The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (6 page)

Listen, I’m not a guy who believes in making things difficult for himself. In an ideal world, I like to case a joint before I break in to it, and if I happen to learn that a venue is likely to be vacant for a couple of days, I’m only too happy to exploit the situation and avoid unnecessary risks.

Victoria’s information file had given me a great head start. True, it had been buried in the bottom of her suitcase—a suitcase I’d been expressly forbidden to snoop through—but, hey, telling a professional thief not to take a tour through your things is like telling a compulsive eater not to peek in your fridge. It doesn’t work. The temptation is too much. And I’m a sucker for temptation.

I’m also a sucker for handsome belongings, and during my time in the editors’ homes, I’d found plenty to tickle my fancy. I’d picked up a selection of expensive silk ties, and I’d had my choice of e-readers. I’d located a reasonable amount of hard cash and an intriguing sculpture from an up-and-coming German artist. I’d even taken a peek at the new manuscript from a best-selling crime author I happened to admire.

So all things considered, Victoria’s tiff really wasn’t a terribly high price to pay for such a golden opportunity, let alone three of them, and I wasn’t about to apologize for being who I was and doing what I did, no matter how annoyed she might be.

Instead, I led her around the corner and along the street toward the destination Freddy had included in his text. To my mind, we were now in the extreme northwest corner of the Turkish district of Kreuzberg. Others would disagree. To the city’s young and hip, the neighborhood was little more than a tourist zone, oozing out from Mitte and the redeveloped Potsdamer Platz, with its skyscrapers and multliscreen cinemas and shopping malls and food courts. For them, the
real
Kreuzberg was farther east, where bohemians, punks, and anarchists had squatted following the collapse of the Wall, and where musicians, artists, and creatives had settled, in the years since.

I don’t suppose it mattered all that much. It certainly didn’t concern me. The only thing weighing on my mind just then (apart, of course, from Victoria’s sulk and the unfortunate murder I’d happened to witness) was the way time appeared to be racing on. Freddy had told me that the function the embassy’s staff were attending would conclude at midnight. It was nudging toward ten o’clock already, and I still had as many as three properties to tick off my list. And we all know what happens when the big hand and the little hand hit the magic number twelve. That’s right, princesses turn back into servant girls, carriages into pumpkins, and burglars into sitting ducks.

The Mövenpick Hotel had a multicolored light canopy hanging above its entrance. I guided Victoria inside and to our left, where I deposited her at the hotel bar. The bar was very dark, lit only by a series of colored neon tubes and an image of a crackling fire that was being projected onto the far wall. It was moderately busy. The clientele seemed to be a mixture of businesspeople and tourists. I heard a variety of accents and languages. Some Dutch. Some French. A good deal of German. And a smattering of English.

I accompanied Victoria to a red leather stool at the bar. “Order me a mineral water,” I told her. “And anything you’d like to eat or drink. Anything at all. I’ll settle the bill when I get back.”

“Generous,” she muttered.

“Listen, can we be friends again?”

She glared at me so savagely that I felt compelled to pat myself down and check for injuries.

“How about acquaintances?”

“Just go, Charlie. Give me some space.”

I could tell there wasn’t much point saying anything more, so I quit while I was very definitely behind, and left the bar. On my way out, I raised Victoria’s mobile to my ear and embarked on a tedious conversation with a colleague back in London. The colleague didn’t exist, and neither, for that matter, did the phone call, but the act was enough to get me past the staff in reception without my presence being questioned, and from there I stepped inside an elevator and traveled up to the first floor.

A sign inside the carriage had informed me that the hotel occupied the site of the former Siemens factory, and the interior design retained a number of nods to the building’s industrial past. There was an old chunk of machinery in a glass case outside the elevator doors. The cast-iron radiators in the hallway were painted a metallic brown and reminded me of the heating system in my old boarding school. The corridor windows were giant sash units with multiple panes, and the stairways were workmanlike structures with concrete treads.

