Desert Fire

by David Hagberg

The lights in Whalpol’s house went out. A couple of minutes later the front door opened and a man emerged, passed through the gate, crossed in front of the parked car and opened the driver’s door. For a brief moment he was illuminated by the dome light. It was Whalpol.

  “Call the van. Tell them we’re on the move,” Roemer said.

  Whalpol’s car pulled away from the curb. Roemer waited until it disappeared around the corner, then followed. Whalpol turned onto the Hinterholerstrasse and sped up.

  Traffic was light, but there was enough to conceal them behind Whalpol.

  They reached the Kölnerstrasse, paralleling the river.

  “Where the hell is he going at this hour?” Manning growled.

  “He’s evidently set up a surveillance team to watch whoever he suspects is the killer.”

  “Could we have been so wrong, Roemer?”

  Roemer shrugged. He felt numb. A lot of bad memories coursed through his head.

  They crossed the Konrad Adenauer Bridge and Roemer had to fall back farther. On the other side, Whalpol turned east on the Königswinterstrasse and sped up again in the general direction of the Köln-Bonn Autobahn.

  Roemer thought Whalpol was heading out to the KwU research facility beyond the airport, but when he crossed the interchange and headed up toward Siegburg itself, a chill passed through Roemer.

  He knew where Whalpol was heading. Suddenly he could see the entire thing all laid out for him like a nearly solved crossword puzzle. It was stunning.

  They came around the corner onto the Bonnerstrasse, and Manning suddenly sat forward.

  “God in heaven,” he said. “The Klauber estate.”

  “Yes.”

  Whalpol’s car turned up a driveway that led to a small house behind and above the estate. Roemer shut off his headlights and parked just below.

  “General Sherif,” Manning said.

  “Or one of his staff.”

  44

  IT WAS COLD in the car. Roemer could see his breath. From where they were parked they had a clear line of sight to both houses. A few lights shone on the first floor of the Klauber estate, but Whalpol’s surveillance house was dark. The BND team would probably have a lot of sophisticated equipment up there. Certainly a telephone monitor, probably an infrared telescope and camera, possibly a long-range sound-detection dish and amplifier. They’d be picking the Klauber house apart electronically.

  Whalpol was guilty of nothing more than an awesome German cynicism. Roemer could see it now. The man had probably had some fatherly feeling for Sarah Razmarah. When she was murdered he had called on Schaller to hire a BKA homicide investigator—but one who could be controlled if the situation got out of hand. It was likely that Whalpol had had his suspicions about someone on the Iraqi team, but no proof. Perhaps with the second killing, Whalpol had discovered something that led him to the general’s staff.

  Whalpol would be working under tremendous pressure; the project must be kept safe at all costs. In a couple of months, if they could all hold out that long, the project would be completed, the Iraqis would have their reactor and their team would go home, and the Germans would have their money. The murders would eventually be buried as unsolved, or with any luck they’d come across a known sex offender dead, the “scapegoat.”

  Manning was now confused, torn between his duties. “What the hell do we do?”

  “Find the killer and arrest him,” Roemer said.

  Manning shook his head. “Do you think Whalpol and his crowd would allow that? We’re playing with fire here.”

  “You should have a clear conscience that there wasn’t a conspiracy after all.”

  A hard look came into Manning’s eyes. “I don’t know which disgusts me more. A conspiracy, or a cover-up. I don’t understand it, Roemer.”

  “Understand this. I’m going to find out who the killer is, arrest him and see that he stands trial. I don’t give a damn who it is, or what Whalpol and his people do about it.”

  45

  SERGEANT JACOBS RELIEVED them a few minutes after two. Roemer dropped Manning off downtown and went over to his own office. He got a cup of coffee and a roll from the canteen and took the elevator up. The only people on duty were the switchboard girl and the night officer. Neither noticed Roemer’s arrival.

