1

Berlin

Days, hours, or minutes.

Sobieski doesn’t know. She’s on her stomach on the cold linoleum floor of what’s left of Siren Securities. Her hands are tied behind her back with what? A belt? No. She wriggles her fingers and feels the soft, pliable plastic coating of wire and cables. The metallic edge of a USB slot. She sees more wires in a clump on the floor near a surge protector. It’s starting to come back.

She closes and opens her eyes three, four times. Full minutes pass between each transition from dark to light. Unconsciousness and whatever this is. Pain and . . . more pain. Mumbling. A man’s voice. She listens with her eyes closed. A man speaking in German. The man speaking in German. “Ich bin Shultz.” Ich bin. She thinks of Kennedy at the wall. Ich bin ein Berliner.

When the thin blond man materializes and sees that she is coming to, he pulls a chair closer, but not too close, sits and leans forward. In his right hand is a section of aluminum window blind rolled up tightly, grasped like a club.

“Don’t try to escape.”

“You’re lucky I slipped.”

“I am. Considering you fancy yourself some kind of cage fighter.” The man speaks in perfect formal British-tinged English. As a second language, Sobieski notes, but perfect.

“You know, you’re in an insane amount of trouble.”

The man laughs nervously and tilts his head back. “Me?”

All at once she jerks and twists, trying to rise up to her feet. Though she’s not successful, the man lurches back and scrambles away from her, holding the blinds in front of his chest in self-defense.

“Damn it!” he shouts. “Stay still. They’ll be here shortly.”

“Who?”

“My employers. The people you were vandalizing.”

She lays her right cheek on the floor and tries to focus on him. Blue jeans. Gray pocket T-shirt. Black canvas sneakers. “Vandalizing?”

“Yes.”

“What is there to vandalize here?”

He lowers the blinds. “We shut down this operation because we anticipated a threat.”

“When?”

“Yester—Why should I tell you?”

She closes her eyes and takes a breath. Fine. Don’t.

The man continues. “What did you mean to accomplish, breaking into our offices?”

Eyes back open. “I came here because your firm is linked to a series of highly questionable transactions that have been linked to serious crimes.”

“Crimes?”

“Murders. Don’t play stupid.”

He walks three steps away, then turns to look down at her. “Preposterous. We are an international securities firm.”

She laughs derisively. “Right. And this is your plush and luxurious worldwide headquarters.”

“Tell me about the murders.”

“Sure. Let me up.”

He shakes his head. Not a chance.

“Okay,” she begins, squinting her eyes and trying to remember the facts. “Hong Kong, Monday, October 17. An order is placed with a broker named Patrick Lau, via a trading account in Philadelphia, linked to a man named Rondell Jameson. U.S. tech stocks, all shorts, thousands of micro transactions, presumably to avoid detection, each just under the total that would catch the eye of someone in Treasury or Homeland Security, or me, totaling nearly a billion dollars. The foreign middleman in the transaction? Siren Securities. Ring a bell?”

The man cocks his head. It’s clear that he is familiar with the transaction but perhaps not so much with what happened next. “And?”

“And that evening in Hong Kong, soon after Patrick Lau got home from work, someone broke into his harbor-front condo and shot him in the head.”

The man sits back down. Scratches his chin. The blinds are at his side, in his loosening grip. “How do you know this?”

“I was at the crime scene when he was still facedown on his counter, blood dripping onto the floor.”

“In Hong Kong?”

“Yes. I can show you pictures if you’d like, once we get out of here.”

“And there’s no chance this was a coincidence?”

She begins to speak more rapidly. “Next day. Tuesday. The second trade. Media stocks. Still shorts. Still huge money. This time instead of Hong Kong it was Dubai. This time instead of Patrick Lau the murdered broker’s name was Naseem Al Mar at Zayeed Capital. And of course, Siren Securities, Berlin, Germany, was in the middle of it. They found Al Mar in a car trunk yesterday.”

He stares, silent, mouth open.

“I imagine your fingers were on the keyboard for that one, too.”

“I . . . we simply carry out the orders of others. Clients. Institutions. There’s no way that—”

“Next came Johannesburg. New media shorts. Rosehall Fund. A woman broker named Sawa Luhabe. They riddled her car with bullets soon after.”

“Are you an assassin?”

“Then, yesterday, the same brutal, despicable shit in Rio.”

He paces away from, then back toward her. Dips his hands in and out of the pockets of his tight hipster jeans. “Who are you?”

“I work for the United States Terrorism and Financial Intelligence task force. I’m agent Cara Sobieski.”

His eyes widen further. For the first time Sobieski thinks he might not know anything about the murders. “If you don’t believe me, check my ID. It’s in my back pocket.”

While he hesitates, she presses. “When are your employers coming? When will they get here?”

“They’re . . . on their way.” He shrugs. “I don’t know . . . minutes?”

“Minutes. And you didn’t know about the murders?”

He shakes his head, glances at her back pocket. “The orders come through and I process them.” As he speaks, he slowly bends and reaches toward her pocket. “Stay still.”

“Orders from whom?”

No answer.

“Listen,” Sobieski says, “what’s your name?”

“My name is Heinrich.” He carefully removes the leather case from her pocket, flips it open, and sighs when he sees the badge. He’s never heard of TFI, but it’s obvious she’s legit.

“And you know nothing about these murders, Heinrich?”

He shakes his head, afraid now, still staring at her badge.

“Then we absolutely have to get out of here, Heinrich.”

“But they—”

She interrupts. “They will kill us, Heinrich. When they come, of course they’re going to kill me. But they’re gonna kill you, too. Same as Lau in Hong Kong, Al Mar in Dubai, and whatever his name is—was—Valverde in Rio.”

“What about the woman in Jo’burg?”

“Last I heard, they haven’t gotten her, but they’re trying. She’s a loose end and they’re eliminating anyone who has touched this.”

As he continues to deliberate, tapping her badge against his palm, she says as convincingly as possible, “Heinrich! You are a loose end. They. Will. Kill. Us!”

Heinrich agonizes one more moment before deciding to believe her. He puts her badge in his back pocket, grabs her right elbow, and helps her to her feet. As they hustle toward the door, her hands still bound behind her back, he asks, “Do you have a gun?”

“Uh-uh. Not with me.”

They bound into the hall and jog toward the elevator bank. As Heinrich reaches to press the down button, Sobieski bumps his hand away with her hip. “Wait.” She gestures with her chin at the lights above the elevator.

It’s rising . . . 2 . . . 3 . . .

Sobieski starts walking away from the elevator, in the opposite direction of the Siren office.

. . . 4 . . .

Heinrich follows.

They’re too far away from the stairwell to make it in time. She stops outside the photography studio. “Quick, try this.” Heinrich rushes over and twists the knob, but it doesn’t give. There’s a bell to ring, but there’s no time.

6 . . . 7 . . .

They scramble across the hall to the accountant’s office. Heinrich twists the knob. No go.

8 . . .

Back across to the literary agency.

9 . . .

Heinrich twists.

Ding!

It opens at the same moment as the elevator doors.