Without Options (7 page)

The Serb let out a labored breath. “I don’t know his name.”

Shaking his head, Jake sliced the man just below the eye, bringing instant blood and pain as the man pulled his head away from the knife.

“Now, that was a lie and you know it,” Jake chided.

This time the man said through clenched teeth, “Gunter Schecht.”

Jake couldn’t believe what he had just heard. “Gunter Schecht,” he repeated. “That’s impossible.” Impossible because Jake had shot the man, putting a bullet in his forehead many years ago in Berlin, Germany. “What did he look like?”

“I never saw him,” the Serb said. “The word got out about a bounty on you, so we made it known we were available. I’m sure we’re not the only ones. A million Euros is a lot of money.”

Not if you’re dead. “How did you get in on the action?”

“A website.” He gave Jake the web address. “From there they call you. I have no idea how they found my number. I didn’t give it to them. But they found me.”

“There are better ways to make money,” Jake assured him. “Trying to kill me is not one of them.”

“I see that now.”

Jake unlashed the guy and pulled him from the car, shoving him into the ditch, where he fell into low ferns and immediately grasped his shot knee.

“Now what?” the Serb asked.

“If I let you go I’m guessing you’ll just come after me again. Am I right?”

The man hunched his shoulders. “My knee must get fixed. Just like yours.”

So the man did know something about Jake. “And then what?” Jake pressed. He aimed his .40 cal auto at the man’s chest.

“That’s a lot of money.”

“At least you’re honest,” Jake said. “So why shouldn’t I just shoot you right here?”

“You should. I would. But then they will keep sending men after you until you’re dead. You can’t get away from fate.”

Okay, honesty could go too far. What the hell should he do? It’s not like he could just shoot an unarmed man. The guy had made a bad choice taking this assignment, but he had no way of knowing that. Jake backed up to the car, opened the driver’s door, and reached under the seat, collecting the Serb’s silenced gun. Then Jake threw the gun a few feet away from the man.

The Serb’s eyes shifted toward the gun.

“Pick it up,” Jake ordered.

“You’ll shoot me before I have a chance.”

“Maybe. But you’ll get more of a chance than you gave me back at the gasthaus.”

“You weren’t in the room.”

“You didn’t know that.”

Jake could see the calculations running through the Serb’s mind. Reach for the gun, roll to the side, raise the gun, and fire. As the man did just what Jake thought he would, Jake stepped quickly to his right, narrowed his profile and heard one puff just as he fired three times. The man crashed to the grass. Jake stepped carefully toward the man, his gun ready to fire again. But it wasn’t necessary. Two bullets had struck the man’s chest, and the third had hit the center of the man’s neck, snapping his spine. The man was dead before he hit the grass.

Feelings were mixed with Jake. He should have hated the man, but he didn’t. He was just doing what he had to do to make a buck. Money was a strange motivator. Sure it was needed to live, yet in his case it had done just the opposite. He thought about what the Serb had told him. Gunter Schecht. Made Jake think. Someone was trying to use disinformation against him. Mess with his mind, knowing Jake had killed the guy years ago. But that wasn’t a well-known fact. Only a few people in the intelligence community knew that Jake had killed Gunter. Unless someone had bought that information and was using it to frame someone else, knowing Jake would know only a few knew he had killed the German.

Picking up the man’s gun, never knowing when he might need a good silenced pistol, Jake saw that the Serb had fired the last bullet before the slide had stuck back. Still, he had given the man some chance. Jake could live with that.

He got into the Audi and drove toward Germany. If someone wanted him to think about Gunter, there was no better place to go. Jake knew he could be walking into a trap, but at least he also knew that was a possibility. The mouse trap only worked when the mouse was hungry.

7

Near St. Anton, Austria

Franz Martini had gotten word of another shooting in the gasthaus outside of the ski resort town and immediately drove to that location. He still had a number of contacts in the Innsbruck Polizei office who would continue to feed him information.

He pulled into the parking lot of the gasthaus and parked behind a line of Polizei cars that blocked off the site of the shooting. Getting out, he looked up to the sky at all the stars. Not a cloud. That would drop the temps to near freezing.

