Jake quickly lowered his gun.
“What the hell?” Jake said. “You were supposed to come here tomorrow morning. I almost shot you.”
Alexandra Schecht slid her legs to the floor and said, “I knew your reactions were better than that.” She rushed to him and wrapped herself around him.
He embraced her also, glad she’d come tonight. “Why the change of plan?”
She pulled away from him a foot. “The Service wants me to try to collect on the hit in Baden-Baden. I’m to coordinate my attempt tomorrow with officers from our Berlin office. There’s more to this than I realized, Jake.” Her breaths heaved her chest with each word, her nipples protruding against her thin white silk shirt, enticing Jake. She took his hand and brought it to her breast, and she moaned with his touch.
He took off his jacket, dropping it to the floor, his bare chest accented by his empty leather holster. She gasped suddenly.
“What?”
“You’re bleeding. How’d that happen?”
Glancing at his left arm, he saw that a bullet had cut through his flesh. Why hadn’t he noticed it when he took off his shirt to put over his head? Adrenalin.
“It’s nothing. I’ll explain later.” He picked up his leather coat and put his finger through a hole on two sides. “Damn. My new jacket.”
She went to the bathroom and found a wash cloth, which she soaked with cold water and placed over the wound, and then cleaned it with a rub.
“Hey, that’s an open wound,” Jake protested.
“Don’t be a baby.”
Jake sat on the edge of the bed. “Well, as long as you’re being a nurse tonight, I could use a complete sponge bath.”
“How about an enema?”
“I don’t go that way.”
She examined the rip in his skin. “The bleeding has stopped.”
“Of course, the blood has flowed elsewhere.”
Smiling, Alexandra grasped Jake’s belt and deftly unhooked it. “I better check the rest of your body to make sure you have no other mystery wounds.”
Jake stood and let her undress him. “If you must.”
When she saw him engorged like that, she hurried to remove her own clothes. The first time came quickly for both of them, their bodies meshing together in a fast, passionate release. The second time they paced their movements, examining the body of each other.
A good while later, they lay naked together in bed, her head nuzzled against his broad chest.
“Now will you tell me about your cut on your arm?” she asked, her voice softer than he ever remembered. As if she was finally herself with him.
He explained his conversation with the former Stasi officer and the hit attempt by the young couple.
“I’ve heard of Hartmann,” she said. “He was quite brutal back in the day. You should have let them kill the man.”
“Maybe. But their tactics were flawed. Perhaps they would have gotten better with age.”
“Too late now.”
“Right.” He felt a little guilty about shooting them, even though they would have killed him in an instant if he hadn’t reacted. Yet, he could’ve simply gone down the elevator and let nature take its course.
“They should have slowed and let you go downstairs before making their move.”
“Better yet,” Jake said. “The woman should have said she forgot something in their apartment, letting them go back in the other direction until I was gone.”
“Why the woman?”
“Did I not mention she was blonde?”
Alexandra slapped him on the chest. “So that’s the true Jake Adams.”
“Okay. The man forgot his car keys. You satisfied now?”
She rubbed her hand along his chest. “Very satisfied.” Her eyes rose to his. “Where do we go from here?”
“To the meet. But we have to decide who takes the lead. If you’re going to have some friends show up, that could be a problem. I might get shot in the crossfire.”
She slapped his chest again. “I meant with us.”
“Oh.” How the hell did he answer that without saying the wrong thing? Don’t delay too long, Jake. “I think we should figure that out once this case is over. If we over think it now, our judgment might be compromised.”
Thinking for a moment, she said, “I agree. But I want you to know I am ubersmitten.”
“Auch.”
She raised her head up and kissed him on the lips.
Anton Zukov’s cell phone buzzed in his pants as he drove his Audi A3 in light traffic along a quiet boulevard near the Tegeler See in Berlin’s northwest. He was looking for a good place to drop a body in the dark. Someplace with light traffic in late evening, and he found just that along the western shore of the lake. It wouldn’t help him immediately, since that meeting would be taken by his associate Nikolai, but he was always trying to stay a few steps ahead of the game.
Finally getting the phone from his pocket, he immediately flipped it open when he saw the most recent number flash for Viktor. “How can I help my good friend?” he asked in Russian.
“Where are you?”
“Driving in the northwest. What’s going on?”
“Two things. First, a couple of our people were killed near Alexanderplatz.”
“Who?”
“The local couple.”
Zukov tried to picture their faces. The husband and wife team had been recruited in Leipzig a couple of years ago — the husband a former Germany Army private who’d done his conscription with little fanfare and great dissolution, and his anarchist wife — too hot for the Army man but nearly too crazy for Zukov to even consider screwing. And that was saying something.
“I thought we were holding them back for something else?” Zukov said with true wonder. He slowed his car at a stop sign and waited. Nobody was coming from any direction.
“We were,” Viktor said, disturbed. “They went freelance after our Stasi friend.”
“What? He wasn’t assigned for two weeks. Not until your friend, the American, was taken out.”
“I’m aware of this. I set the schedule.”
“Of course.” This would throw off his own schedule and that wasn’t good. He liked to move his pieces on the board on his terms. But then their boss had ordered them to move the process forward quicker anyway. “Was our Stasi friend hurt?”
“Not a scratch.”
“He’s still good.”
“He didn’t fire a shot. A man matching Jake Adams’s description was seen entering the building.”
Great. “He’s here.” Deep in the back of his mind he had a feeling Adams was going by the name Remus, and would try to collect on Vladimir Volkov’s death.
“He doesn’t leave anything to chance.”
“I’ll bet he was after our Stasi friend for information, not to kill him.”
“I agree. I’ll let you know more when I know.”
Sensing his boss was about to hang up, Zukov said, “You said you had two things to tell me.”
A car pulled up behind Zukov, so he pulled out to the right and continued along the north shore of the lake.
“Right. About the meeting tomorrow. Our American friend has to be Remus. And he’s not the only one to claim responsibility for Baden-Baden. There are two others.”
“What? We know that man was there, caught on video.” In fact, they weren’t sure that the man in the video was Jake Adams. But it did look like him.
“I know. The other two also have the information, though.”
That was a dilemma. “Will you take out all three?”
“No other choice,” Viktor said. “There’s no money.”
Zukov laughed. “You sure you want me to simply observe?”
“Yes. This could be a feign move.”
That’s what Zukov was thinking. “Understand. We’ll go as planned then.”
Viktor hung up and Zukov shut his phone, setting it in a cup holder on the console. Maybe he could convince Viktor to allow him to bring along a sniper rifle. Just in case. He smiled with that thought and picked up speed.