Private Berlin (Private 5)

“The countess still here, Axel?” Mattie asked, loud enough to be heard.

The man with

the spiderweb tattoo jerked his head back in the direction he’d come from. “She’s with the Argentine. They’re on something stronger than booze, weed, or blow. I’m guessing ecstasy.”

“Just as long as it’s not crystal,” Mattie replied. “I hate tweakers.”

“You’re on your own in any case,” Axel warned. “I can’t have your back on a gig like this.”

“Think it will ruin your image as a creature of the night?” Mattie said.

“That too.”

“Private will send you a finder’s fee.”

Axel grinned. “Even better. Thanks, Mattie.”

She nodded. “Do I have a clean way out of there?”

“Fire exits at both ends of the floor.”

“High ground?”

Axel thought about that. “I’ll make a call. The bar. You’ll have to dance.”

Mattie slapped Axel’s big palm and moved by him toward the entrance to the dance floor. She got out her cell phone as she walked, flipped it open, and called up a school picture of a brunette teenager.

The Countess Sophia von Mühlen of Austria was seventeen. A week ago she ran off with her father’s polo instructor, a thirty-three-year-old Argentine scoundrel and fortune hunter named Raul Montenegro.

In exactly four days, the countess would turn eighteen and of age to wed.

Which is what the countess’s family was desperately trying to avoid, and why Private Berlin had been hired to track her down and return her to Vienna.

Sophia’s mother had died three years before of a drug overdose. Her grandmother, the formidable Sarah von Mühlen, did not want the family name or fortune tarnished by further scandal, especially when Sophia’s father, Peter, a prominent politician in the Tyrol, was preparing to run for higher office.

“Spare no expense,” the grandmother had told Mattie. “Find her.”

Mattie had done just that, tracking the young countess via credit card charges and GPS data from her cell phone to the nightclub. Luckily she’d known Axel, the head of security at Tresor, since her days as a Kripo investigator with the Berlin Kriminalpolizei.

Mattie put away her cell phone and moved onto a dance floor packed with writhing, sweating bodies dancing to a convulsive mix laid down by a DJ named The Mover.

She angled toward the bar, nodding to the bartender, who was snapping shut his cell phone. She climbed up at the waitress’s station and began to dance her way down the bar in time with The Mover’s beat and riffs.

The crowd noticed and began to hoot and cry for her. Mattie smiled, playing the drunken chick. But her eyes moved everywhere until she spotted Sophia von Mühlen and her Latin lover on the other side of the room.

The countess’s arms hung around Montenegro’s neck. She was kissing his chest. His hands were roaming all over her.

Mattie looked beyond them for the fire escape doors.

But then the countess suddenly pushed away from the polo instructor, and wove unsteadily toward the hallway, a lucky break for Mattie, who jumped off the bar and caught up to her in the tunnel where she’d left Axel.

“Sophia?” she said and flashed her badge. “My name is Mattie Engel. I’m with Private Berlin. I’m here to take you home.”

Sophia laughed scornfully. “I’m eighteen. I can do what I want.”

“You’re not eighteen for another four days,” Mattie shot back in a no-nonsense voice. “Let’s go. And try not to make a scene.”

Sophia smiled. “I’m good at making scenes. Big ones. The kind that attract reporters.”