Collision of Evil Page 25

  No one in the room raised objection and Frau Schmeider fell silent.

  “All right,” the chairman continued, “let’s consider the public. So far, they know nothing about this terrorist conspiracy. Do we have an obligation to put out an advisory? Should the Interior minister hold a press conference? Consider things from this angle: the terrorists succeed tomorrow in setting off this Sarin in Frankfurt or Hamburg. People die. If our luck is bad, lots of people die. What do you suppose happens once it gets out that German authorities have been aware of the threat for weeks, and haven’t provided a warning to the public? What kind of position does that place the chancellor in? There would be demands that half the government resign or face prosecution for gross negligence, or worse.”

  “Good point,” said a group member’s agitated voice from halfway down the table. “We should go public now, get the information out there. A press conference is best. The chancellor should make the announcement. And we probably need to provide information on the effects of Sarin.”

  Rapp examined his nails placidly. “On the other hand,” he intoned, “informing the public can have negative consequences, too. Informing the public also informs the terrorists of what we know and what we don’t know. To that extent, it provides them intelligence. A press conference could cause them to accelerate their plans and attack immediately. After which the press would condemn us as idiots for not having kept our operations secret. A textbook case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Also, if we advise the public about a possible chemical attack, would this be useful or cause panic? How will the population react? We need to be careful here.”

  “So what do we recommend to the chancellor?” Frau Schmeider asked.

  “We say that there is no perfect course of action, which is certainly the case.” Rapp made a notation on his notepad. “Unless someone has a better idea, I suggest we advise that the interior minister, during the course of a routine press conference, note that international terrorism continues to be a threat to Germany and that we must be vigilant. That provides us some cover for later on, if needed. Perhaps the minister can say that the authorities are continually alert for terrorist plans. But nothing specific. I advise against mentioning chemical agents. If we raise the specter of a chemical attack, we need to be able to address countermeasures. Does anyone here know what has to be done against Sarin?”

  No one responded.

  “Just as I thought. I seem to recall that there is an antidote to nerve agents, but I can’t say more than that. I’ll make it a point to get that information confidentially from the Health Ministry when we leave. If there is an antidote, do we have stocks of it on hand? Can it be transported to the site of an attack? How effective is it? God knows, there are more questions than answers. Once I get solid information, we can regroup. That’s all for the moment.”

  The group vacated the conference room in a chorus of murmured conversation. A glance through the glass dome of the Reichstag revealed that the clouds, like the mood of the recently assembled, had not lifted.

  Chapter 51

  Waldbaer was surprised to receive the call informing him that he retained primacy in the investigation, and that he was free to request whatever resources he required to prevent al-Assad’s attack.

  His continued leadership of the investigation established, Waldbaer dialed the Hotel Alpenhof and summoned Hirter and Chalmers to join him in his office. “We need to finish going through Kaltenberg’s diaries,” he counseled Hirter, “and focus on hunting these guys.”

  “We’re on our way,” Hirter replied. “I was just in touch with my people and they’re anxious to assist in any way they can. They want whatever new information we develop as fast as we can get it to them.”

  Hirter and Chalmers arrived at the detective’s office in casual attire, with Hirter bearing a bag of warm chocolate croissants from a bakery along the way. “Not exactly what my doctor would recommend,” Waldbaer mumbled as he bit into one of the concoctions with ill-concealed exuberance.

  “How do you want to proceed?” Hirter inquired, savoring the soft dough of a croissant himself and combating the tension that coursed through him.

  “We finished the first diary, the wartime one. Now we have the second, more recent diary to review. This is postwar stuff. I gave it a cursory glance, and it focuses on Kaltenberg’s activities as a chemical salesman in the seventies and eighties. Most of what I read seemed of no importance—office politics in the firm where he worked, competition with other salesmen, and an accounting of various transactions. Dull stuff. Still, I don’t want to miss anything useful.”

  “Right,” Hirter interjected. “And I’ve brought along a debriefing report from Turkey.” He passed two neatly folded sheets of paper to the detective. “What’s interesting is that Baran says that al-Assad remarked that ‘a businessman’s gift’ plays a role in the planned attack. A businessman: that has to be Kaltenberg in his postwar persona. What we don’t know is how and why Kaltenberg’s Sarin secrets got to a jihadist cell. It’s a missing piece of the puzzle. Something happened between the nineteen-forties and today, but it remains concealed.”

  “I agree,” Waldbaer said. “Let’s read the second diary.”

  Forty minutes later Hirter stood up, one arm in the air like an or chestra conductor. “Here’s something.” He indicated the page to his companions and began to read.

  Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

  Closed a deal for the provision of painkiller and disinfectants to the Riyadh hospital this afternoon; we make a solid profit under the conditions of the contract. A signed agreement will be sent to the Essen office tomorrow, champagne all around!

