Private Berlin (16 page)

FOLLOWING SIX OLD men who carried the colonel’s ashes, Hauptkommissar Hans Dietrich trudged through wet grass toward an open grave in Zentralfriedhof
Friedrichsfelde, the central cemetery in the Lichtenberg district of East Berlin. The high commissar’s head pounded from the
vodka he’d consumed so copiously the night before, trying to deaden his mind so he would not drown in the dark, twisted quagmire
that was his father.

It had not worked.

Dietrich’s drunken thoughts had not been where they should have been—on the slaughterhouse, say, or on Christoph Schneider,
Agnes Krüger, and now this Amsel woman. Instead, he’d wallowed in memories of the colonel and the ruthless manner in which
his father raised him.

Indeed, brutally hungover, moving unsteadily toward the grave, the high commissar’s mind was still recalling the cold and
often inexplicably cruel acts to which his father had treated him growing up.

Dietrich was fifty-two. He’d been trying to understand the colonel since he was a child. But as he watched the old men observing
his father’s urn being lowered into the grave, he realized once again that he could neither explain his father nor come to
terms with him.

The colonel was dead and about to be buried, yet the high commissar had the shuddering realization that the threat of the
man might never die.

Dietrich gazed blearily at the men gathered around his father’s final resting place. They were in their seventies and eighties,
and they wore somber gray suits, dark raincoats, and fedoras.

There was no minister present. The colonel might have risen from the grave in fury had there been.

But one of the men, stout with rheumy eyes and gin blossoms on his nose, stepped forward at last, and said: “Conrad was one
of the last of his kind, and to me it is fitting that he be given a final resting place close to the greats.”

Dietrich looked off toward a circular brick wall strangled in vine. He knew there were many burial urns sealed in the wall.
A tall upright stone slab cut like an ancient tombstone stood dead center of the yard inside the brick wall. Surrounding the
tombstone were the graves of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Wilhelm Pieck, and seven other titans of the German communist
movement.

My father’s heroes, Dietrich thought bitterly. So close and yet so far.

He looked back at his father’s mourners. They were looking at him expectantly and he realized the stout one had stopped speaking.

The high commissar said nothing. He took two steps forward, picked up a clod of wet black earth, thought to hurl it, but then
dropped it on the urn. He stepped back, aware of the mud on his hand and not caring.

One by one, the pallbearers tossed dirt into the grave and then shook Dietrich’s hand, blackening it further.

The last mourner, the stout man, said, “You have the condolences of the inner committee, Hauptkommissar. Your father was a
valued member.”

With a dull, flat expression, Dietrich nodded. “Thank you, Willy.”

Willy hesitated, and then hardened. “I suppose
you
must feel relieved then, now that he’s gone.”

Dietrich had to fight to quell the nausea roiling in his stomach as he said, “Actually, I feel cursed by him, by all of you.
I won’t be free of that until I know that every last one of you is dead, and all your secrets are buried with you.”

IT IS JUST past 10 a.m. when I turn the Mercedes into a parking structure on the northwest corner of the grounds of the IAA Motor Show,
the largest car exhibition in the world. Gleaming exotic rides litter the parking lot, and I’m instantly a happy man. I love
cars. They’re one of the best disguises there is.

In the right car, my friends, you can be anyone, don’t you think?

I park and study a photo of Artur Jaeger downloaded from the Internet, thinking about the helpful secretary who told me where
I might find the engineer.

I look in the mirror, checking the makeup job that makes me appear bald and much older. I zip up a blue windbreaker, and then
put on a red one with an Aston Martin logo over it.

I tug on a matching ball cap.

I pause, forcing myself to breathe deep and slow.

I know what a terrible risk I’m taking.

It’s unlike me. I prefer to have the odds in my favor. But I have no choice.

So I get the pistol and the suppressor from under my seat and slide the weapon into a holster I wear beneath the windbreaker.

I open the door and make a show of pain as I get out. I’ve got a bad hip, or arthritis, or at least I do today.

I gimp toward the galleria entrance, telling myself that if I am as cold and deadly as my father taught me to be, I just might
leave Frankfurt an even more invisible man.

THE TAXI FROM the airport dropped Mattie and Burkhart in front of the unequal twin towers called Kastor and Pollux that front the city
entrance to the Frankfurt Messe trade fair. They paid for admission at the Festhalle entrance and entered a sprawling campus
of gigantic halls linked by moving walkways and escalators.

It was the second to last day of the show, but the place was still packed. Using a map, they navigated toward the BMW stand
in hall number one and began looking for Artur Jaeger using a photo Dr. Gabriel had sent to their cell phones.

