Olen Steinhauer - An American spy

Leticia Jones was one of the famed Tourists, just as Weaver had once been. Now she was in Berlin with a man who could be another of them. Berlin, where there resided a Moldovan immigrant the CIA wanted for the shooting of one of their own. Add to that last week’s renditioning of a man in Budapest who was, like Stanescu, connected to both Milo Weaver and Xin Zhu, and this was an arrangement of players that she could not ignore.

She rubbed her face hard, then looked up at Oskar, who was already grinning. He had an Easterner’s joy of watching misery. “I suppose you’re gassing up the car,” she said.

“You’re the big boss now,” he told her, “which means I’m more than just an underling. Someone else is gassing it up.”

On the ride, she remembered her last conversation with Andrei Stanescu. Upon his return to Germany after shooting Weaver, she’d had Oskar and a couple of others pick him up at the airport and bring him to a waiting car. Oskar gave him a phone, through which she tried to make herself completely clear:

“I know what you did, Mr. Stanescu, and I do not approve, but if I let everything I disapprove of get to me I never would have made it to my twentieth birthday. We’re receiving calls from the other side of the Atlantic asking for your arrest and your extradition to face American justice.

“I am not going to scold you. I won’t even tell you that you are an idiot for shooting a man who, as I explained before, did not kill your daughter. All that is past. For the present, I will hold off the Americans for as long as I can, but I ask one thing of you, a single condition. You, Mr. Stanescu, will tell no one what you have done. You will not tell your wife, nor your brother. You will not tell your priest. It is the one act of your life that you will have to carry entirely alone.

“If it becomes too much, and you believe that you cannot hold your tongue any longer, then you will call me directly. Because I am the only person on the planet you can share this with.

“If you do not comply with this one request, the penalty will be immediate. You will disappear, and then reappear in America. Your life will be in the hands of strangers who know no empathy and care nothing about what you’ve been through. More importantly, your wife will lose a husband in addition to a daughter. We both know that she wouldn’t be able to take that.”

As far as she knew, he had followed her instructions perfectly, but still here they were.

She and Oskar took rooms in the Berlin Radisson Blu, and later that night, when one of her men in the lobby informed her that Davis and Garza were having a drink in the bar, she and Oskar went down to find them. She despised going out into the field, but the possibility of someone else getting this wrong was even more hateful. So she went personally to a table against the wall, settled down, and watched as Oskar, flanked by two Saxons who looked far less threatening than they really were, invited the two Americans for a drink. It was a sign of their coolness that they acted as if they’d expected this, which she doubted. Soon, Leticia Jones and the man known as Hector Garza were sitting across from her, the woman carrying a martini, the man holding something pink and fruity.

Erika introduced herself but didn’t bother asking their real names. What was the point? She wasn’t here on a fact-finding mission but to offer advice. They listened to her slow, measured English with feigned earnestness, and she pointed out that, given that they were on German soil, and given that their mission was now known, they could abandon it without shame. “Really, you can’t expect a rebuke from your department head. Alan Drummond, right?” she asked and got confused stares in reply. “The point is,” she said, “if you want to have a conversation with Mr. Stanescu, it can easily be done here-but in my house, you have to follow my rules. What you cannot do is shove him into some little plane, as you did with Henry Gray.”

There was no reason to assume that either had been on hand for that abduction, but she noticed something tense in Hector Garza’s features.

She could have shared more, in particular that she knew that these Americans had that morning parked a refrigerated truck painted with the insignia of the HIT grocery store in a private garage in Zehlendorf, but why bother? They would only come up with new plans, something Tourists were rumored to be adept at.

When they smiled and thanked her for the wonderful conversation-confessing, however, that they had no idea what she was talking about-she let them go without argument. Erika’s people had placed two trackers on their truck, and there were now twelve men and women in Berlin whose sole task was to watch this pair.

The next morning-Tuesday, April 22-those twelve people watched as the pair parked their HIT truck outside Stanescu’s Kreuzberg apartment building and followed his taxi as he headed in for his shift. However, along the way, the Tourists’ pursuit was interrupted by two of Erika’s men who smashed cars into the HIT truck at the corner of Gneisenaustrasse and Nostitzstrasse. Once that was accomplished, she called Stanescu directly and asked him to come to a restaurant along the Spree, the Altes Zollhaus, so that they could have a word. He arrived looking confused, having just witnessed a suspicious-looking three-car pileup on his way, but he was properly submissive. After offering wine and food and receiving disconsolate refusals in his broken German, she asked if he remembered a man named Rick.

Andrei stared at her. “I know one man what is named Rick.”

“Well, the people in the truck that was following you know that you’re acquainted with this man you call Rick, whom they call Xin Zhu. They are very interested in learning about him, and they believe you can help them.”

“They are CIA?”

She nodded, her jowls trembling.

“But you attack it.”

“They had a car accident, Mr. Stanescu.” She placed a plump hand on the edge of the table. “That is not important to you. Before, I promised you that I would hold them off as long as I could, and I think I’ve reached the limits of my power. I don’t think they’re interested in prosecuting you for what you did to that man in Brooklyn. What they seem to want is information about the Chinese man, your Rick, who they believe sent you to shoot him.”

Andrei leaned back, finally saying, “I can answer. Questions, I can answer.”

“I’m sure you can, and I’m sure you will. However, we will do it my way, and not theirs.”

“What is it, their way?”

She cleared her throat, and a waiter looked over before realizing she wasn’t calling to him. She said, “They would have grabbed you and pushed you inside that truck, where there is a bed and a lot of drugs. You would have woken up in a plane heading somewhere. Perhaps to the United States, perhaps to Turkey-I don’t know. For a minimum of a week, probably more, you would have been interrogated.”

“And what is it, your way?”

She sighed. “I don’t like it when German residents are dragged out of the country by other governments, particularly by friendly governments. You and I will go to a house outside of Berlin for, at most, three days. No drugs, just conversation. I will allow a single American on the premises to ask questions.”

Two hours later, Oskar brought his phone. “It’s the office. They’ve got a Gwendolyn Davis on the line.”

In perfect German, Leticia Jones said, “So, does the offer still stand?”

The conversation lasted for one and a half days in a house off the E51 to Potsdam. Jones showed up early both mornings with a handheld audio recorder while Hector Garza stayed in his hotel room or strolled the shopping avenues, occasionally even buying shirts. Erika was surprised by this, having expected Garza to do the talking. After all, they had no idea how Andrei Stanescu felt about black people, nor how he would deal with a female interrogator. Leticia Jones wasn’t just fluent in German, though; she had a remarkably welcoming presence that encouraged her subject to go deeper than simple answers.