Private Berlin Read online

  “He took personal leave early last week,” Katharina was saying. “He was supposed to be back the day before yesterday, but he never checked in. He still hasn’t. I’ve tried his cell, the house, e-mail, text. Nothing.”

  This wasn’t like Chris Schneider at all, Mattie agreed. He was a careful, methodical detective, and a stickler for following the agency’s rules and procedures, which included checking in when you were supposed to.

  “You try the chip?” Mattie asked at last.

  The year before, Private employees around the world had been offered a small locator chip that could be embedded under the skin of the upper back so they could be found in case of emergencies. Mattie had balked at the idea, thinking that if it was misused it could turn totalitarian in nature.

  But to her surprise, Schneider had agreed to the procedure.

  “That’s why I was calling,” Katharina replied before hesitating again. “I’m lying in bed, couldn’t sleep after some voodoo tea my mother made me drink. And I was thinking that you could authorize it.”

  “I don’t have that authority, Kat,” Mattie said.

  “You’re the closest to it, Mattie.”

  “Not anymore I’m not. Are you ready to report Chris missing to Kripo?”

  “I don’t know. I’m confused. You know…he could be off with someone.”

  Mattie hesitated, and then sighed. “I can’t control that.”

  “I’d hate to send in a rescue team in that sort of situation.”

  “I can see your dilemma, but I can’t help you. Look, you’re going to have to call Jack Morgan to get authorization.”

  Morgan owned Private and ran its famous Los Angeles office.

  “I put in a call to him an hour ago. He hasn’t gotten back to me.”

  Mattie chewed on her lip, then said, “I’m sure he’s okay. But if he hasn’t checked in by noon, say, or if Jack hasn’t called in, we’ll activate the chip.”

  “Unless you hear from me, I’ll be at the office at noon,” Katharina said.

  “I’ll be there too,” Mattie promised, and hung up.

  Outside, thunder boomed and through a porthole window she saw lightning split the sky. Rain began to drum on the roof of the aircraft. Mattie looked over at Sophia, who was watching her with genuine concern.

  “Who’s Chris?” Sophia asked softly.

  Mattie swallowed at a sick taste seeping into her throat, and then replied, “Until six weeks ago, countess, he was my fiancé.”

  FIVE

  AS DAWN APPROACHES, I find myself standing in a room with mirrors for walls and ceiling, and a big round bed with red sheets.

  I am naked in this room of mirrors, stripped of all disguises save one—the reconstructed face a surgeon in the Ivory Coast gave me twenty-three years ago.

  I look at my face, this ultimate mask, and smile because no one would ever know that behind it is me, and because a rare beauty has agreed to join me here in this room of reflection and pleasure.

  Except for the snakeskin stiletto heels, the stunning brown woman shutting the door is naked too. She’s from Guadeloupe, or so she says. Her name is Genevieve. Or so she says.

  Whoever she really is, she smiles weakly as I set the canvas bag I carry on the bed.

  “I have seen you around before,” she says in an uncertain French accent.

  I don’t even blink. “Have you now?”

  “I think.” She looks at my case and tenses. “What’s in there?”

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s something rare and beautiful.”

  She nods, but there’s no conviction in the gesture.

  “You seem concerned,” I say.

  She rubs her hands together. “Just nerves. One of my friends here, Ilse? She disappeared last week. You might have seen her. A spinner? German?”

  I wave my hand dismissively. “I don’t remember names, my dear. They’re artificial. Made up. I mean, do you use your real name here, Genevieve?”

  She hesitates, but then shakes her head.

  “There you go now,” I say in a teasing, friendly manner. “It’s all a fantasy. You can be whatever person you want to be. Or anything you want to be. I am comfortable with that. Are you?”

  Her eyes shift, pause, and then she nods the tiniest of nods.

  “Good,” I say, but part of me feels a twinge of anxiety. Did she see me with Ilse? No. That’s impossible. I’m certain we were alone at all times.

