17
Early evening now, and Toni drove her rental Opel along the German Autobahn near Martinislautern. She exited at the Ramstein Air Base exit and then slowly drove along the priority road toward the front gate of the American Air Force Base. She’d gotten a call from the CIA director, Kurt Jenkins, earlier in the day, telling her to pick up a package at the base Office of Special Investigations detachment. She’d been on the sprawling Ramstein many times while working in Europe, but hadn’t been given any indication as to what she was picking up. Most communications in the Agency now were not only highly encrypted, they were easily downloaded to hand-held devices, which Toni carried at all times. However, she also knew that her boss, Kurt Jenkins, was a bit old school and liked to maintain some of the old communications methods. Couriers were still important to him — especially if he felt other methods had been compromised in some way.
She signed Franz Martini onto the base and they proceeded to the OSI detachment building.
“What do you suppose they have for you here?” Franz asked her solemnly.
Toni had a feeling it was a package of information. Something she could have just as well accessed with her computer. “I don’t know,” she said. “Intel I’d guess.”
They’d discussed all afternoon what to do — try to follow Jake and hopefully catch up with him, or move in another direction. Part of her wanted to drop Franz off at the nearest airport and let him fly back to Austria. His health seemed to be deteriorating by the minute. His coughing had forced them to go to a pharmacy in Trier and get him a suppressant, which he was sucking down like an early-morning alcoholic takes down his first drink of the day.
She pulled in front of the OSI building and parked. A sign out front said ‘No Smoking Within 100 Feet of Building.’
“I’m sure that means outside,” Toni assured him. “They won’t let you inside anyway. So why don’t you stay here and have a smoke while I retrieve whatever’s here for me.”
He nodded agreement.
Getting out, she saw him light up as she rounded the front of the car. Although she’d said he could smoke in the car with her, he’d refrained from doing so. Smoking seemed to be the man’s only pleasure in life and she had no desire to take that from him.
After going through security inside, she was escorted to the office of the OSI detachment commander, a man in his early thirties with a full beard and long hair in a ponytail. He stood and shook her hand before slumping back into his leather task chair. The office had no windows and appeared to be in the exact center of the building, with sound-deadening walls much like the conference room at the German Intelligence building near Munich. She remained standing.
Toni glanced about the office for any package of size that might have come from the Agency. “Where’s my package?” she asked the commander.
He moved a few pieces of paper and produced a sealed folder the size of a DVD. He handed it to her and looked eager for her to open it there in front of him. It was in a standard diplomatic envelope with Kurt Jenkins’s familiar signature across the seal. Inside, she knew, would be a DVD carefully sealed further in an airtight plastic like a freezer bag. It would have survived a plane crash packaged like that.
“Must be pretty important,” the OSI officer said, “to be flown in here on an F22.”
She didn’t take the bait. “It’s a mix CD from my boyfriend. Yeah, we’ve been having a few problems and he likes to make grand gestures. Thanks for your help.” She left him there pulling on his beard.
By the time she got back outside, smoke filled the inside of her car, making it look like it was on fire. She opened the door and let air flow for a moment.
“You forgot to leave me the key,” Franz said. “Couldn’t open the window.” He glanced at the package. “That’s all?”
“Afraid so.” She took a seat behind the wheel and thought for a moment. She needed to view whatever was on this DVD alone. Her cell phone rang and she checked to see who it was. Kurt Jenkins.
She flipped open her secure phone and said, “Yeah.”
“You got the package, I understand,” Jenkins said.
“Sure did.”
“You need to go over the data immediately. I’ve reserved two rooms for you at Air Force Billeting. Yours will be one visiting dignitaries normally use — colonels and general officers. You can review the information there. Give me a call once you’re done.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“Our friend is still in France. At least as far as we know. We’re guessing he won’t change transportation, since he’ll want his guns.”
“With the money he has,” she said, “he could charter a flight. But we don’t even know where he’s going.”
“Check out the DVD.”
“All right.”
They both hung up.
“Everything okay?” Franz asked.
“You don’t mind staying here tonight, do you?”
“Not at all. But I could use a drink.”
Toni cranked over the car. “I hear that.”
Twenty minutes later and Toni had dropped Franz off at his base hotel room, where he planned on taking a nap before the two of them would go to the officers’ club for dinner and drinks. Meanwhile, Toni brought her laptop and set it up on her bed, letting it warm up as she stretched for a moment. She’d been locked up in the car for the past few days and felt constricted. What she really needed was a quick run or a long walk.
She broke the seal on the package and cut the DVD out of the inner plastic wrap. When she slid the DVD into her computer, the first thing that happened was a video image starting up. It was simply Kurt Jenkins sitting behind his desk talking to her, explaining that they had a number of analysts going through the data and would continue to do so. He was concerned about a leak of some type. Not on his end, but somewhere with their European partners.
“We still don’t know why someone wants Jake dead, but we think we’re getting closer,” Jenkins said. “This could be classic deception. So far there have been Kurdish Turks, Serbs, and now Iranian Kurds coming after Jake. That doesn’t even include the Eastern Europeans who killed his girlfriend two months ago. As you know, Jake was involved in the past with the Kurds, and they have long memories. However, it’s more likely that this is a ruse of some sort. If you send someone to assassinate another, you want someone with no possible ties to you. So a German might send a Chinese agent. But you know this. Then, I’m guessing, they knew that Jake would kill some of them and have law enforcement after him. They counted on this.”
She paused the video. Of course. She’d been so stupid. Concentrating on finding Jake and not even considering who was after him. Or why. Whereas she should have been seeking the source. She started the DVD again.
Jenkins continued. “That way they could monitor the progress and perhaps direct more assets. Then, once the deed was done, they would send someone to kill the killers. There would never be a payout of the million Euros. Review the data files and then call me on your secure cell. Alone.”
The video faded to black and the screen went to a set of file folders. She clicked on the folder labeled ‘The Dead.’ Inside was a folder for each man who’d been killed so far, from the two men two months ago that Jake had killed when Anna was murdered, to those two Jake had shot in France that morning.