Collision of Evil Read online

  A moment later he was on the street, boisterous with life. His trained eyes detected no sign of observation, and he merged with the stream of humanity heading toward the U-4 subway station a block away. He forced a vacuous smile and walked with an enthusiastic step that he truly felt, but for reasons far different than all of those around him. He felt like a shark invisible to the school of fish within which he swam. Staring ahead, he could see the U-bahn sign a few hundred yards in front of him. As he approached the stairs leading to the underground, al-Assad noticed two stationary men who seemed to be intently studying the stream of people passing them by. They could be policemen, he thought, or perhaps they were just waiting for a friend.

  Taking no chances, al-Assad spotted a blonde woman in the crowd ahead of him and deftly moved to her side. As they approached the two suspicious men, al-Assad began talking to her as if they belonged together. “This will be even better than last year,” he said to the slightly perplexed woman, “the weather’s great and you can tell everybody is in a party mood.” They swept past the two men and al-Assad drifted away from the blonde and moved with the human herd to the subway tracks, his grip tight around the plastic bag containing the Sarin. Al-Assad knew that a train would appear momentarily and he would be on his way to the Oktoberfest grounds, a few minutes ride away. He felt a rush of anticipation surge through his veins.

  Fifteen minutes after al-Assad’s scheduled departure, Taamir repeated the procedure of leaving his room and settling his account at the hotel desk. He, too, had left his luggage in the room and carried only the brightly colored plastic bag. Exiting the building, Taamir took the same route as al-Assad and merged with the torrent of pedestrians. Taamir’s thick head of hair, now largely red, reflected the autumn sunlight. As al-Assad had instructed, he carefully arranged his features into a happy configuration.

  A few moments later, and wholly unknown to Taamir, he was observed by one of two men standing near the entrance to the U-bahn station. The undercover policemen considered Taamir’s features for a moment, but the lack of beard, broad grin, and red hair did not match the image in the officer’s head.

  Taamir continued on his way unmolested, cosseted by the crowd of revelers. Minutes later, as Taamir pushed himself into the jammed confines of a subway car, the diminutive form of Jawad left the hotel as well, but, staying above ground, walked a different route to his target.

  Sayyid gazed at the plastic clock in his room and knew that the others had by now departed. He pulled himself from the bed, muttered a final sura from the Koran, and descended the creaking stairwell to the lobby. There were no customers at the front desk, only the balding, old clerk who worked the morning shift. “Checking out from room three twelve,” Sayyid half-whispered, taking out his wallet. “I’ll pay cash.”

  The clerk nodded, and entered strokes on the keyboard in front of him. The man hit another key and a printer groaned into brief life, spitting out a page that the clerk passed to Sayyid. “Where’s your suitcase?” the man asked in a gravelly voice. Flustered by the unexpected question, Sayyid could only think to say, “I already took it out.” He lifted his plastic bag into view. “This is the last of it.” The clerk had already lost interest. Sayyid pushed the hundred euro notes across the counter. “Keep the change,” he added, feeling more nervous and vulnerable than he had expected.

  Bumping along the street with the endless crowd, Sayyid was halfway to the subway entrance when he discovered that he had left the baseball cap back in the hotel room. He cursed the oversight, knowing al-Assad would not be pleased. He considered returning to the hotel, but rejected the idea as it would entail another conversation with the clerk, perhaps being accompanied back to the room and then being discovered in a lie with his luggage lying on the unmade bed. No, Sayyid thought, better to go ahead without the cap. It was no big deal.

  Markus Henkel touched his companion’s elbow gently. “Straight ahead,” he murmured, “edge of the sidewalk about thirty meters.” His colleague Tobias Mauer shifted his eyes and focused on a dark-haired young man.

  The observed man had a brooding look on his face not consonant with the occasion. The thick hair and low hairline matched at least one of the suspects—but no beard. As the man walked closer, jostled by the celebrating crowd, Mauer thought he could make out the outline of where a beard had recently been. Then again, the man was not wearing a backpack, only carrying a small plastic souvenir bag.

