Rise of the Order Read online

  “I told you. . .we are under attack,” Albrecht said, his breathing somewhat calmer, but the shock still hanging onto his face, an ashen mask of disbelief.

  If he had no wrinkles before, he soon would, Jake thought. “Did you know the shooter?” he asked.

  Albrecht shook his head. “How would I know a murderer?”

  “What about the two men at the bar? When you entered you didn’t even look at them. And they had barely touched their beers.”

  The Grand Master was about to speak, but he hesitated, as if looking for the right words. When the words finally came he said, “They were Brothers of the Order.”

  “Worked for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were tactically flawed,” Jake said, somewhat callously.

  “They’re dead,” Albrecht said. “Trying to protect me.”

  “They should have split up and selected a spot on the end of the bar with a full view of the room,” Jake said. “Then when I came in they wouldn’t have to try to catch a look in the mirror. And if anything went down, which it did, they would have been protected from the bar. At least long enough to pull their weapons. Plus, they kept their jackets on. A dead giveaway they were carrying weapons.”

  “They were Brothers, Mr. Adams. Former Austrian Army.”

  Part of Jake wanted to drive back and pick up his car, find a hotel for the night, and then drive back to Innsbruck in the morning. The other part, the part that hated being shot at under any circumstances, wanted to hunt down the shooter, cut off his balls, and use them for salt and pepper shakers.

  “All right,” Jake said, “what now?”

  Albrecht looked confused. “I thought you would know what to do next.”

  It wasn’t like Jake had never been in a situation like this before. Yet, most of the time he was on the hunt, not the hunted. He preferred it that way. “First we need to find a place to hide you,” Jake said. “Then you hand over everything you know.” Hiding him would be fairly easy, but keeping him in place without Jake babysitting would be another matter. He sure as hell couldn’t play nurse-mate while he sought the guy who had tried to kill Albrecht. He also had a feeling the local Polizei would be a problem, looking into the death of Albrecht’s two men.

  Albrecht shook his head. “I can’t run and hide. What kind of signal would that send?”

  “A better signal than your murder,” Jake assured him.

  “Good point.” The Grand Master thought and then added, “I have a place in Kitzbuhel. I could go skiing.”

  “No. They’ll know about it.”

  “Then where? Christmas is in two weeks. I have events I must attend.”

  “Listen. Someone’s trying to kill you. If you go about like business as usual, you could not only endanger yourself but those around you.”

  Albrecht must have been thinking about his two dead Brothers when he slowly nodded his head in agreement.

  “Great.”

  ●

  Across town at the Donau Bar, police cars had cordoned off the street for two blocks. Sitting behind the wheel of his unmarked dark green Polizei Mercedes, Kriminal Hauptkommisar Franz Martini adjusted the intermittent wipers to clear the freezing rain. Martini had taken over his new job six weeks ago, coming from his native Tirol. At times like this he wished he was still in Innsbruck, where they would be getting snow at this time. Snow he could deal with. But this?

  At his age, early fifties, Martini knew this could be his last post before retirement. A retirement that could come early if murders like this continued in Vienna. He glanced up at himself in the rearview mirror. His once dark hair was now entirely gray and thinning. His normal mustache was replaced by a narrow goatee, and even that was almost entirely gray, covering a strong jaw with a hint now of a double chin.

  The passenger door opened and Martini’s assistant, Jack Donicht, slid onto the leather seat and slammed the door behind him. Donicht had followed Martini from Innsbruck. The two of them had worked together for twenty years.

  “Looking for dark hairs?” Donicht asked, a smile barely revealing his imperfect teeth.

  “Smart ass. I hear Schmidt in Linz is looking for someone with your qualifications.”

  “Schmidt? My God. He eats small children, I hear.”

  “Just a rumor,” Martini said. “What do you think?” He raised his chin toward the front of the bar.

