. . I don’t know who you are, so I don’t know what you know.”
“Just start talking. I’ll tell you to skip ahead if I’m bored,” Court replied.
“There is an Iranian named Haz Mirza who lives in Berlin. He is Quds—”
Zoya interrupted. “Skip ahead. We know about Mirza. We know you were tracking his phone.”
Annika took a few breaths, then said, “Mirza’s phone, we had it bugged and geotracked. It gave us the location of the factory.”
Court asked, “Who knew that you had it geotracked?”
She thought about this, staring at a point on the wall as she did so. “Moises, Yanis . . . the two technicians you say were killed. Ric Ennis.” She looked up at the trio standing in front of her. “And Rudolf Spangler. The owner of Shrike. That is all.”
“So . . .” Court said, “you are saying that there is only one person on that list who is still alive.”
The three stared down at her. She shook her head.
“Nein. Nein, you are wrong. Rudy is like a father to me.”
Zack had been standing close to the balcony, keeping an eye on the dark street outside. But he turned around to face her now. “Yeah, then I’m just gonna say it. Your dad sucks.”
She glared at him, but Court got the impression she was a very smart woman and was putting this all together about as fast as he and his mates were.
Still, she fought against her intellect. “I can’t believe he would—”
Court interrupted. “Spangler gave those guys Mirza’s phone, which means either he, or the guy actually calling the shots, has control of Mirza. Either way, your boss helped lead you there tonight so that those gun monkeys could kill you. You’re smart enough to see that, aren’t you?”
Dittenhofer looked at him, tears streaming freely down her face. After several seconds she nodded. “I don’t understand why.”
To this, Zoya said, “You know too much. The two technicians knew too much. You all had to be removed.”
Dittenhofer sipped her coffee and stared at the floor. “I don’t even know that much. They were asking about you,” she said, with an accusatory finger pointed towards Court. “What do you have to do with any of this?”
Before Court could answer, Zack knelt in front of her. His voice dark and menacing, he said, “Tell you what, Fräulein. When you and two of your buddies snatch my friend at gunpoint, you get to ask him whatever you want. Until then, it’s his turn.”
She looked down to the floor. “Yes, I put surveillance on some Quds men, some VAJA men, even some MeK men. I recruited cyber assets into Shrike. But all I did was collect the intelligence product and pass it on to Rudy. I don’t even know what Rudy was doing with the information.”
“Do you know what Ric Ennis was doing?” Court asked.
She shook her head vehemently. “No. We were compartmentalized in our assignments. I have no idea what Ennis did, what the cyber team was doing.”
Zoya said, “Ennis told me what he was doing.”
And Court added, “Clark Drummond told me what he was doing.”
“Why would they tell you that?”
Zoya answered. “Ennis knew a German intelligence officer had been killed while trailing our operation the other night. He was scared. The morning he died he came to my room, told me we had to run. I wouldn’t listen so he told me what was really going on. He wanted me to know how incriminating this all was for Shrike. He said he’d spent months breaking into apartments of the Quds Force and VAJA men, planting evidence that would tie them together.”
Annika bit her lip and sniffed hard, as if she could recoil the tears back into her eyes. “I knew it was something like that. Rudy would tell me to stop my coverage on Quds and the Iranian embassy spies, usually for just two or three hours at a time. I asked him about it but he said the client was directing us to do so and he did not know why.” She looked to Zoya. “If Ennis was doing black-bag work, then that was Rudy giving him the instructions. Ennis didn’t know the client any more than I did.”
This was obvious to Court, but Annika clearly still had trouble wrapping her head around the fact that her surrogate father was as dirty as he clearly was.
Annika now asked, “But . . . what is the objective in all this?”
Court knelt right in front of the German woman