The Eagle's Covenant (9 page)

Hoffman knew about it but had been quite happy to let Lechter’s department handle it in view of the Schiller kidnap. “What about it?”

Lechter explained briefly the result of his and Baum’s conversations and conjectures, and the resultant find that the money was counterfeit. “It could be the typical double-cross.”

“And?”

“The owners of the house were not killed in the blast. They are away on a world cruise. We will almost certainly find that those killed had no right to be in that house and were only there for the pay off. It was being used as a temporary safe house without the owner’s knowledge.”

Had that supposition been put to Hoffman as a standard scenario presented to him at Police College, typical of underworld organisations, he would have gone along with it and thought no more of it. But, significantly, Lechter was telling him about a crime that did not require his opinion. He was telling him because he, Lechter, felt there could be a link between Hoffman’s investigation and the bombed house.

“You feel there’s a possible link between it and the Schiller kidnap?” Hoffman put to him.

“I think it’s worth running the two investigations in parallel until we can discount it one way or the other,” Lechter told him.

Hoffman felt that old, familiar excitement when a case begins to open up, and little fragments fall into place as the picture emerges. There was no evidence yet and no conclusive proof, but he liked the feel of this one.

“Right, we’ll run this as you say. I still want you on my team but I want you to stay there. Anything you get, download it on to the Schiller file here. I’ll read it every day, whether there’s a development or not. Anything else happens, phone me.”

“Yes sir. Oh, one other thing. I’ll need access to the Schiller file.”

Hoffman knew it would be pointless asking Lechter to feed all his information through without being able to do a comparison himself. He agreed to Lechter’s request.

“I’ll have Jansch give you the code.” He thanked Lechter for his intuitive guesswork and put the phone down. Solving cases was all about a number of things; hard work, luck, evidence, hunches and mistakes. But the mistakes had to come from the bad guys. And so far, Hoffman believed they had made two. Issuing the counterfeit money was just one of them. He hoped the other would be as fruitful.

*

They came that night. There were two men, coasting up silently to Conor’s other apartment in a dark BMW. Conor knew they would come but not quite so soon. He had to admire the efficiency of the organisation in acting so quickly. No doubt the same scenario was being acted out at the addresses of the others who had been killed in the explosion. Although the organisation knew one of them had escaped, they weren’t to know which one.

Conor had dressed completely in black with a black ski mask pulled down over his face. He was sitting behind the window of his bed-sit. There was no light in the room which meant he would be invisible to all but a well-trained observer. He had a night sight with him, which he used to observe the two men get out of the car and walk up to tenement building.

Conor immediately left his bed-sit and went down to his own car which was parked in the road beneath his window. He turned the key in the ignition and let the engine idle. He knew what the two men would find because he had left the flat looking as though it was still lived in. The gear that he had removed and carried out in the black bag was all he considered as essential for comfort and safety.

He had disposed of the money Breggie de Kok had paid them with. Conor was no mug; he just couldn’t believe the organisation would use anything other than counterfeit bills when they intended blowing the bloody place apart. The money he had used to pay Frau Lindbergh for his room was from the same source, but he knew he would have to live with that.

Five minutes after Conor had started his car, the two men emerged from the building. They climbed into the BMW and pulled away from the kerb. Conor followed. They drove down the west bank of the Rhine along Adenauer Strasse, cutting into Bruhler Strasse and under the motorway. Conor’s knowledge of Cologne was not exemplary, but he was happy with the way things were going.

Eventually the car turned into a side street and deposited its passenger. He waved at the driver as the car pulled away. Conor made a note of the address and continued to follow the BMW. About fifteen minutes later it pulled into a driveway on the outskirts of Brühl. The driver parked but didn’t bother to put the car away in the garage of the moderately sized house. Conor was satisfied. He drove past, made a turn further along the road and headed back to Cologne.

Conor could hear the sound of a television filtering through the closed door of the apartment. It was late, but the noise was loud enough to cover the sound made by Conor as he picked the lock. He pushed the door open gently. There was no light burning outside the apartment, so Conor was not afraid of whoever was in there being aware of the door swinging open.