  “Forensics just finished collecting. They’re bagging the bodies now,” Donicht said. “The man in the back had his throat slit. He was the bartender. The two in the front were both killed with a shotgun. We’ve pulled some lead out of the front door and the wall behind the dead men. Looks like they died instantly. Didn’t get a chance to pull their guns.”

  Martini thought for a moment. He had checked out their guns. Both carried identical Glocks in .40 caliber. “Why were they carrying weapons?”

  Donicht shrugged. “Looks like they needed them, but didn’t get a chance to use them.”

  “They’re not law enforcement,” Martini said. “Not intel types. Both from Vienna.”

  “I doubt they’re Russian Mafia, then.”

  “Exactly. Private security?”

  Donicht wrote the words in his notebook. “I’ll check it out, Franz.”

  Something was bothering Martini. The bartender. “Why kill the bartender with a knife?”

  Donicht looked at his notebook. “I had a question about that as well.”

  Think, Franz. The bartender is killed in the back room. “What if the two men out front were not the target,” Martini said. “Private security. The two men had to be guarding someone. Maybe that person got away. Maybe he was the target.”

  “Good point,” Donicht said, his pen writing that down. “That would explain the six nine millimeter shell casings we found on the other side of the bar.” Donicht smiled broadly.

  “You’re getting to be a real pain in the ass in your old age.”

  “That’s why you keep me around,” Donicht said. “And I’m six months younger than you.”

  Martini watched the first body come out on a stretcher, the medical personnel trying their best to keep their footing on the icy cobblestones. When the man in front slipped and fell, his weight overturned the stretcher, which brought down the man in the back and sent the bagged body sliding onto the slick sidewalk. The two medical men flopped around on the sidewalk like fish out of water.

  “You see that?” Donicht said, laughter in his voice.

  “A couple of comedians. Go help them.”

  Without saying a word, Martini’s assistant shoved on his leather gloves, got out of the car, and scurried onto the sidewalk. Martini thought about Innsbruck again. Maybe he should have stayed there. He didn’t need this promotion any more than he needed prostate cancer, which had been diagnosed in him only two days ago. He still needed to schedule surgery. Now that would have to wait. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes he had bought earlier that evening. No need to worry about his lungs when his prostate was the problem. Lighting his first cigarette in a year, Martini took in a deep breath, held it for full effect, and then slowly exhaled a stream of smoke.

  ●

  Two blocks away in a charcoal Audi A6, Kurt Lamar gazed out into the darkness at the scene through night vision goggles. When the two ambulance personnel slipped on the ice, he couldn’t help but laugh. He put down the NVGs and clicked onto his laptop computer, which was hitched up to his cell phone. He had run all of the license plates of cars from three blocks away in all directions and had been waiting for response on the owners.

  Quickly glancing down the names and addresses, his eyes stopped suddenly when he read one; Jake Adams, Innsbruck, Austria.

  “My God,” he said aloud to himself.

  He quickly disconnected the phone from the computer and punched in a number.

  “Toni?” No answer.

  “Yes.” A soft woman’s voice, somewhat put off.

  “I’m at the scene. Ran the license numbers and got one hit.�
�

  “Yeah?”

  “A VW Golf TDI.” He paused, wondering if he should continue. Finally, he said, “Registered in Innsbruck, Austria to Jake Adams.”

  When the long silence came, Kurt expected it. He didn’t think it would last a full minute, though.

  “Jake is involved?” she said tentatively.

  “Hey, he has a way of finding trouble,” Kurt told her, something she already knew. “Does he know I’m working here?”

  She let out a deep breath. “I haven’t talked with him in six months. He doesn’t even know I’m working here.”

  Kurt had heard the story of how she had come back from an assignment to the Middle East and found Jake with another woman.

  “Is it the Chinese woman?” Kurt asked her. “Remember, though, you left him.”

  “I had an assignment I had to take.” Her voice was strained now.

  Kurt knew some of that. Her Arabic language skills had made her nearly indispensable with her undercover work in Syria and other countries that even he was not aware of, nor would he ever fully know about. That was the nature of the beast.