But the overall impression was strikingly modern. The carpet was a deep purple in color, inlaid with bold floral patterns. The walls were painted off-white and decorated with long German phrases in a flowing black script. The doors to the hotel rooms were made of sleek, dark wood, with aluminum fittings. And the information signs and room numbers were etched onto squares of jauntily colored plastic, backlit by electric bulbs.

Room 134 was at the far end of the corridor. According to Freddy’s text, it was the temporary home of a lady by the name of Jane Parker, who was in residence at the hotel during a short-term posting in Berlin. Freddy’s message had concluded with the information that she was a security consultant, on assignment from London. The idea that a security specialist could have stolen something of value from the office of the British ambassador seemed a bit iffy to me, but since Freddy was the guy calling the shots (not to mention paying for them), and since he’d insisted that the mystery item had been stolen, I was going to have to go ahead and search her belongings.

First, though, I knocked.

It was a pretty timid knock. I wanted it to be just loud enough to be heard from the inside but not so loud as to draw the attention of a guest in an adjoining room.

There was no response, but that was hardly conclusive, so I held my breath for a moment and knocked again. I even cleared my throat and spoke in a low, fast voice.

“Room service.”

On reflection, it was just about the dumbest thing I could have said. If there
was
somebody inside and they answered the door, it was going to strike them as pretty odd if they hadn’t ordered any room service. And it was going to seem even stranger if they opened their door to find me standing there in my soggy raincoat, drenched jeans, and scummy baseball trainers, without a food cart or a serving tray.

Lucky, then, that my knock went unanswered, and after a short pause to recover my senses and remind myself that now really wasn’t the time to be a total moron, I turned my attention to the next obstacle in my way—the key card entry system.

It goes without saying that there are several ways to defeat a magnetic card reader, and naturally enough, the best way of all is to have the right key. Failing that, you can try and bluff the folks in reception by claiming that you’ve mislaid your card. But since the room was booked in the name of a female guest who happened to be staying alone, and since Victoria wasn’t in the most amenable frame of mind to assist me just at the moment, I didn’t believe I’d try that particular technique. But I wasn’t about to cry into my sleeve, either. Because just like the garage elevator in the Tiergarten, the system employed a manual backup—there was a trusty keyhole fitted in the very center of the door handle.

I was just about to drop to my knees and give it the once-over when I heard hushed conversation from behind me. Turning around, I saw a middle-aged couple wheeling suitcases along the corridor. I rolled my eyes and patted my coat pockets like I was searching for my key card. Nope, couldn’t find it. I rolled my eyes some more. I even added a shoulder shrug, just to test my acting range, and then I curled my hand into a fist and rapped lightly on the door.

“Darling,” I cooed. “Sweet pea. I seem to have lost my key.”

The man and the woman smiled awkwardly at me, then huddled around their own door and fitted their card in the slot. The lock disengaged with a clunk and the man held the door open for his partner.

“Honey,” I persisted. “Are you in the bathroom?”

The man dragged his suitcase inside and allowed the door to close behind him.

As soon as the corridor was empty again, I searched inside my coat and removed my gloves and the spectacles case that contains my burglary tools. There was every chance I wouldn’t need my gloves. After all, this was a hotel room, and it was likely to be layered in many thousands of fingerprints. But hell, wearing gloves was one of my key rules, and given how my night had started out, now didn’t seem like the time to take chances.

My gloves were cheap, disposable numbers, made of a very fine, opaque plastic. They were also customized. Some months ago now, I’d spent a very dull evening snipping away the middle and fourth fingers on an entire box of gloves to accommodate the warped digits on my right hand. I’ll admit it’s not a perfect solution, since it makes the gloves a little more delicate than I might prefer, but I was compensating by carrying another two sets in case this pair disintegrated, and I’d wrapped surgical tape around my exposed fingertips to be certain I didn’t leave any prints.

With my gloves secured, I popped open my spectacles case and removed an aluminum raking tool and a medium torsion wrench. I’d been so active just recently that I’d treated myself to a whole new set of tools from a locksmith supply company on the Internet, and they made short work of the locking mechanism.

