The Cutout (36 page)

“The reconquest of the Third Reich?” Shephard was dismissive.

“Yes,” Caroline retorted. “What else is so risky it requires a hostage Vice President and a hamstrung U.S.?” She drove the letter opener deep into the soil of Wally’s wilting plant. “The chancellor is attempting something so enormous—so barefaced—that only the most desperate measure can sustain it. Voekl wants Jack Bigelow to stand aside while he annexes Central Europe.”

“First he’s funding terrorists, now he’s Hitler. That’s
ridiculous
.”’

“Is it? He’s already got people in Prague. A couple of bombs and a pat on the back managed that one. Now Hungary. When news of the treasury heist gets out— and it will, no matter how tightly they hold a lid on it— fortunes will be lost. The currency destabilized. We’ll see blood in the streets. And I guarantee you that Voekl’s Volksturm won’t be far behind.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this. Ask anybody in Germany, they’ll tell you the Reich was an aberration.”

“If it happened once,” Caroline argued, “it can happen again. Only more subtly this time, while nobody’s looking. It’ll happen with money and friendship and
technical assistance—and some brilliant political maneuvering on the side.”

“Not in our lifetime,” Shephard insisted. “We wouldn’t allow it.”

“We just did,” Caroline said.

EIGHT
Berlin, 2:45
P.M.

Y
OUNG PAUL
, as Mrs. Saunders had called him, pulled his plumber’s van to the curb in front of the children’s playground on Kolmarer Strasse in Prenzlauerberg. It was a wonderful playground, famed throughout Berlin, filled with toy mills, large pumps, a variety of pulleys and chutes—an industrial wonderland for city children. Mahmoud Sharif’s small boys, ages four and two, loved it. They lived only a hundred yards away, in an apartment building on the corner of Knaackestrasse.

Paul was driving a serviceable white van in the Agency’s possession, a van whose sides proclaimed in correct German lettering that he was a plumber of distinction. He eased along Kolmarer Strasse until, from the vantage of his driver’s seat, he had an unobstructed view of Sharif’s building. It was five blocks and a world apart from the safe house Sharif had used that morning. Paul’s sleek blond hair was covered with a white cap, and he wore canvas overalls in place of his usual Italian suiting. Behind him, in the body of the truck, sat Fred
Leicester and thirty thousand dollars’ worth of electronic equipment.

Paul turned off the ignition and delved into a paper sack of lunch. It was well after the German workman’s usual hour for eating, but perhaps the plumber of distinction had been preoccupied earlier with an emergency. He brought forth some bread and wurst and a bottle of pilsner and proceeded to gaze enraptured at the horde of youngsters screaming among the iron cages of the play structure. It was a working-class neighborhood; Prenzlauerburg had always been so, under the kaiser and the Nazis and then the Communists and now the West. Lately it had submitted to a rage for gentrification. But many of the young faces were dusky and exotic, the hair uncompromisingly black.

Paul ate slowly. Inside the van, Fred fiddled with buttons and winced at the whine in his earphones.

In the building on the corner of Knaackestrasse, Mahmoud Sharif cleared his throat and flushed a toilet. The four-year-old slapped his brother and stole a toy. A woman named Dagmar—spiky blond hair, beautiful eyes rimmed in kohl—picked up the baby and carried him into the kitchen. She spoke to him in German, her voice husky with smoke.

Paul took a swig of beer. Fred listened, and waited for a call.

“Wally?”

The COS looked up from the sandwich he was eating and said, “Yes, Gladys?”

She glared darkly but let it slide. “The boys just called in. They’re in position outside Sharif’s apartment.”

“Thank you, Gladys.”

“Oh,
will
you stop?” Her head disappeared.

Caroline’s nerves fluttered to life. “Would that be
Mahmoud
Sharif?”

Wally reached for a napkin. “Paul and Fred are out trolling. Just in case Sharif has anything to say.” He glanced at Tom Shephard, who remained slumped in his seat. “Tom, you Bureau guys ever follow this clown?”

“Not on my watch. Palestinian bomb maker, right?”

“Hizballah’s finest.”

“I thought he’d reformed.”

“So did I. But Carrie tells me that Headquarters picked up Sharif’s name in connection with 30 April.”

“Really.” Tom sat up and twisted to gaze at Caroline. He was thinking, she knew, of the black wig and the gray Mercedes he had followed that morning. “A Palestinian in bed with the neo-Nazis … I suppose there have been stranger things. Like the reconquest of the Reich.”

“They have a common cause,” Wally observed. “Killing Jews.”

“So you think Sharif made the bomb that blew the Gate?” Tom whistled softly. “I can see why that would make him interesting to Sally Bowles.”

“Who?” Wally asked around a mouthful of ham.

“Cabaret,”
Caroline supplied. “Berlin in the thirties. Sally Bowles in a top hat and fishnets. Or should I say Liza Minnelli? Tom seems to think I look like her.”

“But you’re blond.”

