“What the hell are you doing,” Conrad said, his voice more than a little disturbed.
Miko Krupjak stood in the hallway, his hair still wet from a shower and slicked back with gel. “Sorry to disturb you, sir,” he said, his eyes trying to look around Conrad. He had seen the man’s girlfriend before, and knew she was quite the beautiful woman.
“You could have called.”
Miko raised his cell phone and shrugged. “I tried many times. There was no answer.”
“But I got calls last night.”
Alexandra, wrapped in a robe, came up behind Conrad and handed him his cell phone. “Here it is, Hermann.”
He took the phone from her and saw that it was turned off. Conrad looked at her and then smiled. “You turned off my phone?”
She pouted her lips. “You kept getting calls last night. You needed your sleep.”
He patted her on the ass and sent her off. “Make some coffee.” Then he turned to Miko and said, “She gets a little maternal. Now what’s so damn important?”
Miko leaned closer and whispered, “We found Albrecht.”
“Really?”
Nodding and smirk on his face, Miko said, “The dumb ass used his Visa at a restaurant in Steyr yesterday. Nobody goes to Steyr on vacation. He doesn’t have relatives there or any Order business that we know about.”
“Outstanding. The news just gets better and better.”
“What’s that, Herr Conrad?”
“Never mind Miko. Go there and find the man. But don’t take him out. Bring him to St. Johann with you.”
Miko had a look of incertitude on his face.
“I’ll explain when I get there,” Conrad said. “It will all become clear. I’ll be leaving Thursday morning. See you in a few days.”
The man nodded his head and left.
Closing the door, Conrad looked to the kitchen and then could hear the coffee pot brewing. Standing at the entrance to the kitchen, Alexandra flashed open her robe exposing her perfect body, the nipples suddenly hard from the cooler air. Damn, he thought. His dick would be sore by the time he got to St. Johann in Tirol.
As Miko Krupjak strolled out onto Kartner Ring to his illegally parked Skoda, Toni Contardo, a block away in her Alfa Romeo, thought he was nearly skipping. And he had a smirk on his face.
The Skoda had three men in there and it pulled away from the front entrance of the Bristol Hotel now. Without the tip from the inside source, Toni knew they might not have found them.
The passenger door of the Alfa opened and Kurt Lamar got in. “Let’s go,” Kurt said.
Toni was already moving, keeping back a ways though.
“Jiri Sikora in the front passenger seat,” Kurt said. “But we knew that. A guy sleeping in the back. Think that was the guy called Grago.”
Her eyes on the car ahead and trying to keep one car between them, Toni said, “How’s the tracker coming in?”
Kurt was already on his computer and was thankful the Skoda was a new car with the European version of Onstar held deep inside a computer box under the driver’s seat. He had punched in the car’s Czech license plate, got the VIN, and then accessed the European database. Once he found the car it was a simple matter of popping the signal into the Agency satellite system. Now he pulled up a local map of Vienna and had the Skoda tracked to within a half a block at any given moment.
Looking at his computer screen, Kurt said, “Krupjak just turned right, southbound onto Weidner Hauptstrasse.”
“Right. Got it.”
Fifteen minutes later they were heading westbound on Autobahn A1 toward Linz.
“So Miko went to an apartment?” Toni asked.
Able to take his eyes off the computer screen now, with the Skoda visible almost a kilometer ahead of them, Kurt said, “Yeah, I’ll look it up.” Kurt minimized the tracking screen and pulled up the Vienna database directory. Then he simply typed in the address and waited a second. Didn’t take long, though, since he had the database on his hard drive. “A woman named Alexandra Bykofsky. Wow.”
“What?”
“She pays fifteen hundred Euros for that place.” He scrolled down a screen and said, “Correction. A man named Hermann Conrad pays for the place.”
“But he doesn’t live there.”
“No. Conrad is from Magdeburg, Germany.”
“Well, looks like we’re on our way to Linz, so that should give you some time to background those two.”
Kurt looked up to the sky, which was getting more cloudy as they headed west. “Maybe more time than we think. Looks like we might get more snow or freezing rain.”
15
Jake and Anna had gotten to the Holiday Inn on the western outskirts of Budapest just before midnight. They had checked in as a couple. What they had needed more than anything was sleep, and both had hit the European feather bed, divided into two sections, almost immediately.
The drapes and Rolladens pulled, the room was still dark at nine when Jake woke up. It would be dark at noon, Jake knew, with the shades in that place.
Anna was still sleeping, so Jake took a shower. When he came out wearing only his khaki pants, he looked at himself in the mirror above the desk. He slicked his hair back. Needed to get that cut soon. Then he twisted and looked at the knife wound on his left arm. The glue was still holding after the shower. He should have had about twelve stitches, he knew, but the liquid band aid would have to work.
“How you feeling?” Anna said, still in bed and on her side, the down comforter covering her body.
“A few bruises,” Jake said, rubbing gently a couple of spots where the men on Vaci Street had hit him. He looked at her through the mirror. “My head is the worst. I think I need some coffee.”
“Looks like that glue is working.”
“It’s a wonder liquid.”
She nodded, her eyes on his hairy chest. “I need to shower.”
“Just a sec.” Jake found a T-shirt in the bag he had packed in Innsbruck and slipped it over his head. He guessed he would need a week’s worth of clothes, but now realized it would take longer. He found another shirt and set it on the dresser. Then he turned to Anna and said, “I know you don’t have extra clothes. You can wear some of mine. It’ll be big but clean.”
“Thank you,” she said, a big smile.
“I’ll head down to the lobby and grab us some coffee and pastries.” He left her there, walked down toward the stairs, and thought about her walking around their room naked. She was something. He had slept, but it had been hard — in more ways than one — sleeping next to her without making any contact.
He waited a respectable amount of time, one coffee and two donuts, and then went back to the room with more coffee and pastries on paper plates stacked on top of that. He knocked lightly and waited.
Anna answered the door wearing his Aximer Lizum T-shirt, from a major ski area outside of Innsbruck.
“That looks better on you,” Jake said, coming into the room. She closed and locked the door behind him. She wasn’t wearing a bra under the shirt, her nipples prominent, and Jake trying not to be too obvious with his stare.
She took the pastries and dug in, eating two large Danish rolls and washing them down with swigs of coffee.
Jake noticed her phone out on the dresser. “You call in to the office?”
Her eyes shifted to her phone as she sipped coffee. “Yeah.”
“What’d you tell them?”
Finishing her coffee and throwing the cup into the garbage, she said, “Is this an interrogation?”
Jake picked up the phone. “Not at all. It’s just that you obviously can’t tell them about what we learned from Kopari last night. At least not yet.”
She took the phone from him and shoved it into her pants pocket. “I’m not an idiot.”