  And so I open the bag, revealing a primitive ivory and black leather mask crafted as a leering monster. The stain and lacquer finish is cracked with time, and burnished in places. But the lips have retained their deep henna color. So have the areas around the slits cut for the wearer’s eyes.

  “A Chokwe tribesman in the Congo made it a hundred years ago,” I tell Genevieve. “It’s very rare. It cost me a small fortune.”

  I put the mask on, hooking the hemp straps that hold it to my face so I can see clearly through the eye slits.

  The mask smells of Africa, of moldering wood and nutmeg and roasting peppers. My breath echoes inside the mask, slow and languid, like a leopard contemplating prey.

  I gesture for Genevieve to lie down on her back on the bed. She’s staring at me, and at my mask, and there’s enough fear in her eyes that I feel myself stir and harden.

  That, my friends, is just perfect. Her mind is playing games, inventing scenarios far worse than what I have in mind for a late, late-night delight.

  Isn’t it interesting how that works, that the mere suggestion of threat stirs the darkest regions of the mind?

  Sensing her fear, indeed feeding on it, I kneel next to Genevieve, caressing her soft cocoa breasts, and then slide my fingers into her bare mystery, all the time glancing around at the mirrors that surround me, admiring my newest mask from an array of perspectives.

  I am not a young man, but I tell you one and all that my manhood stands like a spear when Genevieve begins to writhe under my insistent touch. It’s an anxious writhing, and that only fuels me more until it’s simply impossible to keep my desires at bay any longer.

  Pulling her around and throwing back her legs, I poise to enter her, my hips cocked. The breath of the beast I’m becoming rasps from my throat in sharp, cutting bursts.

  Genevieve looks up, clearly frightened by the monster crouched above her, which only excites me more.

  “What is your name, chéri?” she asks in a quivering voice. “What should I call you while we have sex?”

  “Me?” I say, and then thrust savagely into her. “I am the Invisible Man.”

  BOOK ONE

  THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE

  CHAPTER 1

  PRIVATE BERLIN OCCUPIED the penthouse suite atop a green glass and exposed-steel Bauhaus-style building on the south side of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin’s Mitte district.

  Clutching a cup of strong coffee, increasingly worried about her ex-fiancé, and still groggy after less than five hours of sleep, Mattie Engel stepped out of the elevator into the agency’s lobby at a little before noon.

  Three days late was not like Chris at all, she thought for what seemed the hundredth time.

  Unless he went off with someone.

  To Greece. Or to Portugal.

  Like we did when we first fell in love.

  Private Berlin’s lobby featured polished steel sculptures that depicted milestones in the history of cryptography. She passed one of an Enigma machine, and another that included the death mask of Blaise de Vigenère, the sixteenth-century French secret code genius, whose blank eyes seemed to follow her as she crossed to a retina scan on a black pedestal next to pneumatic doors made of bulletproof glass.

  Before she could look into the scanner, Katharina Doruk appeared on the screen above the doors. Olive-skinned with long, wild ringlets of hair, Katharina was one of the most exotically beautiful women Mattie had ever known. She was also one of the toughest—a second-generation Turkish-German who’d grown up in Wedding, a rugged immigrant neighborhood, and the only daughter a
mong six sons.

  Katharina peered through her reading glasses. “We’re in the briefing room.”

  “Any word?” Mattie asked.

  “No, but we’ve got a video conference with Jack in five minutes.”

  Mattie tried to suppress the anxiety that firmly took root in her after the screen went dark. She pressed her right eye to the scan, seeing a soft blue light pass left to right. The glass doors opened with a hydraulic sigh.

  Mattie trudged down a hallway that overlooked a long, linear park where the ground had been shaped into two huge triangles, one facing west and the other east.

  Until the fall of the communist German Democratic Republic, or GDR, the park had been an infamous stretch of the Berlin Wall’s no-man’s-land, a garishly lit, wide, and sandy stretch between the inner and outer cement barriers and the barbed wire and gun towers that had divided the city in two back in 1961.

  Ordinarily, Mattie would have paused to look down at the park because, no matter what her mood, it usually made her feel better. The park represented a terrible time in her family’s life, and in her city’s life.

