The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (21 page)

It wasn’t something I could stand for long, so it was just as well that I didn’t have to. Within minutes, I could hear Freddy speaking on the phone.

“Nathan? It’s Freddy. I’m calling about this situation with the embassy again. Your man’s just…” A swirl of whistling static killed the feedback for a long five seconds. “… sent him to the fourth apartment. It’s in Hackescher Markt. I’m feeling uncomfortable about it. I’m not sure…” More whistling. More interference. “… you would do? I’m concerned that…”

The signal cut out again. This time the whistling was so intense that I removed the stereo buds and covered my ears with the flats of my hands.

I could have tried listening for longer, I suppose, but I didn’t see the point. The bug had already told me what I needed to know. Obviously, this wasn’t the first time Freddy had called his brother for guidance about the job he’d hired me to do. It was just as Nancy Symons had said: Freddy was out of his depth. And while I imagined it would be fairly tough for a foreign agency to bug a telephone line into the British embassy, I guessed it would be a lot easier for them to tap into Nathan Farmer’s phone in Paris.

I was pretty sure that was how the Russians and the Americans, not to mention the French guy and my German caller, had come to know about my involvement in this shambles. It explained how they always seemed to know my whereabouts and my next move. Speaking of which, I was going to have to hurry. Freddy had just spilled the information on the fourth location, and there wasn’t a moment to lose.

*   *   *

I lost too many. It took me twenty minutes to get across to the Hackescher Markt on the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn network, and by the time I hurried down the stairs inside the red-brick train station, I walked straight into the waiting arms of the Russian crew.

Not that their arms were spread wide in an embrace. Pavel, the dapper guy with the tailored overcoat, was leaning against the graffiti-covered brickwork with his arms folded across his chest, like a well-dressed model in an urban photo shoot. Vladislav had his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. His right pocket was bulging. Now true, he exhibited all the basic characteristics of a primate, but I didn’t think he was gripping a banana.

Nope, definitely a pistol. He eased the butt out to show me and smiled his lopsided grin just as I was contemplating turning on my heel and running back upstairs to the train platform.

“Mr. Howard.” Pavel pushed off from the brick wall and paced toward me through the crowds. His coat collar was up around his neck. No scarf today. “May we speak with you?”

“I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said I was too busy right now.”

He inclined his head toward the exit. “You will follow with me.”

“And if I don’t?”

His pal with the scar circled behind me until he was standing very close, then jabbed his gun into my side. I gasped in pain. He’d drilled the muzzle right into the center of my bruising. I can’t pretend I wasn’t impressed. I hadn’t credited him with the kind of brain power to remember where he’d punched me.

“Well,” I said, through gritted teeth, “since you asked so nicely, I suppose it would be rude of me to refuse.”

Pavel led us out through a brick archway onto a cobbled square. There were sidewalk cafés to my left, and plenty of patrons were huddled in plastic chairs, sipping steaming coffees and hot chocolates. A group of tourists were standing nearby, waiting impatiently for a young guy with a satchel slung over his shoulder to begin a city walking tour. Hot dog vendors prowled among them, wearing portable griddles around their waists with gas canisters strapped to their backs like jet packs. I could see a delivery van and a couple of cars parked close by. One of them was the Russians’ black town car.

I was ushered away from the square and beneath a domed brick tunnel that doubled back under the train station, where a network of tram tracks crisscrossed the ground. A row of metal Dumpsters were pushed up against one wall. The Dumpsters were almost camouflaged against the brickwork behind them by the graffiti that had been sprayed over the area. There was a smell of damp and urine. There was an echoing silence. It was a suitably lonely spot.

I was forced up against one of the Dumpsters. Pavel checked both ways to be sure nobody was watching us, then nodded to his pet thug, and Vladislav surged forward and buried his fist in my side.

It was the kidney opposite the one he’d pummeled before. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or bad. I guessed it would give me a matching pair of contusions to admire in my bathroom mirror, but to be perfectly honest, I’d have preferred it if he hadn’t hit me at all.

