Collision of Evil (17 page)

“Yes,” Sayyid interjected, “a cell in Guantanamo.” The men laughed in unison.

Al-Assad continued. “As you know, we turned the rental trucks in at Munich, after we delivered the equipment here. It was purposely not the nearest place; we use distance as a means of security. With these procedures we should be safe. Do nothing to alter that. We would all be disgraced if we fail to carry out our holy duty, our noble task.”

It was at precisely that moment that they heard the unmistakable sound of cartons falling to the concrete floor in the storage room at the far end of the warehouse.

The morning after he had discovered the names of the suspects, Hirter drove down the autobahn to Salzburg, Austria. Alpine landscape flew by like a living postcard; rustic villages, lush meadows, and the indigo of Bavarian lakes presented themselves in a panorama. Salzburg itself