Cutting Edge

50

Lund was slumped forward with her head on the folding table. She was nearly asleep. They’d brought her dinner an hour ago, a nice wienerschnitzel with potatoes and a salad that convinced her the Golden Anchor’s cook could learn a lot from a prison chef in Austria. The heavy meal, not to mention a day of unadulterated boredom, had made her nearly catatonic.

She was stirred to consciousness when the door opened abruptly. It was Blake Winston.

“All right, I think everything is in order. We’ll be leaving for the airport shortly.”

Lund stood up and stretched. “What about my stuff?”

“We’ll stop by the evidence room on our way out to collect it.”

Lund gave a sigh of resignation. She’d come to Austria to help Trey, and now her failure was all but complete. Ahead of her was a two-day trek involving airplanes and escorts, followed by a grilling from her boss — at least she had two days to come up with a story that would sound more believable than the truth. She realized at that moment how little she cared about any of it.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”

They were met in the hallway by a female police officer who led them two floors down to an evidence storage facility. At least that was what Lund took it for — the sign on the door was labeled with a German compound at least twenty letters long. The policewoman escorting them said in thickly accented English, “Neither of you are permitted inside. Stay here, please.” She pushed a button on a cipher lock near the door, then looked up at an overhead camera. There were three lights on the lock, and the bottom one turned green. She walked inside.

Lund said to Winston, “You don’t smoke, do you?”

He frowned.

“Never mind. So is my escort here?”

“Yes, he and I arrived together. As I mentioned earlier, Captain Morales will take you as far as—”

A huge crash reverberated from inside the evidence room. Lund looked at Winston, then they both looked at the door. It was a solid item in a metal frame, no inset window. The light on the cipher lock was red.

“That didn’t sound good,” said Lund. “Maybe we should have a look.”

Winston said uncertainly, “No, she told us to stay here. Besides, the door is locked.”

Lund reached for the call button on the lock pad, but before she could sink it the bottom light went green.

She reached for the door handle, but Winston shouldered in front of her. “Wait … let me.” He opened the door and started to go inside. He paused at the threshold. “What the hell…”

Lund looked past him into the evidence room and saw a giant set of shelves resting against a wall at a forty-five-degree angle. Between the wall and the heavy shelf was the body of a man in a police uniform — he was crushed and clearly dead. Lund noticed the look of horror on Winston’s face, and she followed his gaze to the right. There she saw another body — the woman who’d escorted them here, lying glass-eyed across the counter.

Lund instinctively grabbed a fistful of Winston’s finely tailored jacket, and in the next instant, as she began to pull, her eyes were drawn to a flash of motion. She made sense of it milliseconds later, as she was dropping to the floor — a hulking figure in a shooting stance, a silenced weapon extended. Two sounds seemed to arrive simultaneously — the spit from a silenced gun, and a muted slap. Lund hit the floor amid a spray of blood and tissue, and yelled, “Gun! Gun! Gun!” wishing she knew the German word.

She took one look at Winston, then wished she hadn’t. His face was unrecognizable. Lund knew she could only save herself. She skated to her feet on the polished floor and ran down the hall, searching for an open door or a stairwell — any kind of cover from the open door behind her. Her heart soared when she saw a policeman emerge from a side office with his hand on a holstered sidearm.

It might have been the look on her face, or that she’d called out a gun. Maybe it was the desperate way she was running toward him. Whatever the source, his expression was stone serious, his eyes alert. Then the officer’s gaze locked on something behind her, and he began to draw his weapon. She never heard the spits of the silencer, but the policeman’s gun blasted a round into the floor as he went down. Lund threw herself toward the opening as the hallway behind her exploded in a shower of plaster and chipped wood. She careened off a wall and got to her feet. What she saw in the room was wonderful — six, maybe eight officers in uniform, every one tugging at a holster or reaching into a drawer for a weapon.

“To the left down the hall!” she shouted. “Officers down!”

There was shouting in German among the policemen, and the one with the most stripes on his shoulders apparently decided Lund was not part of the problem. He asked in English, “How many attackers?”

“I only saw one!”

More commands in German.

Lund kept moving, and someone shoved her toward the back of the room where two doors connected to a parallel hallway. She kept moving as shouting echoed all around. None of the words made sense to her, but she recognized the tones: commands, urgency, distress. An alarm sounded, and she saw a man shrugging on body armor, a shotgun in his hands. The cavalry was arriving.

