Retribution (9781429922593) (4 page)

“Do not crowd them until we have proof of wrongdoing. All we have now are suspicions.”

“Sorry, sir, but I'd say that's exactly what we do to the bastards. Make them look over their shoulders twenty-four/seven,” Wolf said. “Force the fuckers to make mistakes.”

The colonel, who had come up through the ranks, smiled. “Personally I agree with you, but everybody takes orders.” His nickname was the Iron Man, because he wasn't afraid of getting his hands dirty in the field.

“Even you, sir?” someone asked from the back of the briefing room.

“Especially me,” Mueller said. “Probable cause, ladies and gentlemen. It's in the constitution.”

Which in Wolf's estimation was a load of horseshit. He couldn't think of any intelligence agency field officer in the world who gave much thought to probable cause. Nobody but the Americans actually talked about waterboarding and the like—enhanced interrogation methods—but everyone used them because they worked.

Ten minutes with Dieter Zimmer and they would start getting answers.

Like why the hell he had dropped everything and suddenly flown to the States, and what the hell was he doing stopped out in the middle of nowhere—lying on the beach and getting a tan?

Wolf got off the interstate at the Fort Pierce exit and headed east with the fairly heavy workday traffic, something bothersome niggling at the back of his mind.

In school, starting when he was about seven, he'd been outstanding at chess. He'd taught himself from a book of matches played by chess masters through the ages, and after one year he was his class champion, then the school's champion and finally the all-city Baden-Württemberg champion.

He'd lost interest by then because the game and his opponents seemed too predictable. Playing became a bore.

But he'd never lost his edge—his ability to see around corners, to work out the next dozen or so moves that his opponents were likely to make and come up with the countermoves to defeat them. When he tested for the Bundeswehr they'd wanted to make him a cryptographer, but in his head working out codes was just like playing chess. He wanted to be physical—blow up things, get into hand-to-hand combat—which in the end landed him in the secret service. He could figure things out and he could kill a man if need be.

These days the only people he played chess with were his ex-wife Renate and their two boys, Jared and Eric, and just for fun—though Eric at six was already showing an inventiveness.

Zimmer had most likely come here to meet someone. But it was apparently a rendezvous in the middle of nowhere, perhaps with the woman who was possibly an American.

The middle of nowhere. The one piece of the puzzle that made no sense.

He phoned his contact at the German embassy in Washington, and when he had identified himself he was put through instead to Gottfried Lenz, chief of the BND's Washington station.

“I'm glad you called, Captain, because I don't like being in the dark, and I especially don't like you co-opting my assets.”

“Yes, sir. If you wish to call Oberst Mueller to verify my orders, I'll wait. But I need a piece of information.”

“I don't give a shit what you need. But I'll call Mueller and find out what this is all about.”

Just now relations with the United States were on the tight side, because of the continuing debt crises over the euro. Germany wanted to let Greece, Spain, and several other members who were in serious trouble because of mismanagement opt out. Sink or swim. Wall Street was in a minor tailspin because the American bankers feared the move would spark a recession in Europe, which would naturally spill over to the States. The White House was putting pressure on Merkel to back down. No one wanted to add to the tense relations.

And Lenz had the reputation of being a hidebound bureaucrat who always followed orders to the letter. He wanted no ripples in his operation.

Wolf called the embassy again, this time asking for the travel and tourism section. A young woman answered. Speaking in German, Wolf identified himself as a tourist on the way up from Miami to Orlando.

“I'm just passing Fort Pierce now and I thought I'd drive out onto the barrier island and take the highway north. I have all day and I was wondering if there might be something to see other than the ocean and some sand.”

“I'm not personally familiar with the area, but one moment please and I'll bring it up.”

“Fine.”

She was back after just a few moments. “Did you serve in the military, sir?”

“Years ago,” Wolf said. It was an odd question.

“Then you have probably heard of the U.S. Navy SEALS. They're a corps of special operations soldiers. Commandos. Their museum is just north of the city on the barrier island highway A1A.”

“Thank you very much, it sounds interesting. Do you have an exact address?”

“Yes, of course,” she said, and she gave it to him. “Will there be anything else I can help you with?”

“No,” Wolf said, and he broke the connection. He plugged the museum's address into his GPS and the location came up with a match for Zimmer's car, which made even less sense.

The man hadn't suddenly flown to the States simply to visit a museum. A military museum. A SEAL museum.

A few years ago the SEALs had become world-famous when they'd swooped across the Afghan border into Pakistan and killed Usama bin Laden and flew off with his body. At the time he remembered thinking that the operation sounded like something the Israelis might have pulled off. It was a lot more daring, with a lot more political risk than most American presidents were willing to sanction. Jimmy Carter had taught his successors that lesson with the botched raid to free the American embassy hostages being held in Iran.

He passed through the downtown area and turned east again over a bascule bridge onto the barrier island when his cell phone chirped. It was Lenz from Washington. He ignored the call.

Zimmer had served in the KSK, getting out on an other-than-honorable discharge. Wolf had seen the man's jacket. He'd not been guilty of anything terribly wrong. He had no court-martial on his record, only a series of bad fitness reports because he couldn't follow orders. He was a big mouth—a braggart, according to one of his supervisors. Very unpopular with his fellow operators. Not a team player. But his marks for CQB drills were all superior. He knew how to fight. His attitude was his only problem.

The man had disappeared for several years, until he'd shown up as a name on a series of random cell phone intercepts. A file had been started on him and eventually the four others, plus the woman, and now he'd come here to a SEAL museum in an obscure corner of Florida.

Why?

To assassinate someone?

Wolf sped up.

 

FIVE

A battered old Ford F-150 pickup turned onto the gravel driveway and parked next to the red Impala. From his vantage point on the roof Dieter watched a man dressed in khaki shorts and a black T-shirt get out on the driver's side.

