Tom Clancy - Command Authority

After a few seconds of feeling around, the figure stopped moving, as if giving up, and dropped his head on the bed. Whoever this was, he had obviously been looking for the briefcase, and he’d obviously realized the police had found it.

Jack knew he had to take the initiative now, while the stranger was on his knees with his head down and facing away.

Jack stepped out of the closet and started across the little room. He’d made it only halfway when the floorboards under his feet gave him away.

The stranger launched up and spun around. In the blue light, Jack saw a hand reach into a coat pocket, and then reemerge quickly, wrapped around something small and black. Jack didn’t know if it was a gun or a knife, but it didn’t matter. He had the momentum, and continued rushing forward with his eyes on the weapon, then balled his fist and reached back.

He saw the pointed steel at the same time he heard the click of the switchblade. The stranger slashed with the knife as Ryan fired out a right jab. His fist slammed into the man’s jaw, connecting near perfectly, and the head snapped back.

The knife flew through the air as the body fell backward on the bed and lay there, unconscious.

Jack felt a pain in his forearm, and he realized he’d been cut by the switchblade; he couldn’t see how bad it was in the poor light, but he felt through the tear in his jacket, then pulled his hand back and rubbed the wet blood with his fingertips. He didn’t think it was too severe, but it stung like hell.

“Son of a bitch!” he shouted, as he pulled off his scarf and wrapped it around the wound.

It took a moment to tie it off, and while he did this he kept his eyes on the figure on the bed in front of him. He couldn’t see the face, so he stepped forward, leaning over the unconscious form. He leaned closer still, reaching down and pushing the hood of the coat back, then moving wet hair out of the way so he could see the face.

He stood up quickly, stunned.

This was a woman.

He looked down at his own fist; his knuckles throbbed after the vicious blow he’d delivered to her face. “Oh, Christ.”

It took the woman five minutes to come around. In that time Jack tied her hands behind her back with the bra from the laundry basket in the corner and placed her on the floor, sitting her up against the bed. He’d also searched her thoroughly. She had no more weapons, and she carried no identification, only a key chain with a few keys on it and two small wads of currency. Ryan thought it was interesting she was in possession of both West German deutschmarks and East German ostmarks, but this was hardly the most interesting thing about her.

As he sat on the floor in front of her, the lava lamp between the two of them, he studied her face. The lighting was bad, her blond bangs hung low over her eyes with her head slumped forward, and there was a red-and-purple bruise on her jaw from Ryan’s fist, so it was difficult to get a great look at her, but he started to suspect he knew who she was.

And when she woke, when her eyes opened and she slowly began looking around the room, Jack was certain.

He said, “I can gag you. If you scream, I will do just that. Do you understand me?”

He could hear her breath quicken. She looked at him, and her eyes widened in fear and tears dripped down her face.

“You speak English, don’t you?”

After a moment, she asked, “Who are you?” Her German accent was strong, but Ryan had no trouble understanding her.

In the soft blue lighting, he looked into her eyes. He saw the terror, but he could also see exhaustion. Her wet hair hung on her forehead.

He said, “You can call me John. And how about I call you Marta? Marta Scheuring.”

Jack had no idea how it was so, but sitting before him was the Red Army Faction member whose body had been identified at the scene of the firebombing in Rotkreuz, Switzerland.

“That is not my name,” she said.

Ryan wished that Nick Eastling were here. The counterintelligence officer had his faults, but he had a knack for getting people to talk.

“There is no use in denying it,” Jack said, while looking around the room for any pictures of her. He couldn’t find anything, but he wondered if the BfV men might have taken them away as evidence.

“Fucking pig,” she said. She turned away, looking at the far wall. “You are American?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“FBI? CIA?”

“How about I ask the questions?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to listen to your shit questions. You are a fool. You all are. You think we were in Switzerland, you think we were involved in the attacks there. But it wasn’t us. None of us were. You pigs killed everyone here for nothing .”

Jack shook his head. “Not for nothing. Your friends were killed because you are RAF, and your identification was found at the location where fourteen people were burned to death. When GSG Nine came to raid this place, someone started shooting from your hotel room up the street.”

She shook her head. Her wet bangs drooped into her eyes and she blew them back up. “ Was meinst du denn?” What the hell do you mean? “What hotel room?”

“Did you rent a room in a guest worker hotel two blocks up on Sprengelstrasse?”

“Why would I do that?” Her voice was laced with derision, but there was a definite tone to her words that told Jack she was telling the truth.

Jack figured as much. He said, “I don’t know you, Marta, but for your sake, I hope you are smart enough to realize that you have been set up. Your entire organization has been set up.”

The German woman cocked her head, and again the bangs drooped. She let them hang. “You believe me? You believe that I didn’t kill anyone?”

“I believe you, yes. But right now I am the only one who believes the Red Army Faction is just a pawn in this. As soon as the BfV finds out you are still alive, you will be the most wanted person in Germany.”

Jack thought the girl looked like she would start crying again, but instead she just muttered, “Fucking bourgeois pigs. All of you.”

“Who was the dead girl in Switzerland with your ID?”

She did not answer.

“Marta, nobody in the world knows I am here right now. If you want, I can go downstairs and tell the cops out front that you’re here. Or you can talk to me a little, and then both of us can slip away, safe and sound.”

Marta mumbled something.

“What’s that?”

“Ingrid Bretz. Her name was Ingrid Bretz.”

“Was she Red Army Faction?”

Marta just shook her head. “She was a waitress at a bar in Alexanderplatz, in East Berlin.”

“ EastBerlin? She is from the East?”

“Ja.”

“What was she doing with your identification?”

“I gave it to her. A week ago, I went over to the East. She said she needed to come to the West for a few days. She needed an Ausweis , an identification. We looked enough alike, so I gave her mine.”

“You were friends?”

Marta hesitated. “Yes, but she paid me. She paid me to go to the East, to give her my Ausweis , and to wait a few days for her to return.”

“Who arranged this?”

“No one. It was just an idea she had.”

Jack didn’t believe her for a second. “If you didn’t have any identification, how did you get back into West Berlin?”

Marta shrugged. “There are ways.”

“What ways? Like a tunnel?”

“Ha. A tunnel? You are a fool.”

Jack didn’t press the question. Instead he asked, “Why didn’t Ingrid sneak over like you did?”

Marta glared at Ryan. It was a look that a left-wing terrorist might give an employee of the CIA. Full of sanctimony and intellectual superiority. “She was going to Switzerland. There is no tunnel to Switzerland.”