he’d learned as a combat soldier: Never move blind in unknown country. And never, ever, do the expected or the easy.
He turned back to Helen. “Feel like a little stroll?” He nodded up the street — directly away from the rendezvous point Mcdowell had specified.
She flashed a quick, thin smile. “My thoughts exactly, Mr. Thorn.”
Together, they turned and walked north — back the way the SBAHN tram had brought them — pausing often to check windows or the sideview mirrors of parked cars for any signs that they were being followed. At the first opportunity, they turned right down a narrower side street and picked up the pace. From time to time, they stopped suddenly — hoping to flush out anyone trailing them.
Nothing.
Ten minutes of hard, fast walking and several more turns brought them out onto a wider north-south avenue — one running just a block east of the intersection they were heading toward.
There were even fewer cars and fewer pedestrians out on the streets now.
Thorn took Helen’s arm and pulled her into a shadowed doorway with him.
He nodded toward the next corner. “I should be able to take a quick look at the RP from there.”
“Oh? What’s this “I,’ Peter?” she asked quietly.
“This is where we split up,” he said. “If anybody unfriendly is out there waiting for us, they’ll be looking first for a couple. So I’ll just mosey on over there — run a fast recon — and then swing back. In the meantime, you keep an eye on my back just in case we missed somebody on our tail. Okay?”
Helen’s eyes narrowed. “You really don’t trust Larry Mcdowell, do you?”
Thorn shrugged. “From what you’ve told me about him, and from what I saw at the crash site, I trust him to be a lying, slimy, incompetent asshole.”
She laughed softly. “I’d say you have the man pegged just right. Okay, Peter, you go run your sweep. I’ll watch your back.”
He kissed her once and then stepped out of the doorway. He sauntered off, whistling softly under his breath — determined to look and act as much as possible like a local making his way home from one of the several pubs they’d passed.
At the corner, Thorn stopped briefly — looking both ways before crossing the street. He let his eyes sweep west down the block toward the intersection Mcdowell had picked out as the rendezvous point, scanning for anything and anyone out of the ordinary.
Nothing. Nothing.
There! His eyes lingered for an instant on the dark Mercedes sedan with Berlin plates parked halfway down the block under a burned-out streetlight. That’s too nice a car for this neighborhood, he thought grimly. And he’d bet a month’s pay there were a couple of guys sitting inside that can-hidden behind tinted windows. His senses went on full alert.
Without breaking stride, Thorn crossed the street, putting a graffiti-smeared apartment building between him and the Mercedes. It took him another five minutes to circle his way east and then north again to get back to the doorway where he’d left Helen on watch.
“Well?” she asked.
“We’ve got trouble,” Thorn said. He filled her in on the car he’d spotted.
“Might just belong to the local Lotto winner …” she said slowly.
Thorn grinned. “Why, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus …”
“Very funny, Peter.” Helen tapped her watch. “We’ve still got fifteen minutes before Crittenden is supposed to show. You want to scope this out a little further?”
He nodded. “Let’s say I’m kinda curious to find out who may be gunning for us this time.”
She shook her head. “Jesus, Peter, I sure hope you’re just being paranoid.”
They headed east for several blocks before turning south again. Once they had gone far enough that way, they swung back west down a trash-filled alley. It took them the better part of ten more minutes to work their way closer to the target intersection, approaching it from the south this time.
They were within a hundred meters of the rendezvous point when Thorn felt Helen stiffen slightly. Her hand closed around his arm — and tugged him off the street into another alley between two brick tenements.
“Shit,” she said under her breath. “I don’t frigging believe it.”
She looked up at him, eyes wide in the darkness. “There are two more up ahead fifty meters or so. Standing in a doorway on our side of the street.”
“Describe them,” Thorn said.
“Dark leather jackets. Jeans. One’s wearing a baseball cap. The other’s bareheaded.” Helen shook her head in disbelief. “How the hell did they know where to find us?”
Thorn spread his hands. “Maybe there’s a leak in the Bureau’s Berlin office. Or in D.C. somewhere. Hell, maybe Mcdowell’s phone’s being tapped …”
She grimaced. “I can’t believe that. The phone lines into and out of the Hoover Building are checked and rechecked practically every day.”
“Well,” he said slowly, “all I know is that these people have been all over us every time we get close to their goddamned operation.
As to how exactly they’re doing that …” He shrugged.
“We should start doing some serious thinking about it later. After we get ourselves out of this fix we’re in right now.”
Helen nodded.
Thorn looked intently at her. “So, if you were setting up a tight surveillance net around that intersection, how would you do it?”
She didn’t hesitate. “I’d cover all four approach routes, and I’d use at least two foot teams and two cars to do it. That way I’d be set, no matter how my targets entered the zone.”
“So we’re facing around eight hostiles here,” he concluded.
“At least.” Helen looked troubled. “We’re outside the net now, Peter.
We could just back off quietly and slip away. God knows, that would be the smart move.”
“Yeah.” Thorn knew she was right, but somehow the idea stuck in his craw. Fading back meant ceding the initiative to their unknown adversaries — again. And it would leave them right where they’d started: stuck in Germany while what they suspected was a stolen Russian nuke was sailing into an unsuspecting American port city.
He suddenly realized that Helen was watching him closely.
“You getting tired of playing it safe, Colonel Thorn?” she asked quietly.
“Playing it safe’s not exactly our forte, is it, Special Agent Gray?”
“No, I guess not.”
He nodded toward the unseen intersection. “Okay. Pretend you’re running that op out there. One of your teams spots someone who might be one of the two people you’re after — but this person is heading away from the place you’ve staked out. What would you do?”
Helen hesitated for only a split second before answering. “I’d detach a team to investigate.”
“But not your whole force?” Thorn pressed.
She shook her head. “No way. Not with so many variables still in play. I’d want confirmation first.” A wolfish smile crept across her face. “You want a little personal contact with a Couple of these folks, Peter?”
He nodded grimly. “You could say that.”
Two minutes later, Thorn waited alone inside the dark alley — near the opening to the street. He could feel the damp, dirty brick wall right at his back. A dog barked somewhere off in the distance. Soon now, he thought.
Helen strode right past the opening — heading straight toward the intersection they knew was under surveillance. Her eyes didn’t even flicker in his direction.
Good work, he thought.
She left his field of view. Her footsteps faded.
Thorn ran a slow countdown in his head. She must be forty meters from the closest two-man surveillance team. Thirty meters.