Mattie spotted him up on a stage beside a beautiful woman in an evening gown. He held a microphone and was describing the
intricacies of the sleek concept sports car that was turning on a revolving platform behind him.

Mattie worked through the crowd toward the front. It was loud inside the massive hall, a general din that competed with Jaeger’s
spiel, so she did not hear what caused the engineer to suddenly jerk, drop the mic, and collapse backward.

But when Jaeger hit the stage floor, she saw the fine plume of blood that burst from his lips.

“Shooter!” Burkhart roared. “Everyone down!”

Chaos bloomed into pandemonium as people around the BMW exhibit began screaming, diving for the floor, or tripping toward
the exits.

Mattie drew her gun, her mind computing the rough angle from which Jaeger had to have been shot. She looked along that line
of sight and spotted among those trying to flee an older man in a red windbreaker limping quickly away.

“The guy in the red jacket!” Mattie shouted at Burkhart.

He heard them. The old man began bulling his way through the melee, showing tremendous strength and agility.

But Burkhart was like a rhino on steroids. He brushed people aside as if they were scarecrows, with Mattie trailing in his
wake.

The killer disappeared out into a crowded passage. Ten seconds later, Burkhart and Mattie exited the same doors and scanned
the crowd, which was beginning to pick up on the frenzy inside the hall as more and more people ran from it talking about
the shooting.

The old man was gone.

Or was he?

Mattie spotted a red jacket on the floor.

“He’s changed jackets,” she shouted at Burkhart.

Suddenly, toward the west entrance to the convention hall, they heard a gunshot and screaming.

A SECURITY GUARD had confronted the assassin at point-blank range and been shot in the chest, his gun discharging as he fell.

Beyond the guard, outside the entrance, and running toward Brüsseler Strasse, a man in a blue windbreaker and black cap dodged
through the crowd. Burkhart took off in a full sprint with Mattie gasping to keep up behind him.

By the time Mattie and Burkhart reached the entrance, the killer had dragged a man from a Maserati, pistol-whipped him, and
climbed in. The sports car squealed away as they ran out onto the sidewalk. Rain was starting to fall again.

As he ran, Burkhart flashed his badge at a man standing shocked beside a red BMW coupe. “Call Frankfurt Kripo,” he shouted
at the man, snatching the keys from his hand.

“Hey!” the man shouted. “That’s not mine! You can’t—”

“Report this vehicle taken by Private Berlin and the Maserati stolen by an assassin,” Burkhart commanded as he jumped in the
driver’s seat. “He killed two.”

Mattie was in the BMW’s passenger seat, strapping herself in. “He’s got a head start.”

“And he’s got more horsepower,” Burkhart said, slamming the sports car in gear and popping the clutch. “But he can’t drive
like I can.”

They went screeching after the Maserati, which had downshifted and drifted through a hard U-turn, heading due east toward
Osloer Strasse. The killer went right past them. He looked out the window directly at them.

Bald. Dark glasses. A moustache. Hard to tell his age.

The killer had already taken a right on Osloer Strasse by the time they’d made the U-turn. They sped after him through a series
of right-hand turns that led them around the perimeter of the fairgrounds and through a red light out onto Route 44, heading
west. The Maserati was four hundred yards ahead of them when it took the ramp onto Autobahn 648.

Due to Burkhart’s remarkable driving skills, the killer could not widen the gap between them all the way to the interchange
with the Autobahn 5. The Maserati headed north.

“Call Kripo,” Burkhart told Mattie. “Tell them to put a chopper in the air and give them his position.”

But right then the skies opened up—a deluge came in sheets and a gale overwhelmed the windshield wipers. Burkhart did not
slow. Instead, he seemed to drive by braille on the three-lane high-speed route, weaving in and out of cars as if the skies
were clear.

It scared the hell out of Mattie, who could not bring herself to take her eyes off the blurry road.

“Call them!” Burkhart snapped.

Mattie shouted, “Slow down and I will!”

“I slow down, we lose him!” Burkhart yelled back.

“We can’t even see where he is!”

“I can see the brake lights where he’s cutting people off!”

Mattie held on for dear life as Burkhart got them closer and closer. She heard herself tell Niklas that she would not die
trying to find Chris’s killer.

For a second, north of Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse, Mattie thought Burkhart would eventually reel in the Maserati.

