Collision of Evil Read online

  “A secret mission. Yes. Like so much in that war, I suppose. Of course, those secrets don’t need to remain secrets anymore. The secrets of a regime that no longer exists can’t count for much. But, if your husband never related these secrets to you, there’s little else to say.”

  A smile creased Frau Bergdorfer’s thin lips without communicating warmth. She looked again at Waldbaer with eyes that struck him as uncomfortably predatory. “You’re not as subtle as you think, Herr Kommissar. I didn’t say that I knew nothing, only that my husband was on a secret assignment for the Reich when the war ended. That assignment was successfully completed. That much I know, even though Horst was circumspect about it. He felt that he’d done his duty one last time.”

  Waldbaer nodded. “I won’t treat you like a child, Frau Bergdorfer. Since we’re being honest with one another, let me ask the obvious question. Your husband’s mission involved delivering cargo somewhere. What was the consignment? What did the convoy transport all the way from Berlin? Did your husband reveal that to you? To be frank, it’s the key for which I am looking, perhaps it will unlock the door to a recent murder.”

  “Remember what I said, Herr Kommissar, my husband was not one of those aging, beer-swilling men who regaled one and all in the gasthaus with war stories. He was taciturn by nature and silent on these matters by discipline. I never pushed, why should I have? My life with him was in the present, not the past. I don’t know exactly what was inside those military trucks.”

  The detective considered the formulation of her words. “I believe you, it goes without saying. It’s too bad, for me that is. Why don’t we do this: tell me whatever your husband did say about this mysterious freight.”

  “All right, Herr Kommissar, I can do that. But the garden grows chilly for my old bones. Perhaps you and your assistant would care to invite me for a cup of tea? There’s a little café in Freilassing center, five minutes by car.”

  “It would be an honor, gnadige frau,” Waldbaer replied, using the ancient formulation for “honored woman.” Frau Bergdorfer responded with a smile that, for once, was not at all predatory.

  Chapter 32

  Peters was pleased with how the interrogation had progressed but troubled by the results. He was certain that Ibrahim had been truly broken and was revealing whatever he knew with as much accuracy as he could muster. Ahmet agreed; the information Ibrahim was providing was valid. That was the problem. The details that Ibrahim provided were alarming.

  Peters glanced around his office in the Ankara CIA facility. The off-white walls were decorated only with a government-issue calendar and two framed United Airlines travel posters, one of the Grand Canyon and one of cherry tree blossoms in Washington, DC. They were an inheritance, having been there when he took over the office from his predecessor. After a few moments, Peters put his pen to a pad of paper and wrote rapidly in large block letters:

  SECRET

  TO: COUNTER TERRORISM CENTER. RESTRICTED HANDLING

  IBRAHIM BARAN (SUBJECT) OFFERED FOLLOWING INFORMATION TO JOINT INTERVIEW TEAM DURING THREE-HOUR SESSION TODAY. ALTHOUGH NERVOUS, SUBJECT RESPONDED OPENLY TO QUERIES. FULL INTERRORGATION TRANSCRIPT IS BEING SUBMITTED SEPARATELY. SALIENT AND TIME-SENSITIVE POINTS ARE NOTED BELOW.

  1. SUBJECT IS ACTIVE MEMBER OF JIHADIST CELL LOCATED IN SOUTHERN GERMANY AND CONTINUES TO IDENTIFY MOHAMMED AL-ASSAD AS CHIEF OPERATIVE OF THIS CELL.

  2. SUBJECT TRAVELED TO ANKARA ON AL-ASSAD’S INSTRUCTION TO MEET WITH ABDUL AL-MASRI, A MIDDLEMAN TO AL QAEDA LEADERSHIP IN WAZIRISTAN. SUBJECT CONTACTED AL-MASRI AND RECEIVED PERMISSION TO INITIATE A TERRORIST ACT IN GERMANY.

  3. SUBJECT PROVIDED ADDRESS OF SAFE HOUSE WHERE HE MET AL-MASRI ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS. TURKISH INTELLIGENCE IS PREPARING TO RAID THE APARTMENT; ONE OF OUR OFFICERS WILL ACCOMPANY AND REPORT RESULTS UPON COMPLETION OF RAID.

