Altogether, Delta knew he had created a window, albeit a very narrow one. His inspired idea of bringing Lund to Vienna was on the verge of going down in flames. Like so many ops, a promising blueprint had been defeated by the most common of enemies — complexity.
Driving wasn’t giving Delta the clarity he needed. He sat rigid and seething, gripping the wheel hard as he weaved amid traffic and circled the same city blocks. He tried to think tactically, bending to the facts as he knew them. He considered going to the airport, waiting near the Air Force jet that was to transport Lund to Germany. When she arrived, he could kill her on the spot, although it would likely entail removing her escort as well. Delta had reservations about killing another Marine — even if he was an officer.
He tried to compose his thoughts. Where would they take her?
Given the circumstances — police involvement, immigration, and diplomatic channels — a large city like Vienna presented any number of possibilities. Was she being held at one of the many police stations? In a secure government ministry building? Had she already been transferred to the U.S. embassy? He tried to leverage META, but the responses came at a glacial pace. Embassy information — daily sign-in logs, message traffic, personnel files — all arrived as if through quicksand. Austrian government data welled up from an even thicker bog, a delay that he suspected was due to the translation from German to English. Or perhaps the delays were only a reflection of his outlook — his frustration level peaking.
He drove aimless circles around Alsergrund, the ninth district in central Vienna. He cruised streets once frequented by Freud, never giving a thought to how the father of psychoanalysis might have marveled over the processes of his META-Marine mind. At one point Delta was so distracted in composing a mental inquiry that he nearly caused an accident outside Schwarzspanierstraße 15, the apartment in which Ludwig van Beethoven had died. It was soon after this near miss, with a taxi driver raising his fist in Delta’s rearview mirror, that the distant voice of a drill sergeant from basic training invaded his thoughts. When things go to hell, simplify.
And that was what he did. He ignored everything that had happened that day, all the hunting gone wrong. Delta backtracked, past the Vienna airport, over an ocean, and settled on something far more basic — his last solid point of orientation. He had discounted the prospect for hours now, but decided it was worth another try. From the window in his eye, he dispatched a request to locate Shannon Lund’s mobile phone.
50
Lund was slumped forward with her head on the folding table. She was nearly asleep. They’d brought her dinner an hour ago, a nice wienerschnitzel with potatoes and a salad that convinced her the Golden Anchor’s cook could learn a lot from a prison chef in Austria. The heavy meal, not to mention a day of unadulterated boredom, had made her nearly catatonic.
She was stirred to consciousness when the door opened abruptly. It was Blake Winston.
“All right, I think everything is in order. We’ll be leaving for the airport shortly.”
Lund stood up and stretched. “What about my stuff?”
“We’ll stop by the evidence room on our way out to collect it.”
Lund gave a sigh of resignation. She’d come to Austria to help Trey, and now her failure was all but complete. Ahead of her was a two-day trek involving airplanes and escorts, followed by a grilling from her boss — at least she had two days to come up with a story that would sound more believable than the truth. She realized at that moment how little she cared about any of it.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”
They were met in the hallway by a female police officer who led them two floors down to an evidence storage facility. At least that was what Lund took it for — the sign on the door was labeled with a German compound at least twenty letters long. The policewoman escorting them said in thickly accented English, “Neither of you are permitted inside. Stay here, please.” She pushed a button on a cipher lock near the door, then looked up at an overhead camera. There were three lights on the lock, and the bottom one turned green. She walked inside.
Lund said to Winston, “You don’t smoke, do you?”
He frowned.
“Never mind. So is my escort here?”
“Yes, he and I arrived together. As I mentioned earlier, Captain Morales will take you as far as—”
A huge crash reverberated from inside the evidence room. Lund looked at Winston, then they both looked at the door. It was a solid item in a metal frame, no inset window. The light on the cipher lock was red.
“That didn’t sound good,” said Lund. “Maybe we should have a look.”
Winston said uncertainly, “No, she told us to stay here. Besides, the door is locked.”
Lund reached for the call button on the lock pad, but before she could sink it the bottom light went green.
She reached for the door handle, but Winston shouldered in front of her. “Wait … let me.” He opened the door and started to go inside. He paused at the threshold. “What the hell…”
Lund looked past him into the evidence room and saw a giant set of shelves resting against a wall at a forty-five-degree angle. Between the wall and the heavy shelf was the body of a man in a police uniform — he was crushed and clearly dead. Lund noticed the look of horror on Winston’s face, and she followed his gaze to the right. There she saw another body — the woman who’d escorted them here, lying glass-eyed across the counter.
Lund instinctively grabbed a fistful of Winston’s finely tailored jacket, and in the next instant, as she began to pull, her eyes were drawn to a flash of motion. She made sense of it milliseconds later, as she was dropping to the floor — a hulking figure in a shooting stance, a silenced weapon extended. Two sounds seemed to arrive simultaneously — the spit from a silenced gun, and a muted slap. Lund hit the floor amid a spray of blood and tissue, and yelled, “Gun! Gun! Gun!” wishing she knew the German word.
She took one look at Winston, then wished she hadn’t. His face was unrecognizable. Lund knew she could only save herself. She skated to her feet on the polished floor and ran down the hall, searching for an open door or a stairwell — any kind of cover from the open door behind her. Her heart soared when she saw a policeman emerge from a side office with his hand on a holstered sidearm.
It might have been the look on her face, or that she’d called out a gun. Maybe it was the desperate way she was running toward him. Whatever the source, his expression was stone serious, his eyes alert. Then the officer’s gaze locked on something behind her, and he began to draw his weapon. She never heard the spits of the silencer, but the policeman’s gun blasted a round into the floor as he went down. Lund threw herself toward the opening as the hallway behind her exploded in a shower of plaster and chipped wood. She careened off a wall and got to her feet. What she saw in the room was wonderful — six, maybe eight officers in uniform, every one tugging at a holster or reaching into a drawer for a weapon.
“To the left down the hall!” she shouted. “Officers down!”
There was shouting in German among the policemen, and the one with the most stripes on his shoulders apparently decided Lund was not part of the problem. He asked in English, “How many attackers?”