She didn’t answer.
“Say yes if you understand me.”
He got a feeble
Fisher walked to the doors and pulled the curtains shut, then checked van der Putten. The former mercenary lay facedown on the bed, a Rorschach of blood staining the white sheets beneath him. He’d been shot once behind the right ear — or what little remained of the right ear. It had been sawed off, along with the left, by the bloody tanto knife that lay beside the body. The ears lay side by side on a nearby pillow. They looked like miniature, dehydrated pork chops.
He quickly searched both men, taking everything he found, then grabbed a spare blanket in the linen closet and covered up the woman. After some coaxing, she got to her feet, and Fisher led her out of the bedroom and downstairs to the living room couch.
“What happened?” she murmured, barely coherent. She was in shock. “Who were those men? Why did they kill Heinzie? Who are you? Why did they…?”
Fisher let her ramble as he went into the kitchen and found a plastic grocery bag, into which he dumped the men’s wallets, pocket litter, and a set of car keys. He then went back upstairs and rummaged in van der Putten’s medicine cabinet, where he found a bottle of Ambien. He gave the woman a tablet and a shot of Scotch, both of which she accepted without protest. He knelt before her.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Isobella.”
“Isobella, does Heinzie have a safe? Someplace he keeps important information? Maybe a hiding place?”
“What?” Fisher repeated the question, and Isobella shook her head. “He just has a watch and some rings. No jewelry—”
“I’m talking about documents. Important papers.”
“Why do you need that?” For the first time since sitting down, Isobella lifted her head and seemed to truly focus on Fisher. Seeing his balaclava-covered face, she withdrew and her eyes went wide.
“I’m a friend,” Fisher said. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here in time to save Heinzie. Those men were after information.” This was likely untrue, but the woman wasn’t coherent enough to dissect the argument. “If I don’t find it and get it out of here, more men will come. Do you understand?”
“More? More men?”
“That’s right. Where did Heinz keep his important documents?”
“There’s a safe. Upstairs. Under the sink…”
“Do you know the combination?”
“My birthday.”
Fisher felt a fleeting pang of sadness. Clearly, Isobella had meant more to van der Putten than Fisher had guessed. “What’s your birthday?”
Isobella blinked a few times and her head lolled. The Ambien/Scotch cocktail was taking hold. “What?”
“What’s your birthday?”
“June 9, 1961.”
Fisher laid her down on the couch, then went back upstairs. As advertised, he found a safe built into the floor of the bathroom vanity. He pushed aside the rolls of toilet paper and bottles of cleaning solution and spun the dial to 6-9-61. Nothing. He tried different combinations and sequences until 61-19-6-9 produced a click. Inside the shoebox-sized safe Fisher found nothing except a 2 GB SD memory card. He pocked it and went downstairs.
“I’ll call the police,” Fisher told Isobella. “You rest.”
She nodded wearily, then rolled over on the couch.
Fisher left.
They’d parked their gray compact two blocks away. He searched it, taking every pertinent scrap of paper he could find and dumping it into the grocery sack before locking the doors and tossing the keys down a nearby sewer drain.
20
“It’s possible,” Fisher told Grim, “but I’ve never been a big believer in coincidences.”
“Me neither,” she replied from the LCD screen. “With luck, I’ll have something for you in a few hours.”
The night before, after dumping the keys to the gray compact in the sewer, Fisher had walked back toward the center of town, stopping briefly to buy a newspaper, in which he wrapped his blood-speckled polo shirt. When he reached the bullring, the community party was in full swing and a huge bonfire was burning. He tossed the newspaper and shirt into the blaze, then spent fifteen minutes dancing and drinking and generally making a spectacle of himself before walking to another convenience store, this one close to his hotel. He used the pay phone to dial 112—Spain’s version of 911—and told the dispatcher in hurried Spanish that he’d heard gunfire near the intersection of Cuesta de los Yeseros and Calle del Alamillo Bajo. He’d then hung up and returned to his hotel.
The choice to call the police and remain in town rather than simply driving away was a tactical gamble, Fisher knew, but given Chinchon’s size a foreigner leaving town in the dead of the night following a brutal triple murder wouldn’t go unnoticed.
Fisher completed the ruse by waking up before dawn the next day, dropping his packed duffel bag off the balcony, and stopping in the lobby to ask the clerk when the bullfight was to begin and how to reach Guadalupe and whether the monastery there was open to the public. Once out the door he picked up his duffel, walked to his car, and drove away, taking the M-404 west out of town before turning north at Ciempozuelos and heading for Madrid and the Third Echelon safe house, where he packaged up his take from van der Putten’s killers and sent it via International Next Flight Out. Grim had the package sixteen hours later.
“One thing I can tell you is that the SD card you got from van der Putten’s safe looks like bank account info,” Grim now said. “As you’d expect, he had several — two of them hidden behind front companies. I’m working on it. If Ames paid him in anything other than cash, it should be there.”
“Good.”
“Back to our noncoincidental coincidence: It could mean either Noboru or Ames was lying about van der Putten.”
“It’s worse than that,” Fisher replied. “It means one of them is the mole.”
There were a few seconds of silence as Grimsdottir absorbed this. On the screen, her brows furrowed and she let out a sigh. “It could be worse than that. If van der Putten wasn’t the source of the lead that pointed Hansen and his team to Vianden, that leaves only three people who could’ve tipped off Ames: me, Moreau, and Kovac.”
“You know who gets my vote,” Fisher replied. “The question is, did he do it to make you look bad, or is it something else?”
“Such as?”
“Ernsdorff. When did you tell Kovac I was moving toward Vianden?”
“About four hours before Ames got his tip.”
“As soon as he realized I was moving toward Vianden and Ernsdorff, he got nervous and ordered Ames to cut me off. Problem was, I’d already penetrated Ernsdorff’s estate.”
“If all that’s true, why didn’t Kovac simply call Ernsdorff and warn him?”
“Hard to say. Insulation, maybe. Maybe Kovac and Ernsdorff are separated by layers — if so, that means there’re bigger fish out there.”
“Big enough to pull the strings of a deputy director of the NSA and Europe’s premier black-market banker. Scary thought.”
