Prime Target (28 page)

‘Then Andreas Wolff must not be allowed to appear in public. He must be made aware he is this lunatic's prime target.'

Mike ran his gaze around the hotel room, breathing steadily, holding down the temptation to start shouting.

‘Sir,' he said, ‘that issue is what prompted this call in the first place. It's the very matter I raised when you picked up your phone. Wolff won't play ball. I just spent ten minutes on the phone trying to convince him of the risk he'd be taking. When I spoke to him the time before, he got the picture, he could see the kind of danger he was in. But now he's had time to sit and think about it and he believes as long as he's surrounded by people, he'll be safe.'

‘What makes him think that?'

‘He believes the assassin is a fastidious type. He only harms his targets, he won't risk other people's lives.'

‘That's rubbish.'

‘I told him about the car bomb, but he said that had been timed to go off when no one else was around. I said I knew different, but he wouldn't
listen. The fact is, Wolff just won't duck down out of view. Especially when ducking down means cancelling a public appearance at a computer fair. Events like that are his idea of the big time.'

‘What about the Stramm woman? Wasn't Sabrina able to alert her that Wolff is a wrong target?'

‘Erika Stramm is missing from home. Not been seen since early yesterday, and her only close contact, the Russian guy Gregor, is mystified.'

‘There's one slim hope,' Philpott said. ‘We managed to get both main Berlin daily papers to run stories about Wolff in connection with the computer show. Both pieces cover his parentage, his background, there's even a few childhood pictures. Maybe Ahlin will see a paper and get the message.'

‘Maybe.'

‘I presume Wolff will have a proper team of marksmen covering him while he's in Berlin?'

‘Afraid not,' Mike said. ‘The Austrian clodhoppers are coming with him. National pride, all that stuff.'

‘Then you'd better cover him yourself, Mike. Get Sabrina on the job and as many sharpshooters from the Berlin police as you can persuade to do us an unofficial favour.'

‘Believe me, sir, I'll do all I can to protect Wolff.'

‘I don't want him coming to any harm. God, it's unthinkable.'

Mike was about to say ‘trust me', but he lacked
the confidence to back reassurance on that level. ‘I'll keep you informed, sir. Sorry I broke into your sleep time.'

Philpott mumbled something and hung up. Mike finished dressing, decided to skip breakfast and got reception to call him a taxi. Before he left his room he strapped on a shoulder holster and loaded up his Harrington and Richardson Defender, a five-shot .38 he kept as a memento of his days with Delta. Apart from its sentimental associations, the weapon had a 3-inch barrel, which gave reassuring accuracy over medium-to-long range.

Half a kilometre from the place Mike was staying, Sabrina Carver emerged from her hotel at one minute after nine and got into her taxi. Twenty seconds later, as the cab pulled away, an inconspicuous grey Opel across the street started up and slipped into the stream of traffic three vehicles behind Sabrina's car. The driver of the Opel was Einar Ahlin. Beside him, tightly belted in and angry, was Erika Stramm.

‘There is no need for this,' she said as they clipped a red light to stay close to Sabrina's taxi. ‘I've told you, keep the money. I'll even give you a generous laying-off bonus.'

‘Not the point,' Ahlin snapped.

Erika stared at him. It was ironical that he looked so much like the ideal of the people he hated. Today, wearing a black leather jacket and black polo shirt, he reminded her of a photograph she had seen of
the arch-Nazi Reinhard Heydrich, relaxing with Hitler and Eva at a lodge by the Baltic.

‘I think you have forgotten the basis of our relationship,' Erika said. ‘I employ and specify, you carry out my instructions and get paid for doing so.'

‘I think perhaps you have not properly understood the relationship in the first place,' he said, keeping his eyes on the traffic. ‘You gave me the opportunity to embark on a mission against specific vermin. I was grateful for that, I am still grateful. But you cannot expect me to dismantle my determination.' He glanced at her, his eyes wide. ‘You can't expect me to chop the legs off my will. I am on a set course and that is that.'

