Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

“But a girl. Fifteen years old…”

“That only limits the possibilities, Hans, which is good for us.”

The call had come that morning. Adriana Stanescu had found a way out of her captors’ small mountain cabin north of Gap, France, in the Hautes-Alpes département. She’d stumbled into town and chanced upon a farm couple who gave her their phone. Her call home was a particular surprise for Inspector Kuhn, who, as a veteran Berlin cop, had given up hope. For a week there had been no ransom calls, and so he’d gone with the textbook, which told him there was no hope. Adriana Stanescu’s kidnapper was a sexual predator, and by now she’d been shipped off somewhere, neutralized by drugs and violence, or she was dead. He’d only stayed with the Stanescus because of the publicity. If he dropped the case of an immigrant’s abducted child, the press would crucify him.

So he was there, with the Stanescus, when Adriana called. Remarkably, the girl was levelheaded enough to give a quick chronology: Kidnapped in Berlin by a man who pretended to be her father’s coworker: late thirties, dark hair. Transferred to a white van-Mercedes, she thought-and taken to France by three men, German, Spanish, and Russian. Held in the mountains. She’d escaped through a broken window.

He’d told the farmers to take her to the Gap police station, then asked Erika to liaise with the French Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire-DST-to fly her to Berlin.

“Who’s going to cover the costs?” Erika had asked.

“We can do that, if necessary.”

“It might be,” she told him, looking for an excuse not to be involved. “You know, the Gap police can take her to the airport without having their hands held. Why the production?”

“It just feels wrong,” Kuhn had explained, clearly frustrated that this was the best answer he could offer. She understood, though. According to Adriana’s story, there had been no rape, no attempt at rape, just three men keeping watch over her in France. Yet none of the men, according to her, were French. Nor were they Moldovan.

Why?

So Erika had done as he asked and called her DST contact and received the promise that by morning Adriana would be back home, with an escort.

It had kept her busy all day, distracted from more important business, and she had looked forward to nothing more than her nightly Riesling and Snickers. Now, this.

Because she moved so slowly, Oskar led the way up the steps, through the metal detectors and down the long corridor to Schwartz’s office in the back. He had turned on the lights and powered up her computer by the time she arrived, still clutching the wine and candy. She settled behind her desk and cleared away the day’s excess papers. Most were printouts of desperate e-mails from Belgrade worrying about the safety of their embassy. In light of the smoldering shell that was left of the American embassy from the previous night’s riot, they wanted to close down, but she had advised against it. The Serbs, despite history, had no problems with today’s Germany; it was America they hated, the way a poor child envies and hates a rich cousin who has taken something from him. Their hatred masked a long-standing love. Toward today’s Germans they felt nothing, and so there was nothing to worry about. The embassy had not been pleased with her explanation.

She looked through her top drawer, pushing around loose pens and paper clips and rubber bands before she gave up and ordered Oskar to find a bottle opener and a glass. “Two, if you want some.”

“No, thank you.”

“As you like.”

Once he was gone, she unwrapped her Snickers and checked the Reuters feed on her browser. A DST agent, Louise Dupont, had been found dead in her car from an accident. The fool hadn’t been wearing her seat belt. Much farther down the road, Adriana Stanescu’s body had been found by French police in the woods.

She pulled up the file on Andrei and Rada Stanescu, which had been updated over the last days as their faces had graced more and more periodicals. A taxi driver and a factory worker. They had arrived in Germany legally two years ago, a move facilitated by Andrei’s brother, Mihai, a baker who spent his spare time volunteering for the German branch of Caritas, the Catholic organization that worked for human rights and against poverty around the world. Caritas had recently been putting pressure on the EU to loosen its immigration policies, and she imagined that was why Mihai volunteered. According to a file she pulled up, Adriana’s uncle had been twice arrested in the last six years for helping easterners slip illegally into Germany. That, certainly, would merit further examination.

She got details of the girl’s murder from a phone call to Paris and Adrien Lambert, a French contact in the DGSE, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. Though Lambert’s agency was not specifically responsible for the Stanescu case, he had already assembled the information in his Boulevard Mortier office, expecting her call. Stanescu’s neck had been broken by hand. The killer knew his way around a neck, he said, and had completed the task with one movement. Gap police had found the mountain cabin in which Adriana had been held. Forensics was working the place over, but it had been cleaned professionally, and they held out little hope. The cabin was owned by François Leclerc, a plumber from Grenoble who was on vacation in Florida with his family. He had no idea who would have been using his place.

“And you believe that?” Erika asked as Oskar returned with a plastic cup and a corkscrew and proceeded to open the bottle.

“More than I believe you,” said Lambert, “when you tell me you don’t know anything about this.”

“Believe it, Adrian. We’re all wandering in the dark.”

After hanging up, she sipped the wine Oskar had poured, took a bite of her Snickers, and peered through her assistant as if he weren’t there. She ran through what she did know. An immigrant girl kidnapped, no ransom requested. In a country with Germany’s racial tensions the kidnapping wasn’t unthinkable, nor was the lack of ransom. It was unthinkable that, for a whole week, the girl had not been harmed or killed.

So the crime was neither sexually nor racially motivated. The girl had escaped by her own means, and someone felt her death was so important that this person was willing to take out a French civil servant as well.

Or was that a coincidence? Had Louise Dupont had an accident, died, and then the girl, with the kind of ill luck you only find in Greek myths, had run into a local psychopath? She doubted it, but the facts did not rule it out, so it remained.

If not, then one of the three men holding her had done it. The German, the Spaniard, or the Russian. Why, though, had they let her live unmolested for a whole week? Did that suggest the involvement of another party? She couldn’t be sure of anything.

She drew back.

Perhaps it had nothing to do with the Stanescus at all. What if Adriana had, say, witnessed a murder, and the killers took her to keep her quiet? There would have been an argument about what to do with her, a schism among criminals. She’s let go by one of them, while another tracks her down and silences her.

Then what about the unknown man, late thirties, dark hair, who first captured Adriana, before these other three took her over?

Unnerved by the small eyes fixed blindly on him for so long, Oskar said, “You’re doing it again.”

A pause, eyes wide. “Doing what?”

“That stare. You’re freaking me out.”

She blinked finally, smiled, then looked at her desk. “Sorry, Oskar. I promise to work on my manners. In the meantime, would you please ask Gerhardt to go see Herr al-Akir? He can bring someone to drive my car back and…” She gazed at Oskar. “And we’ll need another bottle of Riesling. This is going to take all night.”