“What do you mean?” Murdock asked.
“Hard to put a name to it, Lieutenant. But I have the feeling that she figures she can stand anything because she won’t have to last through it for long. Do you know what I mean? Like she’s expecting a rescue.”
“Or,” Dowling-Smythe added, “because she knows that whatever it is she’s protecting, some operation, some mission, will be too far along for us to do anything about it before we could possibly break her. Since she knows she can hold out that long, she’s at peace with the world.”
“Maybe she thinks her friends will try to set up an exchange.”
“Could be,” Dowling-Smythe said. “Though your people back in Washington have shown a keen interest in this bird, Lieutenant. Fairly champing at the bit to have a go at her. Doubt that they’ll be too keen at letting her slip through their fingers.”
“I don’t think I want to know,” Murdock said. He was a warrior, a profession that frequently demanded brutality. Two days earlier he’d killed a man with precision and efficiency, and very nearly killed a woman the same way, would have killed her had he needed to.
But he didn’t at all like this tinkering with a person’s soul.
“We also had something faxed through from Wiesbaden, Lieutenant,” Dowling-Smythe said. “About those four people you pegged the other day.”
“Yes?” He’d been expecting a distillation on the dossiers of the people who’d attacked him and Inge. “Anything useful?”
He shrugged. “Not much. They say that there were fairly complete dossiers in the Komissar computer. The two men who were captured were small-time thugs. Members of a criminal gang based in Hamburg. Bank robbery, extortion, but never any connection with terrorism.”
“Freelancers,” Wentworth suggested. “Hired muscle.”
“A distinct possibility. Our source over there says they’ve questioned them, of course, but they claim not to know who they were working for. Their contact they knew simply as Ulrich.”
“Chances are they wouldn’t know,” MacKenzie put in.
“True. But there was a difference with the other two.” Dowling-Smythe pulled a folded sheet of paper from the inside of his uniform jacket and handed it to Murdock. “This came through for you, Lieutenant. From someone named… Inge?”
Murdock smiled, accepting the sheet. “A friend.”
Swiftly, he scanned the faxed copy of a typewritten, singlespaced sheet. Inge’s letter was curt and to the point, promising full dossiers to follow later.
“The man you killed, Lieutenant,” Dowling-Smythe continued as Murdock read, “was Rudie Waldemar. The woman you captured was Erna Berg. According to Komissar, those two were members of the old Red Army Faction beginning in the middle 1970s.”
“I thought as much,” Murdock said, continuing to scan the information. He’d already described the woman’s H&K tattoo to both men.
“Lately, of course, the German RAF is pretty much dead. Has been for ten years or more. But this strongly suggests that there’s something new afoot. We’ve been hearing rumors for some time that the RAF and some of the other old terrorist groups on the Continent were banding together into something called variously the People’s Party or the People’s Revolution.”
“This says that all four may have been working for something called the People’s Revolutionary Front,” Murdock said. He looked up, handing the paper to MacKenzie. “Is there a connection between that and our North Korean friend in the next room?”
“Hard to say,” Wentworth said. He walked over to the two-way transparency and stared into the next window for a time. “We know that a large number of the terrs we put down in Middlebrough this afternoon were either known Provos — mostly hotheads who wouldn’t accept the latest truce — or Red Army Faction. And both Waldemar and Berg were RAF once. I’d say it’s a fair guess that the old RAF is changing its stripes, turning into the People’s Revolution… that or it’s backing the PRF, bankrolling it and providing personnel and shooters.”
“And importing two North Koreans with experience handling nuclear materials,” Murdock continued. “One of whom has been handling nuclear materials within the past few days.”
MacKenzie whistled. “Fuck, Skipper. I don’t much like the sound of that!”
“I think,” Murdock said quietly, “that we’d better make a full and complete report to Washington.”
10
Inge Schmidt left her apartment, walking down the long hallway, turning into the foyer, and stepping out into the early morning sunshine. It was a glorious day, with a clear blue sky and the promise of an early spring.
She wondered if… no, when she would see Blake again.
The truth of the matter was that the American SEAL had really gotten to her, despite all of her promises to herself never to become emotionally involved again… not the way she’d been with Josef. Thinking about Blake, she couldn’t help but remember the attack that evening, when she’d seen him take down three of their four attackers in the space of a couple of heartbeats.
“Guten tag, Fräulein.”
She started. Glancing to her left, she saw Klaus Dengler’s ironic smile as he leaned against the side of a trash dumpster, crisply dressed in a suit that betrayed the bulge of an automatic pistol beneath his jacket. “Hello, Klaus. All quiet?”
“So far.”
Dengler was a Section Three man, one of those assigned to provide security for Inge since the incident here on this very street three days before. It was nothing so obvious as a constant guard; someone was simply… always about, walking around the block, sitting in a car in the parking lot with a newspaper, or perhaps sitting on the front step, talking with a friend.
“Well, you can come on in to work now,” she told him. “I don’t think anyone will steal the building while I’m gone.”
“Actually, Fraulein, I’ll be following you in this morning.” He shrugged. “The boss wants it that way, until we know more about why those RAF thugs tried to get you the other night.”
“Well, I’ll see you at work, then.” She walked toward her Renault, parked in her numbered space in the lot.
She heard a shoe scrape on the pavement behind her. She assumed it was Klaus… but something tickled at the back of her mind, a warning, a tremor of fear, and she turned. A stranger was there, a big man in a heavy overcoat, coming straight toward her and only a few feet away now. He was reaching beneath his unbuttoned coat, pulling something out…
Turning sharply, she started to run, but two more men had appeared, one emerging from behind her car in the lot, the other moving rapidly toward her from across the street. That stopped her… and an instant later a hand closed on her upper arm. “Be perfectly silent, Miss Schmidt,” the man said in German.
She twisted hard, trying to gain the leverage she needed to break the hold, but something ice-cold and metallic pressed against the base of her neck. “Don’t,” the man said.
“What is it? What do you want?”
“Some information. You will come with us.”
“Go to hell!” She opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could.
The blow on the back of her head stunned her, an explosion of pain that made her gasp and turned her knees to jelly. Slumping forward, she felt the man in the raincoat grab her from behind, keeping her on her feet. She wanted to fight back, wanted to lash out, but the blow had stunned her to the point where she was having trouble coordinating any movement, or even managing to stand. “Help me,” he barked in German to one of the others.