  “But you can’t blame him for moving on,” Kurt said. “Did you talk to him in person?”

  “No. I saw him with the woman and called him on the phone. He never mentioned her.”

  “Maybe she was just a friend,” he assured her.

  “What’s he doing here now?” Toni asked brusquely, changing the subject.

  Kurt thought for a while, his eyes concentrating on the paramedics finally shoving the first body into the back of the ambulance. Did Jake even know that Toni was now the new Agency station chief in Vienna? He doubted Jake knew. She was right. How could he know? When the new Agency was first formed, combining the old CIA, FBI, NSA, DEA, ATF, and all of the various military intelligence agencies, Jake had already gone private. Although he had been called back into service as recently as a year ago in China, Kurt was sure that Jake’s most significant contact with the new Agency was Toni Contardo.

  “It’s not like the Agency took out a press release and said you were in charge here now,” Kurt said.

  “That’s not my point,” she said. “I need to know why Jake is involved with someone we happen to be looking into. That’s all.”

  “We would have known more if the phone tap had been in place,” Kurt reminded her. Although they had just started their investigation of Grand Master Gustav Albrecht, it had become clear that they should move to a more intrusive investigation. Especially following the murder of the priest in Bratislava.

  “I know,” she said. “You were right. We would have known about this meeting.” She paused for a moment. “You think Jake is working for Albrecht?”

  “In what capacity?”

  “That’s what we need to find out. Take care of the car and meet me back here.”

  “What about Albrecht?”

  “GPS has his car near Schonbrunn Palace. Stopped for the past fifteen minutes.”

  “We gonna talk with Albrecht tonight?”

  “No. Yeah, we better. Someone’s out to kill him. We need to know why. Know if he’s tied up with this whole thing. Or if he’s just a target.”

  “In the meantime,” Kurt said. “Jake can baby-sit the guy.”

  “Well, it looks like that might be what he was hired to do. See you in thirty?”

  “Right. I’ll do the car and head right over.”

  ●

  Two blocks farther down the road, adjacent to the Donau Canal, the woman sat behind the wheel of the black Audi Quattro, her eyes stuck to the Zeiss binoculars, focusing on the man who had just gotten out of the Audi A6 and walked to the VW Golf.

  Her phone shook in her pocket and she quickly flipped it open, her gaze still on the man making his way up the sidewalk.

  “Ja?” She listened carefully. “Are you sure?”

  According to her contact, the man was an American who worked for a communications company in Vienna. Interesting. Then what was he doing checking into a crime scene? She thanked her contact and shoved the phone back into her pocket.

  Down the street, the man looked up and down the avenue before pretending to slip on the ice and then swiftly sticking something under the back bumper. Then the man got up, brushed off his khaki pants, and walked back to his car.

  Nice move, she thought.

  Once the Audi pulled away, the woman cast her gaze through the binoculars on the unmarked green Polizei Mercedes outside the front of the Donau Bar. She figured Franz Martini would get the call. Maybe that was a good thing.

  “Super,” she said softly aloud.

  3

  The best way to hide someone was to do something completely out of the ordinary for that person. For instance, Jake wouldn’t hide a monk in a monastery any more than he’d hide this respectable priest in one of Vienna’s many churches. Instead, he burned much of a tank of gas driving around the city’s inner ring. Then Jake had found an all-night sex club with a two-drink minimum, and the two of them had nursed their beers in a dark corner for a couple of hours.

  Satisfied they had burned enough clock, Jake had driven to the eastern train station, parked Albrecht’s Mercedes three blocks away in a ramp, and, the Grand Master in tow, had purchased two tickets on the night train to Bratislava, in the Slovak Republic. It was a local train that followed the Danube River and would be in the Slovak capital in about two hours. That had given Jake time to pump Albrecht for information. The man had no clue why someone had tried to kill him. He only knew that his Order was under attack. The priest in Bratislava had warned him just hours before the man was found murdered, his body battered with a wooden object.

