He typed in a second command and his screen filled with a long list of names. He scrolled down to Chris Schneider's, and then highlighted a corresponding series of numbers and letters. After making a copy of that code, Gabriel called up an application called Sky Eye.
He entered the code into a blinking box and hit Enter. Half of the amphitheater's screen jumped to a Google Earth view of Berlin. Mattie was first to spot the blinking orange icon out on the far eastern outskirts of the city, several kilometers south of the neighborhood of. He highlighted the blinking icon and hit Enter.
The picture zoomed down and in, revealing the blurry image of a building in the shape of an L. It had an arched roof that looked broken in places. Dense vegetation pressed in around the place, which abutted a large undeveloped space choked with trees and brush.
A moment later, an address popped up on the screen along with a file. Gabriel clicked on the file and it opened, revealing a PDF of the building's handwritten property records. Blown up on the screen that way, the words Mattie read sent an involuntary shudder through her for reasons she could not fully explain. Mattie looked at her boss and replied with a slight tremor in her voice: "It says the building is abandoned now. Has been for twenty- five years.
But back in the communist era, it was a state-run Schlachthaus. A slaughterhouse. Jack Morgan had ordered them out to the slaughterhouse, and demanded that Dr. Gabriel start figuring out how in the hell someone had managed to breach Private's state-of-the-art firewall.
Katharina was supposed to go to Chris's apartment to see if his personal computer contained any notes on the cases he was working. Burkhart said nothing as he drove. Mattie was glad for it. She was in no mood to talk. Apprehension had enveloped her, and she tried to fend off the sense of being trapped by studying the giant television tower with its revolving ball and spire looming high above Berlin, getting closer with every moment.
The communists built the tower in as a way of showing the West that they were modern enough to accomplish such a feat. At more than three hundred meters high, it was visible from virtually everywhere in Berlin on a sunny day. But it was gray now. The clouds hung low in the sky. Drizzle had begun to fall on the tower and on the S-Bahn, the elevated train station at Alexanderplatz, a bustling part of the city day and night. The tower loomed over it all as did the Park Inn Hotel, a communist- era building that had been spruced up.
The Park is where Westerners would stay when visiting East Berlin before the wall came down. It was said that there were more electronic bugs in the Park Hotel than anywhere else on earth.
Mattie tried to imagine Chris at eighteen. In her mind, she saw her ex-fiance standing out there on the plaza between the tower and the Park Hotel, one of half a million protesters gathered in early November She saw Chris and the others acting and speaking in defiance of the scores of Stasi — the dreaded and oppressive East German secret police — who surrounded Alexanderplatz that night, filming the crowd, trying to intimidate the protesters into disbanding.
During their two-year romance, Chris had told Mattie very little about his childhood and adolescence. She knew that his parents died in an auto accident when he was eight, and that he'd grown up in an orphanage out in the countryside somewhere southeast of Berlin.
But Chris also told her that shortly after the uprising began in earnest, he left the orphanage with some friends and went to Berlin, ending up on Alexanderplatz the night of the largest protest, the one that showed the world how much the East Germans wanted freedom Chris said that he'd felt like his life really began that night as the wall began to crack and crumble, falling not five days later.
Do you remember, Mattie? What it felt like? She saw herself at sixteen on the west side of Checkpoint Charlie, cheering and singing and dancing with her mother when East Berliners broke through the wall there and came freely into the West for the first time in more than twenty-eight years. Mattie remembered seeing her mother's face when her sister came through the wall that night. They had all wept for joy.
Then, in Mattie 's mind, her mother's teary face blurred and became Chris's the morning he'd asked her to marry him. She felt a ball in her throat and had to fight not to cry in front of Burkhart.
Mattie's cell phone rang. It was Dr. Not much, a couple of meters this way and that, but he's moving. Then she looked at Burkhart. Mattie's mind spun as the prefabricated, Soviet- style architecture that surrounded them became a blur out the window. Was Chris injured? What was he doing in an old slaughterhouse? Was I wrong to have ended it? Was I? Do I still love him? Mattie looked over at him.
Mind telling me why? Just get me there, okay? They circled the woods, seeing only bike trails before finding the vine-choked drive that led to the old slaughterhouse. The rain was squalling now, blown by gusts from the east. Burkhart parked just as Mattie's cell phone rang. It was Katharina. She lugged up her hood and got out, heading straight into the vines, which she pushed and hacked through until she'd reached a clearing of sorts.
