interrogation of the Spanish doctor and her students had begun that they had no idea where the pictures were and or even what their captors were talking about. But he’d gone on with the questioning anyway. Then personally managed their deaths.
Over the years both he and Irish Jack had lived and fought alongside extremely cruel and often fanatical men, but nothing matched what Conor White had done in Spain. He was clearly mad, and in a way neither of them had ever seen before, not even on the battlefield. Still, they would follow him into hell simply because they knew something larger was going on, the substance of which they, as foot soldiers, wouldn’t know about or be told. Whatever it was, it was clearly important enough for White to be giving everything within him to successfully execute. You took orders from men like that, fought alongside them and didn’t ask questions. It was what he and Irish Jack had signed on for and the kind of professionals they were.
RITZ-CARLTON BERLIN, SUITE 1422. 10:55 P.M.
“
Sy Wirth was still at the writing table, his chin resting in his hands, his yellow legal pads piled up beside him, the remains of his club sandwich on a side table.
It was the information he’d passed on to Conor White, secure in the fact that if the Cessna changed course Dimitri would report to him within minutes, and in turn he would alert White. But until then White was to keep a safe distance behind and follow Marten’s Cessna directly to Malaga. Something he would do without question because that was the directive Wirth had purposely given him.
Let him go first. Give him time to get there, Wirth thought. It has to look as if he’s doing this on his own, that he’s out to protect himself, SimCo, and Hadrian at all costs and that Striker has no knowledge of it whatsoever.
Wirth glanced at the two BlackBerrys on the table beside him. One was his everyday phone. The other had a little piece of blue tape on the bottom to distinguish it. Calls made from it were rerouted through the Hadrian Worldwide Protective Services Company’s headquarters in Manassas, Virginia, making it appear as if they had originated from there.
It was the device he’d been using to contact Conor White since the meeting with Hadrian’s Loyal Truex and Striker’s chief counsel, Arnold Moss, in Houston when both companies had agreed to distance themselves from SimCo. The same meeting where, after Truex left, he’d told Moss it was time to distance themselves from Hadrian as well. Hence any calls he made to Conor White would be on telephone company records as having come directly from Hadrian. It was a concept he had devised himself, the system and means of execution very quietly put into play by a friend in the Houston office of the FBI.
11:07 P.M.
Wirth looked at his watch, then picked up his main BlackBerry and alerted the pilots of his Striker-owned Gulfstream on standby at Tegel Airport to be ready for takeoff in two hours. Done, he set the alarm on his watch for midnight, then got up, crossed to the bed, lay back, and closed his eyes, determined to get even a few minutes of sleep. It didn’t come quickly. His mind and senses overrode it.
In addition to normal air traffic, by one thirty there would be four more planes in the air, all headed for Malaga: Marten’s piston-engine Cessna and three chartered jets-Conor White’s Falcon 50, another with Dimitri’s people on board, and his own Striker Gulf-stream. A lot of money, a lot of men, a lot of aircraft to recover a single batch of photographs.
53
A LEARJET 55, SOMEWHERE OVER SOUTHERN FRANCE.
FUSELAGE REGISTRATION LX -C88T7.
AIRSPEED 270 MPH. ALTITUDE 39,000 FEET. PILOTS, 2.
MAXIMUM PASSENGERS, 7. ACTUAL PASSENGERS, 2.
SUNDAY, JUNE 6. 1:25 A.M.
Emil Franck could see Kovalenko hunched over a cell phone in the darkened forward cabin, every once in a while nodding and gesturing with his free hand. His first thought had been that he was in conversation with someone in Moscow-his wife or his children, or perhaps a mistress. Yet the idea that it was a domestic call was doubtful because it was almost three thirty in the morning Moscow time. A more credible scenario was that he was engaged with a superior, discussing the mission at hand and the details of what would happen if and when they recovered the materials they were after.
They’d lifted off from Berlin/Schonefeld just after nine thirty and two hours later gone into a holding pattern, a wide circle over the southern city of Toulouse that swung as far out as the Pyrenees on the French/Spanish border, waiting for the slower Cessna carrying Nicholas Marten and Anne Tidrow to catch up so they could follow it into Malaga or wherever else it might touch down. Wherever else because they knew Marten was not foolish enough to file a flight plan that would tell anyone exactly where he was going.
Franck looked to the laptop he’d been monitoring off and on since they’d left Berlin. On it, superimposed over a map of Western Europe, was a tiny green dot that represented the location of Marten’s Cessna, the information relayed by a powerful thumb-sized transmitter hidden inside the aircraft.
The setup was part of a complex operation carried out quickly and efficiently after his meeting with Kovalenko that morning at Neuer Lake when he’d tapped into his vast underground network of informers and several hours later learned of an urgent request to charter a fast plane-a jet or turboprop-to fly two passengers from a private airstrip near Potsdam to Malaga, Spain, early that evening. Quickly, he’d turned the fast-plane request into one for a slower aircraft, the piston-driven Cessna 340, then had the transmitter installed after the plane had been secured and was being serviced.
His current calculation put the Cessna some two hundred and fifty miles behind them, flying southwest at approximately 190 mph, the speed it had been averaging since he first turned the laptop on and picked up the plane’s location. It meant they were still on course for Malaga. Nothing had changed.
1:30 A.M.
Franck put the laptop aside and leaned back, hoping to get an hour or so of sleep, a prospect he knew was unlikely. Sleep in situations like these was not part of the drill. He glanced at the overnight bag on the seat across from him. In it was a fresh shirt, socks, underwear, a toothbrush, and a razor all tucked neatly alongside a Heckler & Koch MP5K compact submachine gun, which, along with the Glock 9 mm automatic Kovalenko carried in a holster clipped to his waistband, had been locked inside a storage compartment on the aircraft when they boarded.
Who the hell was Kovalenko anyway? A man with FSB credentials-the Federal Security Service Ministry of Internal Affairs-who had arrived on-scene in Berlin quicker than magic, literally within hours of his early-morning meeting with Elsa in the darkened cafe near Gendarmenmarkt Square, as if he’d already been in the city looking for Marten. And maybe he had. Franck might be a top cop in Berlin, a Hauptkommissar of Hauptkommissars, but he certainly didn’t know everyone or everything, and besides, he hadn’t heard from Elsa in ages. So there was no telling who or what she had been involved with since. She might well have been working with Kovalenko for years. That the Russian had known Marten from before, when he’d been a homicide investigator in Los Angeles, was a curiosity in itself. Stranger still was how they should both end up here
