Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

“Let’s walk,” he said. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Molly. We began to walk, and, keeping her distance, she followed.

“All right,” Atkins said, bowing his head as he walked. “The German economy is in a disarray it hasn’t seen since the 1920s, right? Riots in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, Bonn — all the major cities, and in many of the smaller ones as well. Neo-Nazis are all over the place. There’s a wave of violence sweeping the country. You with me?”

“Go ahead.”

“So now the Germans have this big election. But what happens a few weeks before election day? A massive stock market crash. A complete and utter catastrophe. The German economy — well, you can see it; you’ve heard it — is in ruins. A wasteland. It’s in a depression that’s in some ways worse than the Great Depression in the U.S. in the thirties.

“So the Germans panic. The incumbent is thrown out, of course, and the new face is elected. A man of the people. A man of honor — a former schoolteacher, a family man — who’s going to turn it all around. Save Germany. Make it great again.”

“Yes,” I said. “The way Hitler came to power in 1933 in the midst of the Weimar disaster. Are you suggesting Vogel is secretly a Nazi?”

For the first time, Kent laughed, more a snort than a laugh. “Nazis — or, really, neo-Nazis, to be precise about it — are repellent. But they’re extremists. They don’t represent anywhere close to a majority of the German electorate. I think the Germans get a bum rap for that. Yes, Hitler did happen. But that was years ago, and people change. The Germans want to be great again. They want to reclaim their status as a world power.”

“And Vogel—?”

“Vogel is not who he says he is.”

“What does that mean?”

“This was what I was trying to dig up when I couriered those documents to Ed Moore. I knew he was a good man, someone I could trust. Outside the Agency. Outside whatever’s going on. As well as a specialist in the politics of Europe.”

“What did you dig up?”

“I was transferred here a few months after the Berlin Wall came down. I was assigned to debrief KGB agents, Stasi, all those guys. There were rumors — only rumors, mind you — about Vladimir Orlov having moved huge amounts of money out of the country. Most of these low-level guys didn’t know diddly-shit. But when I tried to call up information on Orlov, I found that his whereabouts were marked ‘unknown’ in all the data banks.”

“His location was protected by CIA,” I said.

“Right. Odd, but okay. It happens. But then I debriefed one KGB guy, a fairly highly placed officer in the First Chief Directorate who — I think the guy was desperate for money, frankly — began gassing on about some file he’d seen on corruption in the CIA. Right, sure. Is the CIA corrupt? Does the Pope shit in the woods? A group of officials, I forget the name. It’s not important.

“But here’s what got me thinking: This KGB guy told me about some American plan — some CIA plan, he claims — to manipulate the German stock market.”

I just nodded and felt my heart thud against my rib cage.

“In October 1992 the Frankfurt Stock Exchange agreed to create one centralized German stock exchange, the Deutsche Börse. Given the interconnectedness of Europe, the way all the European currencies are linked now through the European Monetary System, a failure in the Deutsche Börse would devastate all of Europe, the guy says. Especially in this day of program trading and portfolio insurance, computer trading gone berserk. There weren’t any circuit breakers in the German market. Computers were programmed to sell automatically, triggering massive sell-offs. Plus, it was a time of great currency instability, ever since the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, was forced to raise interest rates. So the rest of Europe had to follow suit. That hurt stock market valuations. Anyway, the details aren’t all that important. Point is, this KGB guy says there’s a plan under way to undermine and destroy the European economy. The guy was a financial whiz, so I listened to him. He said all the levers are already in place; all it would take is the swift and sudden infiltration of capital—”

“Where is this guy, this KGB guy?”

“Measles.” Kent smiled sadly and shrugged. That’s a killing that’s meant to look like a death from natural causes. “One of his own, I assume.”

“Did you report this?”

“Of course I did. It’s my job, man. But I was told to drop it. Drop all efforts to investigate this; it’s disruptive to German-American relations. Don’t waste any more time on it.”

Suddenly I noticed that we were standing in front of Atkins’s old rust bucket Ford Fiesta. We had made a large loop, though I was concentrating so hard I hadn’t noticed. Molly joined up with us.

“You boys done?” she said.

“Yep,” I said. “For now.” To Atkins I said: “Thanks, buddy.”

“Okay,” he said, opening the car door. He hadn’t locked it; no one, no matter how needy, would take the trouble to steal such a vehicle. “But now take some advice, Ben, please. You too, Molly. Get the hell out of the country. I wouldn’t even spend the night here if I were you.”

I shook his hand. “Would you mind giving us a lift to the city center?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Last thing I need is to be seen with you. I agreed to meet with you because we’re friends. You’ve helped me through some tough times. I owe you. But take the U-bahn. Do me a favor.”

He got into the driver’s seat and put on the seat belt. “Good luck,” he said. He slammed the door, rolled down the window, and added: “And get out of here.”

“Can we meet again?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Stay away from me, Ben, or I’m a dead man.” He turned the key in the ignition, smiled, and added: “Measles.”

Taking Molly’s arm, we started down the path toward Tivolistrasse. Kent’s engine failed to turn over the first two times he tried, but the third time took and the car roared to life.

“Ben,” Molly began, but something was bothering me, and I turned around to watch Kent back his car up.

The music, I remembered.

He’d shut the car off with the music blasting, that Donna Summer stuff. The radio, he said. But now the radio was off.

He hadn’t turned it off.

“Kent!” I shouted, vaulting toward the car. “Jump out!”

He looked up at me, surprised, smiling uncertainly, as if wondering whether I were attempting some sort of joke.

That half-smile disappeared suddenly in a flash of white light, an absurd, hollow pop like a piñata shattering, but it was the windows of Kent’s Ford Fiesta, then a tremendous, thundering explosion like a clap of thunder, a sulphurous blaze that went amber and blood-red, run through with great leaping tongues of ocher and indigo flames, then a column of ashen cumulonimbus thunderclouds out of which sprayed oddments of the car high into the air. Something struck me in the back of the head: the face of his fake Rolex watch.

Molly and I clutched at each other in mute terror for a second, and then we ran as fast as we could into the gloom of the Englischer Garten.

At a few minutes after noon we reached Baden-Baden, the famous old spa resort nestled in woods of pine and birch in Germany’s Black Forest. In our rented, gleaming smoke-silver Mercedes 500SL (outfitted with burgundy leather upholstery, it was just the sort of car an ambitious young diplomat with the Canadian embassy would drive), we had made very good time. It had taken just under four hours of frantic yet careful driving on the autobahn A8 west-northwest of Munich. I was dressed in a conservative yet stylish suit that I had picked up off the rack at Loden-Frey on Maffeistrasse, on my way out of the city.