from the television. You understand German. You know your way around the city. You had me followed from the airport. That’s how you knew where I was staying. You had somebody watching the hotel, telling you the moment I left it and which way I had gone. It’s how you found me in the park. Then with the police swarming all over you suddenly have to take a shower. And now we’re going to a ‘friend’s’. A woman who has to make ‘arrangements’ first. What kind of friend is she, darling, when everyone in the city is looking for me, and probably by now for you as well? You told me to stop playing games; now it’s your turn. You’re not just Striker Oil. You’re something else. Who? What?”
Ahead was Weidendamm Bridge where Friedrichstrasse crossed the river. Stairs led up to it.
“Take the stairs,” she said quietly.
“I asked you a question.”
Just then two Berlin policemen went by on motorcycles, slowing as they did. A half block later, they stopped and looked back, one of them speaking into a microphone mounted to his helmet. Abruptly Anne took Marten by the hand and pulled him around.
“Kiss me.” She looked into his eyes. “And act like you mean it. Do it now.”
Marten glanced at the police and then did. She kissed him back, long and hard.
The motorcycle cops watched, then rode off.
“The stairs,” she said again and steered him toward them
7:40 P.M.
29
7:42 P.M.
Two more motorcycle officers were waiting when they reached the top of the stairs at Weidendamm Bridge. Their machines were parked to one side, and they stood on the sidewalk chatting. Left was the way Anne wanted to go, but to do it they would either have to walk directly past the police or cross the street to the other side, which might well be interpreted as a deliberate move to avoid them. Instead Anne turned them right across the bridge.
As they went she leaned in and kissed Marten again, whispering as she did. “Ahead is the train station. As soon as we get there, go inside.”
They didn’t look back. If the police were following them, there was no way to know. Forty seconds later they were at the station and going inside.
“If they saw us go in and they’re onto us,” Marten said quickly, “they’ll have cops watching every train. They probably do anyway. We have to get out, and now, but without getting on a train or going back out on the street.”
“This way.” Anne led them past the ticketing booths to a down escalator.
At the bottom she turned them left and then right and along a corridor that took them to an exit door at the far end. From there they crossed to the banks of the Spree as it wound through the city. Seconds after that they were at the top of a landing, then walking down a gangplank with a large group of tourists to board a double-decked tour boat named the
HOTEL ADLON, ROOM 647. 8:05 P.M.
“Get a technical unit up here right away,” Hauptkommissar Emil Franck snapped at Detective Bohlen. Immediately the ghostly thin Bolen clicked on a police radio and left.
It had taken Franck and his colleagues Bohlen and Prosser-with the help of the white-haired taxi driver, Karl Zeller, and concierge Stonner’s excellent staff-little more than thirty minutes to determine the room number and identity of the woman Zeller had picked up from the Hotel Mozart Superior and dropped off at the Adlon’s rear entrance at 6:02 P.M. With her had been a man who clearly resembled the person wanted by the police in the murder of Theo Haas.
“Her full name as registered is Hannah Anne Tidrow,” Stonner read from a computer printout just handed to him by a young hotel employee in a navy business suit.
“Address: 2800 Post Oak Boulevard, Houston, Texas. She checked in at one ten this afternoon and requested an open departure date. She has stayed with us before. She used an American Express credit card in the name of the AG Striker Oil & Energy Company of Houston, Texas. The billing address and the address she gave are the same.”
“When was the last time she was here?” Franck walked carefully around the room, looking at everything, touching nothing.
“Two years ago. March twelve through fifteen.”
“Hauptkommissar.” Detective Gertrude Prosser came in through the open door to the marble and polished-wood bathroom. “One or both of them took a shower. The hotel robe is still damp, as are three towels.”
“Two pieces of luggage.” Franck’s eyes scanned the room. One of Anne’s suitcases was on a luggage rack near the door; another was on the floor next to it. A pair of dark slacks, a designer blazer, two business suits, a pair of black dress slacks, an evening jacket, and a pair of expensive, somewhat wrinkled white linen slacks with a matching short-sleeve top hung in the open closet.
“Technical unit is on the way.” Detective Bohlen came back in from the hallway.
Immediately Franck lifted a small police radio and spoke into it. “This is Franck. I want information on a Hannah Anne Tidrow of the AG Striker Oil and Energy Company of Houston, Texas. What she does there, her title, how she’s involved with the company. If there is a recent photograph of her.” He clicked off and looked to Bohlen. “Get a canine team up here as quickly as possible.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You and Prosser go to the Hotel Mozart Superior. Get the names and addresses of everyone who registered there in the last ten days. Then assemble the staff, give them a description of Hannah Anne Tidrow, and show them the suspect’s photograph. Maybe they were only passing through or using the hotel as a way to throw us off, but if he was a guest there somebody will recognize him, and then we’ll have a name, a room number, and an address.”
“Yes, sir.”
8:12 P.M.
30
MONTE DE EL PARDO, SPAIN. SAME TIME.
The soil under the ancient olive trees was soft from a recent, unseasonable rain and made the grave easy to dig. A few minutes with a shovel and the job was done. Conor White lifted the corpse himself. It was small and delicate in his large hands. For a moment he studied it-the two tiny feet at the end of spindly legs, the unruly fluff of feathers at its neck, the proud twist of its beak, its gray wings, looking as if they