  “What’s so interesting about that?” Chalmers said, “Its boring business stuff. Probably the reason none of us here went into the private sector.”

  “That’s just a prelude,” Hirter corrected, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Listen to this.”

  Following the closure of the pharmaceutical deal, I was invited to a buffet by Prince Hafiz, the Saudi royal who signed the contract. The prince is a small man whose form seems lost in his flowing robes. The prince is a capable businessman and shrewd with contracts. He engaged me in conversation, and in the course of our chat seized on a passing comment of mine that I had been an officer in the Waffen-SS during the war. Being an Arab, the prince is, of course, no friend of the Jews. He was very complimentary in his comments on the historic role of Germany in the thirties and forties, for which I thanked him.

  Chalmers interrupted. “So, the Saudi guy is an anti-Semitic Nazi fan. It must have been like homecoming week for Kaltenberg.”

  “It’s the Arab view of the Israel issue,” Walbaer shrugged. “Anybody who hates Jews can’t be all bad, that sort of thinking. But where’s the relevance, Hirter?”

  Hirter continued reading.

  In view of the prince’s enlightened attitude and his interest in the history of the Reich, I elected to tell him of my final mission of the war.

  Waldbaer and Chalmers sat up in their seats and Hirter smiled, knowing that he had their attention.

  The prince was silent as I recounted the journey from Berlin to southern Germany and Austria. He was clearly taken by my account of the foresight of the German leadership in trying to preserve a weapon that might, someday under the right circumstances, serve Aryan interests. When I finished my account, I could see that the prince was considering what I had said. He asked what the status of the chemical equipment was today. I told him the truth. The equipment, I said, was stored to survive the passage of time and the cavern served to keep out the elements. Although Sarin degrades with time, the same is not true of the equipment needed to produce it. I told him that, in my professional opinion, the equipment secreted away remains fully operable and, in the right hands, could produce the portable devices that we successfully tested so long ago at Dyernfurth-am-Oder.

  The prince followed up with another question. He wanted to know whether I still recalled the location of the cave where
the items are cached. I told him that the place is indelibly etched in my brain. It was odd, I must say, sitting in Riyadh, eating stuffed dates with this Saudi noble and revisiting things from long ago. The prince had a servant bring me a tall glass of Coca-Cola before excusing himself, noting that he had family business to attend to. As we shook hands, he said that he expected I would hear from him again. I count the prince a good contact who might be of utility in facilitating chemical transactions in the future. He is of commercial value in this strange, alien culture where personal connections count for so much.

  Hirter dropped the sheets of paper on Waldbaer’s desk. “Relevant?” he asked of the detective.

  “I believe so, Herr Hirter. It sounds like the genesis of the terror act we’re trying to stop lies in that conversation in Riyadh. This chat with a Saudi prince is the bridge between wartime events and today. It sounds as if Kaltenberg had lost interest in the chemical equipment until the prince inquired. If the inquisitive prince hadn’t pursued the issue of Kaltenberg’s wartime service, that Sarin equipment might still be holed up in the mountain cave today.”

  “Of course,” Chalmers cautioned softly, “we still don’t know how the Nazi production gear eventually got into the hands of al-Assad, do we?”

  “True” Waldbaer replied. “Why don’t you recite a bit more for your devoted readership, Herr Hirter?”

  Hirter picked up the paper and scanned down a page. “The story is interrupted. The next entry, Kaltenberg is back in Germany; there’s a discussion of purchasing raw material from a company in Hamburg. The entry after that describes a birthday party for his wife’s brother in Munich.”

  Displaying a slight grimace, Hirter flipped through several pages. Waldbaer consumed the last bit of his croissant and guiltily wished that he had another.

  “Here we go,” Hirter said at last. “This entry is a few months later. Let’s each read through it at our own pace.” He provided his companions the page number, fell back into his chair and silently took in the words of what he regarded as

  The German Businessmanߣs Tale

  I can now recount that an unexpected phone call I took at home in Freilassing last week has changed my life. I record it here for posterity to judge in some unseen future. Other than this account, the events of recent days are unrecorded. I will not share these developments even with my beloved wife; it could do her no good, and possibly cause her harm. But now to the phone call and the events that followed.

  I was enjoying a fine, dry Austrian Gruener Veltliner white wine at seven in the evening when the phone rang out its shrill signal. I was confronted with a voice unknown to me.

  “You are Mister Bergdorfer?” a heavily accented, bass voice inquired in English. I responded in the same tongue that I was indeed Bergdorfer and asked the identity of the caller.

  “I’m a friend of the prince who hosted you a while ago,” the deep voice replied. This introduction struck me as curious. I asked how I might be of service, hoping another sale was in the offing.

  “I would like you to show me something. Something you mentioned to the prince; items of interest.”

