Their eyes met and Brodie thought back to their last assignment, and a similar moment. Two people, far from home, standing in a hotel hallway in front of their respective rooms. Last time, he’d wondered if at some point one of them would end up in the other’s room and the other’s bed.
But now it felt different. There was still tension here, but they’d experienced a different kind of intimacy in Venezuela—the intimacy of battle, of almost losing their lives and relying on each other for survival. All in all, they both probably would have had a better time sleeping together.
“Scott.”
He refocused.
“You did that thing where you look either lost in thought or in the middle of a stroke.”
“I’m fine. Just need a hot shower and a cold beer from the minibar.”
Taylor did her best Mustafa impression: “Beer warm. Shower cold. Ten euros.”
Brodie smiled. “Meet at seven?”
“Make it eight.”
“See you later.”
She inserted her keycard, opened the door, then paused and looked back at him. “I’m glad we’re working this together, Mr. Brodie.”
“Likewise, Ms. Taylor.”
She went into her room and closed the door behind her.
Brodie entered his room and bolted the door. It was a small, minimalist box with white walls, a double bed, and a desk and dresser that looked like they were from IKEA. A small flat-screen TV was bolted to the dresser and reinforced with a security cable, and the hotel’s titular art hung over the bed. The piece in Brodie’s room looked like someone had accidentally spilled red and blue paint across the canvas. It was titledSYNCHRONICITYand could be his for eighty euros.
There was a window across the room that looked over the park where Chief Warrant Officer Harry Vance had exited this life. And he had done so, apparently, while on some sort of official or unofficial mission, gun in hand. That was the way to go. Better than a nursing home. Brodie should be so lucky.
He took off his coat and tossed it over the desk chair, then kicked off his shoes. He grabbed the TV remote and sat on the bed, then turned on CNN International, where he saw, of all things, footage of downtown Caracas, Venezuela. Thousands of people had taken to the streets to protest President Nicolás Maduro and support some guy that the legislature had recognized as the real president. The chyron read: “LEGITIMACY CRISIS IN VENEZUELA.”
Apparently the country had only continued its downward spiral since he and Taylor left, which was as predictable as it was depressing. Just like when he saw a news story about some awful shit happening in Iraq, he had no desire to revisit a place where he’d almost died. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. He stripped down and walked into the small bathroom.
There was a handheld open shower, a sink, and a toilet. The shower wasn’t hot, but it was warm, and as he showered, he thought about the case. They’d absorbed a lot of information today, and at some point you need to stop and try to separate the facts from the clutter, and the clues from the bullshit.
First, the search for the mysterious Anna might be a pointless exercise. Her failure to go to the police was suspicious, but people make bad choices all the time for no reason other than being scared or stupid. She might just be a person with poor judgment, who’d had a fling with a married man who had met a bad end and now wanted to wash her hands of it.
Then there was the Hezbollah-linked Al Mahdi Center, which might not actually be Hezbollah-linked and might also have nothing to do with Vance’s murder. Same went for the narcotics case with the Khazali network. Harry Vance and Mark Jenkins had spent their careers pursuing dangerous and violent people, and then Harry Vance met a violent end. Those two things were not ipso facto related, but the killing seemed premeditated.
The most concrete thing, in fact—outside of whatever forensics evidence the Germans were discovering—was the fact that Mark Jenkins had been followed in what sounded like a blatant act of intimidation.
But why bother trying to scare Jenkins? You intimidate civilian witnesses to shut them up. But not a U.S. Army Warrant Officer who was a senior CID Special Agent in counterterrorism and a close associate of the victim. It didn’t track. And when things don’t track, you need to pay attention to them.
Of course, all of this was assuming that Mark Jenkins wasn’t suffering from paranoid delusions. Alcohol could do that. So could twenty-five years on this job.
Brodie got out of the shower, dried off, shaved, and got dressed in a fresh button-down shirt and black denim jeans, then put on his shoes and socks and winter coat. Time for a stroll.
CHAPTER 13
Brodie stepped through the glass doors of the Art Hotel into the cold winter afternoon. The sun set a little earlier in this part of the world, and the shadows were already long at a quarter past four. Brodie crossed the street and walked along the southern edge of Körnerpark. He approached the Berlin Police officer at the park entrance. “Guten Tag.”
The officer nodded to him. “Guten Tag.”
Brodie descended the stone steps and walked around the central fountain, where the teens were still at it on their skateboards, a few feet from where Harry Vance had lain dead. They ignored him as he walked toward the steps up to the northern entrance.
He climbed the steps to Jonasstraße, which was where Captain Soliman surmised Vance’s killer got into a getaway car, and where Fatima had seen a car drive away shortly after hearing the gunshot. Directly across the street was a decrepit-looking concrete apartment building, and Brodie wondered if anyone in this building got a better look at the car or the gunman. He looked around for surveillance cameras, but there were none.
He walked east along Jonasstraße, a quiet residential street, and reached Karl-Marx Straße. Directly across the street was a handsome old brick church, and on either side were rows of apartment buildings with street-level commerce.
