Brandenburg (41 page)

“He told the desk clerk one, possibly two. He couldn’t be certain.”

“Is the hotel being cooperative?”

“We spoke with the manager,” Juales replied. “No problem. He’s been very discreet. Even gave us a room two doors away. We’ve got two men there. If Lieber comes out, we’ve got a copy key card. We can plant a bug in his room in case he entertains visitors.”

“What about his telephone?”

Juales said, “We’ve got that covered already. We’re going to wire into the hotel telephone system. The manager wanted to see our permission first. Chief Inspector Gonzales has organized it.” Juales glanced at his watch. “Our people are on their way and should be patched into Lieber’s telephone within the next half hour.”

Sanchez inclined his head gratefully at Gonzales. “My thanks, Eduardo.”

Gonzales smiled, coughed again, and looked at the carved ashtray as he ground out his cigarette, the dark, ghoulish faces staring up at him. “It’s the only way we beat the devils of this world. No?”

Gonzales stood up, hitched his trousers farther up his thin waist,
glanced at the liquid refreshments still untouched on his desk. The atmosphere in the office felt charged. Expectant. Like worried fathers outside a maternity ward.

Gonzales said, “There’s nothing more we can do until Lieber makes a move. We’ve got a hospitality room for visitors down the hall. I’ll have some tacos and fresh drinks sent up, and you can rest yourselves.” He looked down at Sanchez and smiled. “Besides, it will give us a chance to catch up on gossip since Caracas. Okay?”

4:40 P.M.

Franz Lieber stood at the window on the Sheraton’s fifth floor. He swallowed his second scotch-and-soda, gripped the empty glass tightly in his big hand as he stared down at the city below. The air-conditioning was on, the hum distracting.

Tiredness racked his body, pains arcing intermittently across his chest in spasms, like tiny jolts of electricity. Rivulets of sweat ran down his back despite the air-conditioning.

Stress.

Lieber ran the back of his hand across his damp forehead.

The flights had been bad enough. Asunción to São Paulo. An overnight in Paulo, then the long haul to Mexico City. Throughout his long journey, anxiety gnawed like a rodent inside his skull. He took deep breaths, let them out slowly, trying to relax, but knew it was useless.

Mexico City out there and beyond—a ragged, noisy, dirty sprawl. Cities like this drained him. Claustrophobic, chaotic, orderless.

A woman would help relieve the tension. But Kruger had expressly forbidden visitors or phone calls.

Just wait. For the return call.

The hotel would be checked first. To make sure he had no tails, no one watching him. Lieber tried to tell Kruger it was okay when he had phoned him from the airport, that he had been careful, but Kruger refused to accept his assurance.

“Just stay in your room. I’ll get back to you.”

“How long?”

“As long as it takes; just wait for my call,” Kruger snapped back, before he hung up.

Lieber shook his head and swore to himself, felt the trickles of sweat licking his spine. The waiting wasn’t helping his stress.

How long before they checked him out? He’d been in the room almost two hours now. As he went to pour himself another scotch from the minibar, the telephone rang. Startled, he felt as if a shock of electricity had jolted his body.

He rushed to pick up the receiver.

•   •   •

Sanchez sat quietly in the small hospitality room. White walls. Thick, deep-pile carpet the same gray-blue color as Gonzales’s uniform.

For ten minutes he and Gonzales had chatted, until tiredness overcame Sanchez. Now he sat sipping iced, freshly squeezed orange juice from a paper cup. A half-eaten taco and a hot chili sauce dip lay in front of him on a paper plate.

The others sat and talked. Mainly Gonzales. Stories about the old days in Mexico City, the problems, the interesting cases.

Juales sat there nodding occasionally at his boss, his neck lost in his shirt so that it looked as if he had no neck at all. Sanchez guessed he was very capable. His boss had chosen well.

“You think Asunción’s bad,” Gonzales was saying to Cavales, each man puffing on a cigarette, “you ought to try a month here. Twenty-three million people, amigo. Like a cross between a zoo and a lunatic asylum, without walls.”