  “What do you think, Tobias?” Henkel asked.

  “Don’t know, but let’s stop him at least. Take a look into his bag, too.”

  The two men began a slow approach to intercept their target before he reached the subway entrance.

  Sayyid saw the subway sign ahead and began to pray, the reality of his impending death affecting him more profoundly than he had anticipated. He tightened his grip on the plastic bag, nervous that the raucous crowd might dislodge it from his hand. The animated mass in front of him was now pouring into the yawning, shadowed maw of the subway entrance. But not all.

  Curiously at first, Sayyid noticed that two men were moving against the crowd in his direction. He watched them carefully and quickly developed a sickening sensation that they were purposefully guiding on him. I must be wrong, he thought. My nerves are causing me to imagine things. He moved sideways to the opposite side of the street. As he did, he noticed that the two men altered their course as well.

  With sudden, crystalline clarity, Sayyid knew that he had been discovered. He felt cold sweat erupt on his forehead and could think of nothing but to flee. He turned against the crowd and like a swimmer against the waves shoved his way through the phalanx of flesh. Elbowing those around him, he forced a path through the crowd.

  “It’s got to be one of them,” Markus yelled at his partner as Sayyid bolted through the crowd. Both men simultaneously reached for the automatic pistols under their jackets, but realized they had no way of employing the weapons without inflicting innocent casualties.

  “Shit,” Markus shouted, “we have to get closer to him.” They slammed two protesting teenage girls aside as they began their pursuit, keeping their target in sight.

  “Shoot to kill,” Tobias reminded his companion.

  “Only if we get a clean shot.” Pushing through the crowd, they began to make headway toward the dark-haired man.

  Sayyid turned and saw with rising panic that the duo was gaining on him. He felt ill and wanted to vomit. Everything had gone unexpectedly, completely wrong in the span of a few seconds. He did not believe that he would reach the Oktoberfest grounds. He began to sob with the realization that he would not accomplish his sacred mission, would not be remembered as one of the shahid who had struck at the enemy.

  He propelled himself forward, clutching in both hands the bag concealing the Sarin. As he darted down the street, he noticed that the Rote Adler, the hotel he had just vacated, was only fifty yards away. Lacking any other goal, Sayyid decided to reenter its familiar surroundings. He cleared the last group of festival goers and pushed into the revolving door opening onto the lobby.

  “The hotel,” Mauer yelled to his partner, his voice strained from running. Both men had their pistols drawn, safeties flicked off, and a round chambered as they closed on the unimpressive façade of the Rote Adler.

  Mauer tore a police phone from his jacket pocket and hit the button that connected him with the task force in city hall. “Mauer here. We found one of them. He’s trying to evade pursuit and is inside the Rote Adler Hotel. Send reinforcements.”

  Mauer was the first of the two through the finger-smeared revolving glass door.

  Sayyid found the lobby empty save for the elderly desk clerk and one of the sluggish Turkish waiters from the restaurant who happened to be passing through the room. Both of them stared at the fear-stricken face of their former guest.

  Sayyid knew that his pursuers would be upon him any minute. Barely thinking coherently, he plunged a shaking hand into the plastic bag and ripped the top from the cardboard conta
iner within. His hand found the activation plunger housed in the center of the dispersion mechanism. Sayyid pressed it down and heard the canister emit a soft hiss as the spray valve engaged. He heard the door behind him spin open and he turned. His mind had become a seething mess of confusion, torn by competing sensations of fear, anger, and self-loathing. He pulled the polished canister free of the bag and held the shining form close to his chest. His nose began to run.

  Mauer entered the weakly lit lobby, weapon first. The cornered man stood in the middle of the room holding a metal object. The policeman spotted the two hotel employees and determined they were out of the line of fire.

