Desert Fire

by David Hagberg

  “Are you here to kill him?” she asked.

  Azziza’s back was to the window. He was silhouetted in the strong sunlight. “I understand the man may be too old and sick to be moved. A termination would probably be for the best. I don’t relish the idea of carting a dead body back to Baghdad.”

  Azziza radiated a chill. He was of the Hasson al-Sabbath, the ancient assassins. She shivered.

  “I see,” Azziza said, evidently reading her expression. He languidly lit a cigarette. He was dressed in dark trousers, a light shirt, dark leather jacket and soft leather boots.

  “He’s dying,” Leila said. “He probably hasn’t got a month to live.”

  “Tell that to the men, women and children he killed.”

  “What do you care? They were Jews!”

  His eyes flashed. “I do not kill innocent people. You’re young, you have no conception of what I am.”

  He moved out of the direct light. Leila tried to put an age on him, but he could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty.

  “He wasn’t one of the worst ones, but we do know he personally tortured and killed at least a hundred men and women with his own hands. And undoubtedly he signed the orders for several thousand more to die in the gas chambers.”

  “Killing him won’t do anything for us.”

  “No.” Azziza smiled sadly. “Killing him will simply deny him another month or so of life.”

  “If he is dying, maybe it would be better to let him suffer.”

  “You don’t know a thing, little girl, so prim and pretty. Life isn’t given up so easily. We fight for our last breath. Believe me, I know.” He laughed. “I’ve been called a soldier.”

  “You enjoy it.”

  Azziza’s face tensed. For a moment Leila feared for her own life.

  Then he relaxed. “It was a good piece of work you did, following the son to Bern, picking up the Walkmann name. And I can understand why you didn’t pursue it then and there, though Colonel Habash is at a loss.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You are in love with him,” Azziza said casually.

  Leila felt as if she had been punched in the gut.

  “It was also a nice bit of work tracking down Interlaken from his girlfriend. I must say, he has terrible luck with women. But then, all the good ones do.” Azziza smiled. “Don’t look so surprised. I happen to agree with Jacob Wadud. Walther Roemer is one of the good ones.”

  “Someone on our KwU team has probably murdered two young women,” Leila blurted.

  Azziza nodded. “You may be right, little girl. But that is not my assignment. Walther Roemer will find the killer. His father is my concern. You can make it easy or difficult. Where did you fly this morning, little bird? Who did you talk with?”

  “His sergeant is with him.”

  “Max Rilke. A tough old bastard.”

  “Will you kill him too?”

  “I expect he will get in the way.”

  “And the house staff? There may be nurses.”

  “Who did you talk with this morning, Leila?” Azziza stopped within an arm’s length of her. He smelled faintly of cloves. His aura seemed to produce an electric current that paralyzed her.

  “Who are you protecting, Leila? The son?”

  “Jungfraujochstrasse,” Leila said softly.

  “Number?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “And this information came from whom?”

  “The clerk of property records. I asked about taxes on the place.”

  Azziza nodded. Gently, he touched her cheek with his cool fingertips. The gesture shocked her. She reared back, bumping her head on the door.

  Azziza took her arm and led her away from the door. “Get in your car now, little girl, and drive away. Don’t look back.”

  He stepped to the ashtray by the window, picked out his two cigarette butts and pocketed them. He put on a pair of thin leather gloves, then went to the door.

  “What if his son comes down here?”

  Azziza turned back, a distant look in his eyes. “Pray he doesn’t, little girl. He is one I have no desire to kill.”

  He left. For a long time Leila stared at the door, numb. Then she roused herself enough to gather her things and repack her overnight bag.

  The Butcher of Dachau was as good as dead. Azziza would wait until tonight and go in under cover of darkness. The property clerk’s call would put them on their guard. They would not run, however. The dying old man was too sick to be moved so soon after the trip from the sanatorium. His sergeant would be on the lookout tonight. Azziza had called him a tough old bastard. But it wasn’t likely he’d be able to stop the assassin.

  Leila went down to the desk, where she paid her bill, assuring the curious clerk that nothing was wrong with her room or the service; urgent business had come up.

  She drove out of the city. The cold sky was crystal clear, the sun bright at this altitude. Her involvement with Lotti Roemer was over. It was time to go home. To forget.

  On the superhighway toward Bern, she let her mind drift to the warmth of the Tigris Valley. There was work for her there. A million years ago, she had been trained as a nurse. Whenever she went back to her adopted home she opened the tiny clinic, and all the sturdy Bedouins, who for most of the year were as healthy as pack animals, suddenly came down with everything from sprained ankles to mysterious backaches and migraine headaches. She didn’t mind. She enjoyed the busywork. The camaraderie of the clinic. But it was also lonely. Uncle Bashir visited from time to time, but always came with an assignment for her. Something for her special talents.

  She pounded the steering wheel. It wasn’t fair. Where was the love? Where were the bells and the golden path that led out to some garden of togetherness?

  Against her will, Walther Roemer’s strong, good face swam before her mind’s eye. Impossible, she told herself. Utterly impossible.

