Trying his best to sound calm, Kessler quickly relayed the substance of the call he had received. “So you see, I need to get out of Germany as soon as possible,” he said. “I’ve bought a few hours by agreeing to meet with the Ministry of Justice prosecutor later today, but she already knows far too much about my financial affairs. I cannot risk appearing before her.”
“You believe this woman Stahn was genuine?” Renke asked icily.
Kessler was bewildered. “What else could she be?”
“You are a fool, Ulrich,” the other man said flatly. “Did you even bother to confirm her story before you came running to me in fear?”
“What difference does it make?” Kessler asked. “Whoever she may be, she knows too much. I am not safe here.” He felt a flicker of resentment ripple through him. “You owe me this, Herr Professor.”
“I owe you nothing,” Renke said coldly. “You have already been amply rewarded for your services. The fact that others have learned of your transgres-sions is unfortunate, but it gives you no special claim on me.”
“Then you will do nothing for me?” Kessler asked, appalled.
“That was not what I said,” Renke retorted. “As it happens, I will honor your request for my own purposes. Now, listen carefully and follow my instructions to the letter. Stay where you are. Do not make any more calls?for any reason. When the arrangements for your escape are complete, I will telephone you with further instructions. Is that clear?”
Kessler nodded his head rapidly. “Yes, yes, that’s clear.”
“Good. Are you alone?”
“For now,” Kessler glanced at the clock on his desk. “But my handyman and cook will be here in an hour or so.”
“Send them away,” Renke told him. “Tell them you are ill. There must be no witnesses to your disappearance.”
“I will make sure of that,” Kessler said quickly.
“I am very glad to hear it, Ulrich,” Renke said, sounding genuinely pleased. “It will make everything much easier in the end.”
Inside the CIA surveillance van, the first tech turned to Randi with a rueful look on his face. He took off his headset and held it out to her. “This is what we picked up from our tap on the phone line during Kessler’s call.”
Randi slid the earphones on and listened closely while the tech replayed the signals they had intercepted. She heard only a shrill, high-pitched whine broken by patches of static. One eyebrow rose. “Encrypted?”
“Highly encrypted,” the tech told her. “At a guess, whatever encryption software these guys are using is more sophisticated than anything I’ve ever heard before?with the possible exception of our own stuff.”
“Interesting.” Randi commented.
He grinned. ‘Yeah, isn’t it, though? I suppose the NSA might be able to break that noise apart into the clear, but doing it could take weeks.”
“Did you at least manage to trace the telephone number Kessler called?”
Randi asked him.
The tech shook his head. “Nope, I’m afraid not. Whoever set up the communications network he dialed into sure knows how to play the game. Every time we started getting close, the signal skipped over to a new number, automatically resetting our trace.”
Randi frowned. “Could you set up a system like that?”
“Me?” He nodded slowly. “Sure.” Then he shrugged. “But I’d need several weeks, a ton of money, and almost unlimited access to the proprietary switching software for several different telecom corporations.”
“Which means our Professor Renke has some other very influential friends watching his back,” Randi said slowly.
The second CIA technician glanced at Randi with a wry smile of her own.
“I guess you knew what you were doing when you planted all those other bugs in Kessler’s study.”
Randi nodded easily. “Let’s just say I had a hunch that it would be useful to have a fallback when dealing with these people ?whoever they are.”
“Well, the audio-pickups worked beautifully,” the second tech assured her.
“I’ve got recordings of the whole call from Kessler’s end. And once I clean up some of the ambient noise and enhance the sound, we’ll be able to hear everything the other man said, too.”
“Can you isolate and play back the sounds you picked up when he punched in that first telephone number?” her male colleague asked.
“No sweat.”
“Outstanding.” He swiveled back to face Randi. “Then we’re in business.
See, every time Kessler pushed one of the buttons on his phone it generated a unique tone. Once we put all those tones together in the right order, we’ll know that first number he called.”
Randi nodded her understanding.
“And that gives us a little piece of string that we can follow through the telecommunications maze these guys have created,” the tech went on seriously. “It’ll take some time, but by using that first number we can start tracking back through that maze, eventually tracing all the way to the real number hidden at its core.”
“Which must belong to a telephone line tied directly to Wulf Renke,”
Randi said coolly. Her eyes hardened. “And then the professor and I will have a private little chat about these powerful backers of his, right before we toss him into a cell for the rest of his miserable life.”
“What about Kessler?” the second CIA technician asked.
Randi smiled thinly. “Herr Kessler can sit and stew a while longer. He’s already hit the panic button. Now we’ll wait and see just who shows up on the doorstep to collect him.”
Impatiently, Erich Brandt prow led back and forth across his office. He was on a secure line to Berlin. “You have your orders, Lange,” he snapped. “Now cam them out.”
“With respect,” the other man said quietly, “my men and I did not come here to commit suicide.”
“Go on.”
“The Americans are surely watching Kessler’s house,” Lange explained.
“And as soon as we make our move, they w ill close in on us.”
“You are convinced this is a CIA operation?” Brandt asked, forcing himself to restrain his anger.
“I am,” Lange said. “As soon as I received your alert, I began checking with some of our other sources inside the government here.”
“And?”
“There is a real Isabelle Stahn and she is a special prosecutor for the Ministry of Justice,” Lange said. “But Frau Stahn is currently on maternity leave and not expected back for duty until sometime next month. Nor is there any record of an internal investigation with Kessler as the focus.”
“So you think the Americans tricked him into pleading for our help,”
Brandt said grimly.
“Yes,” Lange agreed. “And by now they will be trying to trace that call he made to Renke.”
Brandt stopped pacing. If the Americans found Renke, they would also discover the HYDRA facility. And if that happened, the length of Brandt’s own life would be measured in hours at best. “Will they succeed?”
“I do not know,” Lange said slowly. Brandt could almost hear the other man shrug. “But that is precisely the sort of technical intelligence task at which both the NSA and CIA excel.”
Brandt nodded reluctantly, knowing that his subordinate’s assessment was accurate. As a rule, Americans made pitiful field agents, but their skill with machines and electronics was almost unsurpassed. His gray eyes turned ice-cold. “Then you must destroy this CIA surveillance unit before it is too late.”
“We cannot destroy what we cannot find,” Lange told him bluntly. “The Americans could be working from a vehicle or building anywhere within a mile radius of Kessler’s villa. My team and I do not have the time to drive aim-lessly all over Grunewald in the hopes of stumbling across them. To focus on a valid target, we must have more information on the CIA operations here in Berlin, and we must have it soon.”
Brandt nodded. Again, Lange was right. “Very well,” he said coldly. “I will contact Malkovic immediately. Our