  But it was also a powerful symbol of new beginnings, and she believed in new beginnings. New beginnings were the only way to survive.

  That morning, however, Mattie could not get herself to look at the park. Deep in her gut, no matter how much she tried to quash it, she feared that Chris’s disappearance hinted at the end of something.

  But I wanted us to stop, didn’t I? Didn’t I?

  Before Mattie could drown in those questions she ducked into an amphitheater with rising tiers of desks that faced a curved wall of screens glowing flat blue, waiting for a feed.

  Katharina sat at a desk on the highest tier beside a man who looked like an aging hippie, with long silver hair, round wire-rimmed glasses, a scruffy beard, and a Grateful Dead tie-dye sweatshirt.

  His name was Ernst Gabriel, Dr. Ernst Gabriel, and he was the smartest person Mattie had ever known, a polymath with five advanced degrees, including an MD, a PhD in computer science, and master’s degrees in physics and cultural anthropology.

  Gabriel was also a forensics expert and ran Private Berlin’s investigative support system. He’d be the one turning on the tracking system and operating it.

  Mattie was climbing the stairs toward Gabriel and Katharina when a tall, muscular, bald man in his late thirties appeared behind them. Tom Burkhart was Private Berlin’s newest hire. Until recently he’d been a top operator with GSG 9, Germany’s elite counterterror unit. He usually ran security details.

  Mattie frowned, wondering why Katharina had called him in.

  “Hi, Burkhart, Doc,” Mattie said, before kissing Katharina on both cheeks.

  She took a seat between Burkhart and Gabriel just as the big screen at the front of the amphitheater blinked and then lit up with the handsome and very tanned face of Jack Morgan, owner and president of Private.

  Morgan peered at them and said, “I just got in. I was sailing over from Catalina and don’t have coverage out there. Is he still missing?”

  “He is, Jack, going on three days now,” Katharina replied in English. “I’d like permission to activate his chip.”

  Morgan winced slightly. “The chip? You’re sure? I wouldn’t want to invade his privacy unnecessarily.” His eyes shifted. “Mattie? What do you think? Shouldn’t this be your call?”

  Mattie flushed. “Jack, uh, I don’t know if you heard, but we broke off the engagement.”

  Morgan looked greatly surprised. “I didn’t. I’m sorry. When?”

  “Six weeks ago,” she said. “So it’s entirely your call, Jack.”

  Morgan digested that, and then said, “Gabriel, have you had a chance to look at his credit card receipts? His cell phone records?”

  “I just got in, myself, but I did manage a quick search,” Gabriel replied. “I’ve got a steady trail of purchases in and around Berlin and Frankfurt, all on his Private card, until this past Thursday evening. And then nothing. And I’ve got a long list of phone calls that ended about the same time. Nothing since. I haven’t dug into the particulars yet.”

  Morgan put his hands in a prayer pose. “What was he working on?”

  CHAPTER 2

  KATHARINA GAVE HER laptop several commands. Morgan’s face shrunk and shifted left on the big screen. A photograph of a soccer player performing a dramatic scissors kick appeared beside him.

  “This is Cassiano, the top striker for the Hertha Berlin Sports Club, and the top goal scorer in the German second league,” Katharina said. “Manchester United hired us to look into him because they are thinking of acquiring him.”

  Even though Cassiano had proven himself a prolific scorer, the British team was concerned about the Brazilian’s erratic play in a handful of games. They’d wanted him vetted before offering him a contract.

  Katharina said, “But as of two Fridays ago, Chris told me he had just a few loose ends to look into, but he was leaning heavily toward clearing Cassiano.”

  “And Chris’s other case?” Morgan asked.

  Katharina typed on her laptop again. A video clip played showing a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat and dark sunglasses that shielded much of his face. He exited a black Porsche Cayenne and walked away from the camera. A beautiful, elegant woman climbed out the other side and followed him.

