Wolfhardt hesitated for a few seconds beyond the delay, and DeCamp, who’d met him only twice before this assignment, still knew him well enough to see the man’s wrinkled brow because he’d not gotten the answer he wanted. “Dead?” he asked, his tone mild.
“Untraceable,” DeCamp replied.
Again Wolfhardt hesitated. “You are aware of the consequences of failure,” he warned.
“Certainly. Are you?”
“When I see the news on CNN your account will be credited. And there will be further assignments.”
“For which I’ll need more time.”
“These will be of a simpler nature,” Wolfhardt said. “But perhaps equally as important.”
“We’ll see,” DeCamp said, and he broke the connection and laid the phone on the passenger seat. Wolfhardt’s attitude was completely different this time. He’d never pressed for details until now, nor had he ever issued any sort of a warning. He’d come to DeCamp because of a recommendation from General Jan Van Der Stadt who’d been a close personal friend of DeCamp’s mentor Jon Frazer, and who had been the Buffalo Battalion’s commandant at the end, so there’d been no need to present bona fides or make silly promises or answer stupid questions.
But then it came to him that Wolfhardt, or perhaps the man or men he represented, was frightened. Because of the fourteen months it had taken to pull off this bit of business. But a man of the German’s obvious background — there was no doubt in DeCamp’s mind that Wolfhardt had been East German Stasi, the stamp was practically a scarlet letter on his broad Teutonic forehead — would know what planning and training had been necessary. He would understand the delicacy of such an operation. It was one thing to go into a situation — a bombing, an assassination, an act of sabotage — with no expectation of coming out alive but something completely different otherwise. And such operations took time.
Wolfhardt had evidently been under pressure to produce results. In a timely fashion because … of what? DeCamp asked himself. Money was a possibility, though where the profit would be in destroying a nuclear power plant was a puzzle. Certainly the German was not allied with an Islamic radical organization, there was no fit there that made any sense. Nor had Wolfhardt ever made even an oblique mention of his employer.
They had met the first time by arrangement in Paris at the touristy sidewalk cafe Deux Magots, on Boulevard Saint-Germain across from the Saint-Germain-des-Pres church. The place had been crowded and in fact DeCamp, who’d arrived a half hour early to look over the situation, had waited twenty minutes before getting a table. When Wolfhardt had walked across the street from the church, and not from a cab or the metro, it had struck DeCamp that the man had also arrived early as a precaution.
“It’s a good thing to be cautious,” DeCamp said as the German sat down.
The waiter came and he ordered a cafe au lait and waited until it was set before him before he got down to business. “You’ve come highly recommended.”
Nothing was required for DeCamp to say.
“I have a job for a man of your skills. An assassination.”
DeCamp relaxed and he nodded. No doubt the German had made his preparations, careful to make absolutely certain that no one could hear their conversation. The area had been swept for bugs and listening devices, and the man’s operatives were certainly nearby, otherwise he would not have spoken so openly
“I make no kills on French soil.”
“This would be in Berlin,” Wolfhardt said. “A German businessman who is a principal in the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. He has a lake house outside the city.”
“Would there be family, staff, security?”
“Yes, all of that.”
“And they would have to be eliminated as well?”
Wolfhardt shrugged, the gesture suggesting a near-total indifference. “That would be up to your discretion. For your own protection. But I will offer five hundred thousand euros for the man. Nothing for the others.”
“Two fifty now, and the rest on completion.”
“Agreed,” Wolfhardt said, and he took a CD in a jewel case out of his jacket pocket and handed it across the table. The disk was labeled
“That’s not necessary,” DeCamp said. He took a plain business card, no name, address, or phone number, only two sets of numbers — the first with nine digits, the second with ten — and slid it across to the German. “I’ll begin immediately after the initial deposit.”
Wolfhardt nodded curtly. “You’ll have the funds within twenty-four hours,” he said, and he rose to leave.
Driving toward Miami, DeCamp remembered that first meeting clearly. Up until the end, the German had been coolly professional, but just before he’d walked away, he’d said one more thing, his tone at that point almost congenial, almost friendly, one comrade in arms to another. “Good hunting,” he’d said.
The businessman’s name was Rolph Wittgen, and as it turned out the house staff had been dismissed early, and the security cameras and devices switched off. The only other person there that night was Wittgen’s mistress. Killing both of them in the act of lovemaking and getting away had been simple, and two days later the second payment had shown up in his Channel Islands account. The entire affair from the meeting in Paris until the final payment had taken less than one week.
They’d met once again for a similar assassination, and then again fourteen months ago at a different cafe in Paris, and that time Wolfhardt had presented the same coolly professional demeanor as before, not questioning DeCamp’s abilities to carry out the assignment — that of sabotaging the Hutchinson Island reactor — despite the size and complexity of the operations.
No questions, ever, neither before nor after an assignment, not until just now over the sat phone. It was puzzling, and DeCamp disliked puzzles unless they were of his own making. But as long as the money arrived as promised he decided not to take Wolfhardt’s changed attitude as a sign of anything other than the unexpected length of time the assignment had taken.
Yet DeCamp had the disquieting feeling that the men he had worked for seventeen years ago had displayed the same change of attitude just before the Buffalo Battalion had been disbanded. They had been cutting their losses, disassociating themselves with the very men they had directed into battle. The war in Angola had been terminated, to no one’s satisfaction, and the Battalion had been dismantled and swept under the rug, its continued existence a potential embarrassment to the South African government.
“If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on the desert sands in vain, beware the anger of the legions!”
Anger indeed, he thought. They had no idea what he was capable of. Always had been. Setting the LED counters ten minutes back, for instance. No mercy. No prisoners. No quarter.
And now there was the possibility of more assignments. More money.
EIGHT
Kirk McGarvey, dressed in jeans, deck shoes, a white long-sleeved shirt, and a khaki sports coat, got out of his rented Chevy and walked inside the National Air Guard’s main hangar at Homestead Air Force Base a few miles south of Miami, pretty much in the same bad mood he’d been in for the past eighteen months. He was a tall man, in very good physical condition because he’d worked out just about every day of his life, and more than once that regimen had save his life. In his early fifties, still not too slowed down or mellowed even after a twenty-plus-year career with the CIA — mostly as a black ops field officer, which meant killings, but for short stints as deputy director of operations and director of the entire Company — he was alone as he’d never thought he would be at this stage of his life.
His partner, Alan Lundgren, slightly built with wire-rimmed reading glasses and a buzz cut, was formerly an FBI counterterrorism special agent. He had arrived on base a half hour earlier and was explaining the facts of life to a group of seven National Nuclear Security Administration Rapid Response team recruits gathered around him just to the left of the open service doors, about the distinct possibility of facing a terrorist one-on-one, which could
