C. Graham - The Solomon Effect

The steps emptied into a winding street filled with market stalls hung with baskets and brass pots that glinted like gold in a shaft of early-evening sunlight. The driver of a green van laid on his horn, its brakes screeching as the man in the blue windbreaker darted across in front of him.

Jax ducked around behind the van, his gaze on the dark mouth of an alley opening up on the far side of the street. The killer bolted down it, Jax twenty steps behind. The air here was cool and dank, the houses shuttered, silent, the only sounds the pounding of their feet and the rasp of their breath and the swish of traffic from the street ahead.

As he cleared the alley, the man seemed to come to some kind of a decision. He whirled, his hand reaching beneath his jacket to close on the handle of his gun. But the sidewalk here was narrow, his momentum so great that he took a step back off the curb into the street as he brought up the big H &K.

Jax heard a squeal of brakes, saw the man’s head turn, his eyes widen the instant before a battered white delivery truck slammed into him with a heavy, fatal thud.

Tucking Erkan’s Walther out of sight beneath his sweat-soaked shirt, Jax pushed his way through the excited, jabbering crowd of shoppers gathered around the front of the truck. Jax took one look at the man’s blood-smeared face, the wide and sightless eyes, and turned away.

A couple of blocks down the hill, he paused long enough to wipe down Erkan’s gun and drop it into a convenient trash receptacle. Then he turned his steps toward the blue waters of the bay below. From somewhere to his left came the low, melodic notes of the afternoon call to prayer. Allah Akbar…

One after the other, the muezzins of the city’s mosques joined in, until their voices rose up in a wave of sound that rolled across the bay. Allah Akbar. Ash-hadu alla ilaha illal-lah. God is Great. There is no God but God.

Captain Lowenstein was not going to be happy.

Jax called Matt from the shade of a plane tree overlooking the Gulf of Izmir. His truncated conversation with Erkan had raised some serious questions, and Jax had doubts about Langley’s ability-or maybe its willingness-to give him straight answers.

“Where are the German military archives from World War II kept?” Jax asked.

“The military archives?” There was a pause while Matt digested this. “I think they’re still in Freiburg im Breisgau. Why?”

“Then that’s where I’m going.”

“You know, we do have people in Freiberg. I could ask them to-”

“No. I want to find out for myself exactly what was on that damned sub.”

“Did something happen I need to know about?”

“Kemal Erkan is dead.”

“Shit. Listen, Jax. I’ve got a contact in Freiberg I can set you up with. A historian by the name of Walter Herbolt, at the university.”

Jax stared across the broad avenue, toward the water. From here he could see Tobie and Captain Lowenstein. Tobie was calmly sipping a bottle of Evian at a shady table overlooking Pasaport Quay. But Lowenstein was pacing up and down, his cell phone plastered to his ear with one hand, his other hand gesturing wildly through the air as he talked. Jax said, “Thanks, but I’m getting kinda tired of these station people.”

“Herbolt isn’t part of the Company. He’s a personal friend. I’ll tell him to expect you.” There was a pause. Matt said, “It doesn’t sound like that U-boat was carrying gold, does it?”

“No. No, it doesn’t.”

“You’re feeling pretty cocky, aren’t you?” Jax said to Lowenstein as the captain escorted them through Izmir’s crowded, gleaming airport toward their concourse.

So far, news of the shooting in the agora had yet to wend its way through Turkish police channels to the base, and from there to field personnel. Pausing at the sign that warned in four languages, TICKETED PASSENGERS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, the Captain rocked back on his heels and grinned. “You may have given me the slip there for a while, but I think I made a pretty good recovery. And in another forty-five minutes, you’ll be gone.”

“And without a single international incident.” Jax slapped the big Air Force captain on the back and turned to leave. “You did a heckuva job, Lowie.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” whispered October as she put her carry-on bag on the conveyer belt at security. “Who did you kill?”

“Not here, October.” Jax kept a smile on his face as he glanced back at Lowenstein. As he watched, the Captain answered his cell phone, his expression changing ludicrously as he listened to the voice at the other end. Across the crowded security area, the two men’s gazes met. Jax brought one hand to his forehead in a wry salute and turned away.

He gave October a full briefing as they sat by the gate, waiting for their flight to Istanbul to board.

“What I don’t understand is why that gunman in the agora didn’t shoot you, too,” she said when he finished. “I mean at first, when he had the chance.”

“Probably because no one paid him to kill me. He looked like he came from the local rent-a-thug crowd, which means that whoever hired him to kill Kemal Erkan had no way of knowing I’d be there when he made the hit. And guys like that don’t do freebies.”

“You think he was hired by our friends in Kaliningrad?”

“Or at least by the same outfit that hired our friends in Kaliningrad.”

A rustle of movement wafted through the waiting crowd as a uniformed attendant appeared at the gate. “Now it’s your turn,” said Jax, studying her through narrowed eyes.

“What?” she said with a half laugh. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“When we were at Pasaport Quay, how did you know I wanted you to distract Lowenstein?”

She leaned into him teasingly as a droning voice began to announce their flight’s boarding pattern. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid I read your mind or something?”

“The thought did occur to me.”

Still smiling, she sat back and shook her head. “Just because I’m good at remote viewing doesn’t mean I’m psychic, Jax. I saw the waiter hand you the note.”

He continued to stare at her, unsure whether to believe her or not. She said, “Do you think Lowenstein will ever connect you to what happened at the agora?”

“Officially? Not if he’s smart.”

Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Wednesday 28 October

7:10 A.M. local time

By the time their connecting flight from Munich swooped down over the mountains of the Black Forest to land at Freiburg im Breisgau, it was early the following morning.

“These overnight flights are going to kill me,” said October as they caught a cab directly from the airport to the philosophy faculty of the university. “I must look like shit.”

“Lowenstein obviously didn’t think so.”

“Enough about that, already.” Settling into the cab’s backseat, she rummaged around in her bag for a brush and used it to draw her hair back into a clip. “I don’t even know what day it is anymore.”

“It’s Wednesday.”

She looked up at him, her arms stilling at her task. “The twenty-eighth?”

“That’s right.”

“Christ,” she whispered. Halloween was three days away.

“Be thankful for overnight flights.”

They drove past undulating renaissance facades of red sandstone and white plaster, past gently flowing canals that gurgled with the fresh waters of the Dreisam River. By the end of the Second World War, Jax knew, American and British carpet-bombing had reduced this elegant university city to a burned-out shell. But there was no sign of that now. The historic heart of the city had been painstakingly and lovingly restored.