I went down on one knee and clutched my arm to my side. Vladislav pinched my chin between a grubby finger and thumb and tilted my head so that I was gazing up at him. To an outsider, I might have looked like I was proposing. He would have made some fiancé. His ugly face was slanted by the tug of the scar and drool was pooling in the corner of his mouth.

He bunched his spare hand into a fist and frowned at his knuckles. They were scuffed and scarred from years of hurting people. I was certain they were coming my way.

But before he could treat me to a backstreet nose job, Pavel stepped up and placed a hand on his cocked shoulder. He peered down at me with all the compassion of a guy staring at roadkill.

“The code is incomplete,” he said.

“Excuse me?” My voice was soft and high and wavering.

“The code,” he repeated, “is incomplete.”

“No, I heard you. I just don’t understand you.”

“What is not to understand? There is code missing. A page, at least. Tell me where it is.”

“I have no idea. Truly.”

Next thing I knew, my skull had bounced off the Dumpster behind me. It took me some moments to realize that Vladislav had boxed me on the ear. A sound wave expanded in my head very fast, like a bubble of compressed air. It popped with a percussive whoosh that felt as if a balloon had burst inside my brain—one filled with sharp tacks and acid.

Something trickled out of my ear. I pressed my fingertips to it. They came away wet with blood.

My hearing wasn’t good, but my balance was terrible.

Vladislav bent low and snatched me by the hair and hauled me to my knees again.

The world tilted sideways and then flipped right over. I didn’t flip with it. The brute wouldn’t let go of my hair. I thought I might pass out. There was hot liquid in the back of my throat. Saliva or blood or bile. I couldn’t tell which.

“Where is the code?”

Pavel had hitched up his tailored trousers and ducked down in front of me. He was resting his forearms on his knees, hands clasped loosely together.

“Where … is … the … code?”

Saying it slower didn’t help at all. It just made the distortion of his words even worse, like a record that was being played at the wrong speed.

I tried to focus on his hands, but they were spinning like disks. My eyes were spinning with them. I felt like I was being hypnotized.

I blinked and shook my head, and regretted it immediately. The pain was still there. It was an evolving beast, growing worse all the while. My ear throbbed. It was filled with a swirling, droning, piercing buzz.

Then there was a different noise. Something clipped. Precise. It echoed off the brick archway above us.

A woman in heeled shoes was hurrying by. She glanced at me furtively, then away again. She fixed her attention on the ground. Picked up her pace.

“I don’t have your stupid page of code,” I said, spitting the words out along with some blood. It seemed I’d bitten down on my lip when I was punched. “You took everything I had.”

Vladislav yanked at the roots of my hair. I yowled and raised my arms in front of my face, scrabbling at his wrists.

“We know why you are here,” Pavel said. “We want the package.”

I dropped my arms a fraction and squinted at him. “But I thought you wanted the code?”

“We want both.”

Greedy,
I thought. But I didn’t say it. This wasn’t a time for smart talk. This was a time for survival.

“What is this package?” Pavel asked.

“No idea,” I lied. But his question was interesting. It didn’t sound as if Freddy had given the
entire
game away on his phone call to his brother. “But I’ll get it for you,” I said. “I’ll break in right now and I’ll figure out what the package is and I’ll bring it to you. You can wait here for me.”

“Nyet.”

“Help me out here, will you? Either you want the package or you don’t.”

“We want it. But we will come with you.”

I didn’t speak for a good few seconds. I didn’t care for his suggestion. Not even a little bit.

“No can do,” I told him, tasting the blood on my tongue. “I work alone.”

Vladislav tugged at my hair so hard I feared my scalp might tear.

“I have a proven method,” I said, talking fast now. “A set of rules. I don’t work in groups. It’s too dangerous. We’ll draw attention. If you’ll only wait here, I’ll—”

Vladislav seized a fistful of my coat and shunted me backward against the Dumpster.

“We will come with you,” Pavel repeated.

“Well, if you put it like that…” I said, and gently probed the back of my head, steering clear of my thick ear. “But you have to do everything I say. You have to listen to me and pay attention.”