  He took off his coat and opened the six-inch-thick sheath of files he had amassed on this case. He thought once again about Leila Kahled. She was a trained Mukhabarat operative, and she lived under the same roof as the murderer. Did she know who it was? Did she have suspicions? Or had she become so blinded by pursuing old Nazis that she had seen or heard nothing? Frankly I didn’t think Leila played that rough. Whalpol’s words. Yet Roemer suspected that Khodr Azziza had come to Switzerland at Leila’s behest to kill or kidnap Roemer’s father. It would take them a little time, so he had some breathing room. Time enough, he hoped, to identify and arrest the murderer. Afterward he would go to Interlaken to take up the vigil with Sergeant Rilke.

  From the original files that Whalpol had supplied, Roemer began digging into the backgrounds of General Sherif and his entourage at the Klauber mansion.

  In addition to the general and his daughter, there were thirteen others. The general’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Mahmud Habash, and twelve men and officers from the Iraqi Department of Security. For each, Whalpol’s files provided a few scant paragraphs of information.

  Habash had been with the general the longest, but the others had served in the army with the man at one time or another. All had been detached to the Security commandos. Specialist soldiers. Several had training in demolitions or communications, but not one of them was a nuclear technician.

  A curious staff, Roemer mused, for a deputy minister of defense to bring with him on such a project. They were more like a bodyguard or an elite strike force. Perhaps the general felt unsafe here in Germany.

  Seven of the men were married, but none had brought a wife or children.

  Whalpol’s notes yielded no indication of what the men had been doing over the months they had been here. Certainly there would be little for them to do at the KwU research or assembly plants. They would have to be like caged animals by now.

  Perhaps he was dealing with nothing more than a bored soldier who had escaped his prisonlike existence to take his revenge on two young women.

  But that would not explain how he had come to kill the two who had strong ties to the KwU project. Ties inimical to project security.

  Roemer sat back and lit a cigarette. Stanos Lotz’s observation that both Sarah Razmarah and Joan Waldmann were dark, black-eyed, pretty career women kept going through his mind.

  He was looking for an Iraqi soldier who lived in the Klauber estate and was familiar enough with the project to understand the threat both women presented; further, it had to be a man with an intense hatred for young career women. Perhaps an Islamic fundamentalist who thought women should know their place and remain in the background. Someone strong. Someone who had come at last to Whalpol’s attention. Someone, therefore, important.

  Who fit such a description? Roemer looked at the files spread out on his desk. Someone who had suffered for the cause, who had gone to Mecca on the hajj, who professed his faith five times each day. There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet.

  All the general’s troops were under the age of thirty-five. If they had suffered, it had not been for long. Only Colonel Habash and General Sherif himself even came close to fitting the picture, if the information in Whalpol’s dossiers was correct.

  Roemer’s cigarette stopped in midair, another piece of the puzzle dropping into place. Leila was the chief of Mukhabarat activities for the KwU project, Whalpol’s counterpart. She knew that Sarah’s relationship with Ahmed Pavli had gone sour. She would have known about Joan Waldmann’s threatening to expose the KwU project on television. And she had been raised to be anti-West in the PLO by her widowed father.

  The father knew what the daughter knew.

  Roemer open
ed the general’s file. Several photographs showed him coming out of the Council of Ministers building in Baghdad, one with Saddam Hussein, and another showed him inside at a conference table with the Revolutionary Command Council—Iraq’s governing body.

  Josef Assad Sherif, born June 15, 1940, in Jerusalem to a father who was an attorney and a mother who was a medical doctor. His parents were killed in an Israeli Irgun raid in 1957, the day before his seventeenth birthday. The file was vague about the next part, but whoever had written the dossier speculated that the murders of several prominent Israeli citizens in Tel Aviv over the next few months might have been committed by Sherif.

  That fall, he turned up at the Arab University at Beirut for double master’s degrees in international law and political science. It was there that he met Hanna Kanafani, who was also studying law. They were married in 1962, and their only daughter, Leila, was born the next year.