Conor didn’t know which apartment the skinhead was using, but by solid reasoning and the general condition of the door and graffiti on the walls, he figured that the occupant of this particular place didn’t give a toss about cleanliness.

As the door swung open, he could see general litter along the passageway. A pair of designer trainers lay on the floor and a carelessly flung coat had fallen from the coat hooks on the wall and lay among some newspapers and magazines. The smell that drifted down the hallway was a mixture of alcohol, drugs and an unclean toilet. He was confident he had found the right apartment.

The man who Conor had seen go into the place had decided to watch some late night pornography on television. He was happily engrossed in the pulsating body movements on the screen and was into his second can of Grolsch lager when he felt the press of steel on the back of his neck. He instinctively turned and saw the edge of Conor’s open hand flash towards his face.

The crunching pain of his broken nose was mercifully dulled for a moment by his loss of consciousness. When he opened his eyes, he was spread-eagled in his armchair and the silhouette of someone dressed all in black standing over him. The figure had a gun pointed straight at him. On the end of the gun was a silencer.

“
Wer sind sie? Was wollen sie
?” The fear was evident in his voice.

“Never mind who I am,” Conor told him. “But what I want is for you to answer a few questions.”

The man, or youth really for he couldn’t have been more than about eighteen years of age, looked pathetic. His head had been completely shaved and he had tattoos on his forehead and cheeks. He had earrings through both ears and a silver loop through his nose.

“Fuck off!” he snarled.

Conor moved the weapon closer. “Careful. I have the gun, remember. Now, who sent you to the apartment tonight?”

“I told you, fuck off!” He spat the words out, blood mixing with spittle.

Conor shot him in the knee cap, the plop of the silenced gun barely audible above the noise of the television. The youth came off the chair in a scream, clutching his shattered knee. Conor whipped the end of the silencer across his battered nose.

“Answer my question. Who sent you?”

The youth started crying. The words fell out in an interminable rattle. They were unintelligible. Conor leaned closer without touching him. He pressed the gun against the boy’s temple.

“Slowly.”

He wept and told Conor that he didn’t know who gave the order. All he knew was what the driver of the BMW had told him.

“What’s his name? Where can I find him?”

The address was the house to which Conor had followed the driver of the car.

“His name,” Conor insisted.

“Oscar Schwarz.” The name was given reluctantly through clenched teeth.

“Does he live alone?”

“Yes.”

Conor stood up. “Thank you,” he said pleasantly and shot him in the head.

Conor left the dead man’s flat and gunned the Volkswagen into life. He had planned to drive to Brühl, but now he wasn’t entirely sure how he would play this one. Killing the skinhead had meant nothing to him. It was dog-eat-dog; the skinhead would have thought nothing of killing him, and probably having a bit of sport into the bargain. They were all the same, he thought to himself; hard as nails when in company of others. Thick as two short planks most of them. As far as Conor was concerned he had done society a favour.

No, the next move would have to be different. The skinhead’s partner was likely to be Conor’s link to the next member of the chain, likely to be the person who issued the orders. He made up his mind, killed the engine and went back to the apartment where the unfortunate skinhead lay dead.

Conor wasn’t in their long. He found what he wanted and headed back to his bed-sit in Cologne.

*

Breggie yawned and put the baby back in the cot. She looked and felt awful. She had smoked too many of Joseph’s ‘funny fags’ the night before and that, coupled with the frustration of not finishing a job properly was enough to put her on a ‘downer’ the morning after. But the baby had been a little bugger during the night. Despite feeding little Manny and changing him at the right times, he didn’t want to settle. He just kept crying, sleeping, crying.

Joseph had got irritable too. Eventually he moved to a spare room so he could get some sleep. Breggie didn’t feel at all sorry for him because she would need to catch up on lost sleep soon and he would simply have to look after the baby.

She went downstairs and made up another bottle for the infant. Then she made herself some coffee and sat down at the table to drink it.

The baby started crying. Breggie groaned and put the cup down with a loud clatter. She looked up at the ceiling, praying he would settle, but after a couple of minutes she knew he wouldn’t. The crying persisted.