Vladislav grunted and finally released me. It was all I could do not to collapse to the ground.

“You will not fail us,” Pavel said. “Now, get up. We must not waste time.”

“You’re right,” I told him, dusting myself down. “I apologize. I should never have thrown myself against your man’s fist in the first place.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

So this was a novel dilemma. I finally knew what I was looking for, but I wasn’t on my own anymore. I had company. Unwanted, unpredictable company, and I didn’t like to imagine how the Russians would react if the not-so-secret package wasn’t inside the apartment Freddy had dispatched me to. But likewise, I had no idea what I was going to do if I
did
find the object. There was no way I could let the Russians have it because I needed to exchange it with my cryptic German caller for Victoria. And yet I was pretty sure they’d have a problem with that.

Talking of problems, I couldn’t see a way to get inside the apartment building without appearing suspicious. The glass entrance door I was interested in was located between a pharmacy and a shoe shop, opposite the station cafés and just along from where the Russians had parked. It was about as conspicuous as you could get. So were the Russians. They looked like dangerous men. They radiated a tangible threat. And having them crowd around me as I got busy with my picks would be a long way from subtle.

Then again, I was beginning to believe that discretion was overrated. Take the woman who’d hurried by as they’d beat me up. She hadn’t intervened. She hadn’t stopped to ask what they were up to. And I doubted that anyone else would be dumb enough to take a different approach.

We walked toward the door in a tight group. I was leaning to one side, clasping my hand to my aching gut. Vladislav was to my left, Pavel on my right. They both slipped on black leather gloves as we approached.

I tried the door. It was locked. No surprises there.

The lock was a simple spring latch. No dead bolt. No guard plate.

The Russians arranged themselves around me, facing the street, like a human shield or a security cordon. I tried not to let it go to my head.

Humming a distracting little ditty to myself, I pried open my spectacles case, moved my tools aside, and removed my plastic shims. I selected one at random and swiped it down past the latch. Then I hauled the door open and breezed inside the foyer.

The two Russians still hadn’t moved. They were waiting on the wrong side of the door.

“Ahem,” I said.

They glanced over their shoulders, then did a fast double take.

“What can I say? I’m a professional.”

They exchanged a look that suggested they were beginning to revise their opinion of me.

“Here,” I said, and passed one of the shims to Pavel. “You might want to hold on to this. It could save you the trouble of breaking somebody’s window, maybe.”

I released the door and Vladislav stiff-armed it open for his boss. They followed me across the foyer. The foyer was little more than a short corridor with an elevator dead ahead and a fire door on the right. The fire door would open onto a stairwell, and normally it was the route I would have selected. But Freddy had told me that Andrew Stirling lived in a penthouse apartment on the seventh floor of the building, and I didn’t feel capable of climbing that far.

I was still a little nauseated and plenty dizzy. My ear was hot and tingling, and my hearing was yet to clear. It was buzzing and whistling, a bit like listening to the dodgy bug transmission from Freddy’s office. And my stomach was churning and gurgling and cramping. I was stooped over like I had a hernia. Maybe now I did.

I prodded the call button. There was a muted ding followed by the instant parting of the elevator doors. I stepped inside and waited for my new colleagues to join me. The carriage bounced under our weight. The compartment was tight and cramped, and I was pressed flat against the mirror on the back wall.

“Penthouse, please,” I said.

Pavel sighed and pressed the button marked
P
. But the elevator failed to move. He jabbed it again. Still nothing. The Neanderthal looked across. He grunted and smacked the button with the heel of his hand. Oddly enough, that didn’t work, either.

I squirmed between their shoulders and switched positions with Pavel. Bending down, I spotted a socket for a key beside the button for the penthouse suite. It was the same system I’d encountered in Daniel Wood’s apartment building.

I created some wiggle room with my elbows, then removed a raking tool and a torsion wrench from my spectacles case and got to work on the keyhole. I had the thing rotating in just under a minute, and then I leaned forward and prodded the
P
with the tip of my nose. The button lit up. The elevator doors shuffled closed. The carriage started to ascend.