  There were few details about the general’s life over the next ten years except that he was very active in the PLO, especially Yasir Arafat’s al-Fatah. He was also one of the fedayeen, a freedom fighter, helping to defend the Tall al-Za’tar PLO camp, where in 1957 the civil war in Lebanon really began.

  Sherif’s wife was killed at this camp in 1976, a few months before it finally fell, and he and his daughter disappeared, turning up at Saddam Hussein’s side in 1979 when the Tikritis took over the RCC, and therefore the actual leadership of Iraq.

  Sherif’s had been a tough life, but nothing in his dossier suggested that he could be a rapist and a murderer of young women, or that he was an Islamic fundamentalist. If anything, Sherif (Hussein had promoted him to general in the Special Security Forces in 1984) was an opportunist, albeit a very mysterious man.

  Roemer wondered if he was following another dead-end hunch. To imagine that General Sherif was the killer was even more difficult than to believe that Whalpol had committed the crimes on orders from Pullach. Sherif was a highly respected soldier turned diplomat. It was hard to believe that he would risk a project of such importance to his adopted country for the murders of two women.

  And where was the motivation? Locked somewhere in his experiences in war-torn Lebanon? In the horrors of Tall al-Za’tar?

  Roemer turned next to the computer printouts that Gehrman had supplied him from passport control. The general and his chief of staff, Colonel Habash, were often out of the country. Perhaps they had been gone during one or both of the murders—the perfect alibi.

  Sarah Razmarah had been murdered sometime late on the evening of Wednesday, November nineteenth. Roemer spread out the passport printouts. The general and his COS had left for Baghdad the very next morning. He himself had watched them leave the house together shortly before Leila had raced off to Pavli’s apartment. They had taken a direct flight from Bonn to Baghdad. Anxiously, Roemer flipped through the printouts, to Saturday. General Sherif and Colonel Habash had returned late that day. A full twenty-four hours before Joan Waldmann was murdered.

  There was the triple-star imprint on Sarah Razmarah’s palm. And Whalpol warned that Schaller would not want to know who had killed the two women.

  Roemer lit another cigarette and went to the window, which looked out over the city. It was nearly five o’clock. Soon traffic would begin and Bonn would awaken. He was weary. No matter what the outcome, his life would never be the same. How badly he had misjudged people was just coming into focus for him. Gretchen, Leila, Whalpol and now the general. He felt alone and cold in the predawn darkness.

  The telephone on his desk rang. Manning was on the line.

  “Whalpol returned to his house about an hour ago.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have there been any more phone calls?”

  “None. But listen, Jacobs just called me. Leila left a few minutes ago.”

  Roemer snapped out of his introspective mood. “Did Whalpol’s people follow her?”

  “No. There’s been absolutely no activity up there. No lights, nothing.”

  She would be going to Bern, now that the assassin was presumably in Switzerland to pick up his father’s trail from the sanatorium. She would find him.

  “Where is she going, Roemer, have you any idea?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is she part of this?”

  “I don’t think so, at least not directly.”

  Manning hesitated. “You know who killed the two girls?”

  Roemer sighed. “I think so.”

  “Who?”

  “You’re not going to like it. No one will.”

  “Who?”

  “I think General Sherif is the murderer.”

  “God in heaven! Why?”

  “I don’t know. But we’re going to have to go very slowly now, Manning. Whalpol is watching the general. If it comes to a confrontation, Whalpol will protect the man.”

  “What do we do?”

  “I’m going to try for a search warrant later today.”

  “From Schaller? He’s in bed with Whalpol. He’ll never give it to you.”

  “We’ll see,” Roemer said. “But keep yourself available. If it happens we’ll have to move quickly.”

  “What about Jacobs?”

  “Keep the tap on Whalpol’s phone. If anything happens he’ll be the first to know. But pull Jacobs away from the Klauber estate before dawn. I don’t want him spotted.”

  Again Manning hesitated. “How sure are you about this?”

  “Not very.”