The walls of the slaughterhouse were cement block and rose to a line of blown-out windows below the eaves of an arched roof. The place was covered in old graffiti, including a skull stamped with a dripping bloodred X.
Mattie felt unnerved, which was completely unlike her. She'd been a full-fledged Kripo investigator for the Berlin criminal police for ten years, five of them in homicide, and had another two years working high-profile cases for Private. She'd seen the worst one man could do to another, and Mattie always handled these incidents like the professional she was. But now, seeing that graffiti, she felt like ignoring years of training and yelling out to him.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Burkhart drawing his Glock. She drew her own pistol, whispering, "Bluetooth. I'm going to call Doc. Then he donned latex gloves. Mattie did the same. The wind gusted, amplifying the drumming of the rain on the leaves and causing a chain to clank somewhere. Mattie moved toward it through the sopping-wet grass and weeds, redialing Dr. Gabriel's number. He answered immediately. Looks like he's up against the east wall. He pushed at the barn door with his foot.
It creaked open, revealing a cement- floored hallway with drains set at intervals down its center and partitions every four meters or so. Mattie peered closer at the floor. It was covered in old trash and dust. Rat shit. And bolts sticking out of the wall about knee high and again about shoulder height. Seeing the bolts, Mattie felt a distinct sense of menace around her. He twisted his head quickly. His neck made a cracking sound.
They probably kept the livestock in here awaiting slaughter. But Mattie could not shake that sense of threat. Indeed, the closer they got to the barn doors at the end of the hallway, the more pronounced the feeling became. She could barely breathe when Burkhart slid back one of the double doors.
Pigeons spooked and flapped toward the empty windows. She and Burkhart both swung their beams in that direction, hearing Gabriel say: "He should be right there at thirty meters. That's impossi — " Gabriel paused. He's not here. Then Mattie caught a flicker of movement and heard glass rolling on cement.
She swung her light, the powerful beam finding an enormous rat that froze, blinded, sitting up on its haunches, staring into the light, eyes blinking, and nose twitching. There was something shiny between its teeth. The gunshot surprised Mattie so much she jumped hard left, landing and then tripping on one of the bolts on the floor. She sprawled in the dirt.
She glared up at Burkhart. As Mattie struggled to her feet, he crouched over the rodent a moment, then stood and turned to face her. Claude Rains, the same guy who played the enigmatic French captain in Casablanca, stars as a mad scientist who turns homicidal after he figures out how to erase his visible body. Not surprisingly, it's one of my absolute favorite films of all time. One scene in particular never fails to leave me howling with laughter.
In it, Rains is covered in bandages and has taken refuge at an inn run by the Irish actress Una O'Connor. She happens to enter Rains's room when he's removed the bandages on his head. He looks decapitated, but alive. O'Connor's eyes bulge. She goes over-the-top insane. She starts to shriek bloody murder. It's my special moment. One I wish I could re-create in my own life. But alas, attaining invisibility is an art more than a science. For instance, I have found over the past twenty-five years that the best thing you can do to remain unseen is to relax and inhabit your mask so thoroughly that people come to think nothing of you, especially in Berlin, my beautiful city of scars.
I'm not being poetic here. I'm telling you the truth. Pay attention now. My friends, let me state unequivocally that if you are relaxed in Berlin, comfortable in your own scarred skin, and not causing outward trouble, the millions of scarred Berliners around you will just go on about their silly days, unaware of beings like me.
Or at least not believing in their wildest nightmares that someone like me could still live among them. Still hunting. With all that in mind, I am very, very cool as I drive an unmarked white panel van — one of a small fleet of vehicles I've collected over the years — through the rainy Berlin streets, past the scars of Hitler, and the Russians, and the Wall, way out to a forest north of Ahrensfelde, and down a wet wooded lane to a children's camp on Liepnitz Lake not far from the sleepy village of Utzdorf.
Do you know Utzdorf? It doesn't matter. Just understand that there is no one at that camp today. At least that's how it appears at first glance. Then again, why would there be? It's pouring out and cold and there's dense fog building out on the water around the island.