  The second policeman, Henkel, burst through the door just as his partner shouted at the suspect. “Police. Drop the cylinder. I won’t ask twice.”

  Sayyid did nothing but stare balefully at the policeman and Mauer fired a round, the noise magnified enormously by the confines of the lobby.

  The first bullet hit the target squarely in the chest, knocking him off his feet and sending him crashing backward. The canister pitched off to one side, hit hard, and rolled along the tile floor.

  Sayyid had landed on his back, from which a dark liquid pool began to emanate. With a low moan, he tried to pull himself up. He had nearly achieved a sitting position when the second round, this from Henkel’s pistol, punched a small hole into his forehead just below the hairline. The exit wound was substantially larger, tearing off the back of Sayyid’s cranium in a shower of blood and brain tissue. The reverberation of the shots died away, and the lobby was again quiet. The clerk and the waiter had sought cover behind the reception counter and now slowly reemerged, gaping at the carnage.

  Henkel and Mauer approached the prostrate form with their weapons still trained on the center of mass. They stared into dead brown eyes. The bullet hole in the victim’s forehead emitted little blood.

  The desk clerk and the waiter approached them with hesitating steps. “He just checked out of here a while ago. His name is in the registry,” offered the clerk, eyes bulging and face flushed. The policemen nodded and urged him away from the corpse.

  “At least he didn’t have time to explode the device,” Mauer advised his partner.

  “Right, thank God,” Henkel responded, moving to retrieve the canister from the spot where its rolling journey had ceased. As he approached it and reached out a hand his ears detected a faint sibilance. “Shit,” he yelled, jumping back from the device. “Tobias, have them get everybody out of the hotel, it’s doing something. Don’t let them exit through the lobby for God’s sake.”

  Mauer turned to instruct the elderly desk clerk to evacuate the building and noticed that the old man had a trail of mucous stretching from his nostrils to his chin. The clerk fixed the policeman with a vague look and weakly announced, “I don’t feel well,” before starting to twitch and pitching to the floor. Tobias grabbed the shaking, wheezing man by the arm and started pulling him toward the lobby door. He heard a crashing sound and looked up to see that the lanky waiter had also collapsed.

  “Markus, we need to use our atropine,” he yelled to his companion. Mauer watched helplessly as the clerk’s brown eyes rolled back in his head and he began gasping for air like a fish yanked from a stream.

  Mauer himself felt dizzy and pulled a small red tubular plastic container from his trouser pocket. Removing a cap at the top, he withdrew a hypodermic needle and prepared to plunge it into his thigh through the clothing. At precisely this instant, he noticed that his hands had begun to shake uncontrollably and his clenched fist opened involuntarily, the needle falling to the tiles. A blast of pain exploded behind his eyes, which refused to focus. He felt his muscles spasm and he went down hard, his legs denying him support. The convulsions intensified and his respiration became ragged and then failed altogether. A few feet away, his partner was already dead, lifeless eyes pointed at the hotel ceiling.

  Green and white vehicles marked Polizei were arriving in front of the hotel, lights flashing. Uniformed officers disgorged from the fleet of Opels and Mercedes and cleared the area, setting up a cordon around the hotel. Inside the lobby, there was no movement at all.

  Chapter 63

  Waldbaer was easing himself from his unmarked car and preparing to join the others on the festival grounds when the radio banter took an ominous turn. He listened raptly to the initial call from officer Mauer alerting them to the pursuit of a suspect into the Rote Adler, which Waldbaer recalled was near the main train station; he had driven past it the previous night with Hirter. Waldbaer listened to the terse call-ins from cruisers reporting their progress to the hotel.

  Minutes later, an officer reported from directly outside the hotel that, as seen through the front window, there were several bodies strewn across the lobby, all apparently lifeless. The officer also reported that a peculiar-looking object could be detected on the floor. “It looks like a stainless-steel thermos bottle. It has some attachment on top. It could be what we’re looking for.”

