Page 55 of Sigma

I leap at him and hug him, startling him into a backward step, his arms going around my shoulders. “God, Anselm, am I glad to see you.”

He lets me go. “You as well, Kyrie. Are you all right?”

I bob my head side to side. “I mean, I’m not hurt.”

A nod. “This, I understand.” He looks in the direction Kai had gone. “You let him go. Why?”

“I can kill when I have to, I can shoot if I’m about to be shot. But I’d taken him hostage and he wasn’t a threat to me any longer. I couldn’t just shoot him. Maybe I should’ve but I couldn’t. He has a wife and sons—Apollo used them as leverage to make Kai work for him. I don’t know. Something just told me I had to let him go.”

Anselm nods. “It is best, I think. You have done well.”

I poke his arm. “But now you’re here, so I can let you do the yucky stuff, right?”

He laughs. “Hopefully.”

“Did you get the other guys? Kai said there were ten.”

Anselm nods. “Ja. The Berlin authorities will find ten bodies to deal with. This is what took so long—they were not all together, and I had to be sure of my targets.”

“Kai said Spain.”

“For this Apollo?”

I nod. “That’s what he said—that Apollo owns property in his own name in Spain.”

“Well, then, let’s go to Spain.” He gestures at the car. “Not in that, however. It is most certainly being tracked. The cell phone from this Kai fellow as well. Leave it all here.”

“Can we get ahold of the others?” I ask.

“When we areen route. We must put distance between us and this last known location.”

* * *

Gettingout of Berlin the way Anselm does things is a slow process. First, we use my cash to buy a burner phone, assuming the device Anselm had been using was now compromised. Then, we buy a stash of nonperishable food and bottles of water. Then, leaving me at a bus stop with the bags of food, Anselm vanishes into the shadows, returning a few minutes later in a late model BMW.

It’s a nice car, clean and well-kept, a few years old and fast.

“You don’t steal cheap cars, do you?”

He chuckles. “Not if I can help it.” He drives away at a sedate pace, as if in no hurry. “It is partly an ethical thing, however. A cheap automobile, what you in America call a beater? The person who owns that does so because he or she cannot afford anything better. A vehicle of that sort is often that person’s only lifeline, their only way to work and thus to stave off poverty. I would not steal from such a person, except in a case of a life or death emergency. A newer auto like this, an expensive one, it is owned by someone who can afford its loss. They would be inconvenienced, but it does not have the same deleterious effect.”

“Huh,” I say. “I never thought of that.” We’re heading west out of Berlin, now. “I didn’t think it was possible to steal a car like this.”

He just grins. “You can steal anything. You must simply know the tricks.”

“Secret spy tricks, huh?”

A shrug. “Not so much this, no. There are devices, technologies. If I am off-grid, operating in the dark, so to speak, I often must steal automobiles to get where I must go without being detected when public transit is most certainly being monitored. So, I keep such tricks up my sleeve. These tricks also disengage the tracking and anti-theft devices.” He taps the infotainment screen. “It disables this, as well, but I do not need navi to get from here to Spain.”

“So now we call in?”

He nods. Holds out his hand for the burner phone. “I will dial. There are procedures in place.”

He dials a long series of digits, listens, dials again, listens again. “Alpha-Tango-one-four-six-Kilo-Romeo.” Listening again, another series of numbers, and then he hands me the phone. “It’s ringing for your husband.”

I put the phone to my ear, hearing it burble—not a typical ringing sound. The elaborate process Anselm went through was to patch into a secure, encrypted line that couldn’t be tapped into from the outside.

“Hello?” His voice is the most familiar thing to me on the planet. “Kyrie?” He sounds choked up.