  Now the train was some thirty minutes or less from reaching Bratislava, the darkness outside nearly complete, with the exception of an occasional barge moving up or down the river, its running lights the only indication anything was there on that cold water. In the past, Jake knew, they would have had to stop at the border. But after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Europe was a free travel zone. Sure the border guards into the Slovak Republic would still take a cursory glance at passports, but that was the extent of inconvenience, especially with its tenuous inclusion into the European Union.

  The changes Jake saw coming to Europe, although geared toward free trade and freedom of travel, seemed to be stripping away the identity of each country—not only with the switch to the Euro. Maybe Jake’s identity was changing also. For years he had known who he was—a man who saw injustice and did every damn thing within him to make things right. But now the differences between right and wrong was becoming as blurred as the national borders. He looked at his reflection in the train window and wasn’t sure who was staring back at him.

  Albrecht slept now to the left of Jake, the man’s head planted against the window rocking gently with the train’s sway. The man looked vulnerable, Jake thought. He was obviously out of his element.

  Jake nudged Albrecht. “Hey. We’re almost there.”

  Albrecht’s eyes shot open, as if he was reliving the shoot-out at the Donau Bar. “What?”

  “We’re almost to Bratislava,” Jake said.

  The Grand Master sat up straighter and rubbed his hands across his face and through his hair. Part of Jake wanted to simply drop the guy off somewhere—a gasthaus perhaps in some tiny village—and pick the guy up in a few days. Once Jake had a chance to figure out who had it in for Albrecht. But he thought, for now, it would be better to keep the guy close to him. At least Jake would provide some protection. It would also put Jake’s life at risk, but he was used to that. Didn’t like it. But he was familiar with the prospect at least.

  A short while later they reached the main Bratislava train station, and walked five blocks to St. Michael’s Cathedral. Albrecht knew the parish priest there and guessed he might have information about the Order priest who had been killed. The two priests had been ordained at the same time almost thirty years ago.

  The cathedral had been built in the fifteenth century. It was c
old and dank with a constant breeze that seemed to tickle the hairs on the back of Jake’s neck. He had put his leather holster over his sweater inside his wind breaker, so at least he could draw his 9mm without catching the barrel sight on his pants pocket. He unzipped his coat open and felt the comfort of his gun with his left arm.

  Something wasn’t right. Jake was sure of it. He watched Albrecht, a few steps ahead of him down the main aisle, pause at the front row of pews, kneel, and then cross himself, just as he had when he first entered the church. Jake rushed forward and grabbed Albrecht by the shoulder. Then, a finger to his mouth, Jake drew his gun and quietly clicked the hammer back, his CZ-75 leading the way to the right of the altar toward a back room, where a dim sliver of light pointed out to them.

  Jake could feel the breeze stronger on his face. They reached the edge of the door, which was wide open, the wind sucking through like that of a mountain tunnel.

  Sniffing the air, Jake could smell it now. The iron of blood. Feces and urine, a natural response to death.

  Albrecht bumped into Jake. “What’s the matter?” he whispered.

  “Shhh.”

  With one swift motion, Jake rushed into the room, his gun shifting from left to right and then pointing down at the stone floor. Laying face down in a puddle of blood was a priest in a black robe.

  “My God,” Albrecht mumbled from the door, his hand on his mouth.

  Jake turned for a moment and then hurried to the head of the priest, but he already knew the man was dead. The blood was too dry for life. He checked for a pulse. The priest was still warm but dead.

  The killer could still be there, Jake thought. He reached into his pockets and pulled out a pair of leather gloves. He shoved them on as he rose to his feet. “Is that your friend?” Jake asked Albrecht.

  The Grand Master was frozen in time, his eyes wide with horror.

  “Is this the priest you know?” Jake said abruptly.

  Albrecht nodded.

  “Let’s go. We’ve gotta get out of here.”

  “We can’t leave him like this,” Albrecht pleaded.