Breggie went upstairs and lifted the little fellow out of the cot. He stopped crying as soon as she cuddled him in her arms. His little cheeks were red and he was quite hot. She decided he had too many clothes on so she removed his little jump suit. Then she held him close and rocked him gently until he was fast asleep. She put him back in the cot and lay down on the bed. Very soon she was fast asleep.                                         

*

As Breggie was falling asleep, and Hoffman was driving home to see his wife and have breakfast, Levi Eshkol was waking from a troubled night. He had discussed the Covenant at length with his colleagues at Hess’s sumptuous house in the Teutoburger Wald and their conclusion was that they had underestimated Molke’s intelligence network. But far from worrying how Molke’s agents had penetrated their own security precautions, they were more concerned with protecting the Covenant.

Eshkol had originally planned to spend some time in Germany before returning to Israel, but now he had to abandon his plans and return home immediately. By mid-day the house was empty and closed up. The men and the Covenant were gone, and by nightfall, they would all would be out of the country.

CHAPTER SIX

Hoffman was standing in Doctor Kistler’s palatial office wondering whether to leap across the sprawling mahogany desk and throttle the President of the North Rhine Westphalia Police or turn and walk out. They had been having an argument about the right of access to Hoffman’s inquiry by Kistler. Hoffman had challenged him about the file on his desk. Kistler’s brutal answer was that he had every right to all information relevant to the kidnap and had made that abundantly clear from the outset.

“I chose not to wake you because you were obviously tired out from all the effort needed in compiling the few notes in the file,” he commented acidly.

Hoffman had attempted to impress upon the man the principle of ‘need to know’ but was failing miserably. He was also labouring under the weight of Kistler’s authority.

“It is now two days since the kidnap and you have made no progress at all. You have the entire Federal Police Force at your disposal and yet you are not one single step closer to catching the perpetrators.” Kistler rose up out of his chair. The dark hair on his head was oiled and swept back revealing the ‘widow’s peak’ at the centre. The lines on his forehead furrowed into deep trenches above his abundant eyebrows.

He balled his hands into fists and leaned menacingly on the desk. His knuckles gleamed white as they took his weight. His bulk seemed to shut out the light from the large window behind him. Hoffman was aware of the Rhine disappearing behind Kistler’s silhouette.

“Why?”

Hoffman deeply resented the man’s arrogance and ingenuous approach to policing, but fate had cast him in a subordinate role to this postulating overlord; it was a burden that went with the job.

“I can only act on evidence received and positive leads from inquiries. I can’t go running around the countryside busting down doors and arresting every person who I think might have something to do with the kidnapping.” He could feel his words spilling out with shards of venom among them. He took a mental step back and paused for a moment.

“Doctor Kistler, you know as well as I do that an inquiry of this nature will not yield anything until we can collate all the detail we have available. And at the moment it is pretty scant. There has been no contact by the kidnappers with Herr Schiller; nothing but silence.” He shrugged. “I can’t make things happen unless we have something concrete to work on, and there’s precious little of that.”

He stopped then. No point in trying to ram down Kistler’s throat the words he did not wish to hear.

Kistler remained statuesque for a while; digesting Hoffman’s pointed remarks about the little progress he was making. He knew there was little to be gained from what was basically a standoff. He would have to let his senior police officer manage the inquiry without too much interference, but at the same time he did want to know exactly what was going on and what progress was being made.

“That will be all, Hoffman,” he said at last. “Just continue to have a report on my desk each morning whatever the state of your inquiries.” He sat down. The interview was over.

Hoffman left and closed the door behind him. He felt better now. He had let Kistler know that he brooked no interference and was not happy about Kistler’s sneak reading of the file. One thing he hadn’t told Kistler though was that he was a little further down the road than he had made out, but not as far as he would liked to have been.

The incident room was full of officers beavering away in front of computers, typing furiously at their keyboards. Some of the officers were in uniform, others in plain clothes. At the end wall was the usual board depicting a family tree of clues, but only Karl Trucco’s photograph adorned the tree. He was one of the unfortunate terrorists who perished in the bomb blast, identified by his DNA profile. This had been the kidnappers’ other mistake.

