The Diaries - 01 (36 page)

He was coming for
him.

This was
it—decision time.
 
Gage could wait on the
policeman and allow himself to be taken in.
 
Everything he had done could be explained away.
 
It would take some time, but with a good
lawyer and Colonel Hunter’s testimony, he could beat the rap.
 
Gage was tired, hungry, and nearly defeated.
 
He slowed his pace.

The policeman was
now on the walking trail and was accelerating.

Gage passed under
the bridge.
 
The bike was a hundred feet
behind him.

 
 
***

Schupo
Gregor
Brand didn’t
suspect the man of anything.
 
There was,
however, a nationwide search on for a man roughly the same size as the one down
by the river.
 
Gregor
thought about Frankfurt, and the distance from where he was currently
patrolling.
 
Yes, a man walking very fast
could have covered that amount of distance.
 
Especially a former soldier, as the wanted man was.
 
And with the Main River running almost right
by where the murder had taken place, it would have made a fine avenue for
escape.

Maybe today would
be the day to get promoted.

This man, however,
wore a
Würzberger
Beer jacket.
 
He was probably just some factory worker
whose car was broken down, heading south for second shift.
 
But the way the man walked with those long,
efficient strides…and the width of his back muscles…
Gregor
at least wanted to chat with him.

After negotiating
the slippery slope, he eased the bike into second gear and quickly closed the
gap.
 
The man turned left after going
through the underpass, taking a stone stairway that led upward to the
road.
 
This made
Gregor
suspicious, and it was less than ten seconds before he arrived at the stairway,
stopping the 1200cc BMW with a slight bark from the tires.

There was no one
on the long stairway.

Gregor’s
heart raced as he backed up, whipping the wheel to
his left.
 
Leaning forward, he twisted
the accelerator and muscled the bike quickly up the steps.
 
At the top, on a two lane road,
Gregor’s
head swiveled left and right, looking for the
man.
 
He was gone, disappeared.

Heart now pounding,
Gregor
reached for his chest radio, ripping the
mouthpiece from its Velcro holder.
 
That’s when powerful arms jerked him off the bike, pulling him flailing
backward into the high winter grass.

***

Gage knew he had
crossed the line now.
 
Killing a mobster
was one thing, especially in self-defense.
 
But assaulting a cop—in any country—is at the outer fringe of lunacy.

The policeman struggled
as Gage pulled him into the high weeds, well below the sightline from the
road.
 
Gage had the element of surprise,
and gravity, on his side.
 
Controlling
the policeman with his arms and his legs from behind, Gage cinched his left arm
under the man’s helmet.
 
The policeman
was trying to reach his pistol but Gage clamped his legs around the man,
trapping his arms with “hooks”, in martial arts parlance.
 
Just like he had done on the Lufthansa flight,
using his right arm as the force, Gage tightened his left arm under the
policeman’s head, causing blood to cease its flow to the brain.
 
Within fifteen seconds, the policeman was
unconscious.

 
 
***

Gregor
Brand felt wet.
 
He opened his eyes, feeling hung-over.
 
He also felt confined, realizing he was unable to move his arms.
 
They were secured behind his back in the wet
grass.
 
He turned his head to see a man with
a ragged buzz cut, wearing his own polizei leathers, pointing
Gregor’s
service Heckler & Koch P10 at his head.
 
It was the man from earlier, and he spoke in
smooth,
hoch
Deutsche
.

“Be quiet and I
will not hurt you.”

Gregor
felt an odd calm come over him.
 
While this was a most unnerving situation, he
actually instantly believed the man.
 
He blinked
several times, struggling to get moisture to his tongue.
 
“You are the murderer from Frankfurt.”

Gage’s eyes
flicked to the name badge on the leathers he now wore.
 
“No, Officer Brand, I am not.
 
That was my girlfriend who was killed, but it
wasn’t
me who did it.”

Gregor
allowed his head to lie back in the weeds.
 
“Why, then, am I handcuffed and you have
stolen my uniform and sidearm?”

Gage lowered the
pistol a fraction.
 
“Because I have been
wrongly accused and it’s not as simple as turning myself in.
 
There are other factors at play.”

“Then you’re
digging an even deeper hole,” the policeman said gravely.

“Be that as it
may, I’ve got a question for you.
 
How
often do they expect you to report in by radio?”

“Why should I tell
you that?”

Gage lifted the
pistol, tipping the slide back to check to see if there was a round seated in
the chamber.
 
With an audible click, he
thumbed off the safety and pressed the cold Heckler into the side of
Gregor’s
face.
 

“Sometimes hours
between reports,” Brand said quickly.

Gage nodded,
correctly guessing it was more often than that.
 
He pulled the pistol away and dragged
Gregor
,
gently, across the stairway into the weeds next to the bridge.
 
After a moment’s searching, he found a metal
support small enough to accept
Gregor’s
second set of
handcuffs.
 
Gage snapped one end of the
cuffs around the support and attached the other end to the cuffs already behind
Gregor’s
back.

The policeman
could only come to his knees, and even that was a stretch.
 
He was held to the bridge, wearing only his
long-john pants, socks and a t-shirt.

“It’s very cold,”
he protested.

“Hang on,” Gage
answered, reaching into the side bag of the bike and retrieving the beer
jacket.
 
He draped it over
Gregor
and turned to retrieve the bike.

