was the catalyst for her to reconsider their relationship. Reich showed no sign of animosity in the office, even as his life shrank suddenly, his international affair dead. As far as she knew, he and his wife were getting along wonderfully.
There was no joy in this, but in the present situation it felt necessary. The Americans had suggested Reich because they knew he would cut off his own hand before doing anything to risk his pension. Berlin also knew this but was too scared to dispute the suggestion. So she would have a talk with Dieter Reich. He would continue to head the case-she didn’t care who got credit-but he would allow her to assist. If he refused…
It was all here in the Badawi file, because what Reich could never have predicted was that on September 11, 2001, the world would change, dragging a variety of ambivalent people into the extremes. Badawi had been one such convert who, like Erika, felt the Americans had too much of a hand in things that didn’t concern them. Badawi, however, lacking any real power to effect change, returned to Cairo just after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and became a member of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, considered a terrorist group by the Egyptian government, the European Union, and the United States-which since 1993 had held its blind leader, Omar Abdel-Rahman, in a federal prison. There was no telling what pieces of German intelligence had crossed their pillow and made it eventually to ears in Egypt.
By one, when Oskar returned from the basement, she had settled on her plan of attack. He closed the door behind himself, and she noticed a folded sheet of paper in his hand, and that, below his puffy eye, his cheeks were very red. “Did one of the secretaries slap you again?”
Oskar leaned so that the edge of the desk cut into the meat of his palms, the paper held tight between two fingers. “Three things. One: Milo Weaver-or, at least, his passport-wasn’t in Europe when Adriana was kidnapped. As far as we can tell, his passport hasn’t left America since last summer.”
It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it was still disappointing. “What about Budapest?”
“No record of it,” he said with a dismissive wave of his free hand. Then he grinned the way he did when he hoped he might shatter Erika’s cool exterior. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I can see you’re burning to put me in my place. Number two?”
“Milo Weaver hasn’t been in Europe recently. But Sebastian Hall-he’s been around for months.”
“Who?”
He unfolded the page to display a police sketch of a man who looked for all the world like Milo Weaver.
“That’s…?”
“Exactly. As Sebastian Hall, Milo Weaver robbed the Buhrle Museum a few weeks ago.”
“The Buhrle? How did this come in?”
“Face popped up on the Interpol list fifteen minutes ago, and I was downstairs to see it. Sebastian Hall, American. Seems he made the mistake of adding a Serb to his crew.”
“No need to be racist, Oskar.”
“Sorry,” he said through a smile. “But I thought you might like to know the third thing.”
“I think I would.”
“Mr. Hall just arrived in Warsaw, from London, an hour ago. Another couple hours, and we’ll have the hotel and room number.”
Erika blinked at him. It was excellent work, but Oskar was too easily charmed by his successes. “You’re going there, of course.”
“Of course,” he said. “As soon as my boss is put back on the case.”
“Right.” She groaned to her feet. “Give me a minute.”
Once she reached Dieter Reich’s dusty basement office, it only took seven minutes-more time had been spent getting there. She made her case concisely. All it took was a suspicion of helping the enemy for not only this case but his career to slip from his hands. An early dismissal, and then his entire pension would be called into question. “It would certainly be hard on Dana. The loss of money, of course, but the details of the affair-it would crush her, I imagine.”
By the time she returned to her office, she desired nothing more than a long bath to wash off the dirt, and Oskar misinterpreted her expression as failure. “Ask the motor pool for something reliable,” she told him. “Dieter will okay it.”
“How did you do it?”
She took a long time to settle back into her chair. “I put on the clothes of the kind of people we hate.” She stared a moment at her desk, then peered up at him. “The trouble is, they fit rather well.”
9
Despite the fact that, at thirty-two now, Oskar Leintz had been only fourteen when the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, he would remain, for the rest of his life, an Ossi living in the West. It was a fact he was never able to forget, particularly when he traveled back to Leipzig for family gatherings. His parents still considered Munich a foreign city.
He sometimes wondered if this in-betweenness, or this lingering outsider status, was why Erika Schwartz had plucked him out of the training center in 2000 as her personal assistant. When he asked, she joked, “You looked like you could lift things, which is really all I need. Someone who can lift things.”
Things like you? he’d wanted to ask, but at that point he still had no idea how good she was. Her name had come up among the other students, no more than rumors about an obese, caustic woman who could take a stack of files and ferret out a mole and turn him into a triple agent, all without leaving her desk. It took a while before he finally believed the rumors.
At various points during their eight years, he had wondered if accepting the position had been career suicide. Others even mentioned it to him. Franz Teufel, probably acting for Wartmuller, approached him after the CIA heroin scandal-a liaison position had opened up in Berlin, and perhaps Oskar was interested? When he said he wasn’t, Franz gave him an opaque lesson on the biorhythms of bureaucratic careers. “They max out, lose their internal drive, and after a while simply collapse. Schwartz has had her time, Oskar. There’s no need to be on hand to witness the collapse.”
Was it loyalty, misplaced or not, that compelled him to remain Erika Schwartz’s manservant?
Perhaps, but more than that Oskar tended to believe that he had chosen the right side, and that in the end, despite evidence to the contrary, Erika’s camp would be victorious. Whatever that meant.
He signed out a gray Mercedes and was on the road by three. Though the drive would take as much as twelve hours, flying was impossible, both because of what would be done with Milo Weaver and because Weaver’s fate had to be kept from their superiors. As he drove, he made two calls. Following Erika’s suggestion, he contacted Heinrich and Gustav, two Leipzigers he’d known from the BND academy, both of whom had been useful for other under-the- radar operations. They promised to meet him at an OMV station along the E51, and when he arrived they were waiting with thick jackets, sunglasses, and cheerful smiles.
The first leg took five hours, heading north toward Potsdam, then turning east. After nine, they stopped in Frankfurt an der Oder and ate rushed meals of ready-made sandwiches and jogged around a bit to stretch their legs, then continued into Poland, taking turns at the wheel so everyone could nap in the back. That last dismal stretch after LodZ was the worst, and just before Warsaw they topped off the gas tank and verified that all the lights were working-a Polish cop pulling them over for a broken blinker would have been a disaster. Then they continued into town and parked as close to the Marriott as possible.
As they took the stairs up to Weaver’s room, Oskar had to talk himself down. Over the last hour his adrenaline had begun to kick at him as he remembered that video clip. This man, the girl, and the report of a professionally broken neck. Then the footage he’d seen over the previous week of the miserable parents making their inept televised plea, and later seeing them in the flesh outside the Bulgarian church. These memories coalesced into a hatred that surprised him, and he had to whisper to himself to make sure he didn’t kill this CIA man.
Before entering, he measured 30 mg of liquid flurazepam hydrochloride into a syringe. Gustav found the switch to turn off the hall lamps, while Heinrich used a homemade skeleton keycard on the lock. They entered slowly, and in the light from the television the two helpers nearly laughed at the sound of Weaver’s snoring, but Oskar didn’t. He took in the form on the bed, half dressed, stinking of alcohol and cigarettes, his nose swollen from what must
