TWENTY-TWO
I eased up on the throttle after putting some quick distance between us and Chase’s watery grave. The wooded shoreline had given way to a belt of leafy suburban homes, then clusters of concrete apartment blocks, finally succumbing to the industrial zone surrounding Tegel Airport. I had guessed right about our location.
“Take over,” I said to Horst, who was sitting on a bench behind me wrapped in a blanket.
“In which direction?” he asked, slipping into the pilot’s seat.
“No direction,” I said grumpily. “Just stay afloat and don’t hit anything.” I grabbed the black briefcase that Chase had stowed under the control panel and climbed down to the lower deck, where I could investigate its contents without Horst looking over my shoulder.
I located a screwdriver and a large wrench in the cabin and knocked the locks off the case. Inside I found a walkie-talkie and a stopwatch along with a Canadian passport, driver’s license, and $250 in traveler’s checks in the name of Ian Howe. My own passport, which I hadn’t seen since Johnson relieved me of it three days earlier, was also there, but two entry visas to the Soviet Union had been added. The only other item was a small medical kit that contained a loaded hypodermic needle, presumably another Cosmic Cocktail meant for yours truly. It was a return trip I’d happily miss out on.
With a little luck—and I thought I must be due some—the walkie-talkie meant that Chase would’ve been operating independently, in contact with the rest of the team solely by radio. Keeping me isolated made sense, of course. The last thing they needed was for the accused assassin to be connected to the actual assassins. Chase, the only direct link to me, would’ve been on his way back to Saigon within minutes of the action, and anybody who went looking for Mr. Ian Howe of Toronto would find themselves chasing thin air.
Good news/bad news. Nobody would be expecting to see Chase; that was good news. The flip side was that it was a two-way radio, so they were expecting him to check in. I could probably get by on the voice, but he would have a password, and if he’d committed it to memory, well, it was as gone as he was.
One method black ops uses to secure communications is to designate a control operator, who receives signals from any number of individual satellite operators. He is the conduit for all communications, receiving information and relaying it to the intended recipient. Control can broadcast to any combination of satellites, each one of which has its own prelocked secure frequency. If one is compromised, as Chase’s would be when he didn’t check in, the control operator would simply remove that frequency from the relay. Literally cut him out of the loop. Whoever was running the op—presumably Harvey King—would then have to choose between aborting the mission or proceeding with a possible security breach. I couldn’t be sure which way he’d go, but based on what I’d witnessed the night before, I’d put my money on a green light. If that was the case, I wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing to stop it. Without the password, I might as well go home and watch it on TV. My best, and maybe my only, shot was if the code word was stashed somewhere in the briefcase.
I looked through the papers again. It could be anything, of course. It might be “Tulip,” the street that the nonexistent Ian Howe called home, or his birthplace of “Hamilton,” or even his mother’s maiden name, “Davis.”
I noticed a piece of paper, folded over twice and taped to the inside back cover of my passport. When I opened it I found three typewritten lines in the center of the sheet:
VICTORIA HOTEL, SCH?NEBERG
11 am check-in
confirm EZECH13V10
It wasn’t the password, but it was a location and a timetable, which gave me some breathing room. I shut the case and climbed back up the ladder.
“What time is it?”
“Nearly six,” Horst said. I wondered what Chase was supposed to do with the five hours before he checked into the hotel. It was unlikely that there would be any contact planned, so it wasn’t too important, but it was strange. Why not go directly there?
“Do you know the Victoria Hotel in Sch?neberg?”
“Yes, I’ve been for a drink,” Horst answered. “It’s quite nice.”
“How close is it to city hall?”
“Directly in front. You can see it—” He stopped short. “Kennedy speaks there today….”
“That’s right.”
“It’s where they will attempt to shoot him?”
“Looks that way,” I said.
I had to admit, it had a certain flair. The leader of the free world, murdered in front of hundreds of thousands of witnesses—millions if you count the television cameras that would beam the moment around the globe. It was a hell of a thought. An event that could very well take the world over the brink, unleashing the nuclear nightmare we’d been flirting with for fifteen years. The whole world would see it, but no one would ever have a clue about who did it or why.
A guy named Adolf once said: “The great masses of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” Well, this was one goddamn major-league monster of a lie.
