IN A MOMENT of clarity, Stag remembered her brushing against his sleeve in Pariserplatz and her murmured apology. He looked down at his sleeve but could find nothing. No GPS dot, nothing. Again, he recalled her smile as he handed her her iPad at the Adlon elevator. Now here she was again, this time staring at him: Her mark. Her dupe.
When he looked again, she was gone. Like a spirit dissipating in the mist.
Jogging across the busy boulevard, he took a shot at finding her, but there was no sign of her. All around him on the sidewalk were women in athletic shoes and briefcases heading for work and men in Burberry trench coats looking like young George Smileys.
But no blond. No scarlet coat.
He stood there amidst the morning work commuters, unsure of his next move, his mind whirling. Tarnhelm was close. It was all around. The only way to survive long enough to get the information he wanted was to Nacht und Nabel himself. Let him disappear into the night and fog for a little while. To get his research done, he needed to exit Berlin, pronto.
He made to disappear into the crowd, but three men in suits suddenly blocked him. They stared, mute and immobile as stone. Then one man, older, with the short stature of a Russian president, stepped forward, his hand up with a badge. It said in large letters, INTERPOL.
“Mr. Maguire.” The little man put away his badge. A black Mercedes pulled up and one of the men opened the door.
“May we go for a little ride?” he said as he gestured elegantly toward the car.
Stag gave them all a long, assessing stare. But he was outnumbered and overwhelmed.
“What’s this all about?” he demanded, already knowing the answer. They were looking for him. To answer questions; why he ditched Harry’s body in his apartment in Wuttke.
“If you would be so kind? We have some things we’d like to ask you.” The older man motioned again to the Mercedes.
Resentfully, but without protest, Stag ducked his head and slid into the back seat. Two special agents flanked him on either side and they pulled away.
“I don’t know who she is. She was staying at the Adlon. I kept seeing her.” Stag sent a hostile stare at the small man.
He’d been bundled out of the car and into the Berlin office of Interpol. The little man was Chief Aldernay Troost, an American, who had now proven to be very good at asking questions, and very bad at answering them.
Stag again looked at the two bits of video Troost had shown him. The first was an exterior shot of Pariserplatz. It showed in grainy black and white his first little encounter with Red Riding Hood when she obviously intentionally bumped into his naive ass. Vid number two was of them in HD, smiling at each other at the elevators like polite, normal people do.
“Her name is Angelika Aradi. A most unusual woman. She has an uncanny knack of appearing and disappearing, wouldn’t you agree?” Troost raised his eyebrow. “I don’t mind telling you, we’ve had a helluva time tracking her. But here you’ve met with her twice.”
“Again, what do you want with me? I don’t know her.”
Chief Troost perched on the desk between them. They were ensconced in an interrogation room complete with hospital-green walls and dirty baseboards from the fifties. Troost took his time before speaking. He seemed to be weighing the pros and cons of telling him anything. Stag observed his worn cuffs and out-of-date tie. Troost was an old cold warrior if there ever was one, at war in his old Cold War surroundings. He wondered if the fight had been worth it. A lifetime of bureaucratic frustration on a public servant’s salary.
“You’re wanted for questioning in Wisconsin. I could send you back there on our first plane out of Tegel.”
“I take it you’re not planning to. I’m wondering why.” Stag gnawed the inside of his cheek.
Troost turned his baggy eyes to a framed poster of a beach. It was a generic South Pacific paradise, beaten egg-white sand, irradiated blue water, neo-plastic palm tree. “Sometime, do you ever think, ‘Why bother?’ Nothing we do in this life is bound to have a lasting effect. Why not just drop out?”
“I’m not much of a philosopher,” Stag said.
Troost laughed. “Me either. I’d like to think I was instrumental in bringing that wall down out there. That great big nasty wall.” He seemed to laugh to himself. “And I’ll be goddamned if it isn’t happening all over again.”
“Communism?”
The older man snorted. He pulled on the worn-shiny knees of his gray trousers, adjusting them. “No. No. That never worked. Nobody’s going to be conned into that again. No, I’m talking fascism. Dictatorship. Megalomania. And all the lemmings that hurl themselves off the cliff in their name.”
“Who would we be talking about here? Germany today is about as anti-fascist—”
“Of course. Yes. But what I’m talking about is corporate fascism. I’m talking about that kind of dictatorship.”
“What corporation would you be talking about?” Stag asked warily.
Troost raised one eyebrow and his humor made him seem suddenly younger and more vigorous. “There’s a transparency to government—even a bad one. It’s not that they don’t hide things; it’s just in government, there are too many people to control. There’s only so far you can go these days. You can’t control all the media like you could in the 1930s. You can’t round up six million people today without other countries knowing about it.
“But a corporation—well, they don’t operate under any real moral or ethical purpose, now do they? They aren’t a group of people trying to bring order or reform. No matter how screwed up the Nazis were, they were pretty fucking sincere about their ideals. But a corporation—they exist to make money. That’s it. That’s their god, their philosophy, their sole endeavor. If governments are bacteria in the wake of penicillin, then corporations are the unkillable viruses of the new millennium.”