Hoffman took all this in as he swept through to his office at the end of the room. Jansch spotted him as the police chief lifted a full cup of coffee from the desk of an unsuspecting junior detective. The hapless individual looked pained as Hoffman crooked a finger at Jansch and went through to his desk.

“I have just received the equivalent of a massive bollocking from Herr Doctor Kistler.”

Jansch watched his expression change from an affected downcast look to a wry smile.

“The man’s a bloody menace. However,” Hoffman went on brightly, “he’s not on the team.” He drank some of the stolen coffee as the victim of his smash and grab went across to the vending machine for another cup. “What do we have so far, Uwe?”

Jansch flipped open a file he had brought with him. “Not a great deal, sir, I’m afraid. We know of Trucco, and inquiries with the FBI and Interpol are still progressing. We are still conducting discreet inquiries into Joanna Schiller’s background and circle of friends and acquaintances to see if we can identify any South African connection.” He paused and ran his finger down the page. “We have supplied the Czech manufacturer of the limpet bomb with the few details we have. Perhaps we can open up a line that way.” He muttered under his breath. “Nothing on the counterfeit money yet,” he closed the file and looked up at Hoffman, “and no word from the kidnappers either.”

“Naturally.” Hoffman felt that Schiller would hear quite soon but wondered if Schiller would tell him. He had doubts about the man’s willingness to work with the police and wouldn’t be surprised if Schiller attempted some sort of deal with the kidnappers. Or perhaps put an army of private investigators on to the case. “We need to push this Trucco thing. If we can pin him down it’s possible we’ll make a link with the other terrorists. Make that a priority, Uwe.”

There was nothing else to be discussed so Jansch went back to his desk and began making calls on the secure police computer network. Hoffman finished his coffee and phoned the front desk for his official car to be brought round. It was time for his daily round with Herr Schiller.

*

Hoffman decided on an attempt to prise open Joanna’s reluctance and find a short cut to her possible association with the woman who took her baby. It was a line he had been considering during the drive out to the Schiller residence.

“When did you meet your husband?”

Joanna looked much better than on that terrible, first day. She appeared calmer but Hoffman was no mug; he knew she would still be in quite a state, and would probably continue to be until her son was returned to her.

“At Cambridge University.”

“You were at college together?”

She shook her head. “No. Hansi was there on a post graduate course. I was in the second year of my degree. It was a Christmas party. Apart from the occasional glimpse of him, that was the only time I saw him.”

“Why did he go to Cambridge?”

“I’m not sure. He completed his degree at Hamburg. The year at Cambridge came later. Why?”

“Nothing. It’s not important,” Hoffman admitted. “When did you meet him again?”

Joanna considered that for a moment, her mind going back to the moment she saw him and knew that she wanted to go on seeing him.

“It was about two years after I had completed my degree. I gained an honours degree in Computer science and found a good position with Siemens. Part of my training meant going to Germany. I had an A level in German, so it was good opportunity to improve my knowledge of the language, particularly in colloquial German.”

She paused and looked wistful. Hoffman could see in her expression a warm recollection tinged with sadness.

“Hansi was working on a project with Siemens on behalf of the Schiller Corporation.” She smiled. Hoffman thought she looked quite lovely. “He persuaded Siemens to bring me in on the project. The rest, as they say......”

She left it at that, and Hoffman could understand why.         

“Did you ever go to South Africa with the Company?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

“You said that the woman who took your baby had a South African accent. I just wondered.”

She looked down at her fingernails. There was no varnish but they were still beautifully manicured.

“I have been trying to think of where, if anywhere, I might have met a South African woman.”

“What about England?” he asked. “There must have been a number of South Africans at University there.”

She nodded. “Certainly, I had friends who were from South Africa while I was there. But none who had eyes like that woman. I wouldn’t forget that?” She made an attempt at a shiver.

“If you had met this woman, do you think she might have been a fanatic about something?” Hoffman was clutching at straws.

“How do you mean?”

