As he stepped inside and closed the door, he could tell the apartment was empty. Anybody would have known it was empty, and as he walked through the sparsely furnished rooms he thought of how another person might have filled this space with life.
He thought of Sylvie’s apartment nearby, stamped with her personality, and he wondered if he even had it within him to live like that, to live. Foolishly, his thoughts made a run for Stockholm, to some imagined domesticity with Inger, and he was embarrassed by how alluring he found it, a woman he hardly knew and who hardly knew him.
He also knew he couldn’t afford to be distracted. Whatever promise the future held, he had business to finish with his old life first, and he needed to focus on that above all else.
He threw some clothes into a bag, then went into the secure room and put together another bag. He checked the trains then, and headed back out, knowing he couldn’t rely on Patrick to get him through airport security this time.
He took a late-afternoon train to Cologne and picked up the night train there, grabbing a few hours’ sleep but arriving in Berlin just before five in the morning. There was a boutique hotel just along the street from the address he had for Brabham’s office so he’d arranged an early check-in.
It was still dark when he arrived, and bitterly cold, but he could tell why Brabham had chosen this location. It was a quiet, anonymous street in Charlottenburg, a mixture of offices and residential, the odd store or bar, a cobbled road surface. No one would ever suspect it.
In fact, the neighborhood was so ordinary that the hotel, small and incredibly stylish, looked as if it had been transplanted from somewhere else. The room he was given faced outwards, but the view was obscured by the trees that lined both sides of the street and had not yet shed all their leaves.
So he went back out and took a stroll until he was standing opposite the building. It was a nondescript-looking place, probably built in the 1950s, a pharmacy at street level and a door to the left for the lobby that served the two floors above.
There was no one about at this hour so he took a closer look, a keypad on the door, a plaque for name plates, but none on there—maybe Brabham had both floors. He turned and looked at the building facing. It was older, or looked older, an ornate fin-de-siècle quality with little balustrades outside each of the windows on the upper floors. He could also see that it was empty, with mail lying on the floor just inside the lobby door.
He went back to the hotel and picked up one of his bags. He worked the door of the empty building, then made his way to the top floor and set himself up in one of the rooms, clearly a former office, with phone and modem points dotting the floor. He lowered the blinds too, enough to give him cover should one of Brabham’s people choose to look out of the window.
And then he settled in for the wait. They were looking for him, had been searching for him for weeks, and he knew, because he knew the mindset of these people, that it would never occur to them that he was right here, right now.
They’d have increased their security levels, but they still wouldn’t expect him to actually show up here. And for all their knowledge of his history, they wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t in his character to play the part they imagined for him. Whether they knew it or not, whether they were ready for it or not, they were the targets now.
Chapter Thirty-six
The first to arrive came just before eight. It was light but the street still had a sickly pallor, as if a real sunrise wasn’t guaranteed for the day ahead. The guy looked in his late twenties, suit and overcoat, carrying a coffee and some sort of breakfast food in a bag. He moved the bag into the same hand as the coffee and nonchalantly hit the numbers on the keypad.
Dan was looking through his binoculars and scribbled the number down as it went in. He waited a few minutes then, and watched as the lights flickered into life behind the top floor windows, though the blinds prevented him seeing anything beyond.
The next two arrived about twenty minutes later, one in office clothes, the other dressed like someone who worked at some Internet start-up in Seattle. He couldn’t see the keypad clearly as the formally dressed one punched in, but the pattern looked the same for the numbers he’d written down.
Within minutes, a man and woman came along, both in office clothes, and he realized now that this whole office was on the young side. He guessed they were all in their late twenties or early thirties. The last to arrive was a guy in a heavy sweater and padded jacket, a scarf wrapped around his neck, a lanyard hanging outside the jacket—so they probably needed to swipe the card to get through the inner door.