21 Duty and Honor by Grant Blackwood

21 Duty and Honor by Grant Blackwood

Author:Grant Blackwood [Blackwood, Grant]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00


MUNICH, GERMANY

Mitch called Effrem’s cell phone mid-morning the next day. Effrem put him on speaker. “Is Mr. X there, too?” asked Mitch.

“I’m here,” Jack replied.

“Okay, so the computer you got this hyperlink from . . . Did you happen to check the Web browser history? Anything odd about it?”

“You could say that.”

“I figured. You’re right. The site it links to is down, but I was able to root out some interesting stuff. This is malware—a bot, actually—designed to insert Web history into the target computer. It’s also designed to sign up the user at some discussion forums, do some troll posting, and so forth.”

“What kind of forums?”

“Political crap, conspiracy stuff.”

This matched what Jack had seen on Hahn’s computer. “Anything else?” he asked. “Was it monitoring him?”

“Nope,” said Mitch. “Just playing grab-ass with his browser history. Cleverly designed bot, too.”

Effrem asked, “Any idea who created it?”

“I know exactly who created it. All the servers he used were anagrams for Game of Thrones characters: storkbarb, hotboarbanterer, tinylionsranter.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Nope. This guy’s good, but everybody’s got their peccadilloes. This is his.”

“What’s his name and where can we find him?” Jack asked.

“The name part is easy,” Mitch replied. “Gerhard Klugmann. As for where, that’s a bit trickier. Gerhard ain’t exactly somebody you Google. I can do some digging, but he’s skittish. If I don’t pin him down without him realizing it, he’ll pull up stakes and move on.”

“Digitally or physically?” asked Effrem.

“Both, maybe. Guys like him can work anywhere.”

“Find him,” Jack ordered.

After running a few errands, they spent the afternoon waiting in Jack’s room at the Hotel München Palace. Waiting for a call from Mitch; waiting for a call from Belinda; waiting for a call from one of Jack’s own contacts, a gun guy he had met a year earlier during a routine mission for The Campus. Given the penalties for a foreigner carrying a weapon on German soil, Jack had wanted to avoid doing so, but Effrem’s search for 8 Friedenstrasse led to something called Kultfabrik. In Jack’s eyes, urban ambush points didn’t come any better.

A popular hangout that catered to what one website described as Munich’s “bacchanalian night people,” Kultfabrik was a noodle factory turned warren of pubs, discos, a skate park, gambling pavilions, game arcades, and flea markets. The twenty-acre complex was in an industrial area of Munich just east of the Ostbahnhof rail complex. Kultfabrik was closed, Effrem told him, and in the middle of conversion to Werksviertel, an office park/cultural center/apartment complex. In short, Kultfabrik was a construction zone.

This alone put Jack on guard, but in perusing Eric Schrader’s day planner, Effrem had discovered a disturbing discrepancy: Over the last four months Schrader had met with S.M.—Stephan Möller—six times in Munich. However, for three of these meetings Schrader hadn’t even been in the city, but rather in Lyon or Zurich. This left two possibilities: one, Schrader was bad with dates; or two, the day planner was a plant and they were being lured to Kultfabrik. By whom? The most obvious



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