The Hadrian Memorandum

36

BERLIN POLICE HEADQUARTERS,

PLATZ DER LUFTBRÜCKE. 2:02 A.M.

“Why this took so long to reach me, I don’t know. But I promise you I will find out.” Hauptkommissar Emil Franck sat behind his serviceable steel desk in his very utilitarian office, his black eyes cold and unblinking.

Two uniformed motorcycle officers stood in front of him; Detectives Gerhard Bohlen and Gertrude Prosser were to his left. For a moment he stared at the motorcycle officers, then pressed the PLAY button on a digital recorder in front of him. A short silence was followed immediately by a recorded conversation between a motorcycle officer and a Funkbetriebszentrale, a central radio dispatcher at police headquarters.

MOTORCYCLE OFFICER: West for West 717.

DISPATCHER: West 717, go ahead.

MOTORCYCLE OFFICER: Male and female pedestrians with resemblance to fugitives on Schiffbauerdamm, approaching Weidendamm Bridge at Friedrichstrasse. Copy.

DISPATCHER: I have it, West 717.

There was a several-second pause and then:

MOTORCYCLE OFFICER: Ah, West for West 717, again, Dispatch. Cancel that. They’re just two lovebirds playing suck face.

DISPATCHER: I have it, West 717.

Immediately Franck’s right index finger shot out and punched the STOP button. The player went silent, and he looked up at the two motorcycle officers across from him.

“Your first call came at 19:38:44 hours,” he snapped at the officer designated West 717. “Why did you cancel it?”

“It seemed like nothing. They saw us. They didn’t care. Hardly the style of fugitives, Hauptkommissar.”

“How do you presume that? You said yourself they resembled the suspects. How do you know what they were doing or why? Schiffbauerdamm at the Weidendamm Bridge is less than a twenty-minute walk from the Hotel Adlon, and 19:38 was in the correct time frame.” Immediately Franck’s eyes shifted from West 717 to the second officer.

“Did you agree with the evaluation?”

“Yes, Hauptkommissar.”

“I want a report on my desk in five minutes. Exactly what those people looked like. What they were wearing. What they were carrying. And any other circumstance or par tic u lar either of you can remember. You may go!”

Both men drew up, saluted, then turned and left, their futures in the Berlin Police Department very much in doubt.

The door closed behind them, and Franck looked to Bohlen and Prosser. “Maybe they were our Mr. Marten and Ms. Tidrow, maybe they weren’t. The time was right, the area was right. Handler’s dogs lost them at the Reichstag construction site, a fistful of tossed rocks from the Spree. This ‘suck face’ couple were on Schiffbauerdamm at Weidendamm Bridge, also on the Spree and not far from the Reichstag.”

Franck stood up from his desk and crossed to a huge sectioned map of Berlin mounted on a far wall. He stared at it for a moment as if to reassure himself of the Schiffbauerdamm/Weidendamm Bridge location, an intersection he could have pointed to in his sleep, the same as he could almost every other street and intersection in the city. But it was his nature to double-check, and he did. Then, assured, he turned back to his detectives.

“That intersection has two things in par tic u lar. Friedrichstrasse station and the river itself, which means tour boats. The moment I have the report from our very observant officers, I want investigators sent out to interview all station and train personnel and all tour boat crews on duty from 19:38 hours on. They are to get people out of bed if necessary. If our ‘lovebirds’ were somewhere there, I want to know every detail of it. If they were in the station, which door they came in and went out. If they were on a train or boat, where they got on and where they got off.”

2:25 A.M.

Franck stood alone looking at the map trying to assess where in the city Marten and Anne Tidrow might have gone and to put it together with the other information that had come in. Just after midnight he’d received an answer to his query about Marten’s character and the architectural landscape firm where he was employed in Manchester, England. First, Marten was an American expatriate from Vermont who had no criminal record, rented a nice apartment, and paid his bills on time. Second, his firm, Fitzsimmons and Justice, was a long-established, highly respected business that catered almost entirely to municipal projects or private, mostly upscale clientele. Marten had worked there for more than two years following his graduation with an advanced degree from the University of Manchester. First-rate credentials all the way around. As for Hannah Anne Tidrow, she was not only a member of the board of directors of the AG Striker Oil and Energy Company of Houston, Texas, she was the daughter of the company’s late chairman, Virgil Wyatt Tidrow. Moreover, Striker Oil, in partnership with the American private security contractor Hadrian LLC of Manassas, Virginia, had been working in Iraq under a U.S. State Department contract since shortly after the war began and was currently under the scrutiny of the United States Congress for alleged questionable business practices there. Further, Striker Oil did not have an office in Berlin or anywhere else in Europe. Lastly, Marten had arrived at Berlin Tegel Airport at eleven o’clock yesterday morning, coming in not from Manchester but from Paris. Barely two hours later, Anne Tidrow had arrived, also from Paris.

Franck stared at the map a moment longer, then went back to his desk and sat down. Why in hell, he thought, would two people like that come all the way to Berlin to murder Theo Haas and in a place as crowded and public as the Platz der Republik?

He turned to his computer and sent an URGENT e-mail to Detectives Bohlen and Prosser.

Please get more on Striker Oil activities outside the U.S. and Iraq. Also find out where Marten and Tidrow had been before Paris.

Done, he pulled a stack of reports toward him, the findings of more than two dozen investigators who had interviewed witnesses and bystanders at the Platz der Republik and the Brandenburg Gate shortly after Haas’s murder. He opened the first and began to read. Maybe, hopefully, there was something somewhere in them that had been overlooked.