Desert Fire

by David Hagberg

  German guilt, Roemer thought. “But such an effort would be directed. It would have to be preplanned.”

  “Exactly.” Whalpol beamed. “Now you have an understanding of the problem we have faced. Keeping a tight rein on the technology is one thing; keeping track of the personalities and their relationships with each other is another, certainly much more difficult business.”

  The Iraqis almost certainly knew that the Germans would set out spies, and would in turn bring in their own intelligence teams.

  There were four scenarios. In the first, the Iraqis were not interested in weapons technology, and had sent no spies. In that case the BND would have nothing to do. Security would belong entirely to the Chief District Prosecutor’s office.

  In the second scenario, the Iraqis were not after the illegal technology, but had nevertheless sent watchdogs to make sure their people were treated properly. The BND’s job would be only to identify Iraq’s intelligence operatives and isolate them.

  In the third, least likely scenario, the Iraqis were after bomb technology, but cold, with no Secret Service backup.

  And in the final scenario, the one with the highest likelihood, the Iraqis had come to Germany to grab anything and everything they could, and had mounted a highly sophisticated intelligence operation, using not only the team members, but a few well-chosen Mukhabarat operatives.

  Roemer felt another chill. In all of Whalpol’s cold, dispassionate account there was no regard for the people involved. For the human element. A young woman lay dead in Bad Godesberg. He couldn’t get the vision of her ruined body out of his head.

  “Weeks before the main body of the Iraqi team arrived, we received a list of their personnel, who would all travel on diplomatic passports. A few were rejected for various security reasons. Most, however, were allowed to come to Germany. We investigated every team member who would be working on the project.”

  Roemer had been caught up in his own thoughts as Whalpol talked. He suddenly sensed he had missed something important.

  “Just a minute, Herr Major, please.”

  Whalpol fixed Roemer with a steady gaze. “Yes?”

  “You knew ahead of time which of the Iraqi team were Secret Service … Mukhabarat?”

  Whalpol smiled dryly. “It is more complicated than even that, Investigator. We have identified a number of the Mukhabarat officers, including their field chief, but others on the team … damned near every member of the team was and is a potential intelligence operative.”

  “But you did say you recruited Sarah Razmarah.”

  Whalpol nodded. He seemed smug, as if he were a teacher allowing his prize student to work something out that, while difficult, was obvious.

  “You recruited her because you needed some skill that was unique to her. Not merely her engineering ability, but perhaps her looks? Perhaps her loneliness? These are Arabs.”

  Whalpol glanced over at Schaller. “Simply stated, Sarah was recruited because she was a good engineer, she was Arab, she was quite good-looking and she was an unknown. Someone from outside the German engineering establishment. A dark horse.”

  “Plus she was Iranian-born, she had no love for the Iraqis.”

  Whalpol shrugged.

  “But you must have had something or someone very specific in mind for her.”

  “Ahmed Pavli,” Whalpol said. “One of their chief engineers.”

  “A weak link?”

  Whalpol nodded.

  “Sarah was to get close to him—in his bed—and find out what he knew?”

  “She was very good.”

  “This fellow, he is a man of medium height, husky, dark, perhaps even sad-looking?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman in Two-B had told Lieutenant Manning that Sarah had two regular visitors. Pavli, husky and dark. And the other, tall and thin. Whalpol.

  “Did Ahmed Pavli kill her?”

  Whalpol took a long time to answer, and when he did he wasn’t as sure of himself as he had been earlier. “It’s a possibility which I’ve given serious consideration.” He looked down at his hands. “But I don’t think he did it. I wish it were that simple, you know.”

  “Your and Pavli were her only regular visitors?”

  “Presumably.”

  “You for your regular reports.”

  Whalpol nodded.

  “And Pavli … because he was in love with her.”

  Whalpol’s eyes glistened. “I didn’t give a damn about this man. Only Sarah concerned me. I felt a certain responsibility. I researched her background. I recruited her.”

  Roemer waited.

  “Pavli was in love with her, all right. But she fell in love with him. In the end she wanted to quit.”

  “You sonofabitch,” Roemer said softly.

  Whalpol went on as if he hadn’t heard. “I gave her a list of people on the Iraqi team whom I wanted her to get close to. Pavli was to be her first … but not her only one.”

  “She hid your list behind the Schrank in her bedroom.”

  “It didn’t take me five minutes to find it.”

  “Did you kill her, Herr Major?”

  Schaller gasped.

  Whalpol’s head jerked up. “No! What in God’s name do you take me for? What sort of person do you think I am?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Roemer said.

  “I knew there was trouble,” Whalpol continued woodenly. “I’ve known it for weeks. I tried to talk to her, make her see the futility of it, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  “Did you try to pull her off the project?”

  “I did not. It was too important. Besides, we were beginning to suspect that the Iraqis were feeding Pavli disinformation, knowing that it would get to Sarah.”

  “I didn’t think they were that sophisticated.”

  “They learned a lot from the Gulf War.”

  “Did they have her spotted?”

  “We think so. If Sarah had been pulled out, another pipeline would have been shut off. They would have placed someone else in the loop. An unknown. Someone we might not have been able to control.”

