Wolf was sitting up trying to catch his breath from the impact of the two rounds on his Kevlar vest. He’d holstered his weapon and held up his Interpol credentials when the first cop came over the rise.
“Drop your weapon, put your hands together at the back of your head,” the cop shouted. He was young and nervous.
“I’m a police officer,” Wolf said. “Interpol.”
“Put your hands together at the back of your head.”
Wolf dropped his ID wallet and did as he was told. “There is a woman dead in the pickup truck, and at least two more dead inside the museum. This is the man who committed the murders.”
The cop came down the slope and placed handcuffs on Wolf’s wrist. But he was clumsy—it would have been child’s play to take his weapon and shoot him.
He radioed something that Wolf didn’t quite catch, and a minute later two more cops came over the rise. A lot more sirens were close now.
The young cop stood aside as one of the others picked up Wolf’s ID, while the second kicked the pistol away from Zimmer’s body.
“Are you armed?” the cop with his ID asked.
“Yes. Holster under my shirt on the left.”
One of the new cops took his pistol. “You’ve been shot.”
“I’m wearing,” Wolf said. “Can you get these things off me?”
“In a minute,” the cop said. His name tag read Fischer; he was a sergeant. He stepped a few yards away and spoke into a lapel mic.
“The man is Dieter Zimmer,” Wolf said. “He’s a German citizen I was following. We think that he works for a terror cell of killers for hire.”
Two more cops showed up, but Fischer held them back and came over to Wolf.
“Passport?”
“Back pocket, right.”
Fischer took it and read the number into his lapel mic.
Another set of sirens came from the south, their tones more high-pitched than the police cruisers. Wolf figured them to be ambulances.
“Take off the man’s cuffs,” Fischer said at length.
The younger cop did it and helped Wolf to his feet.
“Do you need a doctor, Captain Weisse?” Fischer asked. He was a short black man, his face glistened with sweat.
“No. But I need to contact my office in Berlin. They’ll want to know what’s happened here.”
“My lieutenant is speaking with someone; they want to know if you’re okay. Your embassy is being contacted.”
“Good. May I have my things?”
Fischer handed over his passport and credentials wallet. “I’ll hold the weapon for just a bit.”
Wolf pocketed his ID and passport and went to search Zimmer’s body, but one of the cops stepped in the way. “Sorry, sir, but for now he’s our dead guy.”
“I’d suggest that you get one of your ordinance disposal people down here. These guys are known to sometimes wear explosives, booby-trapped to go off if a first responder isn’t careful.”
The cop stepped back.
“Go ahead and deal with it,” Fischer said from a respectful distance.
Wolf bent over Zimmer’s body and carefully probed the areas of the armpits and groin. But he found nothing. He checked the pockets, coming up with about one hundred U.S. dollars, car keys for the Chevy, and a wallet with a driver’s license and credit cards and a German passport, all of them in the name of Rheinhardt Schey.
“The passport is a fake. We’ll provide you with the proper identification, and I’m sure that the BND or someone will want to claim the body. This is an ongoing investigation.”
“Into what?”
“He was an assassin.”
“There are two people dead up in the museum. One of them is a docent, the other is a younger man, we’re working on his ID.”
“He was a navy SEAL.”
“I saw the front plate,” Fischer said, and he cocked his head and stepped away, apparently listening to something in his earbud.
One of the cops had walked around to the other side of the machine-gun bunker. “We’ve got another one down here,” he called up.
There were now six cops on the dune, and Fischer motioned for one of them to check it out. He was still talking into his lapel mic.
Wolf couldn’t make out what he was saying, but the guy seemed a little surprised. None of this made sense to any of them. The killings were not random; Zimmer had gone through a lot of trouble to come all this way to kill a SEAL Team Six operator. Somehow he’d known that the man would be here at this particular moment in time, which meant the Black October Revolution had pretty sophisticated intelligence contacts here.
He stood staring at Zimmer’s body, when Fischer came over and handed him the SIG.
“Any ideas?”
“His group is called the Black October Revolution, contract killers of high-profile targets—the four hits we know about were businessmen who weren’t in the EU. The hits happened off German soil, one of them, in fact, in Atlanta. Tony Aldrich, who was a big player in the real estate market in Spain and in Monaco.”
“Last year,” Fischer said. “It was in the news. There’ve been no arrests, but his girlfriend was a suspect. They have a penthouse in Palm Beach, so there was a Florida connection.” He glanced at Zimmer’s body. “You think it was this guy?”
“I don’t know, but we think it was the same organization.”
“Motive?”
“Money.”
“Killing a navy SEAL doesn’t fit the profile.”
“No,” Wolf said.
Fischer looked at him. “Your English is good.”
“I spent a couple of years at UC Berkeley a while back.”
“Party time?”
Wolf had to smile, remembering how different it was there than at Kaiserslautern or even Heidelberg. “Yes.”
“I’ve never been anywhere except a couple of cruises to the Caribbean with my wife.”
“Come to Berlin and my wife and I will show you around. Professional courtesy.”
“Sounds good,” Fischer said. “Your embassy wants you in D.C. They’ve booked a flight for you on American Airlines, leaves a little after five. Someone will meet you at the gate.”
“This wasn’t what I expected,” Wolf said, glancing up the dune toward the museum.
“You didn’t pull the trigger.”
“No, but if I had got here a little quicker, I might have prevented the woman’s death. No reason for her.”
“We might need you for the coroner’s inquest,” Fischer said. “Anyway, good hunting.”