“Scott? What’s the move?”
“We’ll figure it out. In the meantime we need to get out of the area before Trent can walk and talk again and tells his security guy what really happened.”
They walked in silence toward Bundesstraße. Then Taylor said, “I spoke to Dombroski. We agreed that your resignation was an overreaction.”
“I disagree. And please don’t talk about me to—”
“He was very upset. He wanted to talk.” She added, “People care about you.”
“I feel the love every day.”
“Asshole.”
“On that subject, your CIA friend—”
“He’s not myfriend.”
“Did he say anything to you before I got there?”
“Nothing that he didn’t say to you.”
“Okay.” Brodie wasn’t sure why Chilcott went out of his way to lure him to the safe house. On the surface, it could be what it seemed: Chilcott plucked Taylor from the airport to use her for bait—to get Brodie in the safe house to question him about what he knew, and also to put him in protective custody while the neo-Nazis were being rounded up. That was plausible.
But if Brodie factored in the Mercer case, and also the fact that the CIA—who liked to do the wet stuff overseas—wanted him and Taylor to take the Mercer case secrets to a very early grave, then it was also plausible that neither he nor Taylor would have left that apartment alive. How’s that for paranoia?
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that we’ll see Mr. Chilcott again.”
They reached Bundesstraße and hailed a taxi. Brodie quickly checked the map on his phone, then told the driver to head to Treptower Park. The park was about a mile and a half to the southeast via major roads and would get them out of this neighborhood quickly while Brodie figured out whether his first postcoital visit with Anna should include Maggie Taylor. And crucially, this route would also keep them a good distance from the eavesdropping radius of the NSA’s embassy surveillance station to the west.
As the driver navigated the midday Berlin traffic, Brodie’s phone rang and he saw it was Mark Jenkins. He showed the screen to Taylor, put his finger to his lips, put it on speaker, and answered, “Brodie.”
“Hey, Scott. It’s Mark Jenkins.”
“What’s up?”
“Wanted to let you know that your and Taylor’s replacements think you’re God.”
“They told me that. Anything else?”
Jenkins laughed, then got serious and said, “I’m driving back to Kaiserslautern. Before I left Berlin, I had a clerk in the Fifth MP pull up the translation of Colonel Brandt’s initial interview, the one he gave while intoxicated before we arrived in Stuttgart, and there’re a few interesting things there.” He hesitated, then said, “You’re off the case, but you and Taylor have to file a final report, so as a courtesy to you, I can forward this on to you. Or Taylor.”
Taylor pointed to herself.
“You can forward it to her.”
“Okay… I read this, and this guy, Brandt… I can pull over and read some of this to you.”
“Thanks.”
There was a pause. Then Jenkins continued: “Okay. Like I said, the interview was mostly a lot of rambling, but here’s a quote… He said, ‘We’re everywhere. And we have important people… and an American officer who used to flush rats for the Stasi. But he’s with us now.’?”
Brodie glanced at Taylor, then said to Jenkins, “Okay. Sounds interesting. But apparently you didn’t find it interesting at the time.”
Jenkins replied, “Thinking back, I think Harry found some of Brandt’s ravings more interesting than I did.” He added, defensively, “It was mostly a lot of racist ranting, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim shit. So this didn’t exactly jump out at me as actionable intelligence.”
“Right. Okay—”
