It took him a minute to set it up using the phone and the laptop, and as much as he knew what he was doing, he felt oddly uncomfortable with Josh watching him, as if the tech guy was about to tell him he was doing something wrong.
Once the footage from the security tape started playing, he turned it back to face them.
“This footage was taken outside a bank in Paris fourteen years ago. In a minute you’ll see two people walk into view, a man and a nineteen-year-old student named Sabine Merel. That name mean anything to you?” They both shook their heads while keeping their eyes on the screen. “How strange that Bill would never mention that.”
Dan wasn’t looking at the screen, but he could see from their expressions that the couple had appeared. Callie in particular looked slightly sick, as if she sensed already what would happen. Dan could tell too, when Brabham and Sabine had disappeared into the alley.
“The man you just saw tried to rape that student at a party a week or so before this, a party at the US Ambassador’s residence. She made the mistake of threatening to tell the police, and she didn’t even mean it, she just wanted him to back off and leave her alone. What he’s doing now while you look at that blank screen is punching her in the face, knocking out her teeth, kneeling so violently on her back that it breaks her ribs, and then waiting for her to regain consciousness before strangling her with her own scarf. Then he’ll rob her and pull her clothes off to make it look like . . . something else.” He turned the screen to face him again, and said casually, “I’ll fast forward because all of that takes him about twenty minutes. I’ll go to the point where he comes out of the alley.” He found the right point and put it on pause, just as Gaston Bergeron had done for them. He turned the screen back to them then.
“Fuck.” Callie covered her mouth, her eyes darting about as if not wanting to actually look at the screen. Josh didn’t seem to recognize the guy, but then Callie dropped her hand, her voice little more than a whisper as she said, “It’s Harry Brabham.”
Finally, Josh did a double take, looking at Dan as he said, “The congressman?”
“The very same. And let me tell you, Bill Brabham has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep this secret, including the murder of a leading French intelligence official.”
Josh looked at Callie and pointed at the screen, saying, “Do you know this guy?”
“I met him, once.” She looked ready to say something else, but didn’t, and Dan suspected she was less than surprised to discover the guy had a dark side.
“While we’re at it, Callie. You said you handled the external assets. Did you order Matty Hellstr?m to kill someone in Stockholm last week?”
She looked surprised and said, “Mattias Hellstr?m? No. He’s on the list—we have a rule against using anyone on the list.”
“There’s a surprise. So Bill Brabham, or someone he trusts more than you, contracted Matty and promised him he’d be back in the fold if he did the job, a promise they obviously had no intention of keeping. The target was Patrick White, who was in Stockholm to meet me. And you’d think it might be risky to order the death of a senior official at the ODNI but, of course, Bill was being driven by fear.” He tapped the top of the laptop screen. “Because he had a feeling we were onto this.”
Once more, she appeared to take in what he said, but was thinking it through, working out how plausible it all was and what it meant, and when she spoke again, she said, “If you have this tape, I presume Patrick White and the ODNI also now have it, and he’ll use that to shut down Bill Brabham’s operation. But that still leaves a big question.”
“Which is?”
“Why are you doing this? Why did you kill all those people before, why are you . . . whatever it is you’re planning to do next? If this tape is genuine, you didn’t need to kill anybody.”
She was right, there was no doubting that. If he was convinced that this tape would be enough to close down both Brabham and his program, there was no need to kill anyone because the dot wouldn’t be on him anymore. He’d been around long enough to know it didn’t always work like that, but he’d be lying to himself if he suggested that was his main motivation.
“What I’m planning to do tonight is go out to Zehlendorf, kill the A Team, and . . . well, I haven’t decided about Brabham yet. Maybe I’d rather hurt him some other way. As for my motivation, it’s mixed—you’ll find that’s often the case with freelancers. But I’d say the biggest part of it’s revenge, for what they did to my friends, Charlie most of all, and for what they want to do to me.”
“Revenge is empty, Mr. Hendricks, you must know that.”
He nodded and smiled at her, and it summed up how far removed they were from each other, that Callie thought a stock truth like that would be enough to give him second thoughts.
Chapter Thirty-nine