I park near the dock. No sooner do I shut off the engine than my young genius friend appears on the porch of the boathouse.
He's bearded, midtwenties, and his soaking-wet hair hangs on his fogged glasses. He takes them off and tries to dry them on a wet sweatshirt that features the emblem of the Berlin Technical University.
I take a gym bag from the passenger seat of my van and climb out, leaving the engine running. I got fucking soaked. I keep it just out of his reach. He retrieves a disk and hands it to me, saying, "All of Schneider's work files. But his body language says otherwise. Once he hands me the disk, I play along and give him the bag of money. He opens it and checks several packets of fifty-euro notes. I take two quick steps behind him, grab his hair, and drive the sharpened blade of the screwdriver up under the nape of his skull.
When at last he drops my money and sags against me, I'm panting, spent and rubber-legged, as if I've just had the most explosive sex imaginable. What a thrill! What an amazing, amazing thrill! Even after all these years that rush never gets old. I stand there for several moments in the aftermath of a great death, calm, drained, sated, and yet hyperaware of everything around me: the rain, the clouds, the forest, and the whistling of ducks out there in the fog.
With his body in my hands, with the sense of his life force still vibrating in me, it's like I'm here and not, hovering on the edge of the afterlife, you know? At last I roll him over on his belly and draw out the screwdriver.
I get out a tube of superglue and use it to seal the entry wound at the back of his neck. No more blood. It's done in seconds. I chuckle as I drag my young genius friend toward my van, thinking how strange it is that there are people out there in the world, people far deeper and more philosophical than me, who spend their lives wondering if a tree falling in woods like this makes a crashing sound if there's no one around to hear it.
What a stupid goddamn thing to spend your life thinking about. Don't they know they would be better off pondering whether a man like me can exist when he's never been truly seen? The high commissar was a tall crane of a man, early fifties, quiet, moody, and extremely private, rarely fraternizing with other cops.
He was even said to resent the fact that he had to work with a second detective on homicide cases. Mattie had heard about Dietrich during her many years with Berlin Kripo, of course, but she'd never had the chance to work with him directly.
Still, an hour after their initial call to Kripo she was more than relieved when she saw him walking toward her beneath a black umbrella in a gray suit, his somber face revealing nothing. If anyone could find out what had happened to Chris, it was this man.
Mattie and Burkhart moved around the uniformed officer now guarding the front of the slaughterhouse and went to meet Dietrich. They showed him their Private badges and identified themselves.
Her cheeks started to burn. A blue Kripo bus appeared, splashing toward the slaughterhouse. Mattie knew what that meant. Every time a body is found in Berlin, Kripo sends out one of these specially equipped buses.
They contain all the equipment and supplies needed to fully document a murder scene. Seeing the bus, Mattie became angry. Dietrich grimaced and looked over his shoulder at the stout little woman in her midtwenties marching earnestly up the driveway toward them He sighed heavily. My trainee. Then he looked back at Martie and Burkhart. Inspector Weigel took copious notes. Dietrich took none. He just stood there, listening intently, expressionless.
He asked only one question. Like someone used one of those blowers that gardeners use to erase all tracks. Burkhart had not mentioned that before. Dietrich gave Burkhart a glance of reappraisal, and then went inside the slaughterhouse. The hallway was lit now with klieg lights. The high commissar walked toward the main slaughterhouse slowly, methodically, his eyes going everywhere, saying nothing.
Mattie said, "The room where we found the chip — it's big. Private could bring in its forensics team to help. We have state and federal certification. A team of criminalists was setting up lights and gathering samples at the east end of the main slaughterhouse where the chip had been found. Dietrich examined the dead rat and then looked up at Burkhart. Mattie dug in her pants pocket and came up with a plastic evidence sleeve with the chip and the flesh inside.
Dietrich took it from her and studied it closely. He was crouched over a bolt protruding from the floor beneath the rusty overhead track. I can't have any more contamination. We backed out the second we found the chip, and we waited for Kripo. You'll have to leave. You should know, FrauEngel. It's department policy. I have every right to be here. So leave, or I'll have you taken out. Give Kripo some space. We've got other things to take care of. Mattie hardened.
Negotiated cooperation then. The high commissar followed them to the south entry to the slaughterhouse, and watched them walk down the driveway in the pelting rain.
