Tom Clancy - Locked On

“I killed Lukas Schuman, and you got away, and I know you did not run back to Markus Wolf and tell him about how your illegal moonlighting job turned ugly. You would have kept your mouth shut to everyone so you didn’t have to turn over the cash.”

Kromm did not speak, but only squeezed his hands into his knees as if he were kneading fat Brötchen before putting them in the oven.

Clark said, “And I was under orders to keep the affair out of the official record of my agency. The only person, other than you, me, and poor dead Lukas Schuman, who knew about what happened in the ghost station that night was my superior, and he died fifteen years ago without breathing a word of it to anyone.”

“I don’t have the money anymore. I spent it,” Kromm said.

Clark sighed as if disappointed with the German’s comment. “Right, Manfred, I came back thirty years later to retrieve a messenger bag full of worthless deutschmarks.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want to know who you talked to.”

Kromm nodded. He said, “I think this is an American movie cliché, but it is the truth. If I tell you, they will kill me.”

“Who, Manfred?”

“I did not go to them. They came to me. I had no interest in digging up the buried bones of our mutual past.”

Clark lifted the pistol and looked down its tritium sights.

“Who, Manfred? Who did you tell about ’eighty-one?”

“Obtshak!” Manfred blurted it out in panic.

Clark’s head cocked to the side. He lowered the weapon. “Who is Obtshak?”

“Obtshak is not a who! It’s a what! It’s an Estonian criminal organization. A foreign office of the Russian mob, so to speak.”

John did not hide his confusion. “And they asked you about me ? By name?”

“ Nein, they weren’t asking in the regular sense. They hit me. They broke a bottle of beer, put the broken bottle up to my throat, and then they asked me.”

“And you told them about Berlin.”

“Natürlich!” Of course. “Kill me for it if you must, but why should I protect you?”

Something occurred to Clark. “How did y">

Kromm shrugged. “They were Estonian. They spoke Estonian. If someone is a thug and they are Estonian, then I presume them to be in Obtshak.”

“And they came here?”

“To my house? Nein. They had me meet them at a warehouse in Deutz. They told me there was money for me. Security work.”

“Security work? Don’t bullshit me, Kromm. No one is going to hire you to do security work.”

The German’s hands rose quickly as he began to argue, but the barrel of Clark’s SIG was trained again on Kromm’s chest in the space of a heartbeat. Kromm lowered his hands.

“I have done some… some work for members of the Eastern European immigrant community in the past.”

“What? Like forgery?”

Kromm shook his head. He was too proud to keep quiet. “Locks. Lock picking.”

“Cars?”

Now the old German smiled. “Cars? No. Car lots. Dealerships. It helps to add to my tiny pension. Anyway, I knew some Estonians. I knew the man who asked me to go to the warehouse, otherwise I would never have agreed to go.”

Clark reached into the pocket of his raincoat, pulled out a notepad and a pen, and tossed it to the old man. “I want his name, his address, any other names you know, Estonians working in Obtshak.”

Kromm deflated in his chair. “They will kill me.”

“Leave. Leave right now. Trust me, whoever questioned you about me is long gone. That’s who I’m after. The men who set it up are just the local thugs. Get out of Cologne and they won’t pester you.”

Kromm did not move. He only looked up at Clark.

“I will kill you, right here, right now, if you do not do as I say.”

Kromm slowly began to write, but then he looked up, past the gun barrel, as if he had something to say.

“Write or talk,” Clark said, “but do it now or I put a bullet in one of those sore knees of yours.”

The German pensioner said, “After they took me, I spent a day in the hospital. I told the doctor I was mugged. And then I came home, angry and determined to retaliate against the men. The leader, the man who asked the questions, he was not a local. I could tell this because he spoke no German. Only Estonian and Russian.”

“Keep talking.”

“I have a friend still in Moscow, he knows his way around.”

“Around the Mafia, you mean?”

Kromm shrugged. “He is an entrepreneur. Anyway, I called him up and asked him for information on Obtshak. I did not tell him the real reason. I am certain he assumed I had business. I described the man who interrogated me. Fifty years old, but with hair dyed like he was a twenty-year-old singer in a punk-rock band.”

“And your friend gave you a name?”

“He did.”

“And what did you do?”

Kromm shrugged. He looked at the floor in humiliation. “What could I do? I was drunk when I thought I could get revenge. I sobered up.”

“Give me thoor ie man’s name.”

“If I do that, if I tell you about the man in Tallinn who came here and ordered the others to beat me, will you bypass the men here in Cologne? Maybe if you go directly to Tallinn they will not know that I informed.”

“That suits me just fine, Manfred.”

“Sehr gut,” said Kromm, and he gave Clark a name as the last of the afternoon’s light left the sky outside.

Unlike the government agencies searching for international fugitive John Clark, Fabrice Bertrand-Morel Investigations billed by the man-hour, so they used a lot of men working a lot of hours.

And it was only this intense canvassing of choke points across Europe that helped them locate their quarry. Bertrand-Morel had concentrated his hunt in Europe because Alden had, through Laska, passed the Frenchman a copy of the dossier on the ex — CIA man. FBM decided Clark’s recent work in Europe with NATO’s Rainbow organization would mean he would have sympathetic contacts on the continent.

So a single FBM man had been placed in each of sixty-four train stations across Europe, working fourteen-hour shifts, passing out fliers and showing photos of Clark to station employees. They had turned up nothing in days of waiting and watching. But finally a man working a pretzel stand at the Cologne Hauptbahnhof had caught a glimpse of a figure in a crowd passing by. He looked at the photo on the small card he’d been handed three days earlier by a bald Frenchman, and then he quickly dialed the number on the back of the card.

The Frenchman had offered him a large reward, paid in cash.

Twenty minutes later the first FBM man arrived at the Cologne Hauptbahnhof to interview the pretzel salesman. The middle-aged man was clearheaded and convincing; he was certain John Clark had passed him heading for the front entrance of the Hauptbahnhof.

Soon three more FBM men, the entire force within an hour’s drive, were in the station working on a plan of action. They had little to go on save for the report that their man had entered the city; they could not very well just spread out, sending four men out into the fourth-largest metropolis in Germany.

So they left a man at the station while the other three checked the nearby hotels and guesthouses.

It was the agent at the station who got the hit. Just after nine on the cold and rainy evening, forty-year-old Lyonnais private detective and employee of Fabrice Bertrand-Morel Investigations Luc Patin stood just at the entrance smoking a cigarette, his eyes occasionally drifting up to the incredible Cologne Cathedral just to the left of the train station, but his main focus remained on the foot traffic that streamed past him toward the tracks behind. There, in a large group of pedestrians, a man who bore a reasonable resemblance to his target shuffled by with the collar of his raincoat up high.