Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

Then again, she had nothing to hide, so perhaps their source didn’t matter.

“Would you call this investigation a personal favor for your friend the policeman?” Wartmüller asked.

Berndt cut in, speaking his first words. “Favor or not, I think this falls under your jurisdiction.”

Erika appreciated the interruption. Back in West Germany, during that other time, she and Berndt had been confidantes of a sort. Once foreign policy had been reassessed after ’89 and each was forced to find new specialties, they had kept up contact. She remained in intelligence, while he moved on-she couldn’t quite call it up-into politics.

She said, “As Berndt points out, it did seem to fall within our scope. Yes, Inspector Kuhn called me because of our friendship, but I took it on because I considered it our responsibility. That’s why I felt free to use our resources.”

Wartmüller grinned. “Oskar Leintz-he’s one of our resources. Looks to me like you’ve been getting the poor boy into trouble.”

“He had an accident on some stairs.”

“I’ll bet.”

As this seemed to be his cue, Franz reached for the yellow file and pushed. It slid down the long table toward Erika but stopped halfway. Berndt had to get up and reach out to drag it the rest of the way. Because they worked as two sides of the same person, Brigit did the speaking for Franz. “This is part of your investigation?”

Inside the file was a still from the Berlin video. The man, clear from the excellent image reconstruction, had heavy, tired eyes but otherwise looked fit. Handsome in an entirely anonymous way as he talked to Adriana. She turned it over and scanned the next page, important details leaping out at her. The BMW the kidnapper had driven had been reported stolen and subsequently found, abandoned and clean, in the Tempelhof parking lot. The Opel driven by the kidnapper’s possible shadow had been rented by an American, whose name they had no record of. Then she saw that the face-recognition software had found a name: Milo Weaver. American. Last known employer: Central Intelligence Agency.

Despite the elegant surroundings, she said, “Scheisse.”

“Indeed,” Brigit said into her spiked coffee.

His point made, Wartmüller returned to the second person. “I’m beginning to wonder if you’re objective enough for this job, Erika. You do seem obsessed with the Americans.”

There was a time, and it wasn’t so long ago, when the intelligence she offered on the Americans could be taken at face value. No longer. That had ended with Afghanistan, poppy fields, and processed heroin making it all the way to Hamburg.

She’d discovered the trail in late 2005, more luck than detective work, while tracking suspected terrorists who turned out to be simple drug barons. Yet the foil-wrapped bricks they brought into the EU had begun life in fields of Taliban prisoners guarded by the U.S. Army. The bricks were sold on to packagers and then distributors in Europe. All run by the CIA to fund things that its masters in Congress chose not to pay for, or didn’t know existed.

She’d brought the information to Wartmüller immediately, and his initial reaction had been the same as hers: disbelief, followed by outrage. She’d even been impressed that a man like him could still feel outrage. He praised her work and told her she would be a crucial part of the nasty job they were going to pull on the cretins at Langley.

A week passed, then two, and she finally got another appointment with him-his schedule had suddenly become full. The outrage was gone, replaced by the stoic pragmatism that she’d expected in the first place. Yes, they were all outraged, he explained, but it had been decided that the greater good needed to be served. In this case, the greater good constituted the reams of excellent intelligence the CIA shared with them as it battled terror around the world. “It’s a matter of keeping your head, Erika.”

Maybe Erika had been at fault-two years later she still couldn’t be sure. In her own estimation, she had kept her head, even as she arranged a slim package of evidence and, in a London pub, handed it off to a representative of Senator Harlan Pleasance, a Republican who was running a committee investigating CIA finances. Pleasance, she knew, was eager for the national spotlight and would squeeze the maximum use out of it. Which was what he did. The story spread like a pandemic, and in the face of protests Berlin had no choice but to condemn the CIA and sever many of its joint operations. Which was why Room S had never been used for its intended purpose.

Wartmüller figured it out, of course. Though no physical evidence could convict her of leaking classified information, she was the only possible source. Evidence has only a slight advantage over rumor, and Wartmüller had spread the story around the intelligence community: Watch out for Erika Schwartz. She’s corrosively anti-American.

Now here she was again. She had a CIA employee on tape kidnapping a Moldovan girl who had spent an unimaginable period suffering nightly multiple rapes in a foreign land that later became her home.

“I’ve talked to Dieter,” Wartmüller told her. “He’s happy to take over the case.”

Dieter Reich was one year away from retirement, with an undistinguished history that had earned him a basement office. “Sir, I don’t think Dieter can-”

“It’s done,” said Brigit, and Franz nodded to remove all doubt.

She looked at Berndt, who seemed to be avoiding her face. “Well, Berndt? Is there a reason you’re here to witness this?”

He swallowed and stared at his hands, still clutching his coffee cup. “I’m the one who brought the order, Erika. It’s direct from Berlin. No one wants you mixing with the Americans anymore. They wouldn’t stand for it.”

“They? The CIA, you mean?” It came out louder than she had planned, and she felt sweat collecting on the back of her neck. “Well?”

“Yes,” he said while the others just stared. “We can’t afford to piss off the Americans any more than we already have.”

“And Reich?”

“Their suggestion,” he said, an involuntary twitch playing around his left eye. “They feel like he’s someone they can work with.”

She spent the rest of the morning in her office, researching Milo Weaver, once of the Central Intelligence Agency. As of last year, according to what information they had, he had been dismissed from his supervisory position in a New York office (the purpose of which was murky) under suspicion of financial misconduct. For this, he’d spent a month and a half in prison until his name was, also according to the file, cleared. Since then, Milo Weaver had been unemployed, living in Newark, New Jersey. He was separated from his wife and daughter, who lived in Brooklyn.

None of this was familiar, but she still felt a pang of something like familiarity. Had she met this man before? She didn’t know the face, though something in those heavy eyes nagged at her. The name? Milo was not so uncommon in the East, but this man was a westerner…

There was only one record of him being in Europe recently-Budapest. She found this not from his file but by cross-referencing reports from various European sources. In December, Johann Thüringer, a German journalist who made occasional reports to the military’s intelligence office, the ANBw, from his home base in Hungary, reported that a stringer for the Associated Press, Milo Weaver, had arrived looking for Henry Gray, another journalist, American, who had disappeared. Interesting, but of little use to her now.

At noon, the BND operator forwarded a call to her. It was Andrei Stanescu, Adriana’s father. He’d said so little in Berlin that at first she didn’t recognize his soupy accent, but she did recognize the desperation in the gasps between his labored German words. “What I like to know is the name, please. The name of this man what kill Adriana.”