The Casey Collins Trilogy

8

8The man I struck was at least six inches taller than van Hoof. I hit too low, my fist smashing hard into his sternum. He gripped my right arm in his and drove his left into my mid-section. I went down hard on the bed, on my back, unable to breathe. The sequence reminded me exactly of my training. Right down to the acrid scent of French tobacco.

An electric prickle raced over my skin. Along with it came such a wave of elation that if I’d had air in my lungs, I’d have cried out. My wrist burned and my guts ached. The pain was real. This was no dream. Stefan was here.

He shifted his weight to his knees and let go of my wrist.

I inhaled a long, shuddering breath. My arms went around his neck then, my mouth found his and I tasted him, the smoky flavor I knew better than my own. I slid my hands under his jacket, felt his warmth through his shirt, held him so tightly against me I vibrated with his heartbeat. Not a dream! Stefan with me, in the flesh.

I was weak with joy.

I was incoherent with rage.

I moved my hands to his shoulders and pushed until I could see his face, the eyes black pools sunken above the angular cheekbones. I sputtered, fumbling over the first word. Tried again until I could voice that “You!” Then blurted out the rest: “You better have a damn good reason for putting me through this.”

The full lips curved up in that knowing grin. “What, no hello-how-are-you?”

“You’re fine. I got proof enough of that.” I ran my hand down his chest to his belt buckle. “Solid proof.” I slapped his belly. “You’re alive and well. So why didn’t you let me know?”

“I did.”

The wool blanket was hot beneath me. I shifted and said, “No, you didn’t. I was right there in DC, waiting.”

“Someone else had to make the call. And that took time to arrange.”

I kept my right hand on his chest. With my left I switched on the bedside lamp. His eyes went from black to hazel, flecked with gold. His hair was the color of strong coffee. He’d cut it as short as van Hoof’s and his hairline receded in the same way at the temples. He looked older. More distinguished. Better. The scent of tobacco blended with his musky smell. I said, “Someone phoned me?”

“The day after Christmas.”

“Five days after the explosion? You let me wait five days?”

He moved off me until he was sitting on the edge of the bed. The temperature in the room had to be ninety degrees. Perspiration beaded his hairline and dampened the dark smudges beneath each eye. He rubbed a hand across his forehead, then pulled off his jacket. He said, “I had to go slow. For your protection.”

“That’s bullshit.” I stood next to the bed, glaring down at him. “You weren’t thinking of me. You want people to believe you’re dead. You wouldn’t risk the contact. No matter what your silence cost me.”

He reached for my hand. His touch sent an electric charge zinging through me. “I was concerned about you—”

I backed away from him. “Keeping me in the dark was supposed to be safer for me? You know me better than that. It didn’t work. It couldn’t work.”

He made a snorting noise. “Whose fault was that?”

“Yours,” I said. “You weren’t thinking about me.”

“Not true—”

I pushed on. “Two days after Christmas—when I saw Holger: Did he know you were alive?”

“Not then. It wasn’t until the next day that I was able to get word to Holger. They were watching him too closely.”

“‘They’?”

“Some of Jibril’s people dropped by his parish.”

Ahmed Jibril headed a group that called itself the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command. They were a violent bunch, but in recent years they hadn’t attacked American targets. Surprised, I asked, “Did Jibril’s group place the bomb?”

“Can’t be sure yet. Maybe them. More likely the Abu Nidal Organization. This was a joint action, coordinated out of Tripoli.”

I felt a jangle of alarm. After his frenzied bloodletting in the mid-1980s, Abu Nidal had moved his organization out of Europe and made his main business extortion and protection rackets and terrorist operations against Yasser Arafat. His people had killed more PLO members than they had Americans. “You think they’ve gone back to their old tactics?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Only an educated guess. Based on increased activity in and out of Libya. Rumors I’ve heard. And, of course, they’ve got plenty of plastic explosive down there.”

The former Czech regime had exported enough Semtex to Libya to make bombs for the next one hundred fifty years. I said, “If you knew they were so active, why’d you fly out of Heathrow on the anniversary of Lockerbie? Why’d you risk it?”

“I was following somebody. A young Libyan who was supposed to have critical information about a future terrorist action. He’d made reservations a month ago on the Global flight. A colleague tracked him to Berlin on December eighteenth. Then, on the twenty-first he boarded a connecting flight from Tegel. I was going to pick him up from Heathrow. Create an opportunity to interrogate him.” He stood. “Damn, it’s hot in here.” He began pulling off his shirt. When he raised his arms above his head, I could count his ribs. He’d gotten thinner and the scar on his lower belly crawled like a gray worm across the pale skin.

