to the bedroom and he got out of his clothes like they were on fire. The first time he’d met Ilka six months ago, she was working for a high-end call service out of a high-rise posh hotel near Tempelhof. Her “client” had died from an aortic aneurysm and Gustav was there to verify there was no foul play. Seeing Ilka, he guessed immediately that she could have induced a heart attack in a marathon runner. She’d taken to Gustav after that for unknown reasons to him, and he’d taken to her for two reasons—one was the obvious physical attraction, and the other out of some guilty Catholic pattern of possible redemption. He’d done the same thing with Kora in Munich, and she was now out of the business and owned a dress shop in Berchtesgaden. One success out of a million crashed and failed attempts.

They made quick and fast love the first time, both knowing they’d slow down and do it right the second time. After, they lay together in bed, the quiet overwhelmingly chaotic for Gustav. He couldn’t get his mind off the case. Couldn’t understand the significance of the murders in other parts of Europe, or how those might relate to his dead men in the Spree River.

“Where are you?” Ilka asked in German with a Russian accent. “If you think of dead corpses all the time, I’m amazed you can become hard at all.”

“I’m sorry. It’s not so much the dead bodies. It’s the motive behind them.” He couldn’t say any more, but he wanted to open up with her. Confide in her completely. Yet, it was too soon for that.

“Let’s make a deal,” she said, her lips kissing his chest and then her eyes wandering up to his. “When we are together you think only of me. When we are apart, you also only think of me.” She tried not to smile.

“That sounds fair.” He reached down between her legs and felt her moistness. This was why he’d given her his apartment key in the first place. Time to move a lot slower this time. Clear the mind and live for now. There was time to save Ilka later.

●

Anton Zukov had followed the Pole from the main terminal Hauptbahnhof, watching the hapless Polizei try their best to sift through all the passengers on the train from Poland. He had smiled when he saw his contact make it through that checkpoint undiscovered. But this Pole was a little smarter than the last man. He had agreed to meet only at a well-lit location along one of Berlin’s busiest streets a few blocks from the city’s landmark, the Brandenburg Gate. Yet, humans could only be so smart, especially when one million Euros came into play. Zukov let the man get to the meeting site first and made him wait, watching the Pole from a distance become more and more nervous as the clock clicked away, probably thinking he had killed a man with no payout.

Now, Zukov got out of his car and casually walked up the sidewalk, cars passing by faster than one would expect. At this time of night on a weekday the roads here would be mostly filled with those people shifting from late dinners at restaurants to the bars. A bus cruised toward him but kept on going. Zukov had set up the meet on this side of the road at this particular location for a reason—there were no bus stops or normal taxi stops along this stretch of the busy Unter Den Linden that lead to Pariser Platz, the pedestrian zone leading to the Brandenburg Gate. The road used to drive right through the gate, but it had been closed off with the Berlin Wall for some thirty years, opened for a short while in the nineties and turned into the tourist trap it was today at that time.

Making his way toward his contact, Zukov ran through his mind how this meeting should go. He could mess with the man’s mind for a while, make him think he was with the Polizei or something else. But that would be cruel. No, stick with the plan. He wasn’t moving as a man of strength and youth. Instead, he had a cane and make-up allowing him to appear like an old man out on an evening stroll. A slow walk. Painfully slow. Stopping from time to time as if catching his breath. His only constant was his ubiquitous black watch cap covering his nearly hairless skull.

As he approached, he saw the closest pedestrian was more than a block away, heading toward the gate. He could hear nobody behind him.

The man was nervous, it was plain to see, his feet shuffling about as his head moved on a swivel. Okay, maybe he wasn’t as smart as Zukov initially thought.

Closing in on the man, Zukov kept his head lowered and his body hunched over. Just a little closer. Nobody noticed the elderly. They were only one step higher on the food chain from the homeless, who people concerned themselves with more because they were normally younger and might just be crazy.

Ten feet now and the Pole wasn’t even looking at him.

Zukov thought again about changing his plan. No. Don’t deviate, he implored himself. Discipline.

