Jack got on his cell phone and forwarded Mitch a Dropbox link containing the e-mail headers from Belinda and the suspicious link Jack had lifted from Peter Hahn’s computer. Mitch walked over to a laptop sitting on the counter, checked his e-mail, clicked on Jack’s link. He studied the material, then said, “Okay, well, nothing suspicious about these headers. Let’s have a look at the link. Interesting.”
From there Mitch fell into a stream-of-consciousness conversation with himself that sounded only vaguely like English to Jack:
“Have to hide my IP… Let’s go with a proxy from Ecuador. Boot up the VM, get you sandboxed… Let’s see how good you are. Oh, trace route, how I love you…”
After another two minutes of this Mitch straightened up and said, “So, Effrem’s friend, did you click on this link?”
“No.”
“Smart. I’ve got good news and bad news. Good news is I can do something with this. Bad news is it’s going to take a few hours, maybe the day. I’ll call you.”
22
Mitch called Effrem’s cell phone mid-morning the next day. Effrem put him on speaker. “Is Mr. X there, too?” asked Mitch.
“I’m here,” Jack replied.
“Okay, so the computer you got this hyperlink from… Did you happen to check the Web browser history? Anything odd about it?”
“You could say that.”
“I figured. You’re right. The site it links to is down, but I was able to root out some interesting stuff. This is malware — a bot, actually — designed to insert Web history into the target computer. It’s also designed to sign up the user at some discussion forums, do some troll posting, and so forth.”
“What kind of forums?”
“Political crap, conspiracy stuff.”
This matched what Jack had seen on Hahn’s computer. “Anything else?” he asked. “Was it monitoring him?”
“Nope,” said Mitch. “Just playing grab-ass with his browser history. Cleverly designed bot, too.”
Effrem asked, “Any idea who created it?”
“I know exactly who created it. All the servers he used were anagrams for Game of Thrones characters: storkbarb, hotboarbanterer, tinylionsranter.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope. This guy’s good, but everybody’s got their peccadilloes. This is his.”
“What’s his name and where can we find him?” Jack asked.
“The name part is easy,” Mitch replied. “Gerhard Klugmann. As for where, that’s a bit trickier. Gerhard ain’t exactly somebody you Google. I can do some digging, but he’s skittish. If I don’t pin him down without him realizing it, he’ll pull up stakes and move on.”
“Digitally or physically?” asked Effrem.
“Both, maybe. Guys like him can work anywhere.”
“Find him,” Jack ordered.
After running a few errands, they spent the afternoon waiting in Jack’s room at the Hotel München Palace. Waiting for a call from Mitch; waiting for a call from Belinda; waiting for a call from one of Jack’s own contacts, a gun guy he had met a year earlier during a routine mission for The Campus. Given the penalties for a foreigner carrying a weapon on German soil, Jack had wanted to avoid doing so, but Effrem’s search for 8 Friedenstrasse led to something called Kultfabrik. In Jack’s eyes, urban ambush points didn’t come any better.
A popular hangout that catered to what one website described as Munich’s “bacchanalian night people,” Kultfabrik was a noodle factory turned warren of pubs, discos, a skate park, gambling pavilions, game arcades, and flea markets. The twenty-acre complex was in an industrial area of Munich just east of the Ostbahnhof rail complex. Kultfabrik was closed, Effrem told him, and in the middle of conversion to Werksviertel, an office park/cultural center/apartment complex. In short, Kultfabrik was a construction zone.
This alone put Jack on guard, but in perusing Eric Schrader’s day planner, Effrem had discovered a disturbing discrepancy: Over the last four months Schrader had met with S.M. — Stephan Möller — six times in Munich. However, for three of these meetings Schrader hadn’t even been in the city, but rather in Lyon or Zurich. This left two possibilities: one, Schrader was bad with dates; or two, the day planner was a plant and they were being lured to Kultfabrik. By whom? The most obvious answer was Möller, but that meant either Möller had known about their pursuit of him or he’d learned of their arrival in Munich and assumed they would find Schrader’s apartment.
At seven o’clock Jack’s gun guy called and the meeting was set: one hour, at the Ostbahnhof.
Jack called Belinda’s cell phone and got her voice mail. He left no message.
“Let’s go,” Jack told Effrem.
They left moments later, Jack in his Citroën, Effrem in his recently rented Audi, and found a pair of parking spots just east of the Orleansplatz, a crescent-shaped public park across from the rail station.
With night falling, the lights of food vendors’ stalls were coming on, casting colorful stripes across the pathways and on through the trees. The afternoon crowds, made up mostly of parents and children, were thinning out and being slowly replaced by an early-twenties crowd of singles.
Jack stopped at one of the vendor stalls and got a small soda and a napkin, and he and Effrem sat down on a nearby bench. Jack gulped half of the soda, gave the rest to Effrem, then used the napkin to dry the cup’s interior before stuffing six hundred-euro notes inside and replacing the lid.
At seven-forty they crossed Orleansstrasse to the Ostbahnhof, a wide, flat-fronted building just east of the rail hub. In the distance Jack could hear the rumble and screech of incoming and outgoing trains, accompanied by a woman’s voice over the station’s public address system. The station buzzed with commuters.
Once inside, they picked their way through the throngs to a coffee kiosk counter on the north side of the station. Jack’s contact — actually, Ding Chavez’s contact — a man he knew only as Freddy, spotted Jack and waved a rolled-up newspaper at him.
“Wait here,” Jack told Effrem, and walked over.
He and Freddy shook hands. “Who’s that?” Freddy asked in heavily accented English.
“My intern. How’ve you been?”
“Ja, good. I could not get exactly what you asked for, but close. They’re clean.” Freddy placed a brass key with a red plastic dongle on the counter. “Locker twenty-six.”
This had multiple meanings, Jack knew. The guns hadn’t been used in a crime, weren’t stolen, and weren’t traceable; the first two were easy enough to manage, but the third was trickier. Most likely Freddy simply meant the weapons weren’t traceable to him.
Freddy asked, “Anything else I can do for you?”
“Maybe. I’ll let you know.” Jack placed his soda cup on the counter before Freddy, then palmed the key. “How’re you set outside Munich?”
“I have a few friends. Depends on what kind of help you need,” replied Freddy.
“Thanks. See you.”
Jack walked away, nodded at Effrem to follow, then walked across the station to a bank of temporary lockers. He found number 26, inserted the key, removed the blue backpack inside, then left.
Once they were back in their cars, Jack picked up Rosenheimer Strasse and headed east, passed beneath the railroad overpass, then turned north onto Friedenstrasse and slowed down to let Effrem make the turn and catch up.
Jack donned the headset/walkie-talkie rig they’d purchased earlier at Conrad, Munich’s version of Radio Shack, then keyed the talk button. “You there?”
After a few seconds Effrem came back: “Here. These are nifty, eh?”