Sanchez closed his eyes tightly, eyelids aching, opened them again. The view beyond the panoramic window was stupendous, as far as the high Sierras surrounding the city. The high altitude had a dizzying effect, making the effort of thinking and talking a slow process.

But something was happening.

He could sense it.

The next move was Lieber’s.

He wondered what it would be.

Sanchez looked up, heard a soft click as the door behind opened. A good-looking young man in a cream-colored linen suit stood in the open doorway. He clutched a sheaf of papers, smiled warily at the two visitors and Gonzales before his eyes shifted to Juales.

“Captain . . . may I speak with you?”

Juales crossed to the man, and they stepped out into the hallway together. After a few moments of huddled conversation, Juales returned, holding a single sheet of paper.

“We traced the call made at the airport.”

“And?” Gonzales prompted.

“It was to an address in Lomas de Chapultepec.”

“An expensive area,” commented Gonzales. “Did you get the name of the occupant?”

Juales shook his head. “Not yet. But my man did a little quick checking. The property’s owned by a company called Cancún Enterprises. It’s run by a man named Josef Haider. He’s a businessman. Old guy. Very wealthy.”

“I know who he is,” Gonzales said quickly. He looked at Sanchez and Cavales as both men stood up.

Gonzales drew on his cigarette, blew out thick smoke. “Haider is German-born. Rich. A retired businessman. Owns a lot of property in the city.” He coughed and smiled. “Maybe this fits in with what you told me about this other old guy . . .”

“Tsarkin?”

“Sí.”

“Tell me.”

Gonzales sighed. “Haider came here from Brazil maybe forty years ago. He must be very old now. But lots of powerful friends. I remember him because there was a problem once with an extradition warrant from France when I worked in headquarters. They
said Haider was wanted for war crimes there. Claimed he was in the Gestapo. Long time ago, I know, but Haider must have greased a lot of palms, because the charges were refuted by our people. The French got nowhere.” Gonzales smiled. “Simple when you have money, sí?”

Sanchez nodded. “And this is one of his properties?”

“It would appear so,” said Gonzales. “It’s in a wealthy area up in the Chapultepec Hills. Huge mansions and villas in the middle of landscaped parks and rocky ravines. Where only the very rich live.” He smiled. “And maybe a few corrupt police chiefs and judges as well.”

“Can you make a check on the occupants? Get some of your people to watch the place? I would appreciate it, Eduardo.”

Gonzales nodded. “No problem, amigo. Straightaway.”

A shrill sound startled them as Juales’s phone buzzed. The man flicked it on, listened.

Sanchez heard nothing, only Juales’s sharp replies as he frowned.

“When? You got the number? Put out an all-cars alert. But tell them don’t approach. Just observe and report their position. Understood?”

Juales let his hand fall, looked at Gonzales. “Lieber got a call in his room three minutes ago.”

“Our men were tapped into his phone?”

Juales shook his head. “No. The technicians were still working on it. They missed the call. By the time they got to the operator, Lieber had put down the phone.”

“No! Of all the lousy luck.”

“That’s not all. Lieber left the Sheraton two minutes ago. Went down to the lobby, crossed the street, and bought a newspaper. A car came by, Lieber climbed in, and the car moved off like a bat out of hell.”

“The car was a taxi?”

“Not a taxi. A civvy. Volkswagen Beetle.”

“Our men followed?”

“Sí.”

“And?”

Juales swallowed. “As of twenty seconds ago, we lost him.”

37

CHAPULTEPEC. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 5:14 P.M.

Lieber sat in the front seat of the white Volkswagen as it wove through the chaos of traffic.

Lunatic Mexican drivers, chili and pepper smells, and all the time the pressing, claustrophobic sensation of sweaty bodies. Everywhere. Millions of them.

Sweat still poured through his shirt, a fresh one he had hastily dragged on before he left the hotel. He was clear, according to Kruger. Two of Haider’s men checked out the hotel and lobby for almost two hours. No cops or plainclothes so far as they could tell.

