“All right,” she said. “I need your help. Mr. Adams is an important Agency asset.”
“With a million Euro price on his head,” Mayer interrupted.
“So you know,” Franz said, and saw Toni’s staunch gaze upon him, shutting him down.
“Of course we know, Herr Martini,” Mayer sneered in German. “We also know you are dying from cancer and are on medical leave. So…is your presence here on official Austrian State Polizei business, or is this personal for you?”
Franz started to rise in his chair but Toni settled him back down with a hand against his chest. Under his breath, Franz called the German a whore-screwing pig in Italian. Toni smiled at that. Her father had used that phrase many times while watching football on the television.
“Okay,” Toni started. “Herr Martini is working for me as a liaison.” She switched to German and said, “Now, can we cut through the bullshit and get to the business at hand? I know you’ve gotten a call from the director of our CIA, because he assured me you would cooperate fully with our investigation. Do you understand my German?”
The BND officer shifted in his chair and seemed to have broken out in a slight sprinkling of sweat. “Yes,” he said reluctantly. He was back with English.
“Well, come on,” she said. “We’re burning daylight.”
Mayer glanced at his young associate, who hit the lights. They were in total darkness for a split second until an LCD panel that filled much of the far wall came on, with photographs of a man on a train platform. The man’s head was down, but Toni still recognized Jake. Others would’ve had a tough time, though. The next couple of slides were equally obscured. Jake knew he was being photographed.
“Who is that?” Toni asked.
“Jake Adams.”
“How can you be sure?”
Mayer hit pause and clicked his remote. Sound above was of a phone conversation between a man and a woman. It was cryptic, the man asking for a ride, and the woman calling the man her cousin.
“The voice matches Jake Adams from his lectures,” Mayer explained.
“And the woman?” Toni already knew the answer.
Hesitating, Mayer finally said. “An asset of ours.”
“Where was this?” she asked.
“That’s the main Pullach Bahnhof. Yesterday.”
“The woman,” Toni repeated with more force.
Without answering, Mayer clicked another button and the photo of Jake switched to a video clip of Jake coming out of an apartment, a backpack over his shoulder, following a pretty woman. He threw the pack in the back seat of a black BMW and the two of them drove off. The camera followed them down the street and then the BMW sped up and evaded. Good driving, Toni thought.
The video stopped and the lights came on.
“When was that?” Toni asked.
“Just hours ago. And I’m sure you recognize the woman. She worked with you a few years ago in Vienna when you were the station chief there.”
“I thought she looked familiar,” Toni said, no shock in her voice. “But her hair was a different color. So, why do you have one of your own under surveillance?”
That caught the BND officer for a moment. “We thought she might be in some kind of trouble.”
Okay, that was a total line of crap, Toni thought. But then she wouldn’t have told him about an internal investigation at the Agency either. No need to push the issue.
“Where are they now?” she asked him.
“We don’t know.”
“No GPS tracking? Maybe an RFID embedded under her skin somewhere, being picked up by Autobahn scanners like some Big Brother grocery store check-out line?”
Mayer’s eyes raised to the ceiling, as if he was considering the possibility. “Afraid not,” he finally muttered.
She wasn’t going to get anything from these folks. Toni thanked them for all their help, such as it was, and the young officer escorted she and Franz out the way they had come.
They’d driven from Innsbruck in Toni’s rental car, so she got behind the wheel and sat while Franz finished smoking a long-awaited cigarette outside. Although Mayer thought he’d given her nothing at all, that wasn’t entirely true. She could learn as much by what they didn’t say as by what they did reveal. They didn’t have to let her see their officer, Alexandra. They could have doctored the digital file to crop her out, or only showed that portion with Jake. Yet, for some reason they’d allowed her to not only see her with Jake, but to imply that she’d done something wrong. They also hadn’t blocked the license plate of Alexandra’s car, which she’d placed in her memory. She made a quick call on her cell and hung up.
Franz smiled at her and stamped out his cigarette before getting into the passenger seat.
“You can smoke in here,” Toni assured him. “Living in Europe so long, I’m used to it.”
He put on his seat belt. “I thought you were assigned to Langley now.”
“I am. But I’m on the road more than not. Special assignments.”
Glancing at her left hand, he said, “I thought you were married.”
Funny, she thought. He had noticed no ring since the first five minutes the night before and now finally mentioned it. “I am. But I can usually get more information from men if they think I’m available to screw their brains out.”
He laughed aloud.
She started the car and pulled out of the BND facility parking lot.
“What just happened back there?” Franz asked.
“Games. We ask for help and they give us just enough to keep us satisfied. I report their level of help and we give them just a little less next time they ask for assistance.”
Franz shook his head. “At that rate the level will be zero soon enough. Did you leave anything behind?”
“A bug? No. The building is shielded against that. Even room to room. You notice how dead the sound was in that conference room?”
“Yes. No echo at all. You recognized the woman, I’m sure.”
“Your eyes said you did too.”
“She was at Anna’s funeral,” Franz revealed. “I thought you might be there.”
“As I said, I just found out about it yesterday.”
“Your Agency didn’t mention it to you? I personally notified them that Jake had been injured. And Jake said they had even checked into some of his old cases to see if the hit on him was somehow related to those.”
She drove around a residential neighborhood slowly and pulled over in front of an old house, turning off the engine. “What do you want from me?”
Franz looked confused. “I want you to be open with me. I just thought you and Jake were still good friends. Why else would you be here now?”
“I was assigned to find him. Nothing more. Any time a former officer is nearly killed, we need to find out why.”
“My point exactly. He was nearly killed more than eight weeks ago.”
She’d thought about that, wondering on the flight why they’d waited so long. She called from the jet to ask that very question. “I was told they’d been looking into it but had not gotten anywhere. Jake was debriefed in his hospital bed by our Vienna office but had no clue who had done it. It was only after these recent attempts that the Agency decided to take a more active role.”
“I see.” He tapped his fingers on his leg.
“Need another cigarette?”
Toni’s phone buzzed and she picked up. She listened carefully, memorizing what was said. She thanked the caller and flipped the phone shut. Now she knew.
“Something to do with the other call you made in the parking lot?” he asked her.