Inspector Weigel came up beside him. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer? A uniformed police officer is letting two people leave, a tall man, imposing and bald, and a blond woman wearing a navy-blue rain slicker with the hood up. They walk toward me and a BMW parked on the shoulder.
For a second I can't breathe. Dots dance before my eyes. I feel like they're a pack of snarling dogs suddenly biting at my ankles. What have they found? My young genius is wrapped in a blue tarp behind me on the van floor, but I'm not thinking of him. I'm being strangled by that question. Then old training kicks in. I get ahold of myself and quickly lower the sun visor. The passenger windows of my van are slightly tinted.
All the man and the woman will see is a silhouette of me as I pass them and the police barrier. I take my first breath, then another, and by the fifth I have to fight not to hyperventilate.
But I get the van turned into an alley that runs between the two old apartment buildings up the hill from the slaughterhouse. In seconds I'm out on a main drag, heading back toward the neighborhood of Mehrow. My stomach churns. The first chance I get, I pull over, park, and put my head on the steering wheel. And who was that big bald guy with the woman? The air around me suddenly seems negatively charged, and that sets off true panic in me.
Sweat boils on my forehead and trickles down my spine. I force myself to go through everything that occurred inside the slaughterhouse three days ago. What could be left? Blood stains on the bolt, perhaps. Or spinal fluid? Maybe some bone fragments, I decide at last. But they won't know whose blood or bone it is, now will they? Unless dear Chris left behind DNA samples.
But those tests take days. There's nothing else. I've seen to it all. I'm sure of it. Unless Chris told someone where he was going? It was personal. He came for me alone. Given the lack of other evidence, I tell myself the police will soon let it go.
A blood stain in an old slaughterhouse? They'll think someone tripped and gouged their leg or something. I almost convince myself before doubt takes a stroll through my mind.
What if they were to keep looking? This possibility agitates me so much I twist around to look into the rear of the van at the shape of the corpse in the tarp.
Every cell in my body wants to drive by the slaughterhouse to get another look, try to get a sense of the scope of the police action, but I know I can't. Smart cops look for that kind of thing. In the end, I tell myself to return home, or better to call and meet the woman who thinks I love her.
Put a sense of normality in my visible life, rebuild the mask once more. I'll come by tomorrow in a different vehicle. If the police are gone, then I'll dispose of the young genius's body in the normal way and things will go on as they always have. But if they're still there, I'll have no choice but to erase the slaughterhouse and all its dirty little secrets forever.
The white panel van passing by barely registered in her brain. Burkhart shook his head and climbed in. Mattie got in angrily beside him "I should. Dietrich's right. They need impartial people in there.
If you were impartial in this situation, I'd wonder about you as a human. Burkhart turned on the windshield wipers, which slapped away the wet leaves. Mattie threw up her hands. I can'tjust — " "We're going to Chris's apartment. It took them forty minutes to get there in the late- afternoon traffic. Mattie had gone quiet again, looking out at the cityscape as they crossed back from the old east into the west.
Mattie had lived in Berlin her entire life. She was a Berliner through and through. She loved the city, its architecture, people, art, laid-back attitude, and entrepreneurial spirit. But now, in light of the mystery surrounding Chris's disappearance, Berlin seemed suddenly to her to be an alien place inhabited by creatures who might cut a tracking chip out of a man's back and feed it to rats.
They passed the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial, the roofless grand entry hall and wounded spire of a church that somehow survived a bombing raid in The scorched ruins sat on a grand plaza beside an ultramodern belfry. The ruins were among Chris's favorite places in the city. He liked to sit and contemplate the spire, which looked like it had been cleaved in two by the bomb. One side collapsed and fell.
The other still stood, jagged against the sky. She startled, looked around, and then said, "Correct. It was a slightly frumpy address for a man of Schneider's age, but he'd loved the place because it gave him close access to the zoo and to Tiergarten Park, where he liked to run.
Mattie had not been to Chris's place in more than six weeks. Her last visit weighed heavily on her mind as they used her key to open the door to the building. There was a courtyard with grass and raised garden beds. The one below Chris's apartment had been freshly tilled. There were bags of tulip bulbs sitting near a hoe and shovel. A BMW motorcycle was parked on the grass. Mattie frowned. She knew the superintendent of the building, a cantankerous man named Krauss.