After only a few tweaks and twists, I heard a reassuring click, followed by another, and one more, and finally a very welcome clunk. Moving as swiftly as possible, I stepped inside the darkened room and hung the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the outside of the door. Then I sighed, and rubbed my hands together, and allowed myself to relish, just for a moment, the sudden rush of endorphins that coursed through my body. I was all atingle. Another forbidden space. Another violation of privacy. Sick, I grant you, but I can’t pretend it didn’t feel
good
.

EIGHT

The room lights could only be triggered by slipping a key card into a slot on the wall, and since there was no override (or rather, no override that I could be troubled to find), I clicked on my pocket torch.

My penlight is tiny, but it’s powerful, and I cast the beam around to get my bearings. I found that I was standing in a short hallway with coat hooks on my left and a series of fitted cabinets and a bathroom on my right. Ahead of me, the ceiling height doubled above a living-sleeping area that ended in floor-to-ceiling windows shrouded by net curtains.

My first move was to cross the room and close the heavy fabric curtains in front of the nets. Couple of reasons for that. One, the hotel was arranged around a central courtyard, where the hotel restaurant was located beneath a glass atrium, and I didn’t want any inquisitive guests or staff to spot my torch beam bouncing around. And two, I was determined to stick to my new rule and make sure I didn’t glance out the window and spot some dastardly crime.

Once the curtains were drawn, I took a second glance around the room. My torch beam bounced back at me on a whole spectrum of crazy angles. The light was being refracted by a wall of thick glass tiles positioned between the sleeping area and the en suite bathroom. Clearly, this wasn’t the place to stay if you or your partner happened to be a prude.

I have to say I liked it. I liked the high ceiling and the high window. I liked the yellow, modernist armchair. I liked the bold writing desk, fashioned from some kind of lush olivewood, and I liked how the bed frame and headboard had been manufactured from the same timber. I was a little confused by the way the king-sized bed had been made up. The linen was a startling white and high quality, but there were two duvets, and they’d been formed into rolls at the bottom of each side of the mattress. One for each guest, I assumed, unless like Jane Parker you were staying on your own.

But enough about the décor. I had a task to complete and not a vast amount of time to do it in. There weren’t many likely hiding places for whatever it was I was supposed to find, but I knew where I planned to start.

I returned to the hallway and opened a low cupboard down by my knee. The minibar. Not what I’d had in mind, but I scanned it all the same. There was nothing I wouldn’t have expected to see. Alcoholic miniatures. Tiny cans of soft drinks. A couple of chocolate bars and some mixed nuts and potato crisps.

I tried the tall cupboard door on my right. This was more like it. A selection of jackets, blouses, trousers, and skirts were suspended from a metal rail. I patted the clothing down, for form’s sake if nothing else, and then I dropped to my knees and aimed my torch at what I was really interested in.

No, not the laundry service bag. The room safe.

It was a dinky little thing, and the way it was squatting there, acting all tough, was sort of like a kitten pretending it was a jungle cat. There was a ten-digit electronic keypad and a short list of helpful user instructions printed on the plastic fascia. The safe itself was fashioned from reinforced steel, with concealed hinges, and it was about as secure as a wet paper bag. Seriously. I know of at least eight ways to defeat one of these suckers without breaking a sweat. Some of them are simple, and some of them are ingenious, but most of them require a fair amount of time.

Which is why I was going for the fastest option.

Removing Victoria’s smartphone from my pocket, I connected to the Internet. Alas, Web access wasn’t complimentary inside the hotel, so this was going to hurt just a smidgen when Victoria eventually saw her roaming charges.

I typed in the Web address for the blog I was after. The site is administered by a guy in Poland who has an interest in hacking a wide variety of security devices. His real passion is complex intruder systems, but he started out small, and if you search through his archive, you’re nearly guaranteed to find what it is that you’re after.

I found the name of the manufacturer of this particular safe smack in the middle of a handy alphabetical list. I clicked on the name, then waited for the relevant page to load, and once I had it, I held the screen up next to the keypad and started to type.