toward the taxi queue.
A gray-haired, matronly woman wearing a lightweight summer coat watched him go. She had been in a group of others waiting at Gate A14 to meet arriving passengers and had followed him when he left. She’d seen him step to the curbside, take a cell phone from his suitcase, and make a call. Now she followed him again. Safely and at a distance. She stopped as he entered the taxi line, then watched as he got into a black Mercedes Metrocab. Number 77331.
11:35 A.M.
MADRID, BARAJAS INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. SAME TIME.
Tired, but happy to be finally home after a flight delay of nearly two hours in Paris because of mechanical problems, Marita Lozano and her medical-student charges-Rosa, Luis, Gilberto, and Ernesto-left Iberia baggage claim, passed through the customs area, and went out into the arrivals hall on their way to the Metro that would take them into the heart of the city.
The area was crowded with friends, relatives, business associates, and others gathered to meet arriving passengers. Among them were perhaps a dozen limousine drivers, most of them in dark suits and white shirts, holding cardboard signs that were hand-lettered with the names of the clients they’d been hired to pick up.
“Marita!” Rosa was the first to notice. “A sign with your name.”
Puzzled, Marita looked to the bank of limousine drivers. A handsome young man was holding a sign that read DR. LOZANO.
“Some other and richer Dr. Lozano.” Marita said with a laugh and kept walking.
As they passed, the man suddenly approached. “Marita Lozano?”
“Yes.”
“I have a limousine to take you into the city.”
“Me?”
“Yes, and your friends.”
“I don’t understand.”
He smiled. “It was paid for by the oil company in Bioko. To thank you for your work there and help compensate for your trouble with the army. I was instructed to take each of you to your homes.”
Marita looked at him carefully. Something didn’t feel right.
“That’s very nice,” she said politely. “But I think we’ll just take the Metro.”
“Please, doctor, the company insists. You have all had a very long trip.”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on, Marita.” Rosa giggled. “We’re all tired. It’s very nice of them to do this.”
Luis grinned. “Who wants to take the Metro when we have a limo?”
“Nobody,” Ernesto added.
Marita hesitated a moment longer, still unsure.
Rosa pressed her again. “Marita…”
Finally she gave in. “Alright, Rosa, we’ll take the limo.”
“Good.” The driver smiled warmly, then took her bag and Rosa’s and led them toward the exit.
23
BERLIN, HOTEL MOZART SUPERIOR,
94 FRIEDRICHSTRASSE, ROOM 413. 1:35 P.M.
Freshly showered and shaved, Nicholas Marten stood in the window looking down at the street below. He was barefoot and bare chested, wearing jeans and nothing else. The dark blue cell phone was in his hand. He hesitated for the briefest moment and then, for the third time since he’d checked into the hotel ninety minutes earlier, he called the number President Harris had given him for Theo Haas.
Again it rang through. After the fourth ring he again got the husky-male-voice recording. Again he clicked off.
“Damn it,” he swore angrily. Where the hell was Haas? What was he doing? When would he be home?
Suddenly it occurred to him that the Nobel laureate might be traveling and not in the city at all. Then what? Try to have the president or Joe Ryder track him down? That could take days, even longer. In the meantime, where were the photographs, assuming Father Willy had indeed sent them to his brother? Where? Sitting in a branch of the Berlin post office? In Haas’s home, just lying around, opened or unopened? Or did Haas have them with him? Was he at this moment preparing to reveal them as only an irascible world-famous writer could, and most likely would?
As quickly Marten thought of something else: that maybe Conor White’s people or operatives from the Equatorial Guinea military hadn’t been as slow to put Father Willy and Theo Haas together as brothers as he’d first thought. Maybe one group or the other had already reached him. If so he could be in grave danger or even dead. In what could only be described as an urgent, near-involuntary reaction, he lifted the phone and punched in Theo Haas’s number again.
Once more the call rang through. Once more he listened as it rang four times. He was expecting the recording to click on once again when instead a male voice answered.
“Yes?” came a grumble in German.
“My name is Marten, Nicholas Marten. I’m trying to reach-”
“You’ve got him,” Theo Haas said sharply in English.
“I would like to meet with you. Could I come to your apartment?”
“Across from the Tiergarten. Platz der Republik. The grassy park in front of the Reichstag. Five o’clock. I’m an old man in a green cap and carrying a walking stick. I’ll be sitting on a park bench near Scheidemannstrasse. If you’re not there by ten minutes past I will leave.”
There was an abrupt click as he hung up and the phone went dead.
“Well,” Marten said out loud and with relief. At least no one else had gotten to him. Not yet anyway.
PLATZ DER REPUBLIK. 4:45 P.M.
Marten came into the park early, determined not to miss Haas through some happenstance beyond his control. In front of him the Platz der Republik sprawled for nearly a quarter of a mile and was filled with seemingly hundreds of people taking advantage of a warm early-summer afternoon. To his right was the massive edifice that was the historic Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building. He vaguely remembered that it had been burned down, purportedly by the Nazis in 1933, and was then rebuilt and reoccupied by the parliament in 1999 as a symbol of German unity following the Cold War. The words carved above its main facade in 1916 had been restored as well-DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE (“To the German people”). Maybe the historical significance of it was something Haas was trying to impress on Marten and the reason he chose to meet in its shadow. Or maybe it had no meaning at all. What was curious was why he had chosen to meet outdoors in public rather than in the privacy of his home, especially when he knew that what Marten had to tell him concerned his brother. He was known for being a “character,” and so maybe it was a whim, or maybe he simply didn’t want strangers in his home.