“And I can’t sing.”

Wally gave it up. Tom continued to study her coolly, but to her relief he said nothing of ragheads or Alexanderplatz. She made a mental note to request a new identity when she got back to Langley Jane Hathaway was as good as blown. And as for Michael O’Shaughnessy …

In all ignorance, with haphazard luck, Wally was on Michael’s trail. Sharif could lead the station right to Eric’s door. And if he did? Disaster. For Sophie Payne, for the Agency, for Eric— No, not her fault if Eric met disaster. He had brought that on himself.

All the same, anguish surged thick in her throat. She had done exactly what Cuddy Wilmot had warned her against: She had handed Eric’s contact to the bombing investigation. And now Dare Atwood must be told, before events spiraled out of control.

“Can I use a secure phone, Wally?” she asked. “I’d like to call Headquarters.”

Sharif surfaced about an hour after Paul parked the van in front of the playground. By that time, Paul had exhausted his wurst and finished the beer and moved on to the examination of a German soccer magazine, as though plumbers of distinction had nothing better to do than kill a Thursday afternoon. When the phone call came, he and Fred were almost caught unaware—because Mahmoud Sharif had kissed his wife and muttered something in Arabic to his children and had left the apartment on Knaackestrasse completely.

He swung into view for the briefest instant: a dark-haired, tall man in a black leather jacket, peering intently at the corner. His eyes passed over the plumber’s van, the seething play structures.

Paul was absorbed in reading about a test match with Liverpool, parsing out the difficult German sports jargon he had never been taught at Langley Satisfied, Sharif unlocked the door of his gray Mercedes and slid behind the wheel.

Fred vaulted into the van’s passenger seat, cursing, and screamed at Paul to follow the Benz.

They lost a few seconds. That was a good thing, actually, because Fred calmed down and Paul was prevented from dashing out after the gray Mercedes like the inexperienced and overeager first-tour officer he was.

Fred speed-dialed a number on his cell phone.

“Wally we’re following the subject. In case he decides to make a few calls on the road.”

“Where’s he headed?” Wally asked.

Fred studied the car in front of him.

“West,” he said. “On Elbinger Strasse.”

“Think he’ll pick up the highway?”

“Don’t know.”

“Keep me posted.”

The Mercedes abandoned Elbinger Strasse for Osloerstrasse, found Highway 100 and then Highway 110, and appeared, for all the world, to be heading for Tegel Airport. But just as Fred had decided that Mahmoud was taking off for a little R and R in that terrorist playground of choice, the island of Malta, the steel gray car shot past the airport exit. It headed north.

He led them straight to the forest in the middle of Reinickendorf. Here the Schloss Tegel rose like a neoclassical dream above the turgid waters of its lake. It had once belonged to the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, one the founder of Berlin University, the other a scientist and explorer. Not the usual haunt of a Hizballah bomb maker.

“What the hell do I do now?” Paul asked desperately. He had come to a standstill, the van well back from the
castle’s parking lot. They were screened from their quarry’s view by a well-trimmed hedge. But Sharif’s black hair and leather jacket were just visible.

At this hour and this season, the castle was deserted: no schoolchildren skipping stones at the swans; no swans, for that matter. Only the avenue of lindens, a deserted gravel walk. The car park was virtually empty. Sharif let the Mercedes idle near the single other car—a long black Daimler sedan with a uniformed driver—and got out.

Fred patched in the station. “Wally? You there?”

Silence.

“Wally!”

“Yeah,” said Aronson.

“We’re at Schloss Tegel. God knows why. Sharif must have picked us up.”

“Can you get close to him?”

“He’s standing thirty yards away. There’s one other car, a limo. Sharif’s tapping on the window.”

“Think it’s a date?”

From this distance, Fred could make out nothing of the car’s interior. The Daimler might hold an entire chorus of dancing girls. Then again, it might be empty. He studied the chauffeur. The man was probably in his sixties, a loyal old retainer; he looked at Mahmoud Sharif as one might assess an underbred dog.

“Shouldn’t we go someplace less obvious?” Paul whispered urgently at his elbow.

As if echoing his thought, Wally’s voice came over the line. “You can’t hang out in the parking lot. Find a side street on Sharif’s route home. Pick him up when he goes past. Okay?”

“Shit.”

“You lost this one, buddy.”

“Wait,” Fred said urgently. “The driver’s opening the limo’s trunk. He’s pulling something out. Sharif’s helping. Jesus, it looks like … a
body
…”

The chauffeur carried the reclining woman to Sharif’s Mercedes. She was too large to fit in the trunk; Sharif wedged her across the backseat instead.

“Shit! A piece of fucking sculpture,” Fred burst out in disgust. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

“Pack it up and come home,” Wally ordered him. There was the faintest hint of amusement in his voice. “I guess the guy really has gone straight.”

But as the limo driver turned his Daimler and drove away, past the idling plumber’s van and the sighing lindens, Mahmoud Sharif pulled out his cell phone.