  4. ACCORDING TO SUBJECT, JIHADIST CELL IN GERMANY IS PREPARING “SOMETHING BIG” IN NEAR TERM. SUBJECT CONFIRMED THAT THIS REFERS TO A TERRORIST ATTACK IN GERMANY. AL-ASSAD HAS NOT TOLD CELL MEMBERS SPECIFIC TARGET. IN CONVERSATIONS WITH AL-MASRI, SUBJECT LEARNED THAT TARGET SELECTION IS BEING LEFT TO AL-ASSAD’S DISCRETION. CODED NOTES CAPTURED WITH SUBJECT CONFIRM THIS. SUBJECT SURMISES THE ATTACK WILL TAKE PLACE WITHIN GERMANY AND NOT INVOLVE A CROSS-BORDER OPERATION TO ANOTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRY DUE TO SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS.

  5. SUBJECT ADVISED INTERROGATORS THAT THE ATTACK WILL BE LAUNCHED EMPLOYING MATERIAL HIDDEN FOR LONG PERIOD OF TIME IN A CAVERN IN THE BAVARIAN ALPS AND RECENTLY RELOCATED TO A WAREHOUSE IN ROSENHEIM AREA (NO FURTHER INFORMATION). SUBJECT DOES NOT KNOW THE NATURE OF THE STORED MATERIAL. HE DESCRIBED THE MATERIAL AS “SCIENTIFIC DEVICES” WITH WHICH HE IS UNFAMILIAR. AT ONE POINT SUBJECT SAID HE UNDERSTANDS THAT THE EQUIPMENT IS “LABORATORY EQUIPMENT” BUT CANNOT ADD DETAILS.

  Peters rubbed his chin and considered the last sentences he had scribed. He had a case officer’s intuition and decided to note it for the record.

  FIELD COMMENT: CASE OFFICER BELIEVES SUBJECT MAY BE REFERING TO EQUIPMENT REQUIRED TO PRODUCE UNCONVENTIONAL WEAPON OF SOME SORT. NOTATION OF LABORATORY EQUIPMENT AND “SCIENTIFIC” MATERIAL WOULD NOT SEEM TO FIT WITH PRODUCTION OF CONVENTIONAL EXPLOSIVES WHICH COULD BE READILY PRODUCED IN AN APARTMENT, EMPLOYING HOUSEHOLD OR COMMERCIAL ITEMS. JIHADIST CELL MAY BE PLANNING AN ATTACK USING A RADIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL OR BIOLOGICAL WEAPON. CASE OFFICER VIEW ON THIS POSSIBILITY IS REINFORCED BY SUBJECT’S DECRYPTED NOTES WHICH QUOTE AL-MASRI AS CLAIMING THE ATTACK WILL BE “DEVASTATING” AND REPRESENTS NEW LEVEL OF TERROR AGAINST WESTERN INTERESTS.

  Peters had a queasy sensation that he and his associates had uncovered enough information to provide warning of a pending attack, but had failed to garner sufficient detail to prevent it. He ran through the unknowns. Where would the attack take place? No information. When was the attack scheduled? No information. What type of attack would it be? No information. Still, he consoled himself, we have something. The material for the attack is in a warehouse in the Rosenheim area. That was a lead that could be pursued. In addition, a raid on al-Masri’s safe house in Ankara was even now unfolding. If they bagged al-Masri, they would acquire more information that could be exploited to stop the attack. Things could work out positively, Peters concluded. He put the chances of preventing a terrorist event in Germany at fifty-fifty. Not good math, he thought to himself, not nearly good enough.

  Chapter 33

  The coffee tasted bitter to Waldbaer, so he dropped in another cube of sugar. Frau Bergdorfer was contentedly sipping her Ceylon tea from a fragile-looking porcelain cup, and Hirter was idly moving a spoon in his steaming mug of hot chocolate. The small café across from the Freilassing church was nearly empty. Two young, bored waitresses engaged in desultory conversation by the front door. Waldbaer found the chairs far too dainty and unstable and worried that his own might, with the wrong move, collapse unceremoniously beneath him. Glancing about, he noted that the décor was entirely feminine. There was garish wallpaper exuberant with pink roses, and prints of nineteenth-century Parisian scenes were placed at precise intervals. He preferred the honest rusticality of Zum Alte Post. Frau Bergdorfer was comfortable in these surroundings. The waitresses had smiled at her in recognition. The old woman pointed a long, thin finger at the street outside the window. “Freilassing isn’t much to look at these days. When my husband and I first settled here in the 1950s, things were different. The German border with Austria is at the bridge over the Saalach River less than a kilometer away. Freilassing was a border town. Salzburg residents traveled here for German products not available in Austria. All of that business made Freilassing a lively place. But that’s gone now. The European Union put an end to the border. All of a sudden, Freilassing was nothing special and went into decline. Businesses closed up, people moved to Munich to find work. Still, this is my home. My husband is buried in the cemetery, and I will join him there one of these days.”

