Chapter 16

"Who was he?" I asked Eva after a long moment of silence. She'd spoken for nearly an hour at least, the words coming slowly in a dull, emotionless voice.

"He was Friedrich Dubert," she said, pronouncing the name Dew-bare.

"He's French?"

"Alsatian," Wolfgang answered for his sister. "French by birth, German by blood. His father had been a merchant in Strasbourg and his mother from Kehl, a servant girl in the Dubert household. The bastard took his father's name, which is not uncommon."

"You seem to know a lot about him," I observed and Wolfgang shrugged.

"I spent a long time looking for him," he said. "Once he learned the truth about Eva, that he was being investigated, Dubert went into hiding."

"He took Eva with him?" I asked and she nodded.

"He loved me, I think," Eva sighed. "He could not let me go and he would not kill me."

"He just locked you up?"

"Ja. In the beginning," she said. "He would give me drugs, ja? Only so I would want more."

"What about the police? They must have been looking for you..." I narrowed my eyes.

"Not officially," Wolfgang told us. "Losing Eva was embarrassing for her superiors; they didn't want anyone to know how they'd failed her."

"They left me there," Eva said softly. "When I was in trouble. And after it was too late..." she shrugged. "It was too late."

"But you found her," I said to Wolfgang.

"In Hamburg," he agreed. "Eva was working as a prostitute by then. Dubert used her to entertain his Russian friends, the men he was in business with."

"What business?"

"Hamburg is the second busiest seaport in Europe," Wolfgang explained. "So it's easy to move weapons and drugs, restricted technology, almost anything you can think of. A shipment of machine parts from Russia might have one container filled with anti-tank rockets. When the ship stopped in Hamburg, Dubert would switch that container with another and put it with a shipment of fertilizer bound for Libya, for example."

"So he was just the middleman," I nodded.

"Precisely," Wolfgang agreed. "So long as the cargo never left the port, it never went through customs. The German's wouldn't look too closely at anything but the paperwork. Moving the goods like that, switching transports in Hamburg, made it very difficult for anyone trying to track suspected shipments."

"They'd be following the wrong cargo." I looked at Eva. "That's what you were supposed to investigate? It sounds like a job for the CIA or somebody."

"Nein," she shook her head. "We think he is just a drug dealer. A pimp. We did not know of his real business."

"That was part of the problem," Wolfgang said. "Why Eva was abandoned. After Dubert disappeared, the Berlin police learned that they'd compromised a Bundespolizei investigation into Dubert's possible connection with supplying weapons to terrorists."

"So they wanted to forget the whole thing, I bet," I offered him a wry smile.

"Exactly," Wolfgang nodded. "There was a lot of trouble over this. Many countries were interested, including the United States, and the Berlin police were trying to cover their tracks."

"Cover their asses," I sighed. "So they blamed Eva?"

"No," Wolfgang actually smiled at his sister. "That would have made more problems for them. Losing an officer is always bad, but Eva had turned informant for Dubert. She gave him copies of files, lists of witnesses and the evidence against him. To admit any of that would have been disastrous for a department already in trouble."

"So what did they do?"

"They killed me," Eva said with a laugh. "They found a body, a girl young like me, you see? And they give her my name."

"What?" I blinked at her, but she was serious and Wolfgang was nodding his head.

"Eva died a hero," he said, stroking the girl's thigh affectionately and she smiled up at him. "The matter was quickly closed and that was the end of it."

"And you were ... what? Part of the anti-terrorism investigation thing?" I asked Wolfgang.

"No," he shook his head. "Not directly, but I was aware of it. I was newly assigned to GSG-9 then, still learning my job."

"You knew this Dubert guy though," I said and the man nodded, looking between me and his sister.

"I knew of him," Wolfgang agreed. "GSG-9 is part of the Bundespolizei, the Federal Police, it was very simple to put the pieces together. After I was dismissed and discovered Eva is my sister..."

"You found her," I said.

"I found Dubert," he shrugged. "That was shortly after I'd heard Eva was dead."

"What did you do?" I asked. "I mean, if they said she was killed, then ... What were you looking for?"

"Revenge," Wolfgang smiled.