  It took me a moment to understand that the caller was referring to the equipment that I had cached at war’s end. The caller was speaking in a deliberately vague manner, as if the conversation might be overheard. How conspiratorial, I thought, but found myself responding yes, I could show the way to what I called “the goods.”

  “That’s fine,” the man said.

  There was a pause in the conversation, and I asked why he wanted to see such old items.

  “We can talk when we are together,” the caller responded abruptly, a trace of annoyance coloring his voice.

  The rest of the decidedly odd conversation was a matter of logistics. He would take a train to Freilassing; he provided a precise arrival time, indicating that he had consulted a schedule. Would I pick him up at the station? Yes, I replied, despite a certain discomfort. I described how I looked, so the stranger would recognize me. He stopped me in mid-sentence. “I know your appearance. The prince has well described you.”

  The meeting arrangement established, the caller hung up. As I returned to my wine and considered the call, I half-decided to ignore the appointment. I did not want to revisit the cave as it meant revisiting a past best left to slumber. A moment later I swept my doubts aside and concluded that an appointment made is an appointment kept. If the excursion satisfied the prince’s curiosity, I might be rewarded with another pharmaceutical sale.

  The next day broke wet and gray, laced with a cutting, damp April breeze. The snows were gone, but spring seemed hesitant to emerge in earnest, as if fearful it might be struck down by a resurgent Father Winter. I drove the short distance to the Freilassing train station, a prosaic structure that managed to seem run-down even after a fresh painting.

  I entered the building and consulted the large clock in the lobby. It was as I was standing there that the caller’s voice rumbled directly behind me. “Good morning, Mister Bergdorfer, good to see you.” I turned to see a tall man with olive skin and a mane of thick hair, as jet black as the beard beneath. The foreigner had large brown eyes that dominated his face. His demeanor was serious, and I sensed that I was looking at an individual who did not routinely smile. He wore a waist-length black leather jacket and American jeans.

  “Prince Hafiz conveys his regards,” the man said.

  Even after these initial words, I was a bit shocked to have him standing there unexpectedly. “Your train arrived early?” I asked, confused.

  “No, I took an earlier train.”

  “But, presuming you’ve come from Munich, that means you’ve been waiting here an hour. You should have called; I would have come earlier.”

  The stranger shrugged his broad shoulders. “It’s of no importance.” Only later did it occur to me that the prince’s friend had intended all along to precede my arrival, to observe me and ensure that I arrived alone. I had been under surveillance by this mysterious visitor.

  We chatted a bit in the bare station hall, in a stilted way, before I suggested that we start our journey. “It will take time,” I noted, “not the drive but the walk that follows.” The visitor nodded, pointed to the pair of expensive walking boots he was wearing and said, “I am prepared.”

  It occurred to me that I still did not know the name of the prince’s friend, and I inquired as to how he would like to be addressed. His brow wrinkled for a second. “Call me Rashid,” he replied. I suspected that Rashid was not his real name.

  We drove from the train station, out of Freilassing, and into the countryside. I made a foray into small talk, but this proved unsuccessful, so I concentrated on driving the winding country road lined with linden trees. We headed toward Traunstein and the mass of the mountains beyond, majestically purple in the distance.

  “When did you last visit the cave?” Rashid asked at one point, puncturing the prevailing silence.

  “Long ago,” I responded. “A decade or longer. Why should I return? The equipment is a footnote to history, an unacknowledged legacy. After the war was long over, I returned to the cavern once; nostalgia, I suppose. The place was undisturbed. The cave entrance was still concealed with forest debris, and large bushes had grown there in the intervening years, offering more cover still. Everything was as it had been. The crates were still sealed. I just gave the place a cursory look. Curiosity satisfied, I walked away and never ventured there again. Until today.”

  “Until today,” Rashid repeated, and then returned to silence. Still, his question caused me to raise a query as well.

  “Rashid, why is the prince interested in this matter? It’s a vestige of the past. Dispatching you here to see old stuff from the war is a considerable effort.”

  Rashid did not reply for a moment, and I entertained the feeling that he did not like the question. He answered just when I thought he would ignore the query altogether. “The prince is avidly interested in history, it provides him enjoyment. Due to busines
s obligations, he often cannot travel himself. I am his surrogate. I take pictures and give him written accounts that he enjoys reading. I don’t mind this, it is my job.”

  “I see,” I replied, apparently not convincing in my tone.

  Rashid sighed, glanced out of the side window at the passing meadows, and continued. “I know you find it strange. I think the word in English is ‘eccentric,’ isn’t it? Very well. Let’s say that the prince is eccentric. That is his way. But he is a just master, and I try to fulfill his wishes without complaint.” His gaze returned to the windshield, and he again became a cipher.

  We continued the journey in pristine silence, until I parked the Mercedes by the side of a narrow country road in the valley beneath the precipice that we would be climbing.