  “There are red roses on his grave,” Waldbaer said softly.

  The woman regarded him. “Yes, Herr Kommissar. From m
e. Once a week I visit his resting place and leave roses for him. False name or not, he was my husband for many years. I knew him better than anyone. If he can be judged on this earth, I can judge him best.”

  “Exactly,” Waldbaer replied. “Now perhaps we can discuss his final mission of the war?”

  Frau Bergdorfer’s eyes narrowed and she knew that the conversation had been maneuvered to where the detective wanted it. She took another sip of tea, holding the cup in both hands before replacing it on the saucer.

  “Horst told me this much, years ago. He said he was ordered to transport valuable scientific items to Bavaria and hide them. Some of the cargo originated from the fortress Zitadelle in Spandau. Some scientists from Berlin accompanied the convoy to ensure things were properly stored. They found a location that was suitable and placed the items there. That’s about all I can tell you.”

  Waldbaer considered the information. “Why would they want to store these items, for what purpose?”

  Frau Bergdorfer nodded almost imperceptibly. “They thought it might be of military use to a German resistance to the occupation. That’s why Nazi Party functionaries accompanied my husband. They needed to know the location to be able to access the items in the future. Of course, a resistance never developed. Almost everyone welcomed the end of the war; they didn’t want to go back to fighting. They wanted to get on with their lives. This meant that the cargo remained hidden. No one wanted to make use of it. In the end, my husband’s last mission was for nothing.”

  “Frau Bergorfer, let me tell you this. Somebody discovered these hidden items and recently moved them away. I’m troubled by that. Did your husband know what was in that consignment?”

  “Yes, he knew. He never told me though, not that I would have understood anything technical.”

  “Is there anything else, Frau Bergdorfer, any detail that might help me?”

  “One thing perhaps. Horst said he had not been chosen to lead the mission at random. It was because of his background, his education before the war. Horst had been a well-respected young chemist; he went into the chemical export business after the war, perhaps you know that. Anyway, I suppose that means that the material in the convoy had something to do with chemicals.”

  Waldbaer locked eyes with Hirter who lowered his cup of hot chocolate to the table with a discernable thud. Yet still, despite her seeming openness, the detective could not shake the feeling that the graceful old woman was concealing something.

  Chapter 34

  Ahmet Saygun chambered a hollow-point round in his 9-millimeter automatic pistol and glanced up at the apartment with rustling orange curtains flowing from an open window. There were three other officers with him in the sedan, and another sedan parked across the street contained three more Turkish intelligence operatives as well as a dark-complexioned CIA case officer. Ahmet was aware that two of the officers in the other car carried compact Ingram submachine guns under their jackets for added firepower. A radio crackled; the men in the other vehicle wanted to know how long before they entered the apartment block. “Tell them it will be a few minutes,” Ahmet said to the driver who was monitoring the scrambled communications. “We go first; they follow thirty seconds after we enter the front door. I don’t want us bunching up on the street. We take the elevator, they work the stairs.”

  Ahmet flexed his thick fingers and returned his pistol to the holster under his left arm, the safety off. He wanted to get his hands on al-Masri. That would be good for his career, of course, but he had other motivations. He had a visceral dislike for jihadists and their smug conviction that their acts were divinely sanctioned. Ahmet Saygun was the product of secular Turkey and he worried mightily about Islamist fundamentalists gaining power and destroying Attaturk’s imperfect, but functional, legacy. That little bastard al-Masri isn’t even a Turk, Ahmet reasoned, what the hell right did he think he had operating in Ankara? He glanced at the ticking hands on his Swatch and exhaled a breath.

  “Let’s move,” he said and all four doors of the sedan opened simultaneously.

