“That’s what I asked for when I went in,” Jack replied, and sped up again. “Stay close.”
A few hundred yards ahead on the right Jack saw strobing colored lights and lasers crisscrossing the darkening sky. He rolled down the passenger window and the car’s interior was filled with the muted thump of live German trance music.
“I thought you said Kultfabrik was closed,” Jack radioed.
“It is. That’s Optimolwerke. According to the Web, it’s Kultfabrik’s smaller, rowdier next-door neighbor. Developers have bought it. Another couple weeks and it’ll be shut down, too.”
Jack kept driving until they drew even with the entrance to Optimolwerke’s yellow-lighted archway, where hundreds of revelers, most of them dressed in skimpy clothes adorned with rainbow-hued glow sticks, milled about, drinking, laughing, and smoking. A pair of blond-haired girls sat on the curb, vomiting into the garbage-strewn gutter.
Jack muttered, “Hello, future Mrs. Jack Ryan.”
As Effrem had described, Optimolwerke sat directly beside the Kultfabrik construction site, the border a twelve-foot-tall, barbed-wire fence that abutted a line of Bavarian-style structures housing Optimolwerke’s pubs and arcades. It reminded Jack of a satellite view of North and South Korea at night: pitch blackness to one side, a sea of lights on the other.
As if reading Jack’s mind, Effrem radioed, “It’s like a boozy, half-naked Iron Curtain.”
In his rearview mirror Jack saw a little person in a Fred Flintstone costume wave at Effrem’s Audi and shout, “Wie geht’s, Schweinhund!”
Effrem said, “I think he just called me a pig-dog.”
“Sounds about right,” Jack replied. “Keep moving. We’re turning right at the next intersection.”
Jack and Effrem had spent hours studying the Google Earth view of Kultfabrik and its environs, but as with all satellite imagery, this gave them only half the picture. On the ground everything looked different and felt different. Especially at night. The first order of business was for them to start connecting the landmark dots.
Jack drove slowly past the gated and chain-locked entrance of Kultfabrik itself, then made the turn onto Grafinger Strasse. Like its shared border with Optimolwerke, the construction site’s northern and eastern sides were ringed by a high barbed-wire fence, but here they were partially obscured by tall trees so thick Jack’s view of the site was obstructed.
Jack spent the next few minutes circumnavigating Kultfabrik before turning back onto Friedenstrasse and repeating the process, this time lingering at the alleys and driveways of the nearby office parks and apartment buildings as he reconciled the area’s overhead image with his ground view. Satisfied with his reconnoiter, he met Effrem in the parking lot of a closed auto body shop down Grafinger Strasse.
Effrem slowed to a hood-to-trunk stop beside Jack’s Citroën and said out his window, “Well? What do you think?”
Jack thought: I’d like to have three more shooters, a pair of L1 GPNVG-18 ground panoramic night-vision goggles, and a 3D-printed mockup of the place, but if wishes were horses… Instead, he replied simply, “The sooner I get in there, the better.”
It was eight-thirty, thirty minutes before the meeting time. If this was a trap, Möller and his people would probably be doing what Jack was trying to do: set up early and choose his ground. Möller’s purpose would be clear, Jack knew: kill him and Effrem. But Jack’s end goal was fuzzier. All he knew was, if Möller was going to be there, it was an opportunity he wasn’t going to miss.
“Wish you’d change your mind,” Effrem said. “You should have somebody watching your six. Did I say that right?”
“Perfect.” Jack had decided to post Effrem outside the construction site as a quick-response backup, but this was only partially true. Jack couldn’t afford the distraction of having to worry about the young journalist. “I’ll feel better knowing you’ve got the perimeter.”
Jack opened the backpack they’d collected from the Ostbahnhof and unzipped it. Inside were two handguns, one an HK USP45 with Gemtech Blackside noise suppressor, the other a snub-nosed .38 revolver. Better to keep it simple for Effrem. He passed the revolver to Effrem, along with three spare speed loaders.
“What’s rule one?” Jack asked.
“Never point this thing at anything I don’t want to kill.”
“Including yourself.”
Effrem gave him a withering gaze. “I have fired a gun before, you know.”
“Was anyone shooting back?”
“No.”
“Big difference,” Jack replied. “Post yourself on the corner and we’ll get started.”
“Good luck.”
Effrem pulled away, as did Jack, who paused at the lot’s exit until he saw Effrem’s Audi pull to the curb at Grafinger Strasse and Friedenstrasse and douse the headlights. From there Effrem would be able to see two of the three likely approaches to the construction site.
Jack turned left, headed south a hundred yards, then turned into the apartment complex’s parking lot. The front was well lit by streetlamps, but as Jack proceeded around the building they faded and darkness enveloped the car. When he reached the back of the property he turned right and pulled beneath a squat oak tree. He turned off the car, climbed out, then eased shut the car door and locked it.
In the distance he could hear the thump-umph-umph of a band at Optimolwerke. Through the boughs of the tree the night sky pulsed red, yellow, and purple in time with the pumping music.
Jack took off his jacket, donned the HK’s shoulder rig, then put his jacket back on and adjusted the rig so the noise suppressor wouldn’t poke out the bottom of his jacket. Next he donned the last piece of gear he’d purchased from Conrad, an off-brand set of night-vision goggles that looked more like a seventies-era View-Master with a head strap than it did a military-grade pair of NVGs. Jack mounted the goggles on his head, powered up the unit, and looked around. The muted gray-green view was grainy and blurred at the edges but clear enough to keep him from bumping into bad guys. How long the batteries would last Jack didn’t know. He took off the goggles.
He radioed Effrem: “You set?”
“Set. A few cars have passed down Friedenstrasse, but nobody’s turned. Quiet down Grafinger Strasse, too.”
“Good. I’m moving.”
23
Jack ducked beneath the tree boughs and walked until he reached the construction site’s outer fence, then followed it until he reached the sidewalk along Grafinger Strasse, where he headed in Effrem’s direction. He could see the Audi a hundred yards ahead and across the street.
“Can you see me?” Jack radioed.
“No.”
“Good.”
Halfway down the block, Jack stopped and looked around for landmarks. Almost there. He proceeded another fifty feet, stopped again to check his location, then slipped into the trees to his left and picked his way through the foliage till his outstretched hand touched the hurricane fence. His early reconnoiter had shown what looked like a gap in the fence. He donned the NVGs and powered them on.
He’d found the spot. A triangular section of fencing had been cut away; the tool marks were old and a cluster of vines had already pushed their way through the opening. Through the gap Jack saw a pair of backhoe scoops, and beyond these a row of construction trailers. This was the site’s heavy equipment parking area and site offices. He crawled through the gap, then crept to the nearest backhoe scoop and ducked inside.
Though closed and vacant, Kultfabrik’s buildings were too many to search, and the ground was too open for Jack’s liking. Aside from the long, north-south line of abandoned arcades, pubs, and pool halls on the site’s far side, only two buildings had survived the demolition: to Jack’s left, in the center of the site, a clamshell open-air amphitheater; to his right, sitting just inside the fence at the corner of Friedenstrasse and Grafinger Strasse, an L-shaped office building. The walls of the first four floors were finished, sans windows, but the fifth floor was still mostly skeletal, with iron beams and girders backlit by the night sky. Overlapping blue plastic tarps formed the building’s temporary roof. Aluminum scaffolding enclosed the building’s first three floors.