Black Wolf (2010) by Dale Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

Nuri.
    The putdown was regarded as some sort of triumph by Gregor, who practically beamed as she told the waiter in German that she would have a small orange juice. Nuri considered whether he ought just to leave, but the FBI might be of some use at some point in the investigation, and closing the door now didn’t make sense.
    Well, maybe it did. How much help could they possibly be?
    “German’s not one of your languages, is it?” Gregor asked as the waiter left.
    “I can speak a little.”
    “Very little.”
    I’d like to see you handle Arabic, thought Nuri. Or Farsi. Or maybe a subdialect of Swahili.
    “So what do you want?” said Gregor. “Why are you here?”
    “I want to talk to the investigator on the Helmut Dalitz murder case.”
    “Dalitz? The banker?”
    “Businessman. Do you have any information?”
    She made a face. “That’s too local for us to get involved in.”
    “You have nothing?” asked Nuri, surprised. The FBI had been briefed, to some degree at least, on the Wolves and the suspected connection to the murder. Was Gregor out of the loop? Or playing coy?
    Coy. The word evoked images of sex kittens . . . a nauseating concept when connected with the woman sitting across from him.
    “Why is the Agency interested?” Gregor asked.
    “They don’t tell me everything,” said Nuri, deciding he could be just as hard to deal with as Gregor. “They sent me here to see what was going on.”
    “They didn’t tell you why?”
    “I think it has to do with money laundering,” said Nuri.
    “That’s an FBI area of interest.” Gregor’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing like that has come up.”
    “So you are following the case?”
    “From a distance,” she said. “We’re somewhat interested—not involved.”
    The orange juice and coffee arrived. Nuri took a sip of the coffee. It was surprisingly weak.
    “I don’t see where he could have been laundering money,” said Gregor. “He was a respected businessman.”
    “Yeah, it’s probably a total waste of time. That’s the sort of crap they send me on these days,” said Nuri.
    Gregor frowned. “This is because of the connection to the Wolves, right?”
    “Well, I—”
    “All right. Let’s go,” she said, rising.
    “But—”
    “I have other things to do today,” she told him. “If you’re coming, come. And you better leave the waiter a good tip. They really like me here.”
    T he Berlin detective heading the investigation into Dalitz’s murder was a thirty-something woman who spoke English with a pronounced British accent. She was also among the most beautiful women Nuri had ever met.
    She was so pretty, in fact, that if she and Gregor were combined and averaged out, the result would still be among the top ten or so models in the world. Nuri felt his head flush just meeting her; her handshake—firm, not too eager but not unfriendly—weakened his knees.
    “I will be very happy to tell you what we know,” Frau Gerste said, leading them to her office in the upstairs of the municipal building. She worked for the national police even though her office was in the local police station; Nuri couldn’t quite grasp the relationship between the local, state, and national police agencies but decided it was irrelevant for now.
    “I am afraid that it is not much,” Gerste continued, taking a seat behind her desk. This was unfortunate; it removed half of her body from view. “What we have does not seem to lead to much that is usable.”
    Frau Gerste recounted the details of the crime, which had happened in a relatively popular part of Berlin, in an area that had been under communist control before the Wall came down. There had been few people on the street at the time, however, and apparently the assassin and any assistants had gotten away without being seen.
    “We would believe he was waiting somewhere outside,” said Frau Gerste. “There are video cameras, but several blind spots. So he must have studied the area.”
    “It was a