Drinking coffee by herself at the hotel restaurant, Toni’s phone buzzed in her pocket and she picked up. She had just turned it on after going to wake Franz.
“Yeah.”
“Where the hell have you been?” It was her boss, Kurt Jenkins, the CIA director.
“Sleeping. What’s up?”
“Can you talk?”
“I’m at a hotel restaurant, but there’s only a few people here and they’re across the room. What you need?”
“A lot of activity last night,” Jenkins said. “A former KGB slash SVR officer was killed last night in Baden-Baden.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Vladimir Volkov.”
“Jesus. He practically ran the spy game in Germany during the Cold War. What was he doing in Baden-Baden.”
“Apparently retired.”
“How’d he die?”
“Don’t know. There were two others dead in the apartment.”
Toni’s mind immediately thought of Jake Adams. “Was Jake…”
“No. But he might have been there. The Polizei found about a dozen spent brass. Forty cal. Jake’s preferred round.”
“And you think Jake took out Vladimir Volkov.”
“No. He was killed by two shooters with nine millimeter silenced Yarygin PYa pistols.”
“Did the Polizei identified the shooters?”
“Not yet. Based on the guns they’re guessing Russian. Both were in their twenties. Could be GRU.”
“That makes no sense,” Toni said. She saw Franz enter the restaurant and go straight to a coffee machine. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. We searched Vladimir Volkov. He’s been retired in Germany for two years. We got a ping off the Russian’s computer in Frankfurt. Sergei. Volkov also had a one million Euro bounty on him.”
“Interesting.”
Franz sat down across from Toni, his cup spilling some coffee onto the table, which he wiped up after swearing.
“Someone there with you?” Jenkins asked.
“Yeah.”
“Franz Martini?”
“Yep.”
“You need to send him back to Austria.”
“Not yet. Anything else?”
“Maybe. Someone has asked to be paid for the hit of Volkov. I think you should intercept that. Maybe take credit for the hit yourself.” He went on to explain what he wanted her to do, giving her the details of the hit and the meet. When he was done, they both hung up.
“Sorry about that,” Toni said to Franz, stuffing her phone into her pocket.
“Work is work. Any good news from the Agency?”
She wasn’t sure how much she could tell Franz. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the man, but over the years she’d come to compartmentalize almost everything — much to the displeasure of her new husband, who had become increasingly frustrated with her job, even though he knew what he was getting into with her. Well, he knew she worked for the government, not the Agency.
Toni explained the hit in Baden-Baden. She left out the important details, though.
When she was done, Franz gave a little whistle. “Sounds like this goes much deeper,” Franz said. “So Jake isn’t alone.”
“Do we know what Anna was working on with Interpol?”
“As you know, I’m sure, she worked with The Public Safety and Terrorism Sub-Directorate.”
“That could cover a lot of things,” Toni assured him.
“I know. But I’m sure your friends at the Agency could find out more about her work.”
Toni raised a finger while she dug out her phone and called back the director, explaining what she needed. Jenkins said it could take some diplomacy and a few favors to get that information, but said he’d find out.
She hung up and said, “You better get down something solid. We’ve got a little drive this morning. I’ll go check out.” She got up to leave.
“Great. Crazy woman on the Autobahn again. I hope I can keep my food down.”
She laughed and left him there. It was good to see he still had a sense of humor.
Alexandra Schecht reluctantly drove into work, getting to the BND building outside of Munich by nine. As she passed through security, she was stopped and held for a moment until two of her colleagues showed up — Martin Mayer and a young officer, whose name kept escaping her, but who she knew as a smug suck-up.
“I thought you were off for the rest of the week,” Mayer said as they walked down the main corridor.
Where would they bring her? To one of the interrogation rooms? Settle down, Alexandra. She’d run every scenario through her brain, trying to assure herself, and was ready for every possibility.
“I need to report some contacts over the past couple of days,” she said, trying to get ahead of the conversation.
“Wait on that for a moment,” Mayer demanded.
Why was he being such a hard-ass? More so than normal. He would have made a great Gestapo officer, she thought.
The three of them went into a conference room, and Alexandra knew it was not only sound proof, but she would be recorded visually and audibly. Not only that. The chair had hidden plates inside that would check her pulse for lies. If they were trying to intimidate her, they were far from doing so. They were just pissing her off.
In their chairs now, Martin Mayer leaned back and smiled. “All right. Please explain your actions.”
She started from the beginning, like Jake had asked to do, from him showing up in town, to the men chasing her to the Autobahn, and through the Luxembourg incident. She also brought up the fact that Jake had to kill the two men in France. However, she left out the part about her and Jake making mad passionate love for a few days, or the fact that they’d gone to the Interpol officer’s house near Lyon. No need to get Andre involved. When she was done, she leaned back in the chair and let out a slight breath of air to observe Herr Mayer. She knew he had no field experience as a BND officer and had come from academia only a few years ago. Psychology professor from Berlin.
“An interesting story, Fraulein Schecht,” Mayer said, his elbows on the table and his hands clasped together with a steeple, the spire touching his lips. “Why did you come back through Geneva, Switzerland?”
Calmly, she warned herself, or they’d know she was lying. “I said I dropped Mister Adams at a train station in France. If you look at a map, it’s not really out of the way.” This was true from Lyon, but not from much farther north in France, closer to Luxembourg. In her story, she had only said she’d dropped Jake at a train station in France, and not which station. But now he would ask her that location.
“I assure you I understand European geography, Alexandra. Geneva is quite a distance from Luxembourg. Where did you drop off Mr. Adams?”
No harm in telling this, she thought. “Lyon.”
“Ah, then that makes sense.” Mayer spread his hands out onto the table, his eyes shifting to his young minion, who stood in the corner behind Alexandra, and then settled back on her.
Something was bothering her. How did they know she had gone through Switzerland. It had been a long time since there had been any requirement to stop at the borders.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Mayer said. “How did we track you through Switzerland?”
“Exactly. You are brilliant,” she said diffidently. “I didn’t think I had a GPS tracker on my car.”
Martin Mayer grinned broadly. He explained the new tracking system that had been adopted by Germany and Switzerland and would probably spread to all of Europe in the near future.