This had been a mistake. It was now Dalkimoni who had commandeered the dumbwaiter escape route to save his own neck. Housek was ordered to remain behind and sacrifice his life if necessary to cover Dalkimoni's escape. Adnan Khadouri, fanatically devoted to the cause, was left behind to insure Housek's loyalty and dedication did not falter.
"Allah akbar! God is great," Khadouri said to Dalkimoni as his leader stepped cautiously inside the narrow shaftway and placed one foot on the dumbwaiter. "Don't worry, my brother. We'll give you plenty of time to get away."
"Make sure I have at least five minutes," Dalkimoni curtly replied, climbing entirely into the dumbwaiter and crouching atop the shelf.
Khadouri blessed his boss again and re-sealed the opening with the now somewhat dented panel. Then he cocked the AK-47 cradled in his hands and went into the livingroom.
Farid Housek was sitting on the couch, his head propped between his palms, his body shivering. Clearly, he was a man without heart, a craven coward. Worse yet. In Khadouri's eyes Housek was a mahmoon, he who takes it up the ass.
Adnan Khadouri got the assault rifle from where it leaned against the wall and tossed it on the couch beside the gutless Housek. He told this spineless mahmoon to pick up the rifle and prepare to die like a man.
At that moment, Winternitz and Hans were reaching the landing of the fifth floor and crossing toward the apartment door with pistols drawn.
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Winternitz took up a position to one side of the metal door frame. Hans crouched near the stairway landing, out of the direct line of sight of the eyehole at the center-top of the entrance door. Both cops' Sig-Sauer semiautomatic pistols were drawn and charged with a round in the chamber of each.
Winternitz held his gun in one hand while he reached out to rap on the door with the other. Hans clutched his weapon in a two-handed combat grip, his body planed sideways toward the door and his right eye lining up the twin white dots of the rear U-sight with the single red dot of the front sight in a direct line with the door at approximately the chest height of anyone who might open it.
Winternitz rapped on the door and waited a second or two. No answer came in response. He quickly glanced at Hans and tried again.
"Police!" he shouted. "Aufmachen! -- Open the door. We have a warrant to search the flat!"
Both cops could now hear the telltale clink of eye hole covers to left, right and behind them being slid aside as occupants of the floor looked out to see what all the commotion was about.
One door at the corner opened a crack. Winternitz held up his shield and gestured at the woman in curlers and housecoat. The door quickly shut again, and he could hear the security chain ratchet into place.
Winternitz prepared to rap a third time.
A volley of automatic fire punched through the thin sheet metal skin covering the original hardwood door. The rapid series of pops echoed through the tiled hallway, the steel-jacketed bullets fragmenting as they ricocheted off walls, floor and stairway.
Winternitz knew he should call in the SWAT team at this point, but he was not about to step back and let some hot-shit heroes grab his collar. Let them sack him if they wanted. This was his bust or nobody's.
Winternitz had signed out a door-blowing charge from Ordnance and brought it with him, knowing it might come in handy. The small DM-12 Sprengmasse cutting charge (DM-12 being the German equivalent of the US C-4) was designed to clamp over the lock plate. Winternitz quickly put it in place, risking taking a hit, shouted a final warning, and took cover.
As the Sprengmasse detonated, the door blew in, coming right off the hinges and falling flat on the floor of the apartment's foyer. Hans charged through, tossing in two flashbangs, one after the other, just to make sure.
The two cops were in after the non-lethal grenades went off with staccato reports and blinding, disorienting flashes.
Adnan Khadouri was on his feet, pointing the business end of an AK right at them. Triggering the Kalash, he blind-fired a multiround burst, striking Hans square in the chest. Hans went down with a groan of pain and Winternitz fired back, catching Khadouri in the upper chest and face area with a salvo of 9-millimeter hollowpoints.
As Khadouri's upper torso exploded into a raw hamburgerlike mass, Farid Housek flung aside his weapon. He was dazed and disoriented from the effects of the flashbangs, but he knew that he was not about to die for anybody's bullshit revolution. Not even for Allah.