I wanted to trace that line with my fingers, follow it down and under his belt. Instead, I moved over to the mini-bar and took out two beers. He accepted one from me and swallowed greedily. “Taking that flight was a calculated risk,” he acknowledged. “The Libyan was well connected. Unlikely they’d blow up a plane with one of their own on board. But on the way to my seat, I spotted the FBI guy from Brussels. With that friend of yours, the one who looks Vietnamese.”

“Billy Nu. Neither of them noticed you?”

“I managed to avoid them. But I couldn’t stay on board, take a chance they’d see me, say something that would blow my approach to the Libyan. I figured I’d be better off if I got someone else to meet him in New York, hold him for me. I disembarked, planning to catch a later flight.”

“Your seat turning up empty at the last minute—that didn’t set off an alarm?”

“No, unfortunately. I took precautions. Apparently they worked.” His voice was level, but pain thickened every word.

If the crew had noted his departure, they’d have held up the flight, searched the plane again for explosives. Maybe they’d have found the bomb. I sank onto the single chair. Despite the beer I’d drunk, my mouth had gone dry. “To make you board that particular flight, the terrorists used live bait.”

“Dead now.”

“You want them to think you’re dead, too. Like Billy Nu and the guy from Brussels.”

“So I couldn’t phone you up and say, ‘Hey, Casey, I’m fine.’ I had to have someone else use the signal.”

His eyes were sincere over the top of his beer. But I wasn’t ready to give in. “You knew I didn’t get the message. You knew as soon as you talked to Holger.”

“I assumed you’d find out when you got home and played back your messages.”

“Except all my phone messages disappeared. The tape was stolen.”

He swallowed the rest of his beer. “Intercepted. They’re watching you, too. Bad enough they have one example of our signaling system. Good I didn’t try again and give them any more.”

The golden light from the lamp lit half of his face, sharpening the strong bone of his nose, thickening the lips. I wanted to stroke that face, kiss those lips. But I wasn’t satisfied with his story. Not yet. I made myself look away. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll buy that part of it. But what was this business with van Hoof? Why couldn’t he tell me?”

“Hans wants you to think I’m dead. Says your behavior is more convincing that way.”

“Using me.”

“Yes.” Stefan put his elbows on his knees and leaned toward me. The skin on his chest glistened with sweat. “He doesn’t debate ends and means. The only thing that concerns Hans is the most effective way to put the terrorists out of business.”

“He’s as fanatic as they are.”

“He has reason. His daughter was in the check-in line with her luggage in Vienna in 1985 when Abu Nidal’s hired guns opened fire on the crowd. She survived, but she’s been in a coma ever since. The doctors want to disconnect the machines, but Hans refuses. And while he waits for a miracle, he hunts.”

“He wants revenge for the Vienna airport m******e?”

“That’s the connection that brought him into our plans.” Stefan paused. “We’ll have to make some alterations now.”

“Because you’re supposed to be dead?”

“Right. And Hans made a strong argument that your continued ignorance of my survival would be in my interest.”

“But you talked him out of it.”

“I couldn’t convince him I was right.” The bedsprings squeaked and Stefan stood. He took a step toward me. “Hans won’t be pleased to learn I came here.”

He hadn’t told me everything.

I wanted the complete story.

I wanted him more.

I was on my feet before he’d closed the distance between us. I traced his new hairline. I let my fingers continue through his hair until my hand rested on the back of his neck. His left arm went around me. I drew his face to mine.

His lips were soft, his tongue wet. I tasted his beer and the rough hint of tobacco. And something more. Primal and urgent, the salty tang that comes when too much death makes you fierce for life. Nature’s antidote to wasteful murder, that hot desire to breed. I tasted it in him and in myself. I gave in, gave in completely to it. My head fell back as his mouth crushed down on mine. My fingertips pressed tight against the hot skin of his back.

He pulled his mouth away from mine. “Moj skarbie,” he whispered. My treasure.

“Moj skarbie,” I breathed back.

He slid his free hand between us until his fingers covered my breast. A tingling charge radiated outward until the nerve ends in my fingertips vibrated. Blood was pulsing through every artery, surging into the capillaries, roaring into my brain with a noise like rushing water.

Heat was coming off him, a fiery warmth. I inhaled the scent of male sweat. I rubbed against him, skin on skin. The room grew dimmer, then brighter. His hand was slick against my breast, stroking, massaging, squeezing. The roaring sound in my brain grew louder. Sensation receded from my fingertips, flowed back toward my center. I gasped for air. The wall behind him was breathing, too, rubbery, moving in and out and growing rosy in color. A fuzzy halo formed around the lamp and then began to pulse and wiggle.