As he approached the room, he noticed Hermann Jung standing outside talking on his cell phone. He didn’t look happy to see Franz.

Starting to make his way into the room, Franz was stopped by a strong hand smacking his chest, followed by the shorter man stepping in front of Franz.

“Wait a minute, Franz,” Hermann said, flipping his phone shut. “You’re not authorized to be here.”

Franz looked down at the man’s hand as if to say ‘remove it or lose it.’ Hermann Jung reluctantly took his hand back.

“Do you need to go through remedial training on the chain of command,” Franz said. “I could arrange that.” He kept a stern eye on his replacement.

“With all due respect, you are on medical leave, Herr Martini.”

Franz flipped open his identification and pointed at his credentials, his badge. “Until they pull this from my dying hand, I still outrank you, Herr Jung. Now, unless you want to go back to picking up drunk drivers on the autobahn, you’ll step aside.”

Reluctantly, the man did just that, his jaw to the point of crushing his own teeth.

Inside the room, Franz first noticed Jake’s bike against one wall, his helmet strapped around the handle bars and his shoes sitting underneath. Then he saw the dead man, covered like the man dead in Jake’s apartment with the standard-issue clear plastic. Each spent brass casing was marked with a numbered tag. Five feet from the dead man was a pool of blood.

“Did you get a sample of that?” Franz asked a technician.

“Ja, Herr Martini.”

Well, at least someone remembered him, Franz thought. His eyes scanned the room looking for anything that could help him understand the scene.

Hermann Jung stepped up to Franz and said, “It looks like Jake Adams was wounded.”

“Why do you say that?” Franz inquired, not looking at the younger man.

“The extra blood.”

Franz tried his best not to slap Jung across the head. Instead, he pointed to the bed. “Jake wasn’t in the room. Two men kicked the door in and started shooting. One went to the bathroom and shot a few more times. At what? Nothing. Because somehow Jake knew they were coming and he entered behind them. That’s his brass outside the door on the sidewalk. Those are forty cal, his weapon of choice.” Franz didn’t bring up the fact that the bullets that killed the man on the floor might have been standard Austrian Polizei issue rounds from the gun he had provided Jake to protect himself.

“But then where is Herr Adams?” Hermann Jung asked derisively.

Without answering, Franz went to the dead man on the floor, pulled aside the plastic and examined the body. Pulling up the sleeve on both arms, he noticed a tattoo on the man’s left forearm. He smiled and pointed. “You found no identification?”

“None. Just like the man at the apartment.”

“This man is a Serb.”

“What?” Hermann came closer and stooped down. “How can you be sure?”

“The tattoo. Two-headed eagle with two sabers, topped off with the crown. That’s from the Serbian Army flag.”

The wheels seemed to be turning in Herman Jung’s mind, trying to assess the situation anew. “So, the other man wounds Jake Adams and takes him with him for some reason. That makes sense.”

Jesus, help me, Franz thought as he lowered the sheet back onto the dead Serb. He rose and towered above Jung. How in the hell had this man filled his position? “No. You have it backwards. As I mentioned, Jake wasn’t here when the men came in shooting. They don’t need anything from Jake, other than his death, to receive the bounty on his head. All they need is proof of death. Jake, on the other hand, needed something from these two. He needed to find out why they wanted him dead and who had hired them. So, Jake shot this man in self-defense, shot and wounded the other assailant, and then took him in their car.” After he said this last part, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Sometimes his own superiority got in the way of logic. But he couldn’t help correcting such a flamboyant dolt.

With that, Hermann Jung rushed out of the gasthaus room onto the parking lot, pulling his cell phone out and talking in private. Franz glanced one last time around the room to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Jake was either the best Franz had ever seen, or the luckiest bastard alive. How had he known these two would come for him here at this time? Franz thought about the isolated location of the gasthaus, the distance to St. Anton, possible response time and direction of that response, and came up with his best guess. Jake had planned this out quite specifically. It was perfect. Luck had nothing to do with it. He smiled thinking of the intelligent guile of his American friend.

Hermann Jung came back ten minutes later, a smirk on his face. “Thank you for your help, Herr Martini.”