He was within range now, that distance close enough for concern under normal circumstances.

Five feet.

With one swift movement, he lifted his cane as if to reach out for another step, pushed a button and the double-edged blade snapped from the bottom, which he swiftly thrust up into the Pole’s chest, hitting solidly above the sternum. He twisted the cane in a circular motion and shoved with all his might, sending the man onto his back into the grass along the edge of the sidewalk.

Pushing the button again, the blade returned inside the cane and Zukov continued walking as if nothing had happened. From the corner of his eye he saw the stunned expression on the Pole’s face for a fleeting moment.

His own eyes scanning now, Zukov could see a couple across the street. But they hadn’t reacted to the man falling. He turned down the next street and picked up his pace. A few minutes later he got back to his car and took off his old man make-up, removing the gray beard and bushy eyebrows. Driving away at the speed limit, he still didn’t hear any Polizei sirens. For a while he had been concerned that this could have been too risky. But people were easy. They didn’t expect an old man to kill them. Didn’t think a man with a broken arm would shoot them with the cast. And over the years he had perfected dozens of ways to kill. Not once had he even been close to getting caught. He laughed at that thought. Well, there had been that one time in the Alps a few months ago. But that was different. A direct approach. Maybe they should have used more finesse and finished the job right there.

Heading toward the east side of Berlin, he checked the clock on the car dash. Viktor Pushkin, his boss, would be waiting for him at the office. Strategy meeting. Zukov knew what was coming. He could predict the direction they would take as if he stood at a black board inside Viktor’s mind and Zukov was scribbling orders with the chalk.

Driving slowly through the industrial area of the former East Berlin, he finally pulled in front of their building. Two cars sat out front.

Anton Zukov habitually smiled as he punched in the security code to access the front door, knowing he was being watched by one of his colleagues in a back room through closed circuit TV. He lifted his cane as a salute.

Inside, he walked past the display area, where dozens of cell phones sat for their corporate customers to handle. Thankfully they didn’t do business with the general public, only selling the service and phones to companies at a huge discount. They could afford to do so. They had no corporate board, no stock holders, no owners. It was the perfect front for their operation. They made huge profits off phones that had been stolen from the Finns, they sold them to hundreds of accounts, and even profited from the cell service, which was handled by another of their subsidiaries, who then had direct access to all the phones in their target market. They could keep track of any call they wanted, pulling in corporate intel, and blackmailing businesses on each side. They could even keep track of the users physically by GPS. What a business. Make money coming and going.

Zukov wandered through the office into a back room, where large shelves held stacks of phones from floor to ceiling, and into a break room. He stuck the end of his cane into the sink and released the blade. He first ran hot water and soap over the knife blade and the end of the cane. Thinking this might take a while, he plugged the sink and filled it with water, completely submerging the end of the cane. Then he poured two liters of bleach into the water. Let it soak, he said to himself.

Satisfied, he walked back through the storage room and out into the front area behind the counter. There were a few desks there with computers, which were almost never used. This part of the office was mostly for show.

He headed back into a hallway toward Viktor Pushkin’s office, knocking lightly on the door. His knuckles barely left the wood when the door swung in. It was Nikolai. Zukov couldn’t remember the man’s last name, but remembered he had been with the Red Army until about a year ago. Big guy. Brutal as hell. That’s all he really needed to know.

Sitting back in his leather chair in the show office, Viktor Pushkin smiled and motioned for Zukov to take a seat.

“How did it go?” Viktor asked, stroking his thin beard. “Did the man get his money?” He laughed and kept a smile on his face.

“He got what he deserved,” Zukov assured his boss.

“Any problems?”

Zukov shook his head. “No. Not the best location.”

“I agree. Don’t let that happen again.”

He had thought the same thing from the moment he’d made that mistake. But Zukov couldn’t cancel or make changes after the initial order. Neither were to make any communication. They knew how easy it was for someone to listen in on their conversation or to pick up other forms on contact. Zukov simply nodded his agreement, fighting his urge to play with his watch cap.