Free Triple Identity by Haggai Carmon

details.
    A few moments later a fax message from Lan was slipped under my door. It read: “The number you gave me is a pay phone located in the Grand Excelsior Hotel in Munich, Germany.”
    Three road signs leading to Munich: the pay phone and Mina and Ariel's sudden departures. Clearly Munich was my next stop. And I had to get there in a hurry.

T he next day I boarded Lufthansa flight 693 to Munich Airport's Terminal C. The New York office had made the travel arrangements and I'd contacted our embassy legal people. My man, Ron Lovejoy, would be on duty when I got there.
    When I arrived, it was almost 7:00 P.M. and raining lightly. A BMW waited for me at the Hertz counter with a note, as Lovejoy's office had promised. I drove to the Omni Hotel on Ludwigstrasse.
    I checked in and then headed over to the Grand Excelsior Hotel, where the trail to Mina Bernstein went cold. She'd accepted collect charges from a pay phone located in the Grand Excelsior's lobby.
    The hotel was one of those pre–World War II landmarks with plenty of Old World charm and prices far above my budget. I still remember the startled look one of the bean counters in Washington, D.C., had given me when I'd tried to explain why my bill from a Tokyo hotel ran four hundred dollars a night. “Frankly, the place looked like a youth hostel,” I'd said with feigned exasperation, “but with the yen so strong against the dollar that's what you pay there.” He had not been amused.
    The first questions I had to answer were whether it had been DeLouise who'd called Mina in Israel and whether he had been a guest at the Grand Excelsior.
    I went to the desk and asked for Raymond DeLouise. They had no such guest. The response was too pat, I thought. But then, he wouldn't have used that name. How about Mina Bernstein? No. I left the desk disappointed. Then I turned around and made yet another try.
    “I'm sorry, is there a Dov Peled?” I asked.
    The reception clerk hesitated, and then said,
“Minute!”
and disappeared into the back office. She returned a minute later with another man, obviously senior staff.
    “I am looking for Mr. Dov Peled. Can you give me his room number?” I repeated. The clerk's action told me I was getting close.
    “I'm sorry,” said the man, with somewhat fraudulent solemnity. “We were notified this morning that Mr. Peled has died.”
    “Died?” I repeated after him in disbelief. “What happened?”
    “We don't know,” said the man. “The police just told us that he is in the city morgue. That's all we know.”
    “Are Mina Bernstein or Ariel Peled registered? We were all to meet here,” I asked, adding feigned shock to the real thing.
    He looked at the woman next to him. She shook her head. “No, I'm sorry sir, we have no such guests,” the man replied.
    I thanked them, turned around without another word, and went to my car.
    I had my answer. Yes, he had been a guest at the hotel under his old Israeli name, but had he been the one to use the pay phone at the hotel to call Mina in Israel? And if so, why use the pay phone?
    I juggled the various plausible answers around in my mind. Whoever had called didn't want the call to be traced to him or her or else was already afraid that any telephone associated with him or her was being monitored.
    If it was DeLouise/Peled who had called, who or what was he afraid of? No answers. Not yet, anyway. But given his probable horizontal position in the city morgue, his concerns had been justified.
    A visit to the morgue confirmed that Popescu/Peled/DeLouise wasn't going anywhere. I had to find Mina and Ariel; they were my only viable leads to DeLouise's money. Where were they? Munich could be just their point of entry to Europe. They could have taken another flight to Timbuktu in the sub-Saharan desert or driven to Finland. And come to think of it, why was I using the plural form: they? Why should I assume that Mina and Ariel had met in Europe?
    I didn't know where to start, although I had a