No DNA, Sebastian thought. He doubted the police would search for it, as this was a simple, tragic accident. The bodies incinerated beyond recognition he hoped, their injuries obliterated.
From Georgetown, it took fourteen hours to Singapore Central Station. From the train station, Sebastian took a taxi to Orchid Road, had some Singapore dim sum with noodles, mixed with a couple of strands of his victim’s hair, and ate the strange concoction hungrily. Following the meal, Sebastian hailed a taxi to Changi Airport. By this time, the fire that had engulfed the kampong and obliterated seventeen other huts close to the murder scene, and the lives and possessions of those two family members, mothers both, were finally extinguished. The final death toll had been four: the old woman, the young, intended victim, a child who had missed school through chickenpox, and her grandma who had been looking after her.
Three hours and two airport showers later, Sebastian boarded a Boeing 747 on the way back to San Diego, via London.
Chapter Six
Max Cutler was twenty-four years of age in 2005. During the previous five years, he had been through all the recruitment training, and then some, at the Secret Service training academy outside of Washington, DC. Graduating from the course in the top two percentile, he was marked down for the fast track for exceptional officers. He had quickly learned the advanced application training in combatting counterfeiting and could identify a forged dollar bill within seconds. His marksmanship was assessed as sniper level, and he relished and excelled at water survival skills and physical fitness. The slight blemish on his record from the course was the inability to keep his manhood in his pants when a beautiful lady, in this case a female instructor, came a-calling.
Within a year, Max had had several excursions into the field, as part of a covert team investigating counterfeiting and the organizations that undertake such activities. He had had cause to draw his weapon twice in the intervening years and had shot in retaliation once. The Romanian he had cornered with $25,000 in counterfeit bills was not going to come easy and had shot at Cutler and his colleagues three times before Cutler put a 9mm projectile between the Romanian’s eyes.
The Secret Service offered mandatory counselling, as they did for all agents who had participated in a shooting that had led to a fatality. His debrief was short, and the kill was good. Cutler felt no remorse; the guy was trying to kill him. After the shooting, he was no longer treated as the new kid on the block. Cutler had earned respect for his aptitude and attitude from day one from his peers and superiors, but the way he handled himself had built up new levels of respect and admiration from others in the Service.
He had been leading an investigation unit comprised of three agents and himself for the past year. At twenty-four years of age, he was amongst the youngest team leaders the Service had had since the Second World War.
Cutler and his team had been investigating a German gang of counterfeiters for much of 2005 and into 2006.
The Berlin Wall had been dismantled in 1989, which led to the demise of the East German Ministry of State Security, commonly known as the Stasi. Trained by the KGB, the Stasi had a reputation for being one of the most ruthless of any government department, even outstripping the KGB in some ways.
Reforming and restructuring the Soviet Union, known as Perestroika, had been Gorbachev’s legacy, and one of the turning points in the twentieth century. On the downside, hundreds of highly trained East German intelligence operatives had been put out of work overnight. Some of them would be tracked down and prosecuted over atrocities they had committed in the name of the East German government. Some had been taken on by their West German counterparts; most had set up criminal operations and utilized other ex-members or trained up new ones.
Cutler had begun to investigate such a gang, which originated in Dresden, in the old Eastern section. When the police started to close in on them, they moved base, setting up operations in a beautiful small town in Bavaria, Bad Reichenhall, right in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. The area was as stunning as it was quiet, just fifteen minutes from the Austrian border and Salzburg, the same distance up the steep, winding road to Berchtesgaden.
Cutler was on their trail and set up his base in Berchtesgaden. Following the second world war, the USA created a significant military presence in the area and built a large army camp, on the foot of an alpine peak. This town and camp were situated below the lodge known as the Eagle’s Nest, a birthday present for Adolf Hitler in 1939. The American military and CIA had several safe houses near the base. Cutler chose a pleasant Bavarian chalet between the river and salt mine, which was once an SS brothel in the Second World War.
The third day of June 2006, Cutler had travelled some eight miles along the alpine road to Konigsee. The scenery was outstanding: tree-lined, with Bavarian chalets interspersed with woods and fast-flowing rivers of ice melt from the looming alps, which served as a picture-postcard backdrop.
Their destination was an alpine lake with green slopes and wildflowers surrounding the bright expanse of water. Apart from the top of the Alps, the snow had receded two months earlier. Where there had been crisp,
