Betty and the girls, his everlasting treasures in life. He thought about their aborted ski trip and of the plans they had for their daughters’ future. But mostly he thought of how much he loved them.
As the plane taxied to the runway, another thought intruded, and it wasn’t nearly as pleasant. He pictured the Saudi representative who would be there when he landed, and he realized how much he detested the meeting. It was only a ploy. There was nothing earnest about the arrangement. It afforded the Saudis an opportunity to offer “special services” and even outright bribes to anyone they felt they could benefit from.
It was a game he would never play, Dan told himself as the plane started down the runway and the G-force of takeoff pressed him back in the seat. HAMBURG, GERMANY
IT WAS FOUR o’clock in the morning on a drizzly night in Hamburg. Three men were unloading a rusted out van in front of a vacant two-story building along the waterfront. The crates were large and unwieldy, and the men appeared to be exhausted from a long night’s work. One of them tripped over the curb and lunged forward. The crate tumbled from his arms, broke open, and the contents spil ed out on the sidewalk.
The leader of the trio lashed out at the man in Arabic.
“You clumsy fool. What if someone came past and saw what we have? Then what? Get this cleaned up before I have your head.”
The one-room apartment next door was the address of a parolee named Franz Heffner. Franz had never been a deep sleeper, and the commotion out front aroused him from a particularly uninteresting dream. He crept to the window, parted the curtains, and stared down at the men hurriedly repacking the damaged carton. Franz couldn’t identify the contents, and he didn’t real y care. He closed the curtains again and buried himself beneath the covers. The next morning Franz left the apartment in a bad mood. He had an appointment with his parole officer, and this always spel ed trouble. The van he had seen last night was stil parked in front of the vacant store, and Franz was observant enough to see an unusual object with multicolored wires wedged beneath one of the tires. He wiggled it free, stared at it in amazement, and slipped it inside his jacket pocket.
His parole officer was a slight man named Alford Weitz who kept an office off Dortmund Street. His greeting was always the same. “Come in, Franz. Have you been behaving yourself since our last visit?”
Franz’s reply didn’t vary much either. He grimaced and said, “Oh, yes, Herr Weitz. Clean as a whistle.”
Just then, the phone on Herr Weitz’s cluttered desk rang. Weitz excused himself, picked up the phone, and sat back in his swivel chair. Franz wasn’t interested in his parole officer’s phone conversation, so he reached into his pocket and removed the object he had found. He studied the strange looking cylinder with the colored wires and knew from years of criminal activity that he had stumbled upon something that would prove to be of considerable interest to the authorities. Now if he could just use it to his advantage.
When Herr Weitz finished his telephone cal , Franz set the object rather dramatical y in the middle of his desk. He said, “Herr Weitz, I may have some valuable information for you.”
Weitz stared at the cylinder. “Now what sort of information might that be, Franz?”
Heffner related the events of the previous evening. “It was dark, and they were in a hurry. They must have left this behind.”
Herr Weitz wrapped his hand around the cylinder.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’l be back.”
True to his word, he returned forty-five minutes later with two other men in tow. He didn’t bother to introduce them, but Franz recognized government help when he saw it.
One of them sat on the edge of the desk and looked down at Franz Heffner.
“Herr Heffner, we need your absolute cooperation on the matter of this object you found. If you work with us, we may be able to end your parole visits once and for al .”
German intel igence set up around-the-clock surveil ance from