  “That’s Hermann Krüger,” Katharina informed them. “Billionaire. Early fifties. Big art and car collector. Very secretive. Doesn’t like his name in the media. Grew up in the GDR, but took to capitalism quickly after the wall came down. He built a fortune in real estate here in Berlin and big public works projects in Africa.”

  Mattie said, “Didn’t we do some work for his company?”

  “Two years ago,” Dr. Gabriel confirmed as he reworked the band that held his ponytail. “A comprehensive review of their security system. But we didn’t deal directly with Krüger himself.”

  “But Chris was dealing with him?”

  “No,” Katharina said. “Krüger’s wife, Agnes, is the client. She believed he was seeing other women and asked us to look into it. As of the last update I got, Chris had located at least three mistresses. He’d also discovered that Krüger visited prostitutes, lots of them, sometimes twice a day.”

  Burkhart snorted. “Twice a day? An older guy like that must be taking testosterone supplements to be able to get it up that often. And Viagra.”

  Mattie cringed. She’d had limited interaction with Burkhart since he’d joined Private. But overall she’d found him to be headstrong, crude, and abrasive, perhaps good traits for a counterterrorism expert and bodyguard but not, in Mattie’s opinion, for the kind of delicate investigative work Private Berlin often performed.

  “Chris didn’t mention testosterone or Viagra,” Katharina sniffed. “But I know he had an appointment set for tomorrow to update Frau Krüger.”

  “How much would Hermann Krüger stand to lose if his philandering went public in a nasty divorce case?” Morgan asked.

  “A billion,” Gabriel replied. “Maybe two.”

  Private’s owner thought about that. “Why did Chris take time off?”

  “I don’t know,” Katharina said. “He texted me last Monday that he needed a few days’ personal time and that he would call me on Thursday at the latest. He’s such a hardworking guy, I gave him the time without questioning it.”

  “Of course,” Morgan said. “That’s it. No other cases?”

  “Not that I—”

  “Not true,” Gabriel interrupted. “He was working on something else, Jack.”

  CHAPTER 3

  MY MOTHER WAS the first to show me the power of masks.

  She was a makeup artist with the German State Opera and Ballet. She was also a traitor to her country, to her husband, and to me.

  But those are stories for another time.

  The masks.

  As a child I lived with my mother and father in a prefabricated apartment building that the state erected in the far eastern rea
ches of Berlin, out where the city met farms where livestock was raised for milk and slaughter.

  I note this, my friends, only because in addition to being a raging alcoholic, my father was a professional butcher.

  The day I learned about the power of masks, my father was at work, and the opera house was dark for the season. I must have been about seven and had been sick with chicken pox.

  Trying to cheer me up, my mother climbed into the attic and brought down a large trunk. She opened it, and I swore I could smell old people in there—you know, the scent of slow, inevitable decay?

  She pulled out a Papierkrattler mask, which featured smirking, cartoon features: ruby lips, a gargantuan nose, wild eyes, and a raccoon tail for hair. She said it was last used fifty years before during a parade in Ravensburg, down near the Swiss border.

  My mother said that the mask had once belonged to her mother, who had died in the bombing that reduced Berlin and my father to smoking rubble and desperation in the last year of Hitler’s war. The mask had somehow survived.

  “This mask is a miracle,” my mother told me. “A miracle.”

  She set it aside and brought out another mask, this one black, narrower, and fitted across the bridge of the nose like a criminal’s disguise.

  “It’s from Don Giovanni, the opera,” she said as she slipped it on me.

  “Who’s Don Giovanni?” I asked.

  “A bad man who dies badly. That is how an evil person dies. The death of a sinner always reflects their life. Remember that.”

  Of course I would later learn that this was complete and utter nonsense.

  Death is never a form of retribution.

  Death is a thing of beauty, something to behold, a moment to celebrate.

  But good son that I was, I agreed earnestly. My mother brought out her makeup kit and showed me how to paint my face. She gave me surly lips, sunken eyes, and wicked brows that made me laugh.

  After she’d added a wig and glasses, I remember looking in the mirror and thinking I really was someone else, most certainly not me anymore.