He reached back inside and took out what looked like a thick manila envelope and said something to a woman on the passenger side.

Because of the angle of the sun it was almost impossible to make out any of the woman's features except that it was a woman. Almost certainly Barnes's wife.

Barnes turned away, closed the door, and started toward the open gate, but then he turned and went back to the truck and opened the door again.

At first Dieter wasn't sure if this was the right guy. Most of the photographs he'd seen of the SEAL Team Six operator showed a man with long scraggly hair and a week's worth of beard, dressed in the usual tan patterned Crye Precision uniform. This one's hair was a buzz cut, and he was clean-shaven. Which was to be expected considering the condo association he worked for now. The man was no longer a killer. Now he made sure that the lawns were mowed, the palm trees trimmed, the pool cleaned, and everything that needed to be painted was painted. Hinges did not squeak, cracks in sidewalks and walkways were filled, window screens were repaired, and no light in a public place ever stayed burned out for long.

Barnes did not seem happy. It was clear even at this distance that he and his wife were having an argument.

He turned away, then back again, said something else, then slammed the door and marched through the gate and up the gravel path.

Dieter moved a little farther back until Barnes was out of sight below; then he went down the ramp.

From where it was parked the pickup truck was not visible from the front door of the museum. Nevertheless Dieter glanced once over his shoulder as he headed in an even stride down the path, as if he were in no hurry. Just a man leaving the museum on a fine summer afternoon.

Sally Barnes had rolled down her window and was staring off toward the sea oats and other grasses along the dunes in front of the beach. She didn't notice Dieter until he came around to her side of the truck. She looked angry.

“If you want to shake my husband's hand he's inside,” she said. Her voice was high and thin. Dieter got the impression that she was sick, or had been recently.

He smiled. “Actually it's you I came to see,” he said.

She scowled. “What?”

No one was passing on the highway. Dieter looked over his shoulder again to make sure that Barnes wasn't coming back, then he pulled out his pistol and shot her in the forehead, driving her head back against the window.

The 9
×
19 mm load was light enough that, combined with the effects of the suppressor, the bullet did not exit from the rear of her head, making a mess. She slumped over in the seat, her eyes still open.

Holstering the pistol, he opened the door, and shoved her body down onto the floor so that it would be out of sight to anyone walking by. Then he closed the door and headed back to the museum.

The woman had been unexpected. Had she stayed home she would have lived to mourn her husband. But it was of little consequence to Dieter. She was his fourth kill for the organization; her husband would be the fifth. For the moment he was actually enjoying the heat of the day, with no thoughts about returning to Germany to plan for the next phase.

Today was just a warning. It was foolish, he and the others had agreed, but Pam had insisted.

“I want the bastards to squirm,” she told them in her sharply clipped German.

“They'll go to ground once they realize what is happening,” Rolf Woedding, the first man she'd hired, suggested languidly. He was from Hamburg. He'd been a major in the Bundeswehr and had won a couple of medals in Iraq.

He'd been accused, though never convicted, of the slaughter of a dozen civilians, after which he had quietly taken his discharge. For two years he'd worked as a contractor back in Iraq and Afghanistan, but his methods had become even harsher, and his contract guarding Afghan government officials had been terminated.

And he came to the attention of Pam Schlueter.

“No,” she'd disagreed. “They're arrogant, all of them. I know these Americans, who they are, how they react.”

“Their capabilities?”

“Will be their undoing. They work as teams. They don't know how to operate on their own.”

“Once we've taken out the first few, won't the rest coalesce?” Woedding had pressed. “Some of them are still in the service; they'll just as likely return to their bases where we can't get to them.”

“They'll come out when we start killing their families,” Pam said. “Or don't you have the stomach for such things now?”

Woedding had merely smiled, and Dieter remembered thinking at the time that the man's expression was that of a cobra waiting patiently to strike.

No one else said a thing. Woedding outranked them all, and he was almost certainly the most out-of-control son of a bitch in the group. Everyone respected him, but more than that, all of them except Pam were afraid of him.

Just inside the front door, Dieter took out his pistol again and stopped to listen. He happened to glance at the sign-in book where Barnes had written his name and the date, when he heard someone toward the rear of the museum say something.

The words were indistinct, but the tone of voice was clear. Barnes had discovered Pavcovich's body in the office.

Moving to the end of the short corridor, Dieter stopped at the point where he could see the glass case in the reception area. At that moment Barnes came around the corner, his head down as he punched numbers into a cell phone.

He looked up, his eyes widening, and moved to the left the instant before Dieter fired, the shot smashing into a framed photograph of a SEAL Medal of Honor winner.

Dieter fired again, but Barnes disappeared around a corner into one of the display areas.

In any sort of action scenario Dieter's heart rate actually dropped. He became as calm as a man strolling along a beach without a care in the world, though he was capable of moving incredibly fast if need be. Afterward he'd always been able to tell his debriefers details that he never remembered noticing. He had an almost preternatural awareness of his surroundings.

It was not likely that the ex-SEAL Team Six assaulter was armed; nevertheless Dieter moved with caution down the corridor to the entrance into the first display room when he heard the sound of breaking glass. For just a moment he was confused. There were no windows in the front of the building through which Barnes could escape. But then it struck him: he was inside a museum of specialized warfare, with weapons on display. Certainly not loaded, but some of the stuff in here would be deadly in the right hands.

Dieter cautiously peered around the corner as the lights at the far end of the room went out behind one of the display counters. He fired one shot in that general direction, merely to see if he could get a reaction, but Barnes did not respond.

It was possible that the man was trying to reach the back door, which was farther down the corridor beyond the office. Dieter turned to head him off, but Barnes was right there with a World War II M1 Garand rifle, the bayonet fixed.