She had never seen him like this. Before, he had displayed an easy-going temperament, a smoothness of style that added a fine sinister edge to his desire to slaughter Nazis. Now he looked like a bare-fanged fanatic.

‘Why am I being treated like a prisoner, Einar?'

‘You are not a prisoner,' he said curtly.

‘You won't let me do what I want. You've insisted I be here with you today. You've curbed my freedom and I call that being treated like a prisoner.'

‘You're here with me because I want you to be close when the subject is hit. I want you to experience the zest of the event, the rightness of what I do. Then perhaps you will understand that I must carry on, and that it is in your interests as well as mine that I do.'

‘You read that article in the paper, for heaven's sake. This man Wolff is not a target. He's nothing to do with the
Jugend von Siegfried.
Anybody can see that.'

‘Any idiot might believe it, Erika, but it doesn't fool me. That stuff is just more snow, more cover for a Nazi as rotten as the rest of them.'

The previous day Einar had come to the bar where they met once a month to perform the small ritual of lunch and the handing over of a cheque for his services. When Erika told him she had decided to let the authorities deal with the remaining members of the
Jugend von Siegfried,
he had gone very quiet. He would not eat lunch and, when finally she announced she was leaving, he would not let her go. He had used no violence against her, but she knew it would come to that if she tried to get away.

‘You should learn to absorb the messages and the lessons of omens,' Ahlin said now.

‘I don't understand that kind of talk.'

The previous evening, as they left the place where they had met, Erika saw Sabrina. She told Ahlin who she was, and felt compelled to spill it all, the coercion, the acceleration of what was probably inevitable. Ahlin had driven slowly along the street, following Sabrina until he found out where she lived. He had then booked a double room in a cold-water hotel opposite the much nicer place where Sabrina stayed. They had spent the night there, taking turns at watching the front of the hotel.

‘The police will be on the case very soon,' Erika said. ‘You should pull out before that happens, before they're swarming all over the Nazis.'

Ahlin expelled air between his teeth. ‘I might as well have said nothing to you,' he said. ‘Try to get it into your skull, I don't care about the police or anybody else. I have a job, a God-sent job, and I'm going to carry it through.'

‘Then do it without me.'

‘You stay and you witness this one hit. That is important, I told you why.'

‘I want to go home and see Gregor.'

‘He will wait. This won't.'

He swung the car round a corner by a wide-fronted conference centre and parked it at the side of the road.

‘This is the place.'

He pointed behind them. Erika looked and saw Sabrina get out of her taxi and enter the building.

‘Didn't I say so, when you wanted to argue during the night? Didn't I say this woman would attach herself to the man Wolff? They are all part of a whole, don't you see?'

‘Why follow her? You were coming here anyway, it was in the paper where he would be today.'

Ahlin gently eased Erika's fingers away from the buckle of her seatbelt. ‘We are not going in there.'

‘Why not?'

‘Too many people, too much protection around
Herr Wolff. I only ever tempt fate so far, and no further. We will follow him when he leaves.'

‘How will you see him in among the crowd?'

‘He is a protected person. He will come out while the show is busy. It will be quiet out here.' Ahlin smiled thinly. ‘Rely on my judgement, Erika.'

‘You still haven't told me why we followed the girl.'

‘I wanted to see if my instinct was right,' he said. ‘And it was. She is part of what we oppose, she is integrated, whatever her motives.'

‘So?'

‘So I will break my working rule.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘I will kill both Wolff
and
the girl.'

Wolff left the exhibition centre at one o'clock. An armoured Mercedes Benz saloon, property of the Viennese police, was driven up to the front door and he came out with his two lumbering bodyguards behind him. Mike and Sabrina hung back, watching his flanks, guns cocked and ready under their coats. Another two marksmen were at windows on the second floor.

As soon as Wolff was in the Mercedes Mike and Sabrina got into a police Volkswagen which had been hastily rented, together with its driver, after tight bargaining in the refreshment room. Five hundred dollars to the police widows' fund would let them have the car, driver and the use of a
long-range rifle for six hours. Anything after that would be subject to fresh negotiation.

‘Where are they taking him?' Sabrina asked as they raced along back streets towards the north of the city.