  “What if his son comes down here?” Her own words.

  “Pray he doesn’t, little girl. He is one I have no desire to kill.”

  The property clerk had probably called Sergeant Rilke. Would Rilke, fearing the worst, have called Walther Roemer?

  50

  STANOS LOTZ LOOKED up from his microscope, his weak eyes wide and watery until he put on his thick glasses. He plucked the heavy cuff link from the instrument’s stage and turned it over in his hands.

  “No blood, unfortunately,” he said.

  “Is it the same one?” Roemer asked. He had come directly from the Klauber estate to Lotz’s laboratory.

  “If you mean to ask could this cuff link have caused the pattern on Sarah Razmarah’s palm, the answer is yes. But was the impression caused specifically by this cuff link? I don’t know.”

  Roemer had hoped Lotz could pull some trick out of his instruments and chemicals.

  Lotz picked up a large magnifying glass and studied the back of the cuff link, on which the Roman initials JAS were engraved. “These were probably handmade,” he said. “There is a maker’s mark just below the S in the initials.” He looked up. “Find the maker.”

  “It’s the best you can do?”

  Lotz shrugged. “I’m a scientist, not a wizard. Who’s JAS?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Roemer parked on a side street near his office and walked to a Bierstube a block away. It was a few minutes past noon and the bar was crowded with secretaries, clerks and low-level government employees.

  He ordered a beer and telephoned Gehrman’s office.

  “Where are you? The colonel has been raising hell trying to find you.”

  “I’ll be in soon,” Roemer said. “Has Karsten called back?”

  “About half an hour ago. Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

  “The good.”

  “He found Sherif’s file with no problem at all. It was on microfilm, and what there was of it was well indexed. His medical records were there. His blood type is O positive.”

  It was no
surprise to Roemer, but it represented nothing more than another piece of circumstantial evidence. O positive was common.

  “Now the bad, or at least the surprising,” Gehrman said. “Sherif may have been suspected of the 1957 Tel Aviv assassinations, but if he committed those murders, then he and the international terrorist Michael are one and the same man.”

  “That’s fantastic.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Walther. The Israelis looked into the possibility, and even queried Langley in sixty-two and again in seventy-nine, shortly after Sherif and his daughter showed up in Baghdad by way of Beirut. It’s the reason the CIA had a file on him. But they and the Mossad dropped that line of investigation for lack of evidence.”

  “Sherif was a fighter.”

  “No doubt about it. But the way the CIA sees it, he was first a soldier for the PLO in Lebanon, and when that became a stinking quagmire, he bundled up his daughter and emigrated to Iraq, where he became a professional soldier. From what Karsten was able to dig up, he was one of the few Iraqi officers in the Gulf War Schwarzkopf had any respect for.”

  Roemer thought about it for a moment. “So now he comes to Germany to kill young women—” He cut himself off. “What about his wife? Anything in the file about her?”

  “Brace yourself,” Gehrman said. “She had long dark hair and black eyes and she was arguing for Arab women’s rights when husbands could still legally cut off their wives’ noses and subject them to clitoridectomies.”

  “A career woman.”

  “Just like his mother. Same description too.”

  “Just like Sarah Razmarah and Joan Waldmann. I’m going to ask Colonel Legler for an arrest warrant. Sherif knows that I suspect him, and I think he’ll try to leave the country.”

  “He has diplomatic immunity, Walther. You won’t be able to touch him.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Roemer found himself thinking about Leila. She too fit the description. The news that her father was a murderer would hit her at the very moment she was going after his father. Was there any justice in it? He didn’t think so.

  He telephoned Manning’s office.

  “Did you get the search warrant?” the KP lieutenant asked.

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think you would. But that’s not our only problem. We had to pull the tap on Whalpol’s phone. My boss received a very specific call from Pullach. He was told in no uncertain terms that we were to back off. None of the fervor was lost when he passed the message along to me.”

  “That doesn’t matter now,” Roemer said. “I went out to the Klauber estate.”

  “Oh?”

  “I got inside the general’s study.”

  “You live dangerously,” Manning said. “Find anything?”

  “Cuff links.” Roemer explained what had happened, including Lotz’s assessment.

  Manning whistled. “Whalpol will know that you were there. He’ll probably have you shot. But it’s still nothing more than circumstantial evidence, and doesn’t give us a motive.”

  “There’s more.” Roemer told Manning about the call to the FBI in Washington and the results of Karsten’s records search.

  Manning didn’t reply immediately. “He’ll skip, and once he gets back to Baghdad there won’t be a thing we can do about it. Even if you show them your evidence, no one will believe you.”

  “I’m going to arrest him this afternoon,” Roemer said. “Do you want to come along?”

  “He’s got a goddamned army out there.”

  “We won’t be going alone.”

  Again Manning hesitated. “There isn’t a lot I can do without authorization. I’m going to need orders.”

  “I’ll clear it with Legler. In the meantime, can you station someone at the airport?”

  “Sure,” Manning said. “But I don’t know how much good it will do. If he and his people insist, I won’t be able to stop them.”