  It was a different world in which these sorts of people lived and operated, Roemer thought. A world devoid of … he searched for the word … devoid of compassion for the human results of their manipulations. This seemed to be his night for revelations.

  “I met with her on a regular basis. Sometimes at her apartment, at other times in town, or even at KwU. On the chance that she was being watched, we were very careful. Always.”

  “Then her watchdogs may have seen her killer,” Roemer suggested.

  “If that is the case, and if she was murdered by someone on the Iraqi team, you will be working against a double handicap.”

  Roemer could think of nothing to say.

  “At first her product was quite good, you know. She seemed to take to her assignment. But then it began to fall off, and I suggested to her that she might have run her course with Pavli, that perhaps she should move on. But she kept putting me off. She kept hinting at bigger and better things.”

  “You were wild for what she was bringing you … big or little.”

  “When I realized that she had fallen in love, I tried to discourage her. But I didn’t want to upset something. By then she herself was becoming unstable.”

  “What’d you expect?”

  Whalpol made no answer.

  Roemer got to his feet.

  “Don’t go, Investigator,” Whalpol said. “We do need your help. Honestly.”

  “To clean up the mess you’ve created?”

  “No. In actuality very little has changed. The Iraqis will remain on the project. We are talking about eight billion marks here. They will continue to spy on us, and we will continue to spy on them. We want the murder resolved.”

  “But delicately,” Roemer said.

  Whalpol nodded. “Is it so difficult for you to understand?”

  “On the contrary, Major, I believe that I understand more than you want me to und
erstand.”

  “Then you’ll help?”

  Roemer looked at him. “Did you have something on her, or did she volunteer?”

  “We had nothing on her,” Whalpol said.

  “What about me? You have something on me?”

  “Heavens no,” Schaller blurted.

  “Yes, in a manner of speaking, we do,” Whalpol said softly.

  Roemer turned on him. “A refreshing dose of honesty from the BND. What is your lever on me, Herr Major? My father?”

  “If I said yes to that, Investigator, would it satisfy you that indeed I am a bastard?”

  Roemer held himself back from sarcasm. He felt off balance. He was being manipulated. But Whalpol was very good, and in the final analysis, Roemer wondered if he cared.

  “You were selected because you are a good cop, but even more than that, because you are honest, conscientious, and no matter who might try to sway your investigation, you would not be moved. And in the end you will find Sarah’s murderer … people, policies or governments be damned. And that, my dear Investigator, is the lever I hold. Your own honesty is the fulcrum.”

  The bastard was right, and Roemer found himself nodding.

  “Now.” Whalpol picked up his briefcase, set it on Schaller’s desk, opened it and withdrew two fat file folders. “Are you on the case?”

  Roemer returned his gaze. “I will find her murderer.”

  “You will report directly to Ernst and …”

  “I will report to no one, Herr Major. If I need assistance I will call the Prosecutor or you. Other than that you will not hear from me until I have the killer.”

  Whalpol considered that for a moment, then nodded. “Fair enough, but you understand that my work will continue. Don’t interfere.”

  “I’m only interested in Sarah’s murderer.”

  “You will need these.” Whalpol handed the files to Roemer. “One is a dossier on Sarah, the other a list of everyone on the Iraqi team, including those we’ve identified as Mukhabarat.”

  “Who is their field chief?”

  “Her name is Leila Kahled el Zayn.”

  Schaller smiled. “You will do a good job for us.”

  Roemer saw that the man’s hands were shaking.

  12

  THE HOUSE WAS dark, Teutonic in its foreboding heaviness, with its thick wooden beams and tall, smoking chimneys. It looked down on the Rhine and the city of Bonn, just now coming alive with the chill, desultory dawn.

  In a third-story bedroom, Leila Kahled woke with a start, her heart thumping and perspiration on her forehead. She glanced at the bedside clock, then lay back and closed her eyes.

  It was just seven. The same dream again. Insha’ Allah, how she hated it here. During the daytime she was usually all right, but at night, the memories came flooding back and she relived the horror that had forever changed her.

  Too much responsibility for one so young, her Uncle Bashir might say. But at thirty-two she had seen and done more than most men twice her age.

  She was worried about the girl, Sharazad Razmarah, and Ahmed Pavli. Their relationship was disintegrating. But the BND would never let the poor woman go. Not until the project was finished.

  She had to laugh. Colonel Mikadi was worried about the U.S. or Germany’s EC trading partners finding out about the deal. He was rabid about security. In reality the Germans were more interested in security than the Iraqis were. The Germans would make sure it stayed within the country.

  In her last report to Baghdad, she’d recommended that Pavli be pulled off the project. Despite the German cooperation, he was becoming a danger. Her request had been denied. Pavli was too important now that the BND was targeting him. What the Mukhabarat wanted the Germans to learn, they would funnel through him.

  But Allah in heaven, there was more going on than they had told her. Something else was happening here. Something sinister that most of the time she did not want to think about.

  “Find out what they are doing and what they are thinking, but do not antagonize anyone. This is not Lebanon,” Bashir Kahair, the deputy director of the Mukhabarat, had told her. Uncle Bashir, though not really an uncle, was an old family friend.

  No, she thought, her eyes closed in the darkness, it was not Beirut. It was Germany. But again the dream came to her, the same awful memories.

  She’d been just eighteen and full of idealism, working for Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. Everybody worked for the PLO in those days. You didn’t even have to be Arab.

  One night a Phalangist patrol caught her in the hills above Beirut, where she had gone to spy on one of their camps in which it was suspected that some Shiites had been tortured and killed. One by one, all fifteen of the young men raped her.

  That night she managed to escape, and she found and killed them all by slitting their throats as they slept. It was the Arab punishment. The one certain to make them and their brothers understand.

  But the memories refused to fade. At times the brutal rape haunted her. At other times, like this morning, it was the killing of the fifteen young men. It had taken her most of the night. As they strangled on their own blood, the gaping wounds in their throats made horrible gurgling sounds. She would never forget.

  The experience had left its indelible mark on her soul.

  “You are too hard on yourself, my little one,” her father, General Josef Assad Sherif, had told her some years ago. “You need to care for a man, perhaps a child.”

  By then they had left Beirut and enlisted in Saddam Hussein’s growing movement. The PLO would never win the struggle against the Zionists, let alone the West. But with a strong Iraq, the region might come back to the law of Allah. The reasonable law of Allah, not the Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision of the Koran.

  “I can’t care for myself, let alone anyone else,” she had cried. “There’s nothing left inside of me, can’t you see that?”

  When Leila was ten, her mother had been killed in an Israeli air raid on the camp where they’d lived outside Beirut. Her father, who was often absent for long periods, took over the raising of his only child with the help of his good friend Bashir Kahair and the local camp women. She loved her father, but she realized she’d never really known him. He was, in some ways, even more distant a relative than her Uncle Bashir.

  She opened her eyes. She pushed back the covers and got out of bed. She slept nude. Her skin shimmered in the early-morning light as she padded across the large bedroom to the windows, where she pulled back the curtains and looked out. She was a tall woman with a slight, almost boyish body and long legs. Her complexion was olive, her hair long and jet-black and her eyes wide and intense.

  It had rained heavily in the night and the city looked fresh and clean. Below, in the cobblestone courtyard, her father’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Mahmud Habash, was stowing a suitcase in the trunk of a gray Mercedes. He closed the lid and looked up.

  Leila did not move. For a long time they stared at each other. Of the dozen men here on her father’s staff, she liked Habash least. His eyes were cold and dispassionate, yet whenever he looked at her she got the impression that he was imagining her nude body—but clinically, without lust.

  The old Beirut, before the fighting, had never seemed so far away from her as it did at this moment. She shivered but remained where she stood. She would not back down, despite how silly and dangerous for an Arab woman this was. Let the bastard have an eyeful! He answered to her father.

  The happiest days of her life had been when she was a little girl, her mother was alive, and her father would take them to a fancy restaurant downtown, overlooking the water, or perhaps they would stroll along Hamara Street looking in the windows of all the fancy shops. She felt nostalgia for something she’d never had for long: a sense of belonging with another person, shared emotions.

  Habash finally lowered his eyes and disappeared into the house.

  For another minute Leila stood by the window, her eyes drifting to the city and the river th
at wound its way through the plains and hills. She could not imagine Germany as a place of lightness and contentment, even though this country had been their ally from time to time. Germany for some reason was to her a dark, brooding place.

  “The Germans have their hands full, Uncle Bashir, they’re not the enemy,” she’d argued the afternoon she’d been handed this assignment.

  “You’re not going there to make trouble, Leila. You’re going to make sure there is none. Nothing more.”

  “And if there is—what then?”

  “You report the problem and we will take care of it. You’re to be nothing more than an observer for us. A little desert mouse in the corner.”

  “The BND will know who and what I am.”

  “Almost certainly. They will have their people watching us. Their efforts will be sophisticated, no doubt. It is to be expected.”

  Uncle Bashir had come to her apartment near the Tariz Air Base, and they went for a walk in the pleasant evening. He’d come not only to tell her about her assignment in Bonn, but to talk to her about her father, who’d been working too hard. A lot of people on the Council were worried about him, at his age.

  “He won’t listen to me,” Uncle Bashir said. “Calls me an old woman.”

  Leila laughed. She could hear her father saying it. “But he’s not an old man, Uncle Bashir. He’s just fifty-four.”

  “The president has taken a personal interest in his well-being.”

  “I’ll go over and slow him down, if that’s what you really want. But you know how he’s always been.”

  “This is so important to us, Leila. Your father may have discussed it with you, considering your … position.”

  She shivered. Since she had separated from her husband, she’d taken care of her father’s household. She had become the son he’d never had, and assumed the responsibility of mistress of the household for a man who was rarely home.

  “You know how delicate this is,” Uncle Bashir went on. He was a tiny, birdlike man with a mind as sharp as anyone’s in Iraq.

  “The Germans are selling us nuclear technology and no one must know about it. I’m not completely lost in the forest,” she said.