“But no one can
see me from the road.
 
The traffic is too
loud for them to hear me yelling.”

“That’s the idea,”
Gage said, lifting the heavy bike from its side and mounting it.
 
“Listen, I’m sorry I had to do this.
 
Even on a chilly day, someone will walk by on
the path at some point.
 
They’ll get you
free.
 
I’m betting within an hour.”

Gregor
leaned back against the bridge and let out a great
breath.
 
As Gage donned the helmet,
Gregor
asked him one final question.
 
“What will you do now?”

Gage pulled on
Gregor’s
aviator sunglasses.
 
“I have important business to attend to.”

He started the
bike, found his gear, and was off and running, northbound.

 
 
***

Gage accelerated
to well over a hundred kilometers per hour.
 
As he familiarized himself with the Bavarian-bred BMW, he knew he could
have told the policeman everything.
 
Even
in his escape, Brand would relay what Gage said to the investigators, and they,
in turn, would turn a probing eye to the French mobsters and to Jean
Jenois
.
 
And while
Gage’s conscious mind couldn’t quite admit it, a small piece of him knew he had
saved the information just for himself.

After he had the
bike’s controls down pat, Gage needed extra assurance that he would have enough
time to do what it was he needed to do.
 
He pulled off onto the right shoulder and began to search the bike as
traffic whizzed by.
 
Once he had been
through the hard side-bags where he stashed his clothes and pack, Gage opened
the top compartment, seeing what he was looking for: a small GPS device and its
power source.
 
An old pulse-variety GPS,
it would most likely only burst its location every minute or so, and was
probably used by the polizei to track movements for efficiency’s sake.
 
Gage undid the two small straps, unclipped
the batteries from their charger, and pocketed the device.
 

Back on the bike,
he rocketed forward, the front tire lifting through each of the first three
gears.
 
He flipped the switch for the
siren and flashing lights.
 
The tractor
trailer ahead immediately signaled and pulled off onto the shoulder.
 
Gage parked the bike behind the truck and
walked to the driver’s cab.

“I wasn’t
speeding,” the driver offered immediately.

“Where’s your bill
of lading?” Gage asked in German.
 
The
man handed a sheaf of papers over and Gage looked at them, handing them back
after a moment.

“Heading to
Hannover?”

“Yes. What’s the
problem?” the driver asked.

“No problem,” Gage
answered, offering a fake smile.
 
“You
can go now.
 
Just a routine check.”

The driver frowned
as he put the rig in gear.
 
Just as he
was beginning to get the large machine moving again, Gage tossed the GPS unit
into a hollow between the cab and the trailer.
 
That little move would likely buy him even more time as the polizei
would undoubtedly think he was headed north to Hannover.
 
This would be backed up by the handcuffed
officer’s testimony that his crazed assailant had sped off to the north.
 
This would hold up until they found the GPS
unit in the truck, after that all bets would be off.

After the truck moved
away, Gage wheeled the BMW back to the south, pushing it to well over 200
kilometers per hour.
 
Böblingen
was an hour away by car, half that if Gage could maintain his speed.

Head down, Gage
twisted the throttle to the stops.
 
He
did the math as the BMW exceeded 250 kilometers per hour; satisfied that he was
doing in excess of 150 miles per hour.
 
For safety’s sake, he switched on the flashing lights but not the siren.

The cold air
blasted him with a welcome wake-up call as he leaned forward on the bike.
 
Weaving in and out of occasional traffic on
the two-lane road, Gage pressed the motorcycle to its limits.
 
He took in great breaths of the rushing air
and, for the first time since Monika’s death, Gage Hartline felt very alive.
 

***

Château-Thierry

Marcel patted
Napoleon, the two of them nestling into the sofa.
 
Finding his place, Marcel resumed his
reading.

I’ve been exposed to violence since I was a
girl.
 
My grandparents would keep my
brother and me for a month during each of our childhood summers and, even
though I loved him, my grandpapa would sometimes have too much to drink and
take out some sort of pent-up anger on my grandmother.
 
My brother and I would lay there in that
stuffy back room, crying into our pillows, helpless, our tears matching
Oma’s
as we could hear her sobs.
 
And grandpapa would leave afterward, trotting
away on that broken down old horse.
 
The
next morning
Oma
would make us breakfast, smiling
broadly and talking brightly as if nothing ever happened.
 
She would have a knot on her head, or a patch
of hair missing, but would go about in the kitchen humming along as if that day
were the best in years.

Grandpapa would return late in the morning, always
carrying a bouquet of flowers or a box of candy.
 
Oma
would accept
his kiss, but nary a word was ever uttered between them usually until that
evening.
 
And after that, grandpapa
wouldn’t drink for another week or two, before it would happen again.
 
But because
Oma
always seemed to love him despite his actions, we loved him too.

But Aldo’s rage is something altogether different.

I’d seen evidence of it over the years since I
have been here.
 
One particular morning,
just after he’d indicated to me which horrible act he wanted me to perform, he
received a telephone call which made him smash the phone on the floor.
 
A small piece of metal had flown from the
smashed object, cutting my cheek.
 
When
he saw me wincing, he grasped me by my shoulders, shaking me, telling me to let
it bleed and screaming over and over that I had no idea of the sacrifices he
was making for the deserving people in the world.
 
Diary, I cannot describe his rage.
 
I thought his head might burst open in his
anger.