“What shall we do?” Horst asked, his teeth chattering from the cold, and maybe a little excitement, too.
“You’re not gonna do anything except drop me off and go home,” I said firmly. “You’ve done more than enough already.”
He thought for a moment, then said, “You have not much choice but to have me with you.” I was about to set him straight, but he said it with such conviction that I decided to listen.
“You’ll go to the Victoria Hotel?” he said.
I nodded.
“And this is where they expect you to be, correct?”
“Get to the point, Horst,” I said.
“If you walk in alone, they must know that something goes wrong. …”
“And if I walk in with you, they won’t?”
“Are you sure they’ll know it’s me? I’m more or less the size of this dead man and we have something of the same color of hair….” He smiled. “And as the fat lady has said to the man at closing time, it’s better to have me than to have no one.”
I gave him an unhappy look. It was unhappy because he was right. There would be spotters placed throughout the plaza reporting the action to Control, and there would certainly be a couple stationed outside the hotel or in the lobby. In order to maximize security, they’d be men or women that neither Chase nor I knew, spotting us based on photos. But they’d be concentrating on me, not Chase. If I went in alone, alarm bells would go off, but there was a decent chance that they wouldn’t have a good look at the guy I came in with. I took a deep breath.
“Do you own a blue suit?”
He grinned like a kid who’d been told he could go to the circus. “Of course I do.”
I didn’t expect to see Hanna at the apartment, Horst having told me that she’d be on her way to work by seven o’clock, so I was taken by surprise when we found her sitting at the table with a plate of toast and a cup of tea. She looked pleased to see me at first, but something changed her demeanor right away. Her female radar sensed trouble.
Horst asked what she was doing there and she explained that the factory had been closed for the day so the employees could attend Kennedy’s speech.
“Will you go?” he asked anxiously.
“I haven’t decided,” she said, and he suggested that she’d see more on television, reminding her that she hated crowds anyway.
“Yes, I expect I’ll watch from here,” she said, satisfying Horst, who went off to find his suit. I took a seat across from Hanna. She offered me coffee and started to get up, but I told her I was fine. She nodded and sipped her tea, avoiding my look.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t phone you,” I said.
She shook her head and looked up at me. “I told you I didn’t expect anything.”
“I meant to, but …” I trailed off as she got up and carried her plate of unfinished toast to the kitchen. I followed her in, found her wiping down a perfectly clean counter.
“Is something wrong?” I asked innocently.
“What could be wrong?”
I was amazed that we’d managed to get to those two sentences in two short days. On the surface, I was mystified as to why she was acting this way, although I think deep down I must’ve known. I went with the surface.
“I would’ve called, but—”
She gave me a look and cut me down to size. “Do you really think I’m upset because I haven’t heard from you in twenty-four hours? Are you that egotistical?”
“I have no idea what I’ve done to make you angry,” I said flatly. “I’d appreciate it if you filled me in.”
She drew a breath and slowly exhaled it. “I don’t know what you do, Jack, and I don’t think I want to know. But I do know that you won’t be here for long, one way or another. I knew it from the moment I saw you and I accepted it.” She paused and I waited. “You’re dangerous,” she said. “That’s who you are, it’s what you do. But my brother, he’s not the same as you, although he thinks he is. Don’t take him with you.”
I don’t know how she knew, but she did. Not what we were facing, not exactly, but she sensed that something was up, something that might end badly. I could’ve walked out the door right then, of course, leaving Horst safely out of it. But things don’t work that way, do they?
“I won’t let anything happen to him,” I said.
“Is that a promise?” she mocked. I didn’t get a chance to answer because Horst strode into the room at that moment.
“How do I look?” he said, doing a turn in his dark blue conservative best.
I could read Hanna’s dark thoughts as he waited for an answer, but she forced a smile and said, “Like a respectable businessman.”
“Jack and I have an important meeting,” he said, kissing her cheek. “I must look my best.”
“Jack always seems to have an important meeting,” she said. “He must be a very important man.”
“We are both,” he said with a wink. “Someday you’ll know it.”
The look she gave me as we went out the door was one I’ll never forget. It was one of hope and fear, supplication and scorn, all at the same time.