She'd never known him to allow motorcycles in his courtyard, or bikes for that matter. She put that aside and led Burkhart up an interior staircase to a second- floor landing. She hesitated. At some level, she felt like this place was forbidden to her now, no matter what might have happened to Chris. She turned the knob and pushed the door open. Books littered the floor. The closets had been opened, their contents strewn all about. Mattie smelled trash rotting and heard a cat mewing.
The cat had stopped crying. Burkhart grimaced, but then followed her lead. She walked gingerly through the debris, including shattered glass from picture frames.
Several of the pictures showed Chris and Mattie, arms around each other, smiling as if they were the happiest couple on earth. How had it all gone so wrong? How had this happened? The chip. The hacking. And now his apartment is tossed. And why? What was Chris on to? Mattie reached the alcove where Chris often worked at home. She spotted the smashed laptop on the floor and went to it. She crouched and used a pen to push aside the pieces, barely aware of Burkhart picking up a photograph of Chris and a young boy.
We call Kripo. You wait at the car. She stopped breathing in through her mouth and went into the bedroom, which was painted bright white. The comforter was bright white too. So were the drapes, which billowed with the gusts of wind and rain blowing in through the open French windows that overlooked the courtyard. Rain soaked the rug below the windows. There was a wastebasket by the bed filled to the brim with papers, one of the few containers that had not been emptied in the entire apartment.
Mattie crossed to it and saw several crumpled pieces of paper on top. She was picking one up when she heard a meow. She looked over and saw Socrates, Chris's charcoal and gray tabby, coming out of the bathroom. Mattie took a step toward him, grinning. She followed the tracks with her eyes to the closet door at her immediate right, then slipped the crumpled paper into her pocket, took a step toward the cat, and started to reach for her pistol, saying, "Good Socrates.
You hungry? She crashed to the rug next to Socrates. The man tried to kick her in the stomach, but she saw it coming and curled up so her thigh took the impact. He took two steps to the window and jumped out. Mattie fought to get to her feet, drawing her pistol. She heard the motorcycle engine growl to life and staggered to the window just as he popped the clutch, throwing up grass as he wove toward the entry to the building.
Without thinking, Mattie jumped. She landed in the soggy, freshly tilled bed and then rolled out of it as a parachutist might. She saw Krauss coming into the courtyard from the opposite side, horror on his face.
She had no time to explain. The motorcyclist was getting away. She sprinted through the building's main door, hoping to catch the license plate. The motorcyclist was accelerating west. She could see his back and helmet but no license plate. The BMW screeched up beside her, Burkhart at the wheel. By the time they reached the corner he was turning west again, paralleling the canal and the campus of the Technical University.
Burkhart downshifted and almost caught him before he crossed the March Bridge onto campus. Students were diving out of the way of the motorcycle and Burkhart' s car as they raced through campus. At a roundabout the rider curled left onto Hardenbergstrasse and then crossed under the Zoologischer S-Bahn station, where he wove hard to his right onto Joachimstaler, then sharply left onto Kantstrasse, heading east toward the ruins of the belfry tower.
Despite the serpentine course they ran through the city, Burkhart had somehow managed to close the gap again when the man who'd trashed Chris's apartment dodged without warning across traffic and up onto the plaza that surrounded the ruins. It's a Stasi conspiracy story, which is a completely different organization that wasn't even created until It wasn't released until I want them to end happily but they just seem to end TOO fast.
I am always looking for a new one to read. If you are a James Patterson fan and who isn't then you will enjoy this one. Download links for: Private Berlin Advertising. Online stores:. Copy in the library:. Reviews see all Mary. A Most Wanted Man. The book is based around Jack Morgan, who runs and owns a private investigation company.
There are many different branches of the company around the globe to investigate some critical cases and murders. The company includes Jack Morgan himself, his team of investigators, a psychiatrist, a forensic scientist, and a talented computer hacker.
The plot of the book is very engaging and glorious. The novel is very well written. With its thrilling and mesmerizing writing style, the story creates an emotional relationship with the reader. The association helps the reader understand the novel that ultimately gives a fantastic experience to the reader. The layout of the book is understandable and straightforward.
The author has designed the book in a way that keeps the reader come back again and again.
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