He face-palmed his aging, hangdog face. “And the worst, the very worst, are ones that control the information. Control the ‘facts’ and you control the people.”
“Who does the woman work for?” Stag tensed. He pretty much knew the answer.
“We don’t quite know but we have our theories.” Troost frowned. “Of course, we haven’t verified them. We must talk to her and soon.”
“Why do you want her?”
“There’s a little murder we’d like to ask her about.”
Stag recalled Harry’s grotesque death. He had a little murder he’d like to ask about too.
“We have a high-level NATO official dead in a hotel room. Sir Roger Burnett was an expert in the anti-terrorism arm of NATO. He claimed he’d found a concrete connection between information sold by the Tarnhelm Corporation and the radical Daesh terrorist organization of Almawt Al’Aswad. The Plague. Sir Roger was going to come out with it. But before he did, he ended up dead. And she was around for it all, it seems, perennially in our sights, yet forever elusive.”
“You think this Angelika Aradi murdered this man for Tarnhelm?”
“We do. Yes.”
Stag kept his expression tight.
“We are interested in getting information from her but we haven’t enough to bring her in, and so far, she has managed to elude our undercover people. She will not talk to us. But she seems to have an interest in you. I don’t want to frighten you, but that could go very badly for you, from our experience.”
Stag consoled himself with the irony that that last statement was not shocking information. “I know nothing about her. She may be following me or it might be coincidence.” No matter what cards he was dealt, he was going to continue to play them all close to his chest.
“What is your business in Berlin?”
“I’m thinking of doing a series of articles on modern Berlin. Milwaukee, if you didn’t know, has a German ancestry.”
Troost perused a file. “That sounds very speculative for a man who was in such a hurry to leave Wuttke, Wisconsin, that he left his buddy dead in his own apartment.”
“When you got a deadline, you got a deadline.” Stag gave him a level stare.
“You don’t have much family, do you, Mr. Maguire?”
Shifting in his seat, Stag grunted.
“Terrible thing that happened to your wife.” Troost frowned. “But I guess we all have our sad stories, do we not?”
“My wife’s death has no bearing on this matter.”
“Of course not. Of course not.” The older man seemed to be pondering an idea. He wobbled his jaw and reread a couple of items in the file.
“I don’t want to alarm you, Mr. Maguire, but we have reason to believe you may need our protection.”
“Why?”
“Simply because all is not as it seems.”
“What is Tarnhelm anyway? If they’re assassinating people, why don’t you guys know about it?” Stag tamped down his anger.
“Tarnhelm is a corporation that was developed in Sweden after the war, but it’s not necessarily Swedish. Its funds are directed by a holding company into a Dutch stitchting, a tax-exempt nonprofit foundation. The head of the company lives in tax exile in Zug, Switzerland.”
The man paused and looked down at the shiny knees of his suit. “I don’t have to tell you there’s virtually no evidence of any charitable giving from the stitchting. Tarnhelm is flush. Very liquid, with almost no financial oversight. And without that, it is admirably free to do what it will.”
“Even assassinate?” Stag could feel his anger rise.
“We have no proof so far …” Troost shrugged. He looked at Stag. “We’d like your help, Mr. Maguire.”
“My help?” Stag looked around. “I don’t know what I could do for you. I’m a spec journalist who hasn’t worked in years. I can’t see what—”
“Angelika Aradi has an interest in you for some reason. We’d like to find out why.”
So the fuck would I, Stag thought. “I don’t know who she is, who she works for, or what her interest is. I don’t see how I could help.”
“Go to the Adlon. Be visible. If you can pull her out in the open, perhaps you might be able to talk to her, find out what her interest is, whom exactly she works for. For that, we can offer protection. You need it.” Troost looked back to the poster of paradise. “I’m hoping to retire next year, Mr. Maguire. I don’t have a big fat pension like many corporate sellouts of my generation. Tragically, I won’t be retiring there.” He nodded to the picture. “But this final project will be the jewel in my crown. Will you help me?”
Every instinct told him to refuse. Going back to the Adlon would be suicide. Tarnhelm would put a bead on him, and he’d never escape their snare. It was crucial for him to get out of Berlin and do his research alone and in peace. That was the much more prudent way to get Tarnhelm. Bring it down from without.
But here was a chance to bring it down from within. Much less likely a positive outcome. The odds weren’t good. Harry proved what direct contact with Tarnhelm could entail. Meeting up with a strange woman in the Adlon for the police didn’t quite sit well.
But his back was against the wall. How could he justify saying no without divulging information?
“If this woman’s as dangerous as you say, I’ll need some kind of protection, won’t I?”
“I’ll see that our very best men are in the lobby at all times monitoring any meeting.”
God, he didn’t want to do it. But the woman was his best contact with Tarnhelm right now. If he could find out what she knew, he ‘d be ahead.
“I guess I’ll have to,” he said.
Troost seemed strangely relieved. “Good man.”