excitement, it was impossible to make out what he was trying to report. Frowning, Lange straightened up slowly and pushed the tiny receiver deeper into his ear.
“What was that, Mueller?” he demanded. “Say again.”
This time, Mueller, the heavyset man who had met his team at the airport the day before, spoke more slowly and clearly. “I have your targets,” he said.
“Repeat: I have your targets confirmed.”
Lange breathed out. The waiting game was over. He leaned in through the open driver’s side window of their black BMW and retrieved a copy of the faxed list they had received two hours ago. “Read them back to me.”
While Mueller fed him the license plates and makes of vehicles he had spotted during his reconnaissance, the ex-Stasi officer checked them against the list of CIA-registered cars and trucks in Berlin. They matched perfectly.
The folded the fax and slid it inside his jacket. Then he unfolded a detailed map of the local streets. “Excellent work. Now, where exactly are these Americans deployed?”
Lange listened closely, using a red pen to circle the positions given to him by the heavyset man. He studied them briefly, noting relative distances and alternate approach and escape routes. A plan began taking shape in his mind.
Quick and dirty, he thought coldly. And the quicker, the better.
He turned to his companions. “Pripremiti. Nama imati jedan cilj!” he growled in Serbian. “Get ready. We have a target!”
At his command, the three hard-faced men, all veterans of Serbian State Security and of the brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo, put out their cigarettes and scrambled to their feet. Lange opened the BMW’s trunk and swiftly handed out equipment and ammunition. When he was through, the ex-Stasi officer and the members of his handpicked hunter-killer team began donning their gear and checking their weapons.
Although it was only midafternoon, it was growing dark fast. Solid masses of leaden clouds covered the sky. Whipped up by a strong wind from the east, occasional flurries of fresh snow danced across the Grunewald’s nearly deserted streets and sidewalks. The rising wind howled through the nearby woods and sent more snow sliding off the steep slate roofs of houses nestled among the trees.
To keep warm, Randi Russell walked at a brisk pace, heading south along Clayallee. This wide avenue, which ran here along the urban forest preserve’s eastern border, was named for the American general, Lucius Clay, who had ordered the Berlin Airlift to save the city from starvation during the opening rounds of the Cold War. Wearing a fashionable ski jacket, black turtleneck sweater, and jeans, she was returning to the CIA surveillance van after making a cautious prowl through the quiet neighborhood around Ulrich Kessler’s villa.
So far, nothing much was happening. Her lookout outside the villa reported only normal traffic through the area. The BKA official himself was still inside his home. As the day wore on without further contact from Wulf Renke, though, Kessler was growing increasingly edgy. The listening devices she had planted earlier were picking up sounds of constant pacing, sporadic cursing, and the frequent clink of bottles and glassware from around his well-stocked liquor cabinet.
Ranch thought again about this strange silence from Renke. Had the renegade weapons scientist decided to cut his losses and leave Kessler to his fate?
The more time that went by without any sign of movement in or out of the house, the more likely that began to seem. Above all else, Renke was a survivor. He had never demonstrated real loyalty to any other person, country, or ideology. The scientist would save Kessler only if he saw some advantage to himself in doing so. And by now, Renke must suspect that his longtime protector inside the BKA was under close surveillance. If so, Randi wondered, was it worth snatching Kessler herself? Could she squeeze any useful information out of the guy before Langley got nervous and ordered her to hand him over to his own people?
She grinned, imagining the likely reaction of the risk-averse CIA bureaucrats if one of their field officers kidnapped a German federal criminal police official. No, Randi decided wryly, grabbing Kessler was not going to fly. Instead, her best bet might be to back off for now. Later she could look for a discreet way to let his superiors know about his criminal conduct. Of course, she would also have to manage that without revealing that she had hacked into one of their high-security computer networks.
