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Panic-stricken now, Mattie pleaded, “Let him go. Please, he’s just a boy.”
“Yes, he is,” Falk said icily. “So listen carefully if you ever want to see him alive again. I want you to get Ilona Frei, and I want you to bring her to me. You and Ilona. No one else. If you do bring someone else, anyone else, I will cut your son’s throat, ear to ear, just the way I used to bleed out hogs for my father.
“Do you understand?”
Mattie glanced at Burkhart, who had gone cold and hard at the wheel, slowing, looking for a place to stop. Ilona Frei softly whimpered in the backseat. Burkhart looked at Ilona, pressed his finger to his lips, and nodded to Mattie.
“All right,” Mattie said shakily. “Where do you want me to bring her?”
“Where any mother might have looked for a lost child in the last days of the East German Republic,” Falk snarled. “You have ninety minutes to get here or your boy dies.”
“That’s not enough—”
“It’s what you’ve got,” Falk said and hung up.
CHAPTER 120
RACING SOUTH AS the storm threatened, Mattie stared into the darkness, doing everything in her power not to collapse.
In the backseat, Ilona Frei was turning hysterical. “You’re not going to let
him have me, are you? You wouldn’t trade me for your son, would you?”
For a second Mattie was so stunned at the question that she did not know what to say, but then she shook her head. “No. No, of course not.”
“Call the police,” Ilona pleaded.
“That could get Niklas killed,” Burkhart said.
“Then call your friends at Private!”
With Falk’s warning about bringing anyone else along still ringing in her ears, she looked to Burkhart and said: “You’re the hostage rescuer. What do we do?”
“Is there specialized gear in the trunk?”
“Yes, it’s Private’s car.”
“Give me the particulars.”
Mattie struggled to think. “Two bulletproof vests. One 9 mm Heckler and Koch automatic assault rifle. Two twenty-shot magazines in 9 mm.”
“Night vision?” he asked.
“A scope.”
“No goggles.”
“Just the scope.”
“Radios? Cameras?”
“Two earbuds with Bluetooth mics, and two fiber-optic units.”
“Can they feed wireless to a website?”
“Private Berlin’s.”
“So I could access a feed from my phone?”
