The sign was so small that Jack overshot it and had to do a U-turn. He guided the Toyota off the highway, down a dirt driveway, then onto a broad frontage heading east. He had covered several hundred yards when he realized that he was actually on the airstrip’s mile-long runway. He killed the Toyota’s headlights and drove on using only the moonlight to guide him.
There was nothing here, Jack realized. The head of the airstrip was nothing more than a large cul-de-sac, a turnaround for departing aircraft. When he reached this he turned left onto another dirt road, which led him to Bergquell Farm, nothing more than a cluster of rusting sheet-metal huts, none of them large enough to hide even the smallest of planes.
One down.
The second airstrip, Midgard, was thirty miles east of Osona, but the only route there took Jack first north to Okahandja, then on a looping road that followed the edge of Swakoppoort Dam Reservoir. On Jack’s phone the satellite view of Swakop looked like a giant starfish crushed flat, the reservoir’s waters a startling blue against the otherwise brown landscape.
For twenty miles Jack followed the wide gravel road as it wound deeper and higher into the hills, until finally he saw a sign that read MIDGARD AIRSTRIP — KHORUSEPA LODGE. The latter didn’t appear on his map, but he suspected resort lodges came and went around Windhoek, failing under one owner before being renamed and revived by another.
Jack made the turn, followed the road for another half-mile as it wound its way through a series of ravines to a fork in the road divided by another sign. To the left, Midgard Airstrip; to the right, Khorusepa Resort Lodge. Jack turned left and after only a few hundred yards found himself at the edge of a runway. He shut off the headlights.
Parked opposite him at the edge of the tarmac was a white single-engine airplane. The tail number read HB-FXT. It was Bossard’s Pilatus. The plane’s windows were dark, its wheels chocked, the side door closed.
No one was home. Or so he hoped.
He grabbed his rucksack from the passenger seat, climbed out, and walked across to the plane, where he ducked beneath the nose cone. He rapped his knuckles against the aluminum fuselage. Nothing stirred inside the plane, so he knocked again, this time louder. He then walked to the side door, lifted the latch, and twisted. With a hiss of hydraulics the door swung downward, extending the built-in steps as it went. Jack climbed inside and paused to look around. Did it matter? he wondered. The instructions Mitch had included in the FedEx package made no mention of where to place the GPS tracker.
Jack found the bathroom just aft of the cockpit. He removed the tissue-paper box from its cubby, dropped the tracker inside, then replaced the box and left.
Back in the Toyota, he retraced his path to the fork in the road and turned down the road to the resort. Abruptly he rounded a corner and found himself on a palm tree — lined cobblestone avenue at the end of which a thatched entryway spanned the width of the road. Through this he glimpsed a circular driveway, lighted brick pathways, and what looked like individual bungalows.
He braked to a stop and doused the headlights.
This was unexpected.
He checked his watch: It was one-fifteen. He saw no one moving about, no lights in the bungalow windows.
“The hell with it,” Jack said.
He drove down the avenue and through the entrance, then eased the Toyota under the lobby awning. Through the windshield he saw flames rising from a circular stone fire pit. Seated around it were eight people. Jack pulled the binoculars from his rucksack and zoomed in on the group. All were men. Three of them had their backs to him; the five facing him he didn’t recognize, and he wondered if one of them was Gerhard Klugmann.
Something tapped against Jack’s window. He turned his head and found himself looking into the face of Stephan Möller.
Ah, shit, Jack thought.
“Kann ich Ihnen helfen?” Möller called. His tone and posture were relaxed. “Haben Sie Sich verlaufen?” Are you lost?
Jack didn’t give himself a chance to think. He rolled down his window an inch, put a little gravel in his voice, and replied in Spanish, “Estoy perdido. Hablas español?”
“Nein, Deutsch.”
Jack said, “Onjala Lodge?”
Möller was shaking his head now, getting annoyed. “Nein. Sie sind an der falschen Stelle. Gehen Sie weg!” Go away!
“Lo siento, lo siento,” Jack replied.
He put the Toyota in reverse, did a U-turn, and drove off.
It was almost four a.m. when Jack pushed through the door to their hotel suite. Effrem was sitting cross-legged on the floor, the only illumination coming from the glow of his laptop screen.
“Hey,” he whispered.
Jack turned on a table lamp and plopped down in an armchair. “Hey.”
Without looking up from his screen, still typing, Effrem said, “I struck out at Eros. You?”
“The plane’s sitting on the tarmac at Midgard. I found Stephan Möller staying at a lodge nearby.” Jack gave Effrem the details of his night, then added, “There were about eight of them, all German I’d be willing to bet.” And all with a similar skill set, Jack guessed. “Möller was the only one I recognized.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Effrem. “Good job. Mitch hit the motherlode with the Bossard portal, by the way. I forwarded you the link to the server. I’ve been going through the documents for the last couple hours.”
“Anything interesting?”
“A lot, actually. For starters, I know why Rostock wants you dead.”
33
Jack didn’t respond immediately. Though he’d started all this with the sole intention of finding the answer Effrem now claimed to have, Jack realized it hadn’t been on his mind for days. He’d stopped wondering why someone had tried to kill him. It was an odd feeling.
“Tell me,” Jack replied.
“Last year you did a financial audit on a German company called Dovestar Industrial Machinery.”
Jack recalled the job. As part of Hendley Associates’ white-hat cover, he and several other analysts took on consulting contracts, usually having to do with mergers and acquisitions. As Jack recalled, Dovestar was one of five audits he did that year.
“I think I remember,” he said. “It was routine. A couple days in Aachen, then back home.”
“There was a little more to it than that.”
“Refresh my memory.”
“A Dutch company offered to buy Dovestar. By all measures it was a good offer. But Dovestar declined. For whatever reason, both the Dutch and German press got ahold of the story and started asking questions. The rumors were that Dovestar was in financial trouble, considering layoffs, and maybe on the road to bankruptcy. So why turn down the buyout? everyone asked. That’s where you came in.
“To assuage fears, Dovestar contracted Hendley to do an audit.”
It was coming back to Jack now. “It was essentially a financial-soundness report. I don’t recall any red flags.”
“That’s because they were buried very deep, and it wasn’t that kind of audit. The long and the short of it is this: Through a number of cutouts, Dovestar is ultimately owned by Rostock Security Group. That kind of subterfuge is what Alexander Bossard’s firm specializes in, and as far as I can tell, RSG had been their only client for the past six years. Dovestar’s a legitimate company, but RSG has been using some of its accounts as hidden piggy banks.”