Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

The two businessmen at Table 23, closest to the entrance, would need the cart. Not the musclebound fellow whose clothes were straining at every seam; he looked like he carried a fork and napkin around with him in a jacket pocket. No, the other one, tall and bony; he’d just have coffee if Ulrike didn’t bestir herself soon into a little tableside selling. No wonder the previous leaseholders hadn’t made a go of it. You couldn’t just sit up here and let the scenery do all the work. Always be selling.

The proprietor scanned the room. Nineteen tables occupied on a Thursday! You couldn’t tell her Hitler didn’t sell. The heavy one was still going at it, working the last of the veal off the bone. The one with him, Mr. Johnson, appetite long gone, was looking at his watch. Better get the trolley from Inge.

Chernuchin knew the hostess had been looking at him. At them. Was she suspicious? Out of the corner of his eye he watched her tap a young waitress on the shoulder and take the rolling dessert wagon from her. He looked at his watch and thought, two more minutes. What did it matter if she was suspicious? What could she do?

If the next 120 seconds went as scheduled, they’d write this one up in a training manual some day; a book, even. That is, if the KGB ever started up again as an aboveground organization. Step One: Drop malware, literally, into a motherboard to locate a desired object. Step Two: Snatch that heavy object while it was on display in a public place, when the only escape route is a single elevator leading to a long tunnel inside a mountain. Added Difficulties: do it speaking another language in another country, with less than half a day to organize, execute, and escape. Ha! It would take the CIA two weeks, minimum.

He looked at the dessert menu, but his mind wasn’t on all the heavy pastry. In fact, he was full up to here. His stomach was definitely upset from all the flying and the time zones. They’d hardly unpacked after London before being shoved back onto the flight to Munich. No time to plan, just adapt something you’ve done before and slide down the pole into your boots like firemen.

Still, he had to admit there was real satisfaction when a plan came together, even one as straightforward as Find the Tins, Grab the Tins, Follow Where the Tins (and the Professor) Ultimately Led.

He looked over at Suslov, the bottomless pit. Two old farts they were, one tall and one wide. He chuckled to himself: what if the positions were reversed and they were the ones down there in the valley, while Alexei and his flamethrower was up here in the Kehlsteinhaus dining room… Alexei, whose thing for pretty girls was exceeded only by his love of guns and high explosives? By now, fifty innocent people would be fried to a crisp. No, better the sane ones are up here. He chuckled again.

Without looking up from the worried-over veal bone, Suslov said, “Care to share the joke?”

“I was just thinking of the kid. Like a bull in a china shop.”

Suslov gave him one of his looks. “There are no china shops anymore. Everything’s online.”

“It’s an expression.”

The woman who had seated them now glided over to the table with a cart full of fattening German sweets. She said, “How was everything?”

They made the appropriate noises, so she went on. “And for dessert? What may I get for you gentlemen?”

Chernuchin, trapped, was about to order the strudel, not that he’d have to eat it, when Suslov said, “I’ll have the cookies.”

The woman was puzzled. “Cookies? We don’t—”

Suslov said, “It was the cookies that brought us here. Isn’t that right, Mr. Black?”

Chernuchin gave him a withering look, a flamethrower look, and said to the frowning woman, “My colleague will have the apple strudel, as will I,” even as the last five seconds were ticking off his watch.

Boom!

The detonation of the first old truck going off in the valley far below reverberated all the way up the mountain. Had bright boy used too much kerosene?

Another crash, louder, as the second, bigger truck exploded, sending metal fragments thirty feet into the air.

The third one, a farmer’s hay wagon, seemed muffled in comparison with the first two, though the wooden bed of the wagon did a spectacular cartwheel, sailing off in one piece even as the next two trucks were going off.

Boom! Boom!

Each new explosion rattled the dishes and the glasses on the tables and over the bar. By now everyone—the diners, the waitstaff, even the host who doubled as bartender (was he adler01?)—had jumped up from the tables and had their faces plastered against the panoramic windows, looking at the precisely spaced fires in the farmers’ fields down on the floor of the valley.

Boom! By the sixth explosion, halfway through Alexei’s handiwork, Chernuchin and Suslov were already in the entrance alcove on the opposite side of the restaurant from the windows, with the elevator doors open. The kid had sent the cab up to the restaurant level when he’d disarmed the elevator’s call button down below.

The big cowhide-covered book was now in the sack, the one Chernuchin had kept hidden under his jacket during the meal. The doors closed and they were on the way down.

“What was that crap about cookies?”

Suslov let the heavy sack lean against a corner of the elevator. “Just having some fun. You remember fun, don’t you?” Suslov straightened the lapels on his jacket and shot his cuffs, the way he always did. “Computer cookies, get it? The ones on the eBay site that remember your name and password, the ones that led us right to adler01. If you were the least bit tech-savvy, you’d be laughing your ass off.”

Chernuchin didn’t think so. Jeopardizing a job never struck him as humorous. “And you’re Mr. Black. I’m Mr. Johnson.”

“Yeah right, the Russian Mr. Johnson. To be honest, I was thinking of calling you Mr. Pink. Spice things up with a little Quentin Tarantino.”

Chernuchin was doing a slow burn, matching the maddeningly slow pace of the elevator down the inside of the mountain. Of course, the slowness was the beauty of the thing. It would be just as slow going back up, so no one would be following them for at least ten minutes. Certainly not the cops, who were at that moment still rushing to the scene with the volunteers of the Feuerwehr to help put out a burning necklace of a dozen car fires. Would the police be on to them fast enough to stop a tour bus that had been parked at the base of the mountain along with a half-dozen others, a bus with three drivers going out for a beer while their tourists were having dessert? Hardly.

He looked over at Suslov, with his bullet head and his impossibly large neck distorting his shirt collar. “If anyone is Mr. Pink, it’s you.”

Discharged bright and early from America’s northernmost medical facility, Lev Klimt hobbled outside in his walking boot and lit up his first cigarette of the day. A confirmed night owl, he needed the hit to get himself going. And then he remembered Craig and why he’d come up here. The pictures! He took out his recharged phone and was scrolling down to Lara’s name when the dark green Land Rover pulled up to the curb.

Uh oh.

He barely had time to attach the material and hit Send before the first guy to reach him took away the phone.

All those mental tumblers tumbling, but still the vault door wouldn’t budge. If Tatiana the Weather Girl wasn’t working for Kasparov, she must be playing the Black pieces for The Powers That Be. But then, who was the red-headed kid, Alexei—the one with the tattoos and the muddy shoes who’d given her the recordings—playing for? Kasparov? He obviously knew about the Bible.