Effrem, too, seemed fascinated by the scenery. “Have you ever seen The Boys from Brazil?” he asked. “You know, Nazis in South America?”
Jack laughed. “I’ve seen it.”
“Déjà vu, only desert instead of rainforests.”
Jack called Mitch. Munich was an hour ahead of Namibia. Mitch asked, “Where are you?”
“On the road,” Jack replied. He had no reason to mistrust Mitch, but Jack had over recent years become habituated to the need-to-know rule. It was the norm in their business. “You have news?”
“Yeah, a couple things: I’ve got Klugmann’s exact location nailed down. He’s staying at the Hilton Windhoek, somewhere near the top floor. Give me a little time and I can give you the floor.”
“Windhoek has a Hilton?” Jack asked.
“Based on the pictures, it’s beautiful — something you’d see in Chicago or New York.”
“What’s the other news?”
“The name of the woman you gave me, Janine Périer, didn’t match any of the Red Cross rolls for Africa, but there was a Janine Pelzer assigned to Abidjan for about six weeks last year. Her home country is listed as Germany — Munich, to be exact. I’m sending you her picture now. It’s from her official ID card.”
It took a minute for the image to arrive. Immediately Jack saw it was the same woman René had gone to meet the night of his kidnapping. Jack had hoped to be wrong about this, but it seemed clear Janine had been working for Rostock as a honeytrap.
“Current location?” Jack asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Where are you with Bossard’s company portal?”
“I’m into it. There’s a lot of data, some of it encrypted folder by folder, and since I’m hijacking idle user logins I can only work in spurts. The system doesn’t allow multiple terminal logins.”
“I’m not following you.”
“When one of Bossard’s staff goes to lunch or the bathroom they log out of their terminal. I get an alert, then use their login to gain access to the portal. When they come back and log in again I get kicked out, so I have to find another idle username. And repeat ad nauseam.”
“Got it,” said Jack. “How long until you’ve got it all?”
“I should have everything collated tonight after they shut down the office. By the way, you got the FedEx I sent?”
“Yes, before we left Zurich.”
“If anything needs explaining, call,” said Mitch.
Jack hadn’t bothered making hotel reservations in Windhoek, but now that they knew where Gerhard Klugmann was staying, Jack searched his phone for whatever was closest to the Hilton, which turned out to be AVANI Windhoek Hotel & Casino, one block north of the Hilton.
After handing their Land Cruiser over to the valet, Jack and the others collected their bags and went through to lobby reception. Jack asked for and got a top-floor suite, a multi-bedroom space of one thousand square feet with a walkout balcony overlooking the downtown district.
“I went to Las Vegas once. That’s what this reminds me of,” René said, hands braced on the balcony railing. “If there was anything like this in Abidjan, I never saw it. Then again, we never saw much outside the base.”
“Make yourself at home and relax,” said Jack.
They chose bedrooms, then parted company for a couple hours of rest and decompression. Jack was exhausted; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten more than five hours of sleep in one stretch. Effrem likely felt the same; as for René, there was no telling the last time the soldier had any real peace, let alone untroubled sleep. He’d been on the run for a long time, made even more grueling by his mental state, Jack guessed. Part of Jack wondered if he should have taken Marshal Allemand up on his offer to fly René back home. On the other hand, the man had already been kidnapped once. Who knew what a second time might do to him?
As agreed, at five-thirty they met back in the suite’s main room. Jack ordered room service, baked salmon and crab-and-orzo salad for him and Effrem; prime rib, roasted asparagus, and spring potatoes for René.
As they waited for the food, René sat on the coffee table before the flat-screen television and surfed channels until he found a game show, what looked like the Namibian version of Wheel of Fortune, then sat down on the couch to watch. The host and contestants were speaking Oshiwambo.
Effrem looked over at Jack and shrugged; Jack reciprocated. He doubted it was the show’s content René enjoyed, but rather the normalcy of the activity.
Their food arrived and they ate in silence and watched Wheel. When the credits rolled, René used the remote to shut off the television. “Thank you for the meal, Jack.”
“You’re welcome.”
“What is the plan? Are we going after this Klugmann?”
As he’d been with Möller, Jack was of two minds about their best course with Klugmann. Grab him and squeeze him for information, or play the waiting game and hope Klugmann led them to something significant?
“Right now I’m more interested in Bossard’s plane. There’s only one airport aside from Hosea Kutako — Eros. It could have landed there—”
“Actually, if you count airstrips, there are dozens of places within fifty miles of here,” Effrem said. “I couldn’t sleep. I did some research. The Wi-Fi here is excellent.”
“Dozens of airstrips,” Jack repeated.
“But only six with runways long enough to accommodate a Pilatus PC-12. Subtract from that three that lie within state-controlled game preserves, and you’re left with three airstrips Bossard’s plane could put down at — Midgard, Pokewni, and Osona.”
“I’m impressed,” Jack replied.
“It was either this or Minesweeper.”
“You made the right choice. Okay, we’re going to split up. René, I want you to stay here—”
“Why?”
“Because I need someone to stay close to Klugmann’s hotel.”
This was a white lie. Even if Klugmann was there, without the exact location of his room they had no way of knowing whether it was visible from their suite. Jack was more interested in giving René more decompression time.
“If we get word that he’s moving, you’ll have to follow him,” Jack added.
René nodded. “I can do that.”
“Effrem, you’re checking Eros Airport. Take a taxi there and have a look around. From what I could tell, all the on-site hangars are reserved for repairs. If the Pilatus is at Eros, chances are decent it’s sitting outside.”
“And what’s my excuse for loitering about?”
“You’ll think of something. I’ll take the Land Cruiser and check the other three airstrips. Can you send me their locations—”
“Done,” Effrem said, thumbing keys on his cell phone.
Of the three airstrips in question, Osona and Midgard not only were the closest to Windhoek, but also were within thirty miles of each other and a straight shot north from Windhoek, so Jack chose to investigate these first.
Knowing his phone’s signal coverage was likely to be nonexistent much beyond Windhoek’s outskirts, Jack took several screenshots of his phone’s navigation screen, then used these to get on the four-lane Western Bypass highway toward the town of Okahandja.
It was night by the time Jack put the capital’s lights in his rearview mirror. As before, the sky was a cloudless black backdrop sprinkled with pinpricks of light. The moon was so bright Jack almost found his headlights unnecessary.
Forty minutes later the Land Cruiser’s headlights illuminated mile marker 17 and Jack began coasting. According to his map, there were no official signs for Osona Airstrip, but rather a faded wooden one pointing toward the now abandoned Bergquell Farm about a half-mile northwest of the runway.