irritated. “That he’s dead. What do you think?”
She was a careful driver these days, which he supposed was an inevitable result of her two Austrian years. Had she been stationed in Italy, or even here in Slovenia, she would’ve ignored her turn signals and those pesky speed limit notices.
To ease the tension, he brought up old London friends from when they both worked out of that embassy as vaguely titled “attachés.” He’d left in a hurry, and all Angela knew was that his new job, with some undisclosed Company department, required a steady change of names, and that he once again worked under their old boss, Tom Grainger. The rest of London station believed what they’d been told—that he had been fired. She said, “I fly up for parties now and then. They always invite me. But they’re sad, you know? All diplomatic people. There’s something intensely pitiful about them.”
“Really?” he said, though he knew what she meant.
“Like they’re living in their own little compound, surrounded by barbed wire. They pretend they’re keeping everyone out, when in fact they’re locked in.”
It was a nice way to put it, and it made him think of Tom Grainger’s delusions of empire—Roman outposts in hostile lands.
Once they hit the A1 heading southwest, Angela got back to business. “Tom fill you in on everything?”
“Not much. Can I get one of those smokes?”
“Not in the car.”
“Oh.”
“Tell me what you know, and I’ll fill in the rest.”
Thick forests passed them, pines flickering by as he outlined his brief conversation with Grainger. “He says your Frank Dawdle was sent down here to deliver a briefcase full of money. He didn’t say how much.”
“Three million.”
“Dollars?”
She nodded at the road.
Charles continued: “He was last seen at the Hotel Metropol in Portorož by Slovenian intelligence. In his room. Then he disappeared.” He waited for her to fill the numerous blank spots in that story line. All she did was drive in her steady, safe way. “Want to tell me more? Like, who the money was for?”
Angela tilted her head from side to side, but instead of answering she turned on the radio. It was preset to a station she’d found during her long drive from Vienna. Slovenian pop. Terrible stuff.
“And maybe you can tell me why we had to learn his last whereabouts from the SOVA, and not from our own people.”
As if he’d said nothing, she cranked the volume, and boy-band harmonies filled the car. Finally, she started to speak, and Charles had to lean close, over the stick shift, to hear.
“I’m not sure who the orders started with, but they reached us through New York. Tom’s office. He chose Frank for obvious reasons. Old-timer with a spotless record. No signs of ambition. No drinking problems, nothing to be compromised. He was someone they could trust with three million. More importantly, he’s familiar here. If the Slovenes saw him floating around the resort, there’d be no suspicions. He vacations in Portorož every summer, speaks fluent Slovene.” She grunted a half-laugh. “He even stopped to chat with them. Did Tom tell you that? The day he arrived, he saw a SOVA agent in a gift shop and bought him a little toy sailboat. Frank’s like that.”
“I like his style.”
Angela’s look suggested he was being inappropriately ironic. “It was supposed to be simple as pie. Frank takes the money down to the harbor on Saturday—two days ago—and does a straight phrase-code pass-off. Just hands over the briefcase. In return, he gets an address. He goes to a pay phone, calls me in Vienna, and reads off the address. Then he drives back home.”
The song ended, and a young DJ shouted in Slovenian about the hot-hot-hot band he’d just played as he mixed in the intro to the next tune, a sugar-sweet ballad.
“Why wasn’t someone backing him up?”
“Someone was,” she said, spying the rearview. “Leo Bernard. You met him in Munich, remember? Couple of years ago.”
Charles remembered a hulk of a man from Pennsylvania. In Munich, Leo had been their tough-guy backup during an operation with the German BND against an Egyptian heroin racket. They’d never had to put Leo’s fighting skills to the test, but it had given Charles a measure of comfort knowing the big man was available. “Yeah. Leo was funny.”
“Well, he’s dead,” said Angela, again glancing into the rearview. “In his hotel room, a floor above Frank’s. Nine millimeter.” She swallowed. “From his own gun, we think, though we can’t find the weapon itself.”
“Anyone hear it?”
She shook her head. “Leo had a suppressor.”
Charles leaned back into his seat, involuntarily checking the side mirror. He lowered the volume as a woman tried with limited success to carry a high E-note. Then he cut it off. Angela was being cagey about the central facts of this case—the why of all that money—but that could wait. Right now he wanted to visualize the events. “When did they arrive at the coast?”
“Friday afternoon. The seventh.”
“Legends?”
“Frank, no. He was too well known for that. Leo used an old one, Benjamin Schneider, Austrian.”
“Next day, Saturday, was the trade. Which part of the docks?”
“I’ve got it written down.”
“Time?”
“Evening. Seven.”
“Frank disappears …?”
“Last seen at 4:00 A.M. Saturday morning. He was up until then drinking with Bogdan Krizan, the local SOVA head. They’re old friends. Then, around two in the afternoon, the hotel cleaning staff found Leo’s body.”
“What about the dock? Anyone see what happened at seven?”
Again, she glanced into the rearview. “We were too late. The Slovenes weren’t going to ask us why Frank was buying them toys. And we didn’t know about Leo’s body until after seven. His papers were good enough to confuse the Austrian embassy for over eight hours.”
“For three million dollars you couldn’t have sent a couple more watchers?”
Angela tightened her jaw. “Maybe, but hindsight doesn’t do us any good now.”
The incompetence surprised Charles; then again, it didn’t. “Whose call was it?”
When she looked in the mirror yet again, her jaw was tighter, her cheeks flushed. So it was her fault, he thought, but she said, “Frank wanted me to stay in Vienna.”
“It was Frank Dawdle’s idea to go off with three million dollars and only one watcher?”
“I know the man. You don’t.”
She’d said those words without moving her lips. Charles felt the urge to tell her that he did know her boss. He’d worked with him once, in 1996, to get rid of a retired communist spy from some nondescript Eastern European country. But she wasn’t supposed to know about that. He touched her shoulder to show a little sympathy. “I won’t talk to Tom until we’ve got some real answers. Okay?”
She finally looked at him with a weary smile. “Thanks, Milo.”
“It’s Charles.”
The smile turned sardonic. “I wonder if you even have a real name.”