This time there would be no mistake. The Branden-burger restaurant was being staked out from unmarked cars placed in both directions from the entrance; the only other exit at the rear was covered; a plainclothes policeman and policewoman had been inside, posing as customers, since 9:30; and the arrest squad was with Samurai in the temporary headquarters that he had set up in a hairdresser's on the other side of the street, with an open line to -police headquarters. It had all been arranged smoothly and without hitches since Samurai's arrival from Hamburg the previous evening: a paradigm of German thoroughness, exemplifying the kind of discipline and concern for -detail that the rest of the Consolidation needed. Samurai was well -satisfied.
Tension rose as 10:00 drew nearer, peaking expectantly as the hour came. . . . But nothing happened. By 10:30 the watchers were growing anxious and puzzled. Chief Inspector Gelhardt of the Berlin Police tapped a code into his communicator to activate the unit contained in the purse that the woman inside had placed on the table in front of her. It emitted a low beep, inaudible beyond a few feet.
"Go ahead," the woman's voice acknowledged, indicating that it was clear for him to speak.
"Anything?"
"No. There has been nobody resembling either of them." They had Ashling's picture and knew what Nicolaus looked like from the description furnished by the girl in the Hamburg brothel. Yuri's appearance, of course, was -unknown.
When it got to 11:00, Samurai had had enough. Followed by Gelhardt and two of his men, he crossed the street and entered the restaurant. The plainclothes policeman shook his head almost imperceptibly. Samurai marched up to the cash desk and confronted the manager with an ID card.
"International security. These men with me are police." He produced a print of the picture of Ashling sent through from Washington. "Have you seen this man in here this morning?"
The manager looked at the picture. "Yes," he replied simply. "He was here with two other men. They had breakfast together."
"What!" Samurai nearly choked. "When was this? How long ago?"
The manager looked across at a clock on the far wall. "Let me see, a while ago now—the early rush was still on. They sat at that table over there. . . . I'd say about eight, eight-thirty, something like that. A quarter to nine at the latest, anyway."
Samurai stared at him, speechless. It was sickening. There must have been another call from Volgograd later, changing the time, which had either been missed by the NSA or hadn't got through yet. Or maybe the first message had been in a code, where "ten" meant "eight," or something equally simple. But if that was the case, why hadn't the name of the location been coded? . . . Whatever the answer, it wouldn't help now.
"How did they leave?" Gelhardt inquired.
"By taxi."
"Were they carrying anything?"
"I'm sorry, I don't remember."
"Have you any idea where they were heading?"
The manager spread his hands and smiled apologetically. "Again, I am sorry, gentlemen. I don't know where our customers go when they leave. What else can I say?"
The operation was called off forthwith. The cavalcade formed up and proceeded back to the local police head-quarters. It wasn't long before Samurai was upsetting people again.
"Absolutely out of the question!" Gelhardt threw up his hands, turned away toward the window to compose himself, then wheeled back again and planted his knuckles on the top of the desk in his office. "Look, Mr. Harris, I don't think you quite appreciate what you're asking. Close all crossing points through the eastern frontier? I don't have the authority to do that. Nobody in this department does. Nobody in this building does. It's not even under police jurisdiction. It's a matter for border security, and they—"
"And I don't think that you appreciate that what we're talking about here has ramifications of the utmost importance," Samurai countered. "National and international. The outcome of this could affect the political stability of your country and mine . . . of the whole Consolidation."
"That's as may be, but if so it's a matter for international authorities, not us."
"Then I strongly suggest that you—" A phone on Gel-hardt's desk interrupted.
"Excuse me." He touched a button to accept. The screen showed the face of an aide in the general office outside—Gelhardt had closed the door when his exchange with Samurai started getting heated. "I thought I said we weren't to be interrupted," Gelhardt said.
"I know, sir, but we've just had some news that appears pertinent. The desk sergeant at Third Precinct station is on the line. A taxi driver has just walked in there, saying he has information concerning three men that he understands you were looking for at the Brandenburger. Apparently he took them to Friedrichstrasse."
"Third Precinct?" Samurai queried.
Gelhardt glanced at him. "Off Heerstrasse, a few blocks from the Brandenburger."
Samurai didn't need to be told that Friedrichstrasse was one of the city's principal railroad stations.
Gelhardt looked back at the screen. "Tell them to keep him there. We're on our way over."
Another break, straight out of the blue, just when Samurai had been hard put to know which way to go next. It was almost as if Fate was determined to lead him on. Lucky coincidences, he concluded gratefully, didn't only happen in second-rate fiction.
He drove with Gelhardt and several other officers to the Third Precinct station, where a small and scruffily clad man with a day's growth of razor stubble and yellow teeth confirmed that he had picked up two men fitting Ashling's and Nicolaus's descriptions, along with a third man, pinkish in complexion, from the Brandenburger at eight-forty according to his log, and driven them to Friedrichstrasse. He had returned to the Brandenburger later for another fare and been told by the manager that the police were looking for his previous passengers.
"Did they say where they were going?" Gelhardt asked the taxi driver.
"Not to me, sir. But on the way I overheard one of them grumbling about having to spend half the day in Zittau. Then the pink-faced one said that he hoped that this person would get them across tonight. I didn't really catch the name. It sounded like Rosky, Rosesky, or something like that. Then one of the others hushed him up—you know, as if he shouldn't have been talking about it."
There was no guarantee, of course, that all three men would actually be traveling together, which would have been conspicuous. From the wording of the telephone call picked up by NSA, it seemed more likely that Nicolaus would have handed Ashling over to Yuri and seen them onto the train, and then gone his own way.
A check of the railway timetables showed that a train had departed at 9:35 from Friedrichstrasse going through Cottbus, a rail interchange town to the east, roughly halfway down to the southern tip of the country. There was a regular service through Cottbus down to Görlitz, farther south and east, situated on the Lausitzer Neisse River, opposite the Polish town of Zgorzelec. There was a rail connection from there to Zittau, the town mentioned by the taxi driver, which lay yet farther south in the extreme southeastern tip of Germany.
"Why go all the way to Zittau?" Samurai asked Gelhardt after digesting this much from maps.
"It's just past the point where the three frontiers meet," Gelhardt replied. "The crossing is into Bohemia, not -Poland. Controls are easier. From Bohemia they could either go north again into Poland, or eastward, through Moravia and Slovakia into FER territory. Either way would be easy, since outside the Consolidation everything gets lax. Zittau is the kind of place that Pipeline would use."
Samurai departed for Zittau shortly after lunch. Gelhardt, suddenly undergoing the same kind of miraculous transformation into a model of cooperation as had overcome -Inspector Weyel in Hamburg, phoned ahead to have the local agents there check into possible leads on anyone called Rosky, Rosesky, or anything similar, who might be connected with border crossing procedures. As an afterthought, he told the desk sergeant to slip the taxi driver an extra fifty marks from the grease fund the next time he came in.
While Samurai was on his way to Zittau it was still morning in Washington, where a dumbfounded Circo was being blasted by Grazin after being wakened and flown up from Pearse in the middle of the night.
"I don't have any time for bullshit. The war's over for you, buddy," Grazin stormed. "There's only one thing left for you to do now to make it easier on yourself when you go through the wringer, and that's come clean. I want a full disclosure of what's been going on and who's been involved. But before we get into that, we've got this situation over in Europe. Now, I want to know where this Samurai is, exactly what he's doing over there, and who his contacts are." He flipped a switch to start the recorder built into the desk's comm unit. "So sing."