Foreign Agent

CHAPTER 16

The neighborhood known as Bahnhofsviertel included the main railway station, as well as Frankfurt’s red light district. It also included the apartment of the man who had recruited Jörg Strobl.

Harvath didn’t need or want Anna Strobl there, but she had insisted. She had also made a strong case for being able to authenticate the information that he hoped to extract.

Sigmar Eichel worked in airport operations. And as such, he had access to terminals, runways, hangars, and every other facet of Frankfurt airport. He could move in and out of secure areas without arousing suspicion. He knew all of the security protocols, which cameras were working, and which were down. Anna also commented that he likely could access and even alter the CCTV feeds.

An added benefit of having Anna along was that she was a federal police officer. As soon as Sigmar saw her, he was going to know that it was all over for him. The trick would be in convincing him to turn against the people he was working for.

Harvath hadn’t expected the Russians to deal directly with Jörg Strobl. They didn’t need to. They would use a go-between, or a cutout, as it was known. That was Eichel’s job. He passed along the instructions and Strobl carried them out.

Eichel was higher up the food chain. As such, he would have had more training, and likely more to lose. That meant that he might end up being a harder nut to crack.

Strobl had explained that he had gotten to know Eichel back when he had been working out of the Lufthansa Aviation Center. As Strobl opened up to Harvath about his medical condition, Harvath knew almost exactly how the story of his recruitment would unfold.

Shortly after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Eichel had begun bumping into Jörg in different places, both at work and outside the airport. It didn’t happen often, but it happened often enough.

Soon, the pair had struck up a friendship and were getting together for beers after work and occasionally doing things on the weekend. It usually happened, though, when Anna was on duty. She had only met Eichel once or twice.

Figuring that as a cop, she must have had a halfway decent bullshit detector, Harvath had asked her what she thought of him. Her assessment didn’t disappoint.

Physically, Anna remembered Eichel as being overweight and having poor eyesight and dry skin. He dressed like a man who didn’t have a woman in his life and didn’t want one. Personality-wise, he had an overinflated opinion of both his talent and his worth to the airport. His jokes were chauvinistic and not very clever.

To top it all off, Anna detailed that Eichel wore a corrective shoe on his left foot and that his left leg was probably shorter than his right. She commented that because of this, Eichel may have been teased as a child and have subsequently developed poor self-esteem, which resulted in his disagreeable personality and lack of interest in maintaining his physical appearance.

As a final postscript, Anna noted that Eichel might just have been born an asshole, and therefore everything else was simply peripheral.

Harvath had tried not to smile, but couldn’t help it. She had rendered an amazingly insightful assessment and was keenly observant.

Though Harvath was tempted to ask why she had missed so many things about her own husband, he didn’t go there. While love could often be blind, the debilitating illness of a loved one was a no-holds-barred cage match. The blows came so fast and so furious that you were lucky to survive, much less grasp everything that was going on around you.

To expect someone in the middle of an emotional tsunami to sense subtle shifts in their spouse and not chalk it up to the illness was beyond insane. Every day was a new battle. Every day you expected the unexpected. Harvath didn’t blame Anna. Having been on her side of the equation before, he felt for her.

“You’re not married?” she asked.

He was standing at the window of Eichel’s dingy apartment near the Kaiserstrasse, waiting for him to come home.

“No,” Harvath replied. “I’m not married.”

“Why not?”

He smiled. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t like women?”

He laughed. “No, I like women. That’s not the problem.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’m married to my job, I suppose.”

Anna shook her head. “That’s ridiculous.”

“My work is important to me.”

Before leaving the house in Oberursel, Anna had changed out of her uniform into jeans, a T-shirt, and a leather jacket. Peeling off the leather jacket, she set it on the arm of the sofa and approached him.

“Do you have a woman now?” she asked.

Harvath heard alarm bells going off somewhere in the back of his mind. He’d had more than a few women. Many had walked out without even closing the door. “I’m not sure,” he replied.

“What does that mean?”

“We are going to be living in separate cities.”

“But you live in the same city now?”

“No.”

Anna looked at him.

“It’s complicated,” Harvath conceded.

She held his gaze and was about to reply when Harvath signaled for her to be quiet.

He had heard something. “Someone’s coming,” he whispered.