Hesitating and in deep thought, Franz said, “What have you done?”

“One of the men rented a car at the Innsbruck airport using a Serbian passport. They don’t see them very often, so the rental agent made a mental note. The men rented an Audi A4 just hours ago. I’ve put out a bulletin on it. I also informed Interpol in case Adams decides to cross into Germany or another country.”

Great. Franz checked his watch. “He could be in Germany, Switzerland or Italy by now.” At least Franz hoped so.

Hermann gnashed down on his teeth. “We’ll find him. Trust me on this, Herr Martini.”

“You mentioned in the bulletin that Jake Adams is a victim here,” Franz said vehemently.

Not answering, Hermann Jung walked away.

That was fantastic, Franz thought. Now he’d have to clean up this mess behind the scene to keep Jake out of jail. But he wasn’t sure if he still had enough pull in the Austrian Polizei to make that happen.

Central Intelligence Agency
Langley, Virginia

Behind his large desk off the command center, his second office and nearly his second home, CIA Director Kurt Jenkins clasped his hands together in deep thought. His intense eyes moved from the 24-inch LCD screen to a briefing one of his analysts had set in front of him moments ago before leaving him alone to his thoughts. Since taking over the Agency, this was the second time he had been briefed on his old friend Jake Adams. Sure he’d tried to call Jake back into service many times while he was the deputy director of the CIA. Maybe that was a mistake. But he always thought of Jake when he needed something done and could trust no others to do the job with such great verve. And Kurt trusted him like a brother. But this report was disturbing. He had also kept Jake’s recent problems secret from Jake’s ex-girlfriend, Toni Contardo. After what happened the last time the two of them had worked together, he thought that Toni and Jake should keep their distance. Love hate? That was the problem. Kurt wasn’t sure how the two of them felt toward each other anymore. Not that it mattered to him. He had asked the analyst to fetch Toni as soon as he scanned the briefing and she should have been to his office by. . .

Knock on the door.

Now.

Toni entered wearing black slacks and a black sweater that highlighted her still-perfect body. Her long curly black hair flowed sensuously over her shoulders with each step she took in her high-heeled boots. He certainly understood Jake’s attraction. God, almost forty and she was still beautiful. But Toni was now untouchable. Married to a wealthy businessman from New York, whom she didn’t get to see much thanks to Kurt sending her all over the world on special projects. Helluva way to run a marriage.

She took a seat on a leather chair to the side of the large desk, her hand sweeping hair away from her dark eyes. She crossed her legs and slowly tapped her fingernails on the arm of the chair.

“You get your morning coffee?” Kurt asked her.

Toni’s eye’s glanced at the wall, where numerous clocks ran from zulu in the center to locations around the world. It was zero six thirty local east coast. “An hour ago. What’s up?”

“We have a situation in Europe with one of our assets,” Kurt started. “Former assets.” He searched for his words. “Let me bring you up to date.” He explained to Toni what had happened to Jake over two months ago in Austria, just days after Jake had worked a private case in Bulgaria. When he was done he waited for a response, knowing it could be anything from subdued indifference to pulling a gun and shooting him between the eyes.

She looked stunned. “Jake almost died two months ago and I’m first hearing about it now? We’ve been friends for years.”

“I know. I shouldn’t have kept it from you, but we weren’t sure if the hit was directed toward him or his wife.”

“Girlfriend” she corrected.

“Right. Besides, we had a local asset watching him while he was in the hospital for two months. If nobody tried to finish the job, we thought the hit must have been on Anna.”

Toni’s expression changed from concern to alarm. “Really.”

Kurt nodded.

Expelling a deep breath, Toni said, “He could have used a friend, Kurt. I should have been there for him. He probably thinks I’m a complete ass.”

“I thought you moved on. You’re married.”

“We’re still friends.”

Looking at the briefing again, Kurt thought how he had directed the conversation and realized he couldn’t have done it any better than he had. Now to close the deal.

“That’s not everything,” Kurt said. “There was another hit attempt on Jake yesterday at his apartment in Innsbruck.”

“Is he all right?”