  The voice of another officer intervened, announcing that hotel guests were being evacuated from the back of the building.

  Waldbaer punched a button on the steering wheel of his car permitting him to transmit. “Make sure no one goes into that lobby, no one. Once you get a team there in protective suits, they enter unaccompanied. They know what to do. For God’s sake, don’t let on to the media what’s happening. Tell them the cruisers are there due to a fire alarm. Everybody copy?” The radio crackled with affirmative responses. Tense but energetic, Waldbaer bounded from his vehicle and headed to the Oktoberfest entrance.

  Chapter 64

  Al-Assad rode the escalator from the underground station to the Wies’n. He held the bag containing the Sarin at his side, feigning a casual stance. The Germans surrounding him were irritatingly loud, but despite his annoyance, al-Assad fixed a grin on his face. He wondered how many of those around him would end up in the same tent as he and suffer the lethal consequences. His grin became more authentic.

  Emerging into the sunlight, al-Assad squinted until he acclimatized to the prevailing brightness. He was propelled along by the force of the crowd, but managed to squeeze free and take up a position at a small roasted nut stand. Ordering a paper bag of almonds, he turned and observed the stream of humanity emerging from the U-bahn station he had just exited.

  He wanted to ensure that Taamir, the next to leave the hotel after him, was safely on the festival grounds. Slowly consuming his purchase, al-Assad was relieved ten minutes later to see Taamir spill onto the Wies’n, the plastic bag with its deadly cargo inconspicuous by his side. Excellent, al-Assad concluded, things move as they should. Aware that Taamir would be going to the Augustiner tent, al-Assad popped the last almond into his mouth and began his journey to the Hofbräu tent, easing once again into the river of people flowing by.

  Taamir moved at the pace of the crowd past souvenir stands and an establishment selling smoked fish. The main pedestrian street called the Wirtsbudenstrasse, where the beer tents were located, loomed ahead. Taamir considered the scene and concluded that it represented unalloyed decadence. There was no reason why those who chose to come to such a place should be permitted to live. The entire scene was an affront to the values that ordered Taamir’s life. It would be a pleasure to engage the device secreted in the plastic bag gripped in his hand.

  Entering the festival avenue, Taamir recalled the Oktoberfest map he had studied in the hotel. The Augustiner tent was located to his left. Navigating through the crowd, he maneuvered in that direction. A few minutes later he spotted the brewery tent, painted bright white and deep blue and bearing the golden emblem of a bishop’s curling kreutzer.

  Alert to potential danger, Taamir scanned the surroundings for any trace of police. He noted the line of sturdily built men at the entrance to the tent, monitoring the crowd that slowly snaked its way into the enormous beer hall. Through the bobbing figures ahead of him, he saw as well that these civilian security guards, intended mainly for crowd control, occ
asionally asked to inspect a person’s backpack or handbag. This was not unexpected, and Taamir felt confident that his redhead appearance and souvenir bag would pass muster. Feeling tense nonetheless, he knew that if he were discovered, he would activate the device where he stood. Taamir moved forward resolutely.

  “Sir, please open your bag” a baritone voice said in German. Taamir glanced to his right and saw the broad-shouldered bulk of a security guard sporting a crew-cut who was, in fact, an undercover special police officer.

  Taamir smiled vacantly as if to suggest that he had already had a beer or two. “No problem,” he replied. He held up the plastic souvenir bag and opened it for inspection.

  The guard peered into the proffered bag through dark sunglasses. His eyes scanned the contents rapidly, taking in a couple of candy bars and a cardboard container decorated with a Munich scene. Before Taamir could react, the guard reached a large hand into the bag and flipped open the cardboard container, revealing a smooth, shining tubular surface. Not a beer stein, the policeman noted, it looked like a thermos. There was no end to the type of souvenirs they were selling, he thought to himself.