“I only saw one!”
More commands in German.
Lund kept moving, and someone shoved her toward the back of the room where two doors connected to a parallel hallway. She kept moving as shouting echoed all around. None of the words made sense to her, but she recognized the tones: commands, urgency, distress. An alarm sounded, and she saw a man shrugging on body armor, a shotgun in his hands. The cavalry was arriving.
Ahead she saw a green sign labeled: NOTAUSGANG. More intuitively, next to it was a pictogram of a person running and an arrow. Exit.
A young woman in civilian clothes was in front of her, head ducked low as she ran in the direction of the arrow. She disappeared into an alcove, and Lund followed. Two fire doors later, she burst out onto the streets of Vienna. She turned right because there were more people in that direction, and ran at top speed. Her head was on a swivel checking every door and sidewalk. The brooding Bundespolizei building soon fell behind, and she eased to a purposeful walk, her heart racing and her lungs heaving. Lund checked the sidewalks at every intersection, searching for the big bald man, listening for the sounds of World War III behind her. She didn’t see or hear either.
Night was falling, the temperature dropping. Lund wasn’t cold at all. She’d brought a light jacket. It was in her roller bag. Which was in an evidence room littered with bodies. How many? Winston, the female officer who’d gone inside, the evidence room clerk. The officer who’d put his head into the hallway.
Four victims.
Four at least.
But that was only here, only tonight. Lund knew there were more. She knew because two images now stood side by side in her mind, pinned there like twin Polaroids. Pictures that would stay with her forever. One was the massive man she had just seen holding a silenced gun. The other was the captured CCTV photo Jim Kalata had sent. The latter image had disappeared from her phone’s memory, but it was permanently etched in her own. Two portraits of the same lethal subject, a man who’d been spanning the globe. He’d killed in Alaska, killed in Boston. Now he’d come to Vienna.
And he had come for her.
The body count at the Bundespolizei station grew quickly. The duty corporal in the evidence storeroom was obvious enough, as was the much-liked female deputy inspector. Both had broken necks. The American embassy official had suffered one catastrophic round to the face, while the sergeant in the hallway had taken two bullets, one to his neck and one to the chest, either of which would have been singularly fatal. It took thirty minutes to discover the final victim, who was stuffed into the trunk of a car in the parking garage. That casualty wore the uniform of a United States Marine Corps captain, and the car belonged to the motor pool of the American embassy in Vienna.
The station was locked down in a posture of highest internal alert, and the “all clear” took nearly an hour as every room, air duct, and closet was searched thoroughly. Strangely, amid an entire precinct of policemen, no one seemed to have seen the shooter. An administrative clerk thought she might have seen a stranger momentarily — a very wide, bald man who turned the corner down a hallway — as she emerged from the second-floor ladies’ room. Detectives also soon realized that, amid the chaos, the American woman who’d been in custody, awaiting transfer on an expedited diplomatic request, had also gone missing. They were forced to consider, given the death of the American soldier who was to have been her escort, that the armed assailant had come to facilitate her escape.
With the police facing five murders, not to mention the escape of a detainee right under their noses, the mood fell decidedly grim. An all-out effort was made to secure evidence, and it was here that the final professional indignity was imparted. In the building’s security center, a flummoxed technician reported to the chief inspector that all surveillance video for that day had somehow disappeared.
“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?” said the incredulous chief inspector.
“I … I don’t know,” replied the woman behind the monitor. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Her fingers rattled over her keyboard, stepping from one channel to the next. “We have forty cameras in the building, and the footage from every single one has been wiped clean. It must be some kind of system-wide failure … but we never got a warning that it was down. We’re supposed to get a warning.”
A despondent chief inspector took the only course available. He ordered the widest possible dissemination of the passport photo of an American Coast Guard investigator named Shannon Lund, adding that extreme caution was to be taken if she were discovered in the company of a large bald man. The chief dispatched every available detective into the surrounding neighborhood to search and ask questions, and sent an urgent request to city authorities to acquire CCTV footage from the immediate area. Vienna, like most European capitals, was wired for video, although not as extensively as the likes of London or Paris. Municipal surveillance here was largely targeted on areas prone to vandalism and graffiti. The chief knew there was also a vast constellation of corporate and residential video systems, yet these could not be accessed without the approval of a magistrate — an option, to be sure, but something that would take time.
So the Bundespolizei did what they could within the given constraints. The man put in charge of the investigation, a senior chief inspector, went through the motions of his inquiry with increasing frustration, stunned that their newly upgraded technology had failed in the most important hour. What are the chances of that? he thought idly.
51
DeBolt sipped a large caffè Americano as he fine-tuned yet another newfound skill. On the screen in his right eye was the face of a college-aged girl who seemed to stare right through him. He watched in amazement as she bit her lower lip in concentration. Completely innocent, completely unaware.
It was nearly ten o’clock, the conference at the Hofburg Vienna having ended over an hour ago. DeBolt had seen nothing of Dr. Patel at the conference, and had drawn a blank among his peers — no one knew where the professor from Cal was staying. He kept trying up to the last possible moment, until he was finally ushered outside by conference staff amid a group of IBM researchers, a well-lubricated bunch who were heading out on the town. They’d invited DeBolt to join them, but he had politely declined.
Disappointed and frustrated by what seemed a wasted evening, he’d crossed the cobblestone square, and on the far side DeBolt had taken up the inviting paths of the Volksgarten where the night tried unsuccessfully to conceal rows of finely sculpted hedges and a disparate array of fountains. Within ten minutes he’d come across Café Wien, a classic Viennese coffeehouse, and taken a seat outside at a shadowed corner table, feeling somehow safer in the open.
He’d been waiting for his coffee when the idea came to him, and now, twenty minutes on, yet another new world had been unlocked. The concept was born from a selfie stick — an Asian couple taking a self-portrait at a nearby table. Realizing he might be captured in the background, DeBolt was able to identity the man, and subsequently capture his phone number. He tried to search the phone for the picture they’d just taken, and to his surprise was soon flicking through images as easily as if his finger was on the device’s screen. It was, after all, only data, the merest of hurdles being where it was stored and who had access. To his surprise, he found he could also activate the phone’s camera — actually either one, front or back — and if he were so inclined, turn the device into a remote surveillance tool.
Applications for this newfound utility had rushed through his head. He’d watched the Asian couple smile through four more snapshots. At that point, DeBolt was subjected to a stagnant view of the awning overhead after the man set his phone on the table and the two began talking. Bored with that, he ran with the concept, and inside ten minutes had pirated an IP address for a nearby laptop computer. The young girl behind it was taking advantage of the café’s Wi-Fi network. DeBolt could easily have looked over his shoulder to discover that she was working on a document of some kind. A school project perhaps, or a letter — he hardly cared. DeBolt was more intrigued by the laptop’s camera.