And maybe she should be. Maybe she needed to watch her back. Maybe the past is not past. He advised her, “Take personal precautions. The police will further advise you.”
Before she could respond, he left the office, made his way through the stacks, took the elevator down, and stepped outside into the cold, overcast day. He tried to order his thoughts. This case didn’t begin with Anna Albrecht. And it didn’t begin with Elsa Ziegler. Something had brought Harry here to these archives in May of last year.But what?The trail of breadcrumbs was getting reordered, and growing longer, and vanishing beyond the horizon in both directions.
He felt the inside pocket of his sports jacket, which still held the envelope with the microscope slide he’d taken from Harry’s jacket.
Had Harry made contact with Stefan Richter? Was this guy even still alive? And if so, did Richter bullshit Vance the way Elsa Ziegler believed she had been bullshitted by Richter? And was Richter really a former HVA agent involved with a military biowarfare program—perhaps at Storkow—and was Scott Brodie carrying a sample of an East German bioweapon in his jacket pocket? That would be a more interesting souvenir than the overpriced chunk of Wall he got last time he was here.
And if Richterhadworked at Storkow, was he there in 1988, on the day that Odin visited the facility? If he had been, and if Vance had recently spoken to Richter, Harry might have gotten a name—or at least a physical description—of Odin, and maybe wouldn’t have traveled to a park inNeukölln in the middle of the night to acquire or cross-check that same Intel from Colonel Tariq Qasim, who could also have been at Storkow on that day.
Well, first things first—to figure out what actually had initiated Vance’s search for Odin. Brodie took out his phone and dialed Taylor.
She picked up immediately. “Where are you?”
“The Stasi Archives.”
“What? Why?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you.”
“When will that be?”
“Don’t know. Are you at the airport?”
“No. Flight’s delayed an hour. It’s not too late for you to fix a few of your many fuckups.”
“So where are you now?”
“Unter den Linden. On my way to do the embassy drop-off.”
“So you still have the Vance and Jenkins CID case files.”
“For another five minutes.”
“I need you to look in the files and find any CID investigations that occurred in April or May of last year.”
“Are you serious?”
“Taylor, listen—”
“I already read them all, Scott. There was nothing pertinent to this case.”
“Humor me.”
“These are classified documents. I can’tread—”
“This is an encrypted phone call. If the NSA eavesdroppers at the embassy want to hear us, they’ll at least have to put in some effort.”
He heard her sigh and then pull something out of her bag and begin riffling through papers. After a minute she said, “A lot of these cases are concurrent, ongoing investigations, there isn’t a clear timeline at a quick glance.”
“Just look for any cases that were initiated in April or May.”
Another minute or two of silence; then Taylor said, “Two cases, one in April and one in May.” She flipped through some papers, then lowered her voice and said, “April thirteenth, some general signals intelligence chatter about Islamic extremist attacks against American facilities in Western Europe is passed on to CID and other interested American military agencies.Jenkins and Vance are put on the case…” She trailed off. “Nothing came of this, just wannabe terrorists boasting. The May one…” She was quiet a moment, then said, “Okay… May sixth, assault and battery. Joint American-German training exercises in Stuttgart. A retired German Army colonel, Karl Brandt, gets drunk late at night, encounters an American Army captain walking alone on base, pulls his service weapon, threatens to kill the American, who disarms him and calls the MPs.” She added, “The American captain was black, and the attack was apparently racially motivated. Colonel Brandt was interviewed by American MPs and German military investigators, and he went off on a racist, white-supremacist rant.”
Brodie asked, “Why were Vance and Jenkins brought in? What does this have to do with terrorism?”
“I’m pulling up to the embassy.”
“There must be something.”
