“No,” he said. “Wait, yes.” His eyes fixed on a street sign as it whipped past. “Goethe Strasse. I’m on Goethe Strasse.” “Hold on,” Rodgers said. “We’re bringing a map up on the computer.” “I’ll hold on,” Herbert said. “Man, I’ve got nowhere to go.” The van spun onto Goethe Strasse, clipped a car as it did, then accelerated. Herbert didn’t know whether these jerks had some kind of legal immunity, zero brains, or just a lot of mad, because they obviously weren’t giving up. He figured they were pissed because he was an American and a handicapped man, and he’d stood up to them. That kind of behavior simply could not be tolerated.
And of course, he thought, there isn’t a policeman in sight. But as the officer back at the Beer-Hall had said, most of the Landespolizei were tied up watching other meeting places and events. Besides, no one expected a car chase in the middle of the city itself.
Rodgers came back on. “Bob— you’re okay there. Get onto Goethe Strasse and continue east if you can. It’s a straight run to Rathenau Strasse, which runs south. We’ll try to get help to you over there—” “Shit!” Herbert cried again, and dropped the phone.
As the van got closer, the gunman leaned from the window and began firing low, at the tires. Herbert had no choice but to drive into the less-crowded oncoming lane, the lane heading into town. He quickly put himself out of range.
Cars swung out of his way as he raced ahead.
Suddenly, his flight was halted and his orientation rattled as he thumped hard into a pothole. Pinwheeling a half-turn toward the oncoming van, Herbert tapped the brake and took command of the spin. The van shot past him as he stopped facing west, facing the way he’d come.
The van screamed to a stop some fifty yards behind him.
Herbert was back within range. He grabbed the phone and hit the gas.
“Mike,” he said, “we’re goin’ the other way now. Back along Goethe to Lange Laube.” “Understood,” Rodgers said. “Darrell’s on the phone too. Stay cool and we’ll try to get you some help.” “I’m cool,” Herbert said as he glanced back at the roaring van. “Just make sure I don’t end up cold,” he said.
He looked in his rearview mirror and saw the gunman reloading his weapon. They weren’t going to give up, and sooner or later his luck would run out. As he looked in the mirror, he saw the wheelchair and decided to get in front of the van, press the button to activate the bucket, and dump his wheelchair under their wheels. It might not stop them, but it would certainly cause some damage. And if he lived, he’d have fun filling out the requisition form for a new one.
Reason for Loss. He thought of the only essay section of form L-5. “Dropped it from a speeding car to foil neo-Nazi assassins. ” Herbert slowed, let the van come closer, then pressed the button on the dash.
The rear door remained closed as a singsongy female voice informed him, “I’m sorry. This device will not operate while the car is in motion. ” Herbert slammed his palm on the gas pedal and sped up. He watched the van closely in his rearview mirror, staying dead-center in front of them as much as possible so the gunman wouldn’t have much of a shot from the side window.
Then he saw the gunman put his foot to the windshield and push it out. The glass flew up and away in a fluid sheet, then shattered into countless, jagged pellets as it hit the road.
The man poked the gun out and sighted on the car. He fought to steady his weapon in the whipping wind. It was a nightmarish sight, a thug riding shotgun in a van.
Herbert only had a moment to act. He smashed his hand down on the brake, the Mercedes stopped suddenly, and the van rear-ended him hard. His trunk folded up and in like a ribbon. But above it, he saw the gunman tossed forward. The man was thrown at the waist across the lower portion of the window frame. The gun flew from his hands, onto the hood of the van, and slid over the side. The driver was also thrown ahead, his chest colliding hard with the steering wheel. He lost control of the van, though the vehicle stopped as his foot slipped from the gas.
Herbert’s only wound was another unpleasant scrape across his chest, inflicted by the shoulder strap.
There was a moment of clear silence, broken by cars honking from far off, and people approaching cautiously, yelling to other people to get help.
Not sure that he had put the car or its occupants out of commission, Herbert pressed down on the gas to get away.
The car didn’t move. He could feel his tires racing, but he could also feel the tug of the two fenders locked together.
He sat still for a moment, realizing for the first time how his heart was racing as he wondered if he could get himself and the wheelchair out.
Suddenly, the van bellowed back to life. Herbert felt a rough tug and looked in the rearview mirror. A new driver had taken the place of the old one and had shifted into reverse. Now he moved ahead, then shifted back, then jerked ahead.
Trying to shake me loose, Herbert thought, even as the vehicles unhooked. Without stopping, the van continued to back up. It sped off, then turned a corner and vanished.
The intelligence officer sat gripping the steering wheel, trying to decide what to do. In the distance, he heard the siren which had sent the neo-Nazis on their way. One of those loud ones which made the Opel police cars sound like Buicks. People began coming up to the window and speaking to Herbert softly, in German.
“Danke, ” he said. “Thanks. I’m all right. Gesund Healthy.” Healthy? he thought. He thought of the police coming to question him. German police were not famed for their friendliness. At best, he would be treated objectively. At worst.
At worst, he thought, the police station has a couple of neo-Nazi sympathizers. At worst; they put me in prison. At worst, somebody gets to me in the middle of the night with a knife or a length of steel wire.
“Screw that,” he said. Thanking the onlookers again and politely urging them to get out of the way, Herbert quickly shifted gears, picked up the phone, and set off after the van.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Thursday, 11:00 A.M., Washington, D.C.
It was nicknamed the Kraken, after the fabled, manytentacled sea monster. And it was set up by Matt Stoll when he was hired as one of Op-Center’s first employees.
The Kraken was a powerful computer system which was linked to databases worldwide. The resources and information ranged from photo libraries to FBI fingerprint files, from books in the Library of Congress to newspaper morgues in every major city of the United States, from stock prices to air and rail schedules, from telephone directories around the world to troop and police strength and deployment in most cities at home and abroad.
But Stoll and his small staff had designed a system which not only accessed data, it analyzed it. An ID program written by Stoll allowed researchers to circle a nose or an eye or mouth on a terrorist’s face and find it anywhere it appeared in international police or newspaper files.
Landscapes could likewise be compared by highlighting the contour of a mountain, horizon, or shore. Two full-time day and night operators were stationed at the Archive, which could handle over thirty separate operations at once.
It took the Kraken less than fifteen minutes to find the photograph of Deputy Foreign Minister Hausen. It had been snapped by a Reuters photographer and published in a Berlin newspaper five months before, when Hausen had arrived to give a speech at a dinner of Holocaust survivors.
When he received the information, Eddie couldn’t help but resent the cruelty of the juxtaposition of this particular image in the game.
The landscape behind Hausen took a little longer to identify, though here the programmers got lucky. Instead of asking for a worldwide check, Deirdre Donahue and Natt Mendelsohn started with Germany, then moved to Austria, Poland, and France. After forty-seven minutes, the computer found the spot. It was located in the south of France.
Deirdre located a history of the view, wrote a complete summary, and added it to the file.
Eddie faxed the information to Matt. Then the long, powerful tentacles of the Kraken rested as the monster went back to watching, silently, from its secret lair.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Thursday, 5:02 P.M., Hamburg, Germany
As he walked back to the office building, Paul Hood was showered with memories. Crisp, detailed memories of the buried but unforgotten things he and Nancy Jo had done and said to each other nearly twenty years ago.