The night pressed close, wrapping him in anonymity as he walked back to where he had parked his rented BMW. The streets were empty except for the occasional passing car, headlights carving cylinders of smoky light in the fog. Suddenly, he was face-to-face with a young couple, and they startled each other, abruptly appearing, like ghosts.
“Entschuldigen sie,” he muttered as they passed.
He turned a corner and waited, listening for footsteps coming from behind, but there was nothing. After a moment he walked on. The streetlights were pale globes of light and the sounds of cars were muted as they passed. Once, he thought he spotted a shadow behind him, but it was impossible to see for certain in the fog. He got in the BMW and drove carefully out of the city, across the Elbe River and down the E22 toward Bremen.
Once out of Hamburg, the fog lifted and the visibility on the autobahn made for faster driving. With luck, he would be in Amsterdam before two in the morning, he thought, checking the headlights behind him in the rearview mirror. By the time he was forty kilometers outside Bremen, he knew he was being followed. An A4 Audi had been with him since before he’d crossed the Elbe into Wilhelmsburg.
Up ahead he saw the blue sign and crossed knife and fork of a Rasthof service area. He signaled and moved over carefully to make sure that whoever was tailing him stayed with him. He exited the autobahn, parked, and went to the gaststatte, its neon sign and lighted windows a pool of light in the dark parking area. In the reflection of the headlights of traffic on the autobahn in the restaurant window, he saw the Audi pull into the parking area.
He went into the restaurant and out the side exit, then waited in the shadow of a corner of the outside toilet cabin. In a few minutes he heard the sound of a woman’s high heels on the pavement. An overhead light above the toilet door cast the shadow of someone approaching the frauen toilette. As she reached the restroom door, he stepped out and, with a hammerlock, twisted her wrist out and leveraged it behind her back so she was completely immobilized. She cried out in pain as he twisted her around, and he found himself staring into the frightened yet stunning face of the female TV journalist, Najla Kafoury.
“Why are you following me?” he demanded.
“Bitte, sie verletzen mich,” she said.
“I’ll hurt you a lot more if you don’t do exactly as I say.”
“Bitte, let me go. I won’t run,” she said, looking at him with those strange aquamarine eyes.
“It’s a waste,” he said, looking around to see if anyone was taking an interest. Someone, possibly a truck driver, was leaving the gaststatte, but hadn’t seen them. “Using that wonderful tone of sincerity in your voice on such an obvious lie.”
“I’m not lying,” she said.
“Of course you are. You’re scared. It’s to be expected,” he said, forcing her toward the BMW.
“Don’t do this. I just want a story. Bitte, please,” her voice soft and, despite her fear, with an undercurrent of sexiness. He applied a touch of pressure to her arm and she gasped at the pain.
“Get in or I’ll break it,” he said.
“What about my car?”
“Get in,” he said again, opening the door and shoving her in. He went around the other side, got in and drove out of the parking area and back onto the autobahn.
“I’m a journalist,” she said. “On television. N-TV 24 Nachrichten.”
“I know who you are.”
“I’m supposed to check in. I’ll be missed,” she said.
“See, that works better. More believable, but you’re still lying.”
“I have to call. They’re waiting,” she said.
“No one’s waiting.”
For the first time she really looked at him, at his shadowed profile lit only by the dashboard light. “What makes you so sure?”
“No crew. No links. No satellite van. You followed me from the mosque on your own.” He held out his hand. “Give me your cell phone-and don’t be cute. Any kind of a struggle at these speeds and we could both be killed.”
She found the cell phone in her handbag and handed it to him. He shut it off and slipped it into his pocket. He drove at high speed, truck lights flashing by in the darkness as he passed them. Neither of them spoke till they were well past Bremen, nearing Oldenburg.
“What are you going to do with me?” she asked finally.
“That depends on what’s waiting for us in Amsterdam,” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Volgograd, Russia
Borya Khmelnitsky, aka Gospodin Kolbasa, or Mr. Sausage, was laughing as he poured them both another glass of Dovgan vodka, the only kind of Russian vodka he said wasn’t made out of piss. They were sitting at a window table of the Avgust restaurant on the Embankment overlooking the Volga River, where, though it was April, an occasional ice floe still floated by. It was said that Khmelnitsky got the nickname Kolbasa because of what he had done to a rival from the Tsentraly mafia gang at a sausage factory, like Sweeney Todd, feeding him to them at a so-called peace gathering.
“This guy, this Yuri guy, did it because his wife, she wasn’t happy with her neck, okay?” Khmelnitsky laughed. He was a big man. He wore a black leather jacket over a flashy Hawaiian-type shirt, the unofficial uniform of the Ekaterinburg Uralmash mafia. “She has, how you call it, neck like rooster, okay? So she wants operation to fix neck, make pretty like swan. Also Moskva. All the time she wants to go to Moscow; live better life. This is like Chekhov.
“So this guy, Yuri, is big shot in MOD, Federal Security Service for Atomics, da? We do deal for three kilos Cesium-137, make beautiful dirty bomb. Comes out with big truck and with MOD security team and two troop trucks from Twelfth Main Directorate of GUMO, Ministry of Defense. All official, da? They leave Ozersk. Is closed city. Secret place. No one can enter. Officially, doesn’t exist, Ozersk. People call city ‘Mayak,’ but is Ozersk. In Soviet times, say ‘Ozersk’ and you be in Lubyanka Prison, if they don’t kill you on the way.”
“Is that where the aerosol spray came from?” the Palestinian asked. “Ozersk? They moved it there from Vozrozhdeniya?”
Khmelnitsky looked at him sharply, and for a moment the Palestinian could see how dangerous he was. This was the first time he was meeting the man since they had done the deal for the aerosol apparatus with the three canisters of liquid pathogen culture three months earlier. All at once, Khmelnitsky grinned, showing his crooked satyr’s teeth.
“Who can say? When Soviet times end, many things disappear. Even people,” looking hard at the Palestinian, then smiling suddenly with his crooked teeth like they were best pals again. “So like I am telling, this guy Yuri and his MOD trucks, they go through five checkpoints, scan with dosimeter, alpha radiation detector, no problem. Everything fixed, you understand,” he said, making the universal sign for money, rubbing his thumb on his fingertips. “They drive through taiga, forests, villages, like army convoy right to middle of Ekaterinburg. Right down middle of Malysheva Street. I see him, Yuri. I say ‘bakapor.’ ” Dumbass. “‘What you doing?’
“He say, ‘We do business.’
“I say, ‘You crazy mudak. You want do business in middle of street?’
“He say, ‘Chto zahuy.’” What the fuck?
“So we go to Plotinka, big dam. Is like park, in center Ekaterinburg. We talk out in open away from everyone. See everything. No bugs, no FSB. I say, ‘Where is my Cesium-137?’
“He say, ‘Fuck that cesium govno shit. We do better deal. More money.’”
“What was in the truck?” the Palestinian asked.
“Two steel drums. Between is steel drums of water and big sheet lead. Heavy sukin-sin. Inside, you never believe. I never believe. No one believe.”
“So it was all there? Just like that?” the Palestinian said. He’d heard the story before, although each time the details changed, except for the part about the steel drums and what was in them, which had changed everything