Quickly glancing down the names and addresses, his eyes stopped suddenly when he read one; Jake Adams, Innsbruck, Austria.
“My God,” he said aloud to himself.
He quickly disconnected the phone from the computer and punched in a number.
“Toni?” No answer.
“Yes.” A soft woman’s voice, somewhat put off.
“I’m at the scene. Ran the license numbers and got one hit.”
“Yeah?”
“A VW Golf TDI.” He paused, wondering if he should continue. Finally, he said, “Registered in Innsbruck, Austria to Jake Adams.”
When the long silence came, Kurt expected it. He didn’t think it would last a full minute, though.
“Jake is involved?” she said tentatively.
“Hey, he has a way of finding trouble,” Kurt told her, something she already knew. “Does he know I’m working here?”
She let out a deep breath. “I haven’t talked with him in six months. He doesn’t even know I’m working here.”
Kurt had heard the story of how she had come back from an assignment to the Middle East and found Jake with another woman.
“Is it the Chinese woman?” Kurt asked her. “Remember, though, you left him.”
“I had an assignment I had to take.” Her voice was strained now.
Kurt knew some of that. Her Arabic language skills had made her nearly indispensable with her undercover work in Syria and other countries that even he was not aware of, nor would he ever fully know about. That was the nature of the beast.
“But you can’t blame him for moving on,” Kurt said. “Did you talk to him in person?”
“No. I saw him with the woman and called him on the phone. He never mentioned her.”
“Maybe she was just a friend,” he assured her.
“What’s he doing here now?” Toni asked brusquely, changing the subject.
Kurt thought for a while, his eyes concentrating on the paramedics finally shoving the first body into the back of the ambulance. Did Jake even know that Toni was now the new Agency station chief in Vienna? He doubted Jake knew. She was right. How could he know? When the new Agency was first formed, combining the old CIA, FBI, NSA, DEA, ATF, and all of the various military intelligence agencies, Jake had already gone private. Although he had been called back into service as recently as a year ago in China, Kurt was sure that Jake’s most significant contact with the new Agency was Toni Contardo.
“It’s not like the Agency took out a press release and said you were in charge here now,” Kurt said.
“That’s not my point,” she said. “I need to know why Jake is involved with someone we happen to be looking into. That’s all.”
“We would have known more if the phone tap had been in place,” Kurt reminded her. Although they had just started their investigation of Grand Master Gustav Albrecht, it had become clear that they should move to a more intrusive investigation. Especially following the murder of the priest in Bratislava.
“I know,” she said. “You were right. We would have known about this meeting.” She paused for a moment. “You think Jake is working for Albrecht?”
“In what capacity?”
“That’s what we need to find out. Take care of the car and meet me back here.”
“What about Albrecht?”
“GPS has his car near Schonbrunn Palace. Stopped for the past fifteen minutes.”
“We gonna talk with Albrecht tonight?”
“No. Yeah, we better. Someone’s out to kill him. We need to know why. Know if he’s tied up with this whole thing. Or if he’s just a target.”
“In the meantime,” Kurt said. “Jake can baby-sit the guy.”
“Well, it looks like that might be what he was hired to do. See you in thirty?”
“Right. I’ll do the car and head right over.”
Two blocks farther down the road, adjacent to the Donau Canal, the woman sat behind the wheel of the black Audi Quattro, her eyes stuck to the Zeiss binoculars, focusing on the man who had just gotten out of the Audi A6 and walked to the VW Golf.
Her phone shook in her pocket and she quickly flipped it open, her gaze still on the man making his way up the sidewalk.
“Ja?” She listened carefully. “Are you sure?”
According to her contact, the man was an American who worked for a communications company in Vienna. Interesting. Then what was he doing checking into a crime scene? She thanked her contact and shoved the phone back into her pocket.
Down the street, the man looked up and down the avenue before pretending to slip on the ice and then swiftly sticking something under the back bumper. Then the man got up, brushed off his khaki pants, and walked back to his car.
Nice move, she thought.
Once the Audi pulled away, the woman cast her gaze through the binoculars on the unmarked green Polizei Mercedes outside the front of the Donau Bar. She figured Franz Martini would get the call. Maybe that was a good thing.
“Super,” she said softly aloud.
3
The best way to hide someone was to do something completely out of the ordinary for that person. For instance, Jake wouldn’t hide a monk in a monastery any more than he’d hide this respectable priest in one of Vienna’s many churches. Instead, he burned much of a tank of gas driving around the city’s inner ring. Then Jake had found an all-night sex club with a two-drink minimum, and the two of them had nursed their beers in a dark corner for a couple of hours.
Satisfied they had burned enough clock, Jake had driven to the eastern train station, parked Albrecht’s Mercedes three blocks away in a ramp, and, the Grand Master in tow, had purchased two tickets on the night train to Bratislava, in the Slovak Republic. It was a local train that followed the Danube River and would be in the Slovak capital in about two hours. That had given Jake time to pump Albrecht for information. The man had no clue why someone had tried to kill him. He only knew that his Order was under attack. The priest in Bratislava had warned him just hours before the man was found murdered, his body battered with a wooden object.
Now the train was some thirty minutes or less from reaching Bratislava, the darkness outside nearly complete, with the exception of an occasional barge moving up or down the river, its running lights the only indication anything was there on that cold water. In the past, Jake knew, they would have had to stop at the border. But after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Europe was a free travel zone. Sure the border guards into the Slovak Republic would still take a cursory glance at passports, but that was the extent of inconvenience, especially with its tenuous inclusion into the European Union.
The changes Jake saw coming to Europe, although geared toward free trade and freedom of travel, seemed to be stripping away the identity of each country — not only with the switch to the Euro. Maybe Jake’s identity was changing also. For years he had known who he was — a man who saw injustice and did every damn thing within him to make things right. But now the differences between right and wrong was becoming as blurred as the national borders. He looked at his reflection in the train window and wasn’t sure who was staring back at him.
Albrecht slept now to the left of Jake, the man’s head planted against the window rocking gently with the train’s sway. The man looked vulnerable, Jake thought. He was obviously out of his element.
Jake nudged Albrecht. “Hey. We’re almost there.”
Albrecht’s eyes shot open, as if he was reliving the shoot-out at the Donau Bar. “What?”