  The men spilled from the street to the sidewalk, weapons concealed, eliciting no attention from passersby. The door into the apartment building was unlocked, as Ahmet knew it would be. A surreptitious entry specialist from his unit had disabled the lock discreetly before dawn.

  Once inside the door, the four men found themselves in a narrow, empty lobby devoid of decoration save for a dust-shrouded plastic palm tree and an undistinguished painting of an Anatolian village. Dulled street noise seeped through the door behind them, its glass panes bathing the lobby in diffuse, gray light. “Mustapha, get the elevator.”

  In response, one of the men punched a green button on the wall next to the lift. A bell rang and the metal doors to the elevator opened. The men piled in, drawing their weapons. As Ahmet pushed his square frame into the elevator’s narrow confines, he noted with satisfaction that the second team of officers was just entering the lobby and heading toward the stairwell. Good, he thought, everything is moving as it should.

  The polished metal elevator traveled up to the fourth floor, vibrating slightly before shuddering to a halt at its destination. The doors opened with a clang, and the officer named Mustapha was first into the hallway, his pistol preceding him, barrel toward the ceiling. Ahmet and the others followed. He could hear the muffled approach of his other men as they mounted the stairs.

  All knew where to go; they moved in unison toward the door at the end of the corridor, number 421. The apartment of Abdul al-Masri. Ahmet knew they required no battering ram; a covert inspection some days earlier had revealed that the apartments had been built with cheap particleboard doors. The group moved down the hall with quiet celerity. Ahmet glanced at the brown hallway carpet and the bare light bulbs illuminating the scene. They closed in on the apartment just as the second quartet of men debouched from the stairwell, brandishing their weapons. The pungent smell of frying garlic permeated the narrow hallway.

  “Let’s do it, gentlemen,” Ahmet intoned.

  The two men in front launched at the door shoulders first. There was the sharp report of cracking wood as the door emblazoned with the number 421 gave way and separated from its frame. The four men squeezed through the entrance and stood in a sparsely furnished living room. There was no one there.

  “Kitchen next,” Mustapha said, concealing his disappointment that he had not immediately confronted a quivering, bug-eyed al-Masri. Mustapha entered the narrow kitchen, his automatic pistol held at shoulder height.

  Simultaneously, the second unit of four men was moving in file through the apartment door when an intense flash illuminated the apartment followed a second later by the explosion that slammed through their ear drums.

  Ahmet felt himself thrown backward by the searing blast; he felt its angry heat flow over him as he slammed into the linoleum floor tiles. A bomb, he judged instantly, that scum al-Masri had rigged his own apartment with explosives. Ahmet rolled onto his side and pushed himself to a kneeling posture. He felt blood in his mouth and knew from a burning sting that his face was lacerated. His weapon had been blown from his grip by the blast.

  With effort, Ahmet forced his eyes open. Although his vision was milky, he knew with relief that he had not lost his eyes. He took inventory of the scene. Mustapha lay nearby and was clearly dead; his head hung grotesquely from his solid shoulders by a thread of tissue; a pool of blood spreading out from the shattered corpse. All of the other men were lying on the floor, their bodies in flailing animation like worms after a rain storm. Visibility was poor as the lights had been destroyed by the blast, and the air was thick with smoke and floating particles of debris. Ahmet heard voices whispering feverishly. With a start he realized that they were not, in fact, whispering. His comrades were moaning and screaming for assistance. The sound of the detonation had temporarily ruined his hearing.

  Pulling himself to his feet, Ahmet slid his hands over his body searching for major wounds. He found none, but worried about possible intern
al injuries.

  “I can’t move my arms,” he heard one of his men say.

  Ahmet reached into his tattered trouser pocket and gripped his encrypted cell phone in a tremulous hand, punching in the number for the operations control vehicle parked a few blocks away. He could not hear whether someone answered on the other end, but presumed they had. “We’ve got an emergency in the apartment. A bomb has gone off. Everybody is wounded. We have one confirmed dead, and some of the others are in bad straits. Get ambulances here and make sure they have trauma doctors onboard, not just medics. Al-Masri isn’t here. The place was empty. Alert border control, but it’s probably too late. That bastard knew we were on to him somehow. Just get the ambulances and have them bring blood. My people are losing lots of blood.”

  Ahmet was just able to punch off his cell phone before passing out and falling to the floor where the fibers of his tailored charcoal suit soaked in the arterial blood of his companions.