Ahead she saw a green sign labeled: NOTAUSGANG. More intuitively, next to it was a pictogram of a person running and an arrow. Exit.

A young woman in civilian clothes was in front of her, head ducked low as she ran in the direction of the arrow. She disappeared into an alcove, and Lund followed. Two fire doors later, she burst out onto the streets of Vienna. She turned right because there were more people in that direction, and ran at top speed. Her head was on a swivel checking every door and sidewalk. The brooding Bundespolizei building soon fell behind, and she eased to a purposeful walk, her heart racing and her lungs heaving. Lund checked the sidewalks at every intersection, searching for the big bald man, listening for the sounds of World War III behind her. She didn’t see or hear either.

Night was falling, the temperature dropping. Lund wasn’t cold at all. She’d brought a light jacket. It was in her roller bag. Which was in an evidence room littered with bodies. How many? Winston, the female officer who’d gone inside, the evidence room clerk. The officer who’d put his head into the hallway.

Four victims.

Four at least.

But that was only here, only tonight. Lund knew there were more. She knew because two images now stood side by side in her mind, pinned there like twin Polaroids. Pictures that would stay with her forever. One was the massive man she had just seen holding a silenced gun. The other was the captured CCTV photo Jim Kalata had sent. The latter image had disappeared from her phone’s memory, but it was permanently etched in her own. Two portraits of the same lethal subject, a man who’d been spanning the globe. He’d killed in Alaska, killed in Boston. Now he’d come to Vienna.

And he had come for her.

The body count at the Bundespolizei station grew quickly. The duty corporal in the evidence storeroom was obvious enough, as was the much-liked female deputy inspector. Both had broken necks. The American embassy official had suffered one catastrophic round to the face, while the sergeant in the hallway had taken two bullets, one to his neck and one to the chest, either of which would have been singularly fatal. It took thirty minutes to discover the final victim, who was stuffed into the trunk of a car in the parking garage. That casualty wore the uniform of a United States Marine Corps captain, and the car belonged to the motor pool of the American embassy in Vienna.

The station was locked down in a posture of highest internal alert, and the “all clear” took nearly an hour as every room, air duct, and closet was searched thoroughly. Strangely, amid an entire precinct of policemen, no one seemed to have seen the shooter. An administrative clerk thought she might have seen a stranger momentarily — a very wide, bald man who turned the corner down a hallway — as she emerged from the second-floor ladies’ room. Detectives also soon realized that, amid the chaos, the American woman who’d been in custody, awaiting transfer on an expedited diplomatic request, had also gone missing. They were forced to consider, given the death of the American soldier who was to have been her escort, that the armed assailant had come to facilitate her escape.

With the police facing five murders, not to mention the escape of a detainee right under their noses, the mood fell decidedly grim. An all-out effort was made to secure evidence, and it was here that the final professional indignity was imparted. In the building’s security center, a flummoxed technician reported to the chief inspector that all surveillance video for that day had somehow disappeared.

“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?” said the incredulous chief inspector.

“I … I don’t know,” replied the woman behind the monitor. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Her fingers rattled over her keyboard, stepping from one channel to the next. “We have forty cameras in the building, and the footage from every single one has been wiped clean. It must be some kind of system-wide failure … but we never got a warning that it was down. We’re supposed to get a warning.”

A despondent chief inspector took the only course available. He ordered the widest possible dissemination of the passport photo of an American Coast Guard investigator named Shannon Lund, adding that extreme caution was to be taken if she were discovered in the company of a large bald man. The chief dispatched every available detective into the surrounding neighborhood to search and ask questions, and sent an urgent request to city authorities to acquire CCTV footage from the immediate area. Vienna, like most European capitals, was wired for video, although not as extensively as the likes of London or Paris. Municipal surveillance here was largely targeted on areas prone to vandalism and graffiti. The chief knew there was also a vast constellation of corporate and residential video systems, yet these could not be accessed without the approval of a magistrate — an option, to be sure, but something that would take time.

So the Bundespolizei did what they could within the given constraints. The man put in charge of the investigation, a senior chief inspector, went through the motions of his inquiry with increasing frustration, stunned that their newly upgraded technology had failed in the most important hour. What are the chances of that? he thought idly.