We fell onto the bed. I couldn’t feel the wool beneath me now. All sensation was concentrating in my center; all the blood was flowing that way. I was wet, wet and eager.

Stefan slid away from me. I heard tapping, the sound of a single knuckle against the door. In seconds he was across the room, peering through the fisheye. “Cover up,” he said. “We’ve got company.”

Breathing hard, I yanked a sheet off the bed, wrapped it around me.

Stefan opened the door and Hans van Hoof marched in. The air in the room seemed to grow warmer and the oxygen thinner, as though a small inferno were burning in its center. He made a noise of disgust and glared at Stefan. “When Erika called and said you’d gone out, I knew you’d come here.”

As the door whispered across the carpet, a woman moved into the light and stood beside van Hoof. She was dressed in leather—skintight, chocolate-colored pants and a darker suede jacket over a lacy camisole, an outfit that showed her lithe body. She was a few inches shorter than me, at least ten years younger. Dark curly hair, and a face that matched the one in Fräulein Keck’s Swiss passport. Well, the features matched. The photo hadn’t captured the vivid blue of her eyes or her attitude. Even next to van Hoof’s vibrating fury, she was a presence.

The door clicked shut.

Stefan came to stand beside me and said, “She has to know the truth.”

Van Hoof disagreed. “She has to go.”

“Believe me,” I said, “I don’t want to stick around.” I put my hand on Stefan’s arm. “Stefan and I will both go.”

The woman said, “She thinks you’re leaving with her?” Her voice was low-pitched, as though only she and Stefan were in the room.

Before Stefan could answer, I told him, “I saw the two passports. You were supposed to work with her. But you’re dead now. They’ll have to find her a new skiing buddy.”

“Casey,” Stefan said softly, “I’m not finished here.”

“You know a bomb brought down Global 500. And you’ve traced it to Libya and the terrorists holed up there. I’ll give that to the FBI. We can work on it with them, back in the US. The FBI has the resources to nail the bad guys.”

Van Hoof’s voice was like a pistol shot. “Oh, yes, let the Americans handle it. We’ve heard that argument before. The conflict is between the terrorists and the great world power. Leave the solution to the USA.”

I said, “There’s some logic there.”

“Gunslinger logic,” returned van Hoof. “You American cowboys are so happy to have all your shoot-outs on European soil. And what happens? Viennese bystanders gunned down in their airport and Berliners dead in their disco and Scottish villagers crushed by pieces of a plane.”

“You’re talking 1988 and earlier,” I said. “Nothing like that’s happened in Europe lately.”

“Because the terrorists avoided American targets here,” van Hoof said. “But now we have Global Flight 500. The cycle of attack and retaliation will resume, if we allow it. No, I think we will root out this evil on our own.”

“I agree,” the woman told van Hoof. “We must dispose of this distraction and get on with it.”

Was I imagining it, or had she moved closer to Stefan? Given him a seductive look? Had they been lovers once? Were they still? I asked her, “Who are you?”

She bent down over Stefan’s jacket. Without looking at me, she extracted his cigarette pack and removed one. She rose and tossed the pack to Stefan. He caught it easily, as though the two of them had been practicing. She pulled out a matchbook, lit her cigarette and inhaled.

“This is Erika Berger,” Stefan said. “She works for a private arms trader in Antwerp. Her job affords her a number of useful contacts.”

Business in Antwerp had once kept Stefan away from me for so long, I’d recklessly gone to Belgium to find him. And Erika Berger was a gunrunner in Antwerp. How damnably glamorous. Had he known her then? Adolescent jealousy was twisting inside me. Forty years old, and I felt as needy as I had at fourteen. I hated that feeling. I said, “Taking this to the FBI solves a lot of problems for me. Convince me you people can do a better job.”

Van Hoof raised an eyebrow at Stefan.

Stefan spoke directly to me. “You know about the secret meeting in Tripoli.”

A disparate group of terrorists had met clandestinely at Libyan intelligence headquarters in September. “You think that was when they coordinated their plans for this bombing?” I asked.

“And for future actions,” he said. “All using explosives cached in Libya and manpower from the terrorist organizations. All targeting American carriers flying out of Western Europe.”

“Libyan intelligence agents, members of the Abu Nidal Organization and PFLP-GC, people like that—they get the explosive devices onto the planes,” I said.

“Different teams of terrorists,” Stefan told me. “Capturing the perpetrators of the Global bombing isn’t enough. The next incident will use different manpower. We have to find out where and when they’ll strike.”

I said, “Granted, nobody in the US government has shown any talent for penetrating Middle Eastern terrorist networks. But what makes you think a crew of lily-white Europeans can do any better?”