Winternitz slapped the cuffs on Housek and then cautiously scoped out the apartment with pistol drawn and a fresh high-capacity clip in the mag well. Dalkimoni was nowhere in sight.
The chief returned to Hans and found that he was still alive. The Kevlar laminate ballistic vest under his coat had absorbed the impact of the bullets. Though Hans was grimacing in pain, it was probably a combination of shock trauma and several broken ribs. If a lung wasn't punctured, he'd be back on the job in two weeks.
Winternitz called for an ambulance for Hans on his handheld radio and took another look around the apartment. In the kitchen he noticed chips of old enamel paint littering the floor.
It took him another second or two to pry loose the wall panel and comprehend what had happened.
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Inspector Helmut Offenbach was surprised when the busty mädchen he'd earlier seen on the street opened the door in response to his knock and his shouted identification as a police officer. She smiled innocently and told him she was alone in the apartment, and that they must have the wrong place.
Helmut insisted on taking a look around anyway, but had momentarily dropped his guard. Nikki had come to the door wearing only a sling bra and low-cut panties, and there was little left to the imagination, including the platinum blonde's incongruously dark bush. As he entered the apartment, a bearded man with unkempt black hair popped up from behind a sofa and fired a shotgun blast. At only a few yards distance most of the fan of thirty-ought-six steel balls caught Helmut in his upper torso.
Enough of the pellets hit beyond the zone of protection afforded by his bulletproof vest. A butterfly of five of them was enough to tear away most of his throat, including his larynx and lower third of his trachea. Helmut spouted a plume of blood and reached toward his mangled throat as though trying to stuff the flaps of hanging flesh and bulging masses of blood pudding back into it as the impact hurled him against the wall.
Outside in the hall, his partner Adolph Bermann heard the shotgun blast and the shrill woman's scream that followed it. He knew better than try and bull his way inside the flat. Instead he retreated down the stairs and radioed for reinforcements. The routine bust had turned sour in a hurry.
This was not turning out to be a very good day, now was it, he thought bitterly.
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By the time the medics arrived, Winternitz was out the apartment door in a cold sweat. He shoved past them full-tilt to the edge of the landing.
"Wohein?" he shouted aloud. "Where?"
He meant where did Blower/Dalkimoni go, where could he hope to find the bastard before he slipped away for good?
Getting stares but no answer, Winternitz raced down the steps and out into the street, thankful for the force of gravity for making it much easier on the way down than it had been climbing up to the fifth floor.
"What happened up there?"
It was Rudy, one member of the stakeout team from the back. Winternitz had forgotten all about the two men he'd placed there.
"Blower got away," Winternitz told them. "He had a back way out. Through the basement. But he's still got to be somewhere close. Fan out. Cover the neighborhood. Be damned careful."
"Right, chief," Rudy said, he and Rolf already in motion.
Winternitz began running toward the streetcorner. But it was useless, he knew. Dalkimoni had outwitted him. He should have had a team of fucking Lederkopfen hit the place from all sides. Helicopters, APCs, the whole works. But there was no point in blaming himself. Felons sometimes evaded the tightest dragne
ts.
The cop slowed to a lope as he moved through pedestrian traffic on the avenue, his eyes tiredly scanning the gathering crowds for any sign of his quarry.
Suddenly Winternitz saw the dark-haired man crossing the street near the corner of Furstenstrasse, a half block down, right by the U-Bahn or subway station entrance. It was only a fleeting glance from a sizable distance, but Winternitz was hit by a gut feeling. He began running toward the man who, sighting him in pursuit, turned suddenly and then began running himself, racing pell-mell through rush hour traffic toward the subway entrance.
Winternitz didn't care if he had a heart attack. His entire being, body and soul, was fixed on catching up with the perp he'd just glimpsed.
Fortunately, the heavy traffic was making it hard for the escaping terrorist to cross to the other side. Cars were honking and drivers shouted at him as he made for the U-Bahn entrance. Winternitz held up his badge at one of the irate motorists and continued to give chase to the perp.