  “It might slow him down,” Roemer said. “But stay available. When I get the go-ahead, we’ll have to move fast.”

  Schaller and Whalpol weren’t having much luck controlling Roemer directly, so they’d go to Legler. But he was not easily cowed.

  Roemer slipped into the Justice Building the back way and took the stairs two at a time to his office. He telephoned across to Gehrman’s office.

  “I’m back. Bring the files over.”

  “Colonel Legler picked them up not two minutes ago. But Walther, he has company, Chief Prosecutor Schaller and Major Whalpol. They’re waiting for you.”

  It was happening faster than he’d thought it would. “Don’t say anything to anyone, Rudi. I need a few minutes.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Get Jacob Wadud on the telephone. Transfer the call to me.”

  “It would be stupid of me to ask you what the hell you’re trying to do, so I won’t.”

  While he waited, Roemer lit a cigarette and stared out the window. How far was he going to push this? Until justice was done? Until the guilty party was punished? He kept telling himself that, but in the back of his mind he knew there was more. Roemer had his own guilt. The sins of the fathers, after all, were visited upon the sons.

  The telephone rang, and Roemer went back to his desk. It was Jacob Wadud, the Iraqi detective.

  “I’m not glad you called, Walther. I don’t think there’s a thing I can—or even should—do for you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The past is the past, I told her. But I cannot help you, Walther. I’m sorry.”

  Leila had evidently called him for information. She was on the hunt. And now she was probably in Switzerland. Doing what? Sniffing around the sanatorium? Even if she broke in and stole the records on his father, they wouldn’t tell her much. It would give her a name that would lead back here to Bonn. But there was no connection between the sanatorium and Interlaken. He had made sure of that when his father had been admitted.

  “It’s not that at all, Jacob. But it’ll be even less pleasant for you.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “I have two murders on my hands, here in Bonn.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “I think one of your people killed those women. As a matter of fact, I’m going for an arrest warrant as soon as I’m done talking with you.”

  Wadud hesitated a moment. “I have to ask you, Walther, if this has anything to do with your father.”

  “No.”

  “But it is delicate for you at this moment.”

  “It’s worse than that.”

  “Do you have any evidence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then arrest him. Murder is murder, Walther. Doesn’t matter the national boundaries. We’ve gone over that before.”

  “The suspect has diplomatic immunity and is a very important person. His arrest could be … explosive.”

  “What can I do?”

  “A lot of pressure is on me to drop or delay my investigation. They want me to forget about it.”

  “I don’t care who he is. Do you want me to come over?”

  “There’s a possibility I’ll be too late. He may be getting ready to skip.”

  “Back here?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’ll arrest him. Send me the evidence, and your people can begin extradition procedures.”

  Roemer ran a hand over his eyes. “It’s General Sherif.”

  Wadud did not reply.

  Roemer could hear the hiss of the long-distance line. “Jacob?”

  The line went dead. Wadud had hung up. Roemer put down the telephone. General Sherif was a personal friend of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi detective would come under immense pressure as soon as he passed along his information.

  Roemer straightened his tie, put on his jacket and went upstairs. Colonel Legler was just putting down the telephone.

  “Investigator Roemer reporting, sir.”

  Whalpol and Schaller sat in front of the desk. A third c
hair was empty.

  Legler motioned to the chair. The room was tense.

  “Have you any idea what you’ve done?” the BND major snapped.

  “I’ll have none of that in this office,” Legler said wearily.

  Roemer sat down. “General Sherif is a murderer. I want a warrant for his arrest today, before he has a chance to leave the country.”

  “Good God, Walther, you don’t have the proof,” Schaller said. “I promised that when you did, I would cooperate.”

  “I am happy to hear that, Chief Prosecutor, because I now have the proof, and the motive.”

  Even Whalpol was startled. “Sherif admitted it?”

  “No.”

  The case files were spread open on Legler’s desk. The colonel glanced at them. “There is nothing concrete here.”

  “Three other pieces of evidence have come to light since I wrote those reports.” Roemer turned to Whalpol. “But first I would like to ask Major Whalpol how he came to suspect General Sherif.”

  “Come off it, Roemer,” Whalpol said. “The murders are going to stop, but the project cannot be put at risk. If you can’t understand that simple fact of life, then I will personally put you under arrest under the National Secrets Act and have you locked up until we are finished.”

  Roemer looked at him. “I wouldn’t advise it, Major. If need be I’ll go to the newspapers with this thing. The foreign press.”

  “Enough!” Colonel Legler roared, thumping his meaty fist on the desk.

  “I went out to the Klauber estate this morning,” Roemer said.

  “Major Whalpol informed me.”

  “I found a pair of gold cuff links on the general’s desk. They were stamped with the initials JAS. I brought them to Stanos Lotz, who told me they matched the impression found on Sarah Razmarah’s palm.”

  “Anyone could have been wearing those cuff links,” Schaller said.

  “Overnight I had the American FBI conduct a records search at the Central Intelligence Agency in Virginia.”

  The color drained from Schaller’s face. He looked at Whalpol, who was holding himself rigidly erect.