But then the killer did something absolutely crazy. The rain let up enough for her to see the Maserati speeding up as it passed
the exit for the village of Bad Homburg. The car flew over an underpass with Burkhart still gaining ground. Then the killer
must have hit his emergency brake just shy of the on-ramp for vehicles leaving Autobahn 661 for the northbound A5. On the
slick pavement, the Maserati drifted and turned 160 degrees, and then it roared down the entryway to the autobahn.

Mattie’s eyes widened and she gasped as they shot past the lane. “He’s going the wrong way!”

FRIENDS, FELLOW BERLINERS, accelerating straight into traffic feeding off the 661 is the best move I think I’ve ever made.

It’s remarkable how easy it is to get vehicles to turn out of your way when you’re hurtling right at them, fully prepared
to die.

A Lancia swerves right off my front fender, catches the guardrail, and does a cartwheel. The driver’s face was so terrified
I start laughing. This has to be the most fun I’ve had in years.

Better yet, I glance in the rearview mirror and see the red BMW that’s been after me has failed to make the radical move that
I did. Do the unexpected, my friends. It always pays off.

At the far end of the on-ramp, I downshift, throw the car through a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, and hit the gas.

The road to Bad Homburg is miraculously clear ahead. I keep looking in my rearview mirror as I pass through the town, but
I still don’t see the red BMW. They missed the turn. The next exit was five miles away. They’re not coming anytime soon.

Still, I know that the Maserati is a car that’s easy to recognize, one that I will have to lose as soon as possible.

Ten minutes later, I pull the car deep into a wooded lane inside the Hochtaunus Nature Park northwest of Bad Homburg. Do you
know it?

It doesn’t matter.

Just know that I have no time to lose. There will be police swarming the area soon and I have some distance to cover.

I park the car in the darkest spot I can find, wipe down the steering wheel and the door, and get out, heading due northeast
into the sopping-wet forest.

As I walk, I tear off the skullcap, the nose prosthesis, and the moustache. I find a stream and use mud and cold water to
strip the makeup from my face. I ditch the blue windbreaker and continue on in the rain, my mind a whirl.

I keep seeing the look on the driver’s face before he flipped.

I can’t help it, my friends.

I stop out there alone in the woods, throw up my fists, punch them at the weeping sky, and start to laugh.

Soon, I’m hysterical and I’ve fallen to my knees.

I’ve done it. Two more to go and I’ve done it. No one will ever know who I am or what I’ve done.

Some may suspect.

Others may offer conjecture.

But as I get to my feet, and continue to make my way northeast toward the train station in the hamlet of Friedrichsdorf, I’m
more certain than ever before that the person I was will never be linked to the person I have become.

“WHERE DID YOU last see him!” Burkhart shouted as they roared north toward the next exit.

Mattie was craned around in her seat, still shocked by the move.

“Engel?” Burkhart demanded.

Mattie blinked and pointed. “He went off the road back there.”

“Bad Homburg,” Burkhart said.

But by the time they covered the fifteen miles and reached the sleepy little village of smooth-walled gray houses, they knew
they had little chance of catching the Maserati. It could have gone in any one of several directions.

Burkhart smashed his fist on the wheel.

Mattie felt the same way. They’d been so close, but they hadn’t saved Artur Jaeger or the security guard, nor had they prevented
the injuries resulting from the crashes. The killer had beaten them once again, and she was beginning to fear he might be
unstoppable.

“We should go back,” Burkhart said, “and find the police and give our statement.”

Mattie almost agreed, but then something clicked in the back of her mind.

“No, wait,” she said, digging for her cell phone. “Pull over.”

She dialed Dr. Gabriel’s number and got the aging hippie right away. Without pretext she asked, “Where is Ilse Frei from?
The missing woman?”

“Bad Homburg,” he replied.

“You have the address?”

He told her to wait a moment and then came back with it. “What’s happening? Where are you?”

“Bad Homburg,” she said and hung up. She looked at Burkhart. “Ilse Frei lives less than a mile from here. The killer knew
this place. That’s why he ran here.”

Burkhart put the car in gear.

Six minutes later they drove past a modest duplex on the outskirts of town at the edge of farm country. The rain had slowed
to a drizzle and in the distance they could hear sirens wailing.

Burkhart parked the red BMW in the alley so as not to attract police attention. They went to the back door and knocked.

A few moments passed and they were about to knock again when a pleasant-looking blond woman in her early thirties appeared
in the window and eyed them suspiciously before opening the door on a security chain.

“Yes?”

Mattie held up her badge. “We’re with Private Berlin. We—”

The woman’s hand went to her throat and she cried, “Did Chris send you? Has he found Ilse?”