Dalkimoni hotfooted it down the concrete steps, shoving commuters out of the way in his haste to evade pursuit. Winternitz reached the top of the stairs seconds later. A crowd of passengers just disembarked from an arriving train were now rushing toward him up the steps. Despite his detective's ID, Winternitz had to fight them to the mezzanine level at the foot of the stairway.
Directly ahead, he now saw a maze of passenger tunnels, three of them branching off in different directions. The cop ran to the center tunnel and spotted a man running along it about twenty yards dead ahead. Winternitz took off after him. Putting on a final burst of speed that he feared would burst his overtaxed heart, he finally closed within shouting distance of the perp he'd chased to ground.
"Abhalten!" he cried out. "Polizei!"
But the man kept on booking and wouldn't stop. Ignoring the pursuing cop he knocked passengers out of the way, emptying his pockets on the run. Winternitz gave chase and finally caught up with his quarry after another brief sprint.
With his last remaining reserves of strength, the cop launched a flying tackle at the perp, managing to lock his arms around his calves and bringing him down to the hard floor of the subway tunnel.
Now both men went sprawling onto the concrete, Winternitz landing on top of the smaller, slimmer man. Fueled by adrenaline, Winternitz pulled out his spare cuffs and secured the suspect's wrists behind his back. He turned him over and immediately knew something was wrong.
The man was not Blower. He had fucked up. The scars on his arms marked him immediately as a junkie, probably an immigrant from Turkey or Morocco who had brought his habit with him and was spreading it around in his adopted homeland. Glassine envelopes, crack vials and drug works littered the dirty floor of the subway tunnel like bread crumbs from a Teutonic fairy tale.
The bomb-maker had given him the slip. Winternitz had collared himself ein Rottler -- a two-bit hype.
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On the S-Bahn elevated express to which he had transferred from the U-Bahn heading toward the commuter lines servicing the Leipsig rail junction, Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni stood grasping a handhold in the center of the crowded passenger train. He kept his face turned toward the advertising placards above the windows. Though sure he was safe, there was no sense in breaking tradecraft. Ever.
At the next stop, he got off, switched to another S-Bahn line, rode it three more stops, and then went up to street level amid the crowd of emerging commuters.
There, at the kiosk on the corner, he spotted a municipal transit bus arriving. The terrorist went onboard and paid his fare. He knew that the bus was going in the general direction of one of the safe houses maintained by MISIRI, the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and he had been given emergency passcodes to gain acceptance and aid from other cells if the operation went sour.
That was all, for the moment, that he needed to know.
Chapter Four
It was ten A.M. in the Berlin Tiergarten. Max Winternitz sat feeding the pigeons that clustered around his legs, cooing and pecking.
There was an aging hippy who sold postcards, souvenir knickknacks and bags of seed at one of the entrances to the sprawling park and Winternitz was in the habit of buying a bag from him for a half euro. He'd seen him there for years, a fixture of the park as much as the trees were.
Winternitz liked the pigeons. Though they squabbled and pecked at one another, he'd never once seen them draw blood. Less could be said about human beings.
A week had passed since the bust of Farouk Al-Kaukji and his bomb makers, and still the main actor, Jubaird Dalkimoni, was nowhere to be found. Unofficially, Winternitz had good reason to believe that he had made good his escape and was now safe in the Iranian capital, Tehran. Officially, though, the Arab terrorist chieftain was still at large.
Winternitz knew better. At the same time, the scum that his cops had rounded up in the raids were vanishing into the ground like earthworms.
One by one, their lawyers were getting them released on various legal pretexts. Insufficient evidence, improper search and seizure -- any legal dodge seemed to suffice.
The Strike Day Investigation Report, compiled by the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the Strike Day terror attacks, and the US-instigated extraditions and trials that had ensued, had subjected European governments to outside pressures from all sides that they would rather not see repeated in any way.
The word had come down from Bonn -- no one was to be tried. The problem was to be made to simply evaporate. And one other thing; the Americans were to be kept out of the picture.