In the meantime, her audio-operations technicians were busy trying to trace that first emergency number Kessler had dialed. So far, they had linked it to a cell phone registered in Switzerland. Where the trail would lead from there was still anyone’s guess.
A big yellow BVG transit bus roared past with only a handful of passengers on board. Randi looked up, getting her bearings. On her right, to the west, lay the quiet, snow-cloaked forest. On her left, across the road, there were houses and a row of small shops. There were more vehicles moving on this stretch of the avenue?a few private cars and a couple of delivery trucks out making their rounds despite the slowly worsening weather. A block ahead, she could see the surveillance team’s Ford panel van parked between an older Audi and a brand-new Opel station wagon.
She tapped a button on what looked like a silver iPod hooked to her belt.
Designed for undercover operations, this iPod actually contained a sophisticated tactical radio set with several secure channels. “Base, this is Lead. I’m coming in.”
“Understood, Lead,” one of the techs working in the van replied. Suddenly his voice sharpened. “Wait one, Randi. We’re picking up an incoming call to Kessler’s house. Someone’s telling him to be ready to leave, that an extraction unit is on its way!”
Yes! Randi enthusiastically pounded her clenched right fist into the open palm of her left hand. It was about time. “Okay, Base. Get ready to saddle up.
When these guys swoop in and scoop Kessler up, we’ll tag along behind to see where they take him.”
“Got it,” the CIA tech said. Over the radio link, she could hear him awkwardly clambering from the back of the windowless van into the driver’s seat.
Still walking toward the Ford, Randi switched frequencies to speak directly to the young Berlin Station field officer posted down the street from Kessler’s villa. “Watcher, this is Lead. Did you copy that?”
Silence.
She frowned. “Carla, this is Randi. Come in.”
There was no answer. Only the faint hiss of static over dead airwaves.
Randi swung round in alarm, feeling a cold chill run down her spine. Something was going wrong. Very wrong. She unzipped her jacket just far enough so that she could draw the 9mm Beretta pistol in her shoulder holster without snagging it on her clothes?in case she needed the weapon out in a hurry.
At that moment, she saw a black BMW sedan racing down Clayallee at high speed, with its powerful engine revving as it wove in and out around slower-moving cars and trucks. Instinctively, her hand dove inside her jacket, reaching for her pistol. But the speeding car drove on past her surveillance van. She breathed out in relief.
Then, suddenly, the BMW braked hard. The black sedan slewed around through a tire-squealing, rubber- burning, 180-degree turn, and rocked to a full stop just a few meters away from the parked Ford.
Three of the BMW’s four doors flew open, and three lean, cold-eyed men jumped out onto the street. They moved rapidly, fanning out in an arc around the CIA-owned van. Each man held a submachine gun ?Heckler & Koch MP5SDs equipped with integral noise suppressors ?tucked against his shoulder in a shooting stance. Randi’s eyes widened as she recognized the black jumpsuits and dark green, eagle-badge berets worn by Germany’s elite coun-terterrorist unit, GSG-9, Grenzschutzgruppe-9.
“Oh, shit,” she muttered. One of the area residents or local shopkeepers must have spotted her surveillance team, started getting suspicious, and then called the authorities with a warning. After 9/1I and the horror of the Madrid commuter train massacre, Germany, France, Spain, and others now kept elements of their rapid-reaction forces on permanent alert. Randi quickly took her hand off the butt of the Berretta. There was no point in spooking these heavily armed commandos. If they thought they were going up against terrorists, their nerves and reflexes were sure to be set on a hair-trigger.
Instead, carefully reaching inside her jacket for her Agency identity card, she started walking even faster, heading straight for the GSG-9 unit. Maybe she could intervene before these overeager German soldiers blew her whole clandestine operation sky-high. Once they rousted her people out onto the sidewalk in full view of every curious onlooker, there would be no way to keep the story off the airwaves. And the local media would have a field day running breathless updates about the foolhardy American intelligence agents caught spying on peaceful German