‘A hotel in the Mühlenbeck district,' Mike said. ‘It's out of the way, on a quiet street. He has offered to work on finishing the ICON security programs while he's in Berlin, and he's had a load of computer equipment installed in a top-floor suite at the hotel. I suppose we should be grateful for that.'

‘What's security going to be like?'

‘The Austrians have agreed to two extra marksmen in the building with him. They're from the Berlin police, both hotshots.' Mike patted the heavy rifle on the seat beside him. ‘I'll be in the next building with this baby.'

‘And I'll be watching the door, as usual.'

‘Don't be bitter, Sabrina.'

When they reached the hotel the Mercedes drew up close to the door and Wolff was hurried inside. Sabrina moved into the front passenger seat beside the police driver. Mike went to the warehouse next door to the hotel, where police had arranged that he should have a window seat looking directly into Wolff's suite.

He called Sabrina on the mobile and confirmed he was in position. ‘It's tidy,' he said. ‘The goons are sitting at either end of Wolff's work table, watching him do his stuff. The extra marksmen
should be here in a few minutes. I'm ready to go ballistic if anything irregular happens.'

‘And I'm striking up a friendship with a nice German boy in the front seat of a cop car,' Sabrina said. ‘What happens after today? Is Wolff going back to Austria?'

‘He stays here until blue eyes is in custody. The wheels are turning. The police will be looking for him soon, so it won't be long.'

A hundred metres from the hotel, Einar Ahlin was standing by his Opel, using a foot-pump to inflate a tyre he had manually deflated as soon as he stopped.

Erika sat in the front of the car, behind the steering wheel, coping with a new level of stress. On the way across the city, tailing the Mercedes through heavy traffic and along narrow back turnings, Ahlin said he had decided she could no longer simply pay for his services, she had to be practical in her condemnation of the
Jugend von Siegfried.
She must stick with him.

She wound down the window. ‘What are you going to do now?'

‘Wait to be inspired,' he said, watching the hotel. ‘I think we can move closer.'

He finished inflating the tyre, put the pump in the boot and got in beside Erika. She drove along past the front of the hotel. There was no sign of the big Mercedes.

‘God,' Erika said suddenly. ‘It's her.'

Ahlin looked at the car they were passing.
Sabrina was perfectly visible, sitting in the front with the police driver.

‘Now do you understand about omens?' Ahlin said. ‘Stop the car!'

Erika drew in to the side and braked. Ahlin jumped out and walked back to the police car. Erika watched him in the rearview mirror.

‘Lunatic,' she murmured.

There was a strong impulse to run, but she knew it would never work. He would find her, and she didn't want to think what he would do then.

‘Out!' Ahlin snapped, jerking open the driver's door of the police car. ‘Out now! Out!'

The young officer scrambled out and as he straightened up by the open door Ahlin hit him on the side of the head with the barrel of his revolver. The officer dropped without a sound. Sabrina had the other door open when she felt the pressure of the gun in her back.

‘Come out slowly,' Ahlin said. ‘Very slowly.'

She slid across the seats and got out. As she did, a police armoured vehicle appeared and drew in at the side of the hotel, near the entrance to an alley running behind the building. Two men carrying rifles and wearing dark combat suits got out. Almost at once the vehicle moved off and disappeared round the corner.

‘Who are they?' Ahlin said. ‘Tell me or I'll shoot you.'

Sabrina told him they were the reinforcement guard for Andreas Wolff.

‘Go across. Speak to them. Improvise. Understand?'

Sabrina brought up her arm sharply, almost knocking the gun from Ahlin's grip. He held on to it and simultaneously grabbed her hair. He tugged once, hard, making her yelp.

‘Try anything like that again,' he muttered, ‘and I won't bother with warnings, I'll shoot you. Now speak to those men, and remember I'm right at your back.'

She crossed the road, waving to the marksmen. Ahlin walked three paces behind her.

‘Are you going up to Herr Wolff's suite?' Sabrina asked the marksmen in German. ‘Perhaps I can show you the way.'

They stared at her, scowling, puzzled.