She looked at bottle and then back up at him. “What are the side effects?”
“Minimal,” he said with a slight smile. “Nothing beyond a slight drowsiness.” As a parting shot, he added, “But you should probably be careful when operating heavy machinery?which includes firing automatic weapons, chasing down bad guys, and burning down expensive villas.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Randi told him coolly.
Once the doctor was gone, she tossed the bottle of painkillers into the closest wastepaper basket. Then she pushed herself up out of her chair and limped over to where Curt Bennett, the head of the special technical team sent out from Langley, was busy trying to pry his way deeper into Wulf Renke’s secure communications network. The short, fidgety man was using a combination of the first telephone number her surveillance team had unearthed ?the one registered in Switzerland ?and other numbers, these taken from the memory of the scorched and blackened cell phone she had captured at Kessler’s house a few hours before.
Randi leaned over his shoulder. The computer screen in front of Bennett was filled with what looked, to her untutored eye, like a mishmash of strings of random numbers and symbols. Solid lines connected some of them. Others were linked by dotted lines. Still others sat alone in splendid isolation.
“How’s it going?” she asked quietly.
The CIA analyst looked up at her. His eyes were bloodshot, but they still gleamed brightly behind the thick lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses. “I’m making progress,” he promised. “But whoever created this network was reallv v<-‘rv good. It’s a remarkably complicated web of different phone numbers, with a great many loops and blind alleys built into it. Still, I’m beginning to be able to trace some of the patterns.”
“And?”
“So far I’ve identified numbers belonging to accounts that are registered in several different countries,” Bennett told her. “Switzerland, Russia, Germany, and Italy?for a start.”
Randi frowned. “Can you tie any of them to Renke?”
“Not yet,” the CIA expert said. “Most of those accounts look like fakes to me. Basically, I suspect they’re the electronic equivalents of a post office box rented by someone using a fake name and fake ID.”
“Damn.”
“All is not lost,” Bennett reassured her. He raised an eyebrow. “Let’s say you found that real-life post office box. What would you do next?”
“I’d put a tail on anyone who came to collect mail from it,” Randi said.
“And I’d trace any mail forwarded from it.”
“Exactly.” The CIA specialist grinned toothily. “Well, we can do the same thing electronically. As calls pass through those different numbers, we can track them, following them up the ladder to the next set of accounts and so on.”
“How long will it take you to zero in on the core numbers?” Randi asked quietly. “The ones connected to honest-to-Cod phones?”
“That’s difficult to estimate,” Bennett said. He shrugged. “Maybe a few more hours. Maybe a couple of days. To a large extent, it depends on the traffic through this secure network. Now that we’re inside the outer layer, the more calls the bad guvs make using their system, the more information we acquire.”
Randi nodded. “Then keep on it, Curt,” she said grimly. “I need to know where Renke is hiding out. As soon as possible.”
She turned awav, seeing another CIA staffer hurrying into the conference room. “Yes?”
“Langley thinks it may have a name for that last man you shot inside Kessler’s house,” the other woman told her quickly. “That scorched passport you grabbed was definitely a fake, but they were able to match what was left of the photograph with one already in the archives.”
“Show me,” Randi snapped. She took the TOP-SECRET message sent from CIA headquarters. At the top, there was a scan of an old, black-and-white photo, one that showed a thin-faced man with dark hair. He was wearing a military uniform, an East German officer’s service jacket with the four dia-monds of a captain on his shoulder straps. She compared this picture with her mental image of the black-clad gunman who had tried so hard to kill her just a few short hours ago. She nodded tightly. It was the same man.
Her eyes moved down to the text of the message. “Gerhard Lange,” she read aloud. “A former captain in the East German Ministry of State Security.
After the fall of the DDR, initially taken into custody by the Bonn government in connection with several political murders in Leipzig, Dresden, and Last Berlin. Released for lack of evidence shortly thereafter. Believed to have emigrated to Serbia one month later. Rumored to have worked as an internal security consultant for the Milosevic regime from 1990 to 1994 before emigrating again, this time to Russia. No further information on file.”
“Well, well, well,” Randi murmured. “It appears that the good doctor Renke prefers working with his fellow countrymen. I wonder how many other former Stasi goons he has at his beck and call.”
Bernhard Heichler sat numbly at his desk inside the headquarters of the Bundesamtes fiir Verfassunsschutz, the BfV. He stared down at the urgent reports from Berlin, reports that could easily lead to absolute disaster for him. He groaned aloud and then stopped abruptly, appalled by how far the sound seemed to carry in this strangely silent building.
At three o’clock in the morning, the offices of the BfV were almost completely deserted, inhabited only by a skeletal night shift of counterintelligence officers and clerical staff. His continued presence would undoubtedly draw raised eyebrows and lead to sardonic comments, especially from his own subordinates in Section V. Heichler was widely known as a man who craved routine and who ordinarily despised grandstanding. Seen in that light, his decision to stay so late at the office to monitor new developments in yesterday afternoon’s massacre of three American intelligence officers in Berlin would strike many of his colleagues as evidence that he was angling for yet another promotion.
No one would guess Heichler’s real reason for wanting to read those classified Berlin police reports first, before anyone else in German counterintelligence.
He read through them again, still in disbelief. Police forensics teams had managed to connect the weapons used in the murder of the CIA agents with those found ?along with six more bodies ?in or around the burned-out home of a high-ranking official in the Bundeskriminalamt. Heichler swallowed hard, fighting down the acid taste of bile. What kind of hellish conspiracy was he now caught up in?
His phone chirped suddenly, frighteningly loud in the unnatural quiet of his office. Startled, Heichler snatched the receiver off its cradle. “Yes? What is it?”
“An incoming call from America, I lerr I leichler,” the operator said. “From Herr Andrew Coates, a senior aide to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He wants to speak to the ranking officer in Section V.”
“Put him through,” Heichler said harshly. His hands trembled. “Hello?”
“Bernhard?” a familiar voice said into his ear. Coates was the liaison between the CIA and Germany’s confusing array of foreign and domestic intelligence organizations. He and Heichler met fairly frequently to exchange information. “Boy, am I glad that you’re still there! Listen, I wanted to bring you up-to-date on our investigation, and to let you know that we’ve had some good news. One of our people survived that goddamned ambush. Not only that, but we’re pretty sure that she’s managed to get her hands on some crucial evidence that will lead us to the bastards who ordered the attack ? “
Heichler listened in growing terror while his counterpart in the CIA shattered any hopes he had harbored of easily escaping the noose of treason and betrayal drawn so tight around his neck. Somehow he managed to make it through the ensuing conversation without screaming. When the American at last hung up, he sat staring into space for several minutes.
Then, slowly and reluctantly, with hands that shook harder than ever, Heichler picked up his phone one more time. If the Americans captured those responsible for butchering their field officers in Berlin, they were sure to uncover evidence that would lead them right back to the BfV? right back to him. Once again, he thought despairingly, he had no real choice. None at all.
Chapter Forty-One
