"You came a little too close to killing Adams," the boss said.
"He won't die that easily," Gunter explained.
"A little too close," the boss repeated.
Gunter stretched back in his chair and took another long gulp of beer.
"I know you're a professional, Gunter, but will you find it difficult to kill Jake Adams at some point?" the boss asked.
"No!" Gunter said callously. "Do you want us to continue?" Gunter looked at the boss for approval.
The boss glared at him, his hands in front of him as if praying. "Let's keep Adams alive for a while and see what he's up to," he said. "I need to know what he knows. Does he still work for the CIA? Find out! If he is working for Teredata, like we originally thought, then he'll have to go, of course. I can't have government agents dragging us down, and I won't be undercut or underbid by anyone. There's too much at stake. Our research staff has still not figured out the chips. So I still need Charlie Johnson for a while."
Gunter looked up quickly to the boss. "I thought we had everything from him?"
"Let me do the thinking," the boss said. "Just find out about Adams for now."
"No problem." Gunter finished his beer.
Jake was just about to turn the keys to start his Passat when he recognized a man in an old blue BMW less than a block away. He thought his eyes were deceiving him, but at that distance he couldn't be mistaken. The BMW belonged to a German customs officer named Herbert Kline. Herb worked out of Bonn, at least he did the last time Jake saw him, so it should have been no coincidence that he was there. But why was he sitting out in front of Bundenbach Electronics? Kline had a reputation, earned or not, of being less than efficient. He was old enough and had worked long enough within the customs agency to be a secure, tenured bureaucrat. The agency couldn't fire him, and the criminals would rather keep him around alive with his incompetence than replace him with a talented newcomer. At least that had always been the rumor. With the limited exposure Jake had with him, the rumors were unfounded.
Jake needed to leave undetected. He had parked with the nose of his car just in front of a road that ended on his. Starting the car, he made a quick right turn onto the side street. The Passat slowly gained speed. Looking into his rear view mirror, Jake was convinced that Kline had not seen him.
CHAPTER 11
Toni and Kurt drove swiftly along Via Bonanno Pisano catching a glimpse of the white marble leaning tower from time to time between buildings.
"I told you I'd show you Pisa on a Saturday night, kid," Toni quipped.
"Try Sunday morning."
"Close enough!"
She turned left on Via Volturno and crossed the Arno River. Kurt tried to keep up with the street names, but after crossing the river and turning left to parallel it, he lost track of where he was. The streets were poorly marked in this squalid part of town.
"Where in the hell are we?" Kurt asked.
"The Pisa most tourists don't see. Consider yourself lucky," she said with a smile.
Lucky or not, he knew they had a long evening ahead of them. One that would bring him to the very brink of his training.
The Alfa Romeo finally turned down a narrow alley that was both dirty and wretched. After a few blocks, when at times it appeared that the narrowness would rip the outside mirrors from the car, Toni pulled as close to one side as she could and stopped. They both got out on the driver's side. Toni pulled a key from her purse and opened a large metal door. Then she opened the trunk, Kurt and she quickly pulled Lt. Budd from within, and quietly closed the trunk again. Kurt put him over his shoulder and carried him inside.
After the door closed, Toni turned on a small overhead light that partially lit the sordid nature of the tiny corridor. Chunks of wood and metal lay strewn across the cement floor, and the smell of urine and rat feces permeated throughout.
"Nice place, hey, kid? It reminds me of home in New York," Toni said with a piercing echo.
"Is it okay to talk here?"
"Yeah, no problem," she said, fumbling through her keys. "The Italians let us use this place. Most of the people have moved out of this neighborhood. Some developer wants to convert these buildings into trendy apartments overlooking the river. But we've still got a few more years to work out of here. The funding has been slow, and the bureaucracy even more so."
Toni opened the door at the end of the corridor. The room inside was a stark contrast to the alley and outer corridor. The furniture was old and worn, but it looked clean. The kitchen area had a metal table and chair set that could have been from the '50s, but it too was at least clean.
"Put him in the far back room and lock the door," Toni ordered.
Kurt carried him back, turned on the light and plopped the lieutenant in a small cot.
The room that Lt. Budd would now call home was designed to look like a prison cell. It had one small cot, a disgusting sink and toilet, and a cement wall. The wall was notched in groups of five marking off over sixty days for one visitor. The first few notches were deep and defined, but toward the end they were barely visible. The overhead light was actuated by a rheostat so its intensity could be overwhelming or virtually nonexistent. The door had a peep hole to look in, and it opened from the left side instead of the right. Kurt saw why when he noticed the walls in the hall were painted darker at the end than at the front, and a black curtain hung about midway down the hall to keep the kitchen and living room lights from interfering with the intended effects.
When Kurt returned, Toni had two cold beers opened.
"Thanks! I could use one," he said. "That's an interesting room you have there."
"Psychology is the most important aspect of a proper interrogation," Toni informed him.
"Is it totally sound proof?"
"Yes. He can yell all he wants, and we couldn't hear him out here. That goes both ways. We can talk freely."
Kurt had heard of such rooms in his training, but the Naval Investigative Service operated under more controlled conditions. All of their interrogation rooms were on Naval bases or air stations. He had never seen a shipboard facility since he was recruited to the NIS.
Toni quickly downed her beer. "Let's go, kid."
She had explained to him the tactics she wanted to use on Lt. Budd. At first it was hard for him to accept the use of drugs and electrical shock on a fellow officer. But the thought of selling out American technology sickened him even more.
Hours passed. The interrogations became more intense. Kurt's job was to monitor the whole charade from a small control room on closed circuit television. From time to time he would ask questions or make comments over a loud speaker through a muffled microphone. Most comments were in Italian, to make it appear that he was in charge and running the show. He could bring pain with a simple word bugiardo, or liar. The small electrical shocks were intensified in Lt. Budd's mind by a drug Toni had given him. He was in a lot less pain than he thought. She spoke to Lt. Budd in mostly Italian to confuse him, and then in broken English when she really wanted to know something.
The information came slowly. But Leo Birdsong had been right all along. Lt. Budd, the Bingo King, was squeamish at the least. The drugs didn't help his cause. Toni would administer one drug to knock him out long enough for her to change clothes. Then she gave him another drug to awaken him to make it appear as though another day had passed. All along he was on sodium pentothal to allow the words to flow more freely.
After nearly fifteen hours, Toni and Kurt had enough information on tape to keep their investigation going for weeks. Lt. Budd implicated Petty Officer First Class Shelby Taylor and two other men aboard the USS Roosevelt. The number Toni got from him earlier was to a place of business in Rome-an American is all he knew. In the end, Toni placed Lt. Budd into a deep narcosis.