“Well.” He put his hands together and massaged his palms slowly. “People like that; we remember them. That man or that woman from our childhood who stood out. Perhaps they were very tall or very beautiful. Skilful at something. Always able to achieve more than their peers. If they were fanatical we would often think of them as...” – he tapped the side of his head with his finger – “not quite right.”

She put her hand up and shook her head. “Tell me where there is a University that doesn’t have a hundred zealots. Most of us were on some sort of crusade. Environmentalism, animal rights, left wing socialism, the whole melting pot. We were all going to save the world.”

Hoffman could see he was getting nowhere. Joanna was not suddenly going to spring up and declare that she remembered who the woman was. The only glimmer of hope for him was that he could direct Jansch to a specific area of Joanna’s background. Perhaps he should get Jansch to concentrate his efforts on Joanna’s University background and her subsequent first year in Germany. After that, her more recent past, he believed standard police procedures would turn up any undesirable South African woman who had come into Joanna’s circle.

“Well, I don’t think there’s anything else I need to know at the moment, Frau Schiller, so I’ll leave you alone. But you will let me know if you remember anything, no matter how insignificant it may seem, won’t you?”

Joanna assured him she would. She stood up and offered her hand to him. He shook it gently, thanked her and showed himself out.

When he had gone Joanna picked up the internal phone and rang through to Schiller’s central control room where she knew he would be working. He answered the phone almost immediately.

“Manfred, this is Joanna. I have decided to go home.”

She heard Schiller gasp. “
Meine liebchen
, are you sure? To England?”

“No, to Bad Godesberg.” Bad Godesberg was south of Bonn. It was the home Joanna and Hansi shared as man and wife. Joanna had not been in the house since her husband had died. “I cannot wait around like this with nothing to do. That policeman comes each day, we talk and he goes away. It’s driving me crazy; I need something to occupy me.”

“So why are you going back to Bad Godesberg? You haven’t been there for so long.”

“That’s why I’m going. I need something to do.”

“Very well, Joanna. I’ll phone through to our Bonn office and have them take the guards off the house and open it up for you.” When his son had died and Joanna had left the house, Schiller had put a security team in place on full time surveillance. “How will you travel?”

“By helicopter please, Manfred. I don’t want the press to know where I’m going.”

So it was done, and Joanna was the happier for it. She was sorry she had to be so deprecating to the policeman, for it was something Hoffman had said that had made up her mind. And perhaps one day she would thank him for it.

*

Conor was ready. It was early evening and he meant to be at the skinhead’s flat before the dead man’s partner turned up. On the way down the stairs of the house where he had his bed-sit, he bumped into Frau Lindbergh. As ever she was polite and enquiring. Conor was polite back to her and took his leave. No need to antagonise the old girl, he thought as he gunned the Volkswagen into life.

After Conor had killed the skinhead he had searched the man’s wallet for a name, and the possibility of a connection with Breggie or Joseph. He found the man’s name, it was Krabbe; but there was nothing in the wallet or the apartment to connect him with anybody that Conor knew. He took the front door key with him to because he intended to return to there.

Conor parked his car some way from the apartment and walked. He let himself in with the key, checked the dead body was still there, and set about making himself as comfortable as possible.

He found what he needed to make a cup of coffee and settled down to watch some television. It was about two o’clock in the morning when he heard the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. He got up, switched the television off and went to the front door as the bell sounded.

When he opened the door, he saw the man who had been with the skinhead – the driver of the BMW. He was quite tall and was wearing a leather jacket over a sweatshirt and jeans. He looked a great deal smarter than the skinhead.

“You Oscar?” Conor asked, pointing a finger at him. The stranger looked taken aback and not too sure of himself. He nodded.

“Yes. And who are you?”

“John Buck,” Conor lied. It was the name he used on his forged passport and normally when dealing with people who had no need to know his real name. It was just another measure of security for Conor. “Jurgen can’t make it tonight, asked me to help out.” He stepped out of the door and pulled it to behind him. “It’s OK,” he reassured the man who was looking decidedly unsure. “I know what we’ve got to do.”