“Obviously, none of us would attempt such foolishness.” Van Hoof’s eyes glittered. “Far better to direct our energies toward the single intellect organizing these events.”

Not a Middle Eastern intellect, then. He had to mean someone who looked and thought like he did. Stefan had told me the Libyan had come to Heathrow from Berlin. Holger had been instrumental in exposing the German companies behind Libyan construction of a chemical weapons plant in Rabta. The US halted that project but couldn’t plug the German pipeline to Colonel Gaddafi. A German company sold him tunnel-digging machinery and he drilled under a mountain at Tarhuna and began again, his gas-mixing equipment courtesy of Siemens.

“You think a German planned this bombing,” I said. “You’re trying to get information from him or from someone close to him.”

Erika held up her cigarette like a stop sign. “She knows more than she should—”

I looked at Stefan. “You can’t approach him. You’re too well known in Germany. You want people to think you’re dead, you have to stay out of this. Better you stay with me in the US.”

Van Hoof appeared ready to spit at me. “Being around you is equally deadly for him. Stefan should never have come to you. We don’t know who may have tracked you here. Many clever hunters are seeking the reward for his death.”

My stomach lurched. I took a deep breath before I said to Stefan, “There was a price on your head?”

He stared at the cigarette pack, then extracted one. He set the near-empty pack on the night stand. As he drew the lighter from his jeans pocket, he said, “Five hundred thousand.”

“Then the danger is past,” I said. “No one has any reason to believe you survived that explosion. Your killers have been paid off.”

Van Hoof said, “No one’s been paid. The contract is still open.”

“Open? Who put out this contract?” I asked.

Van Hoof and Erika exchanged a look I couldn’t interpret. Neither spoke.

“Who wants to make sure I’ve been eliminated?” Stefan blew out a cloud of pungent smoke. “An otherwise unexceptional German businessman. In the one news photo we’ve got, he’s standing at the fringes of a company party in Brussels. A picture from earlier in the year. It only surfaced last month when police began looking for the Belgian owner of that same company because he’d shipped embargoed computer equipment to Gaddafi.”

“I read about that,” I said.

“Yes, we all read that story with interest. And I spotted our man. Few people would have recognized him or made the connection, his new identity is so artfully documented. Now he calls himself Gunter Storch. But I knew him rather well before, when he was Major Reinhardt Krüger.”

“Major?” I asked. “You mean—”

“Yes,” Stefan said. “Major Krüger was in the Stasi. He worked with terrorist groups. Few of his colleagues realized how intimately he was involved. Wisely, he disappeared right after reunification, before the extent of his collusion was revealed. Apparently he slid quietly into his new identity of international trader. But that’s only a front. His primary activity is as a behind-the-scenes deal-maker between Libya and Western business. Given his background, we are certain he planned the bombing of Global 500.”

“You say he’s got a contract out on you. Yet you’re trying to contact an informant who’s got access to him. What, are you suicidal?”

“We know that more bombings will follow this one. Krüger is the mastermind behind them. I much preferred extracting the information we need in a quiet chat with the Libyan, somewhere in the US.” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, my only alternate source is one of Krüger’s German associates. A man who wants money badly enough to talk to me.”

“Why not leave it to the German police? Let them pick up Krüger and interrogate him.”

Stefan shook his head tiredly. “The police are hampered by rules of evidence. They couldn’t detain Major Krüger long enough to get anything useful from him.”

Van Hoof said to me, “You understand now? This isn’t a problem that can be solved by apprehending one group of terrorists. We can’t turn this over to your FBI. They may be good at catching bad guys like the ones who planted this last bomb. But we want to discover what a different bunch of bad guys will be sent to do next. And that requires delicacy.”

Stefan said, “We can’t help you go home, not yet. We can’t give your people what we’ve got on Global Flight 500. Hans knows a place where you’ll be safe till we can.”

My safety again. Stefan claimed to be so concerned about me. But I felt pushed aside. Told to put my life on hold, while he risked everything to make contact with a shadowy informant. The matching Swiss passports and the Jetta with Swiss registration were leftovers from an earlier fallback plan. One that had Stefan and Erika posing as a couple. They’d have to rewrite the script if they wanted to bolster the fiction that Stefan was dead. But they’d still be working together.

I wondered how Stefan had missed the obvious. I could give him precisely the help he needed now. It was as clear to me as if I were watching myself on a video.

“Enough of this,” Erika told van Hoof. “Let’s not waste any more time.”

She was so eager to get rid of me. I wished I could let her have her way. I wished I could leave. But I didn’t trust her to protect Stefan. Not the way I could.

Ego. My own worst enemy.