Winternitz was in the Tiergarten to do just the opposite. Let them sack him if they liked. Not that they would.
There were factions in the BKA that were pro-and anti-CIA. Winternitz was representing a circle which was friendly to US intelligence and formed a nucleus of backchannel intelligence sources from inside the German intelligence and police establishments.
Winternitz flung the last handfuls of millet seed at the moving mass of gray, brown and white feathers on the octagonal cobbles of the pavement. When he looked up he saw a man approaching down one of the walks.
Winternitz lit a cigaret. Continuing to toss handfuls of seed to the pigeons which cooed noisily as they pecked it off the cobbles, he studied the man with a feigned casualness perfected over a lifetime of police work.
Colonel Stone Breaux took a seat on the park bench beside Winternitz and sat watching the pigeons pecking at their lunch. He'd been briefed on the meet by the spook Congdon -- the same Congdon who had ordered the team into combat to locate and destroy classified advanced technology components of a crashed stealth aircraft a few months before, or at least one claiming to be the same intelligence agent.
Breaux recognized Winternitz from the three-position Bertillon intelligence photo he'd been shown. He'd been told that the cop would be feeding the pigeons. Well, here he was, birds and all.
Breaux went through the rest of the procedure.
"So many birds," Breaux said in German, in which he was fluent from years of living in the country. "You must be wealthy to feed them these days."
He didn't like Berlin anymore. Germany had been a pressure cooker, the US military establishment all fucked-up with petty politics. If the Iraq War hadn't come along, Breaux figured he'd have probably wound up fragging a brass hat, maybe two.
"Not too many, really," Winternitz replied. "And, besides, it calms my nerves."
"Mr. Breaux, I presume," Winternitz added, switching over to English. "We shall sit here a minute longer while I finish up this bag of seed. Then you will get up, bid me aufweidersehn and walk toward that park entrance just ahead. Karl, one of my men, is waiting in a gray Audi. He will drive you directly to a safe house my office maintains. I shall arrive separately a short while after your arrival. Any questions, Mr. Breaux?"
"None," Breaux replied.
A few minutes later he was standing and waving aufweidersehn, then walking toward the
park entrance. Winternitz turned his attention back to the birds, scattering seeds until the bag was empty. Then he too got up and left.
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In the basement of BKA headquarters on Friedrichstrasse, a police clerk named Joachim Kneble sat inventorying the evidence seized during the counter-terrorist raids. The evidence was heaped across a row of three trestle tables stacked end-to-end against a wall of the basement storage area.
Behind Kneble stretched a square chamber made of reinforced concrete that was half the size of a football field and contained row upon row of battleship-gray steel shelves, most of which bulged with evidence seized during various police actions. Directly in front of Kneble was the black cabinet of a Blaupunkt stereo receiver.
Kneble was a pro audio fanatic and the receiver was a newer model than the Blaupunkt Kneble owned, in fact he recalled having just learned from the Web that this particular model had replaced his own, which had been discontinued. This group of factors proved to be a fatal combination. Kneble couldn't resist at least fiddling with the knobs and buttons on the face of the squat black box.
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Sigfried "Siggie" Sonntag was phoning in an order for delivery at the local Thai take-out place for himself, his partner Freidrich "Fritzl" Ettinger and one of the sergeants on the night shift who was just leaving, when the light flashed on the other phone line. Sonntag quickly signed off and took the call, automatically tensing. It was a quarter past ten in the morning and nobody phoned the BKA's ordnance disposal unit at this hour unless it was a serious matter.
Sonntag slid a notepad across the chipped black paint of the metal desktop to the phone and penciled notes onto the ruled paper. By this time his partner had come up behind him and was looking over his shoulder as he hastily wrote. Sonntag concluded the conversation and hung up the phone.
Ettinger had grasped most of it from what he'd seen on the pad while looking over Sonntag's shoulder: An inventory clerk had clicked a knob on a stereo receiver confiscated as evidence. Nothing for a moment.
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