If he had been watched, the watchers were very good. But Lieber doubted that. He had moved too quickly, too carefully. Still, the cop, Sanchez, was not one to underestimate.

The cramped, whining Volkswagen felt claustrophobic, despite the open windows. The man in the driver’s seat was one of Haider’s people. He wore a sweatshirt and tennis shorts, and his forehead was creased as he concentrated on the traffic.

Outside the windows of the tiny Volkswagen, darkness fell, lights coming on, the traffic thickening—if it could get any thicker—a scene of utter chaos. But the driver knew the city, wove down side streets and alleyways, ignoring the irate screams and cries of street vendors whose barrows got in the way, the whiny-engined Volkswagen
climbing up into the hills. The car was well chosen. Mexico City thronged with Volkswagens.

Now whitewashed adobes and filthy colonias were replaced by splendid villas with walled gardens. Armed, uniformed guards, some with leashed guard dogs, stood behind gates. Lieber was no stranger to Mexico City: Chapultepec was a place for the rich and elite.

Suddenly the Volkswagen turned into a quiet avenue and halted outside a double wrought-iron gate. A man appeared beyond the gate and peered into the car. Moments later, he opened the gates manually and let them through.

The Volkswagen strained up a winding gravel road to a white villa, set amid lush gardens full of jacaranda trees and thick-clumped flower beds of poinsettias and
cempazúchitl
. The flower of death, old Haider had once told him it was called.

Sulfur-yellow light washed over the vast lawns dotted with palm trees, and lights blazed in windows. The big villa was lavish. Private. Secure.

Lieber saw the swimming pool, a kidney-shaped shimmering of turquoise light. Next to it a patio and French windows at the side of the house. And then he saw the guards, Werner and Rotman. They wore shorts and sneakers and light rainproof jogger jackets as they patrolled the gardens, carrying Heckler & Koch MP 5K machine pistols.

He glimpsed big Schmidt nearby, a pistol in a shoulder harness across his chest, no sign of the sheathed bowie knife, but Lieber knew the man went nowhere without it.

Inside the lit windows he saw the figures waiting for him. Four men. The tall, silver-haired man and Kruger standing; old Haider seated in a comfortable armchair, lost in the leather, an inhaler clutched in one hand. Wrinkled, wheezy old Haider, face like a dried prune. They said he had killed men with his bare hands in the old days: strangled them, gouged out eyes, raped. But to look at him now, he could have been a grumpy, harmless old grandfather near the end of his days. But still part of the web.

The fourth man, Lieber knew, was Ernesto Brandt. A mischling. German father, Brazilian mother. Thinning hair, brown eyes, metal-framed glasses with thick lenses, and a high forehead that made him look like an eccentric professor. Maybe fifty, but youthful-looking. The man was important, had been one of the vital keys to the plan.

Lieber looked around as the Volkswagen came to a sudden halt in front of the porch.

5:20 P.M.

The piercing scream of the flashing blue siren tore into the growing darkness like a banshee. Traffic separated, horns honked.

Gonzales, in the front passenger seat of the unmarked squad car, said, “Take the next left.”

Juales swung the car down a one-way street of two-lane traffic. He let out an uncharacteristic whoop as he nudged onto the pavement, the car tilting, driving for thirty yards like this, children and passersby staring.

“The only way to travel,” Gonzales remarked above the siren’s wail.

The news had come over the radio minutes before, and Juales had repeated it aloud, a look of triumph on his face: “They caught sight of the Volkswagen, heading up to the Chapultepec Hills. We’re in luck.”

Now Sanchez said, “What happens when we get there?”

Gonzales swiveled around in his seat. “We look and watch.” He paused. “There’s a couple of pump-actions in the back in case we need them. You both know how to use those things? I don’t want my backside ending up like a colander.”

Sanchez and Cavales smiled, said yes, they knew how to use the shotguns. The car began to climb, the streets less crowded, the houses less shabby. Gonzales switched off the siren.

Juales’s phone buzzed on his lap, and he picked it up. He listened, then answered, “Good. We’ll be with you in ten minutes.”