  Now it would begin, Roemer thought. And no one would be happy with the outcome. He telephoned Rudi Gehrman. His friend answered the phone on the second ring.

  “I think you’d better get down here as soon as possible,” Roemer said without preamble.

  “What’s happened?”

  “I’m going to need some fast information. There were some assassinations in Tel Aviv in 1957.”

  “Of Jews?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t suspect the Israelis will cooperate with us,” Gehrman said. “We’ll have to go to Washington, the Central Intelligence Agency. We might be able to get access through the FBI.”

  “Do you know anyone over there?”

  “I have just the man,” Gehrman said. “But it’s still the middle of the night in Washington.”

  “Get him out of bed.”

  “Who is it, Walther? Do you know who killed those girls? An Iraqi?”

  “I’ll fill you in when you get here.”

  Roemer dialed the Interlaken number. It took a long time before the telephone was answered by Sergeant Rilke.

  “Max, this is Walther. Is everything all right down there?”

  “The major had a very bad night,” the sergeant grumbled. “He only got to sleep an hour ago. I do not think he will last much longer. His mind is going.”

  Kill him, Roemer wanted to say.

  “There is big trouble coming your way, Max.”

  “Who is it this time?”

  “A man by the name of Khodr Azziza will find you sooner or later.”

  “I don’t know this name.”

  “He works for Saddam Hussein.”

  The sergeant laughed, short and sharp. “We don’t have a quarrel with them. But let him come. I’ve not had a decent fight in years. The diversion will be interesting.”

  “Max, he might want to take my father alive. They want to use him as a hostage in Baghdad. No matter what happens, Max, my father must not leave Interlaken alive.”

  “Neither of us will, Walther. You have my word on it.”

  46

  IT WAS EARLY morning in Bonn, midnight in Washington, D.C., when Rudi Gehrman called his friend who worked for the FBI. Roemer listened on an extension in his office.

  They spoke English.

  “Tom Karsten, Rudi Gehrman here in Germany.”

  “Rudi, how the hell are you? Have you any idea what time it is here?”

  “Sorry, Tom, but I need your help. Unofficially but fast.”
<
br />   Karsten, an agent attached to the Bureau’s Special Investigative Division, had worked with Gehrman a number of times over the past couple of years. Karsten’s specialty was running down Nazis who had hidden in the United States after the war.

  “It’s a two-way street, my friend. What do you need?”

  “I want you to get out to Langley. The CIA.”

  “I know where it is,” Karsten said dryly.

  Gehrman glanced at his notes. “I want you to look up some records from the late fifties. Israeli criminal records on a series of assassinations in Tel Aviv.”

  “Just a sec,” Karsten said. A moment later he was back. “Go ahead.” He’d probably switched on a recorder.

  “In June of that year the parents of a man named Josef Assad Sherif were killed in Jerusalem by the Irgun. In August, September and October, eight prominent Israeli citizens—four men who were attorneys and four women who were doctors—were assassinated. Sherif’s father was an attorney, and his mother was a doctor.”

  There was a pause.

  “Let me ask you something, Rudi,” Karsten said. “This man wouldn’t be any relation to Iraq’s deputy minister of defense?”

  “One and the same, Tom. But this has to be kept very unofficial, very quiet.”

  “What does your office have to do with an Iraqi general, can you tell me?”

  “No. You’re going to have to trust me on this one.”

  Again there was a pause.

  “All right,” Karsten said cautiously. “I can run this first thing in the morning.”

  “No. Right now. I need this as soon as possible.”

  “I can’t get in there at this hour.”

  “Pick the lock, Tom. Really, this is extremely important.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise anything. What specifically do you need to know?”

  “Anything you can get. I want to know if an arrest was made, and if not, who the Israelis pegged as their top suspect.”

  “You think it was General Sherif?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Will you be at your office?”

  “Yes,” Gehrman said. “And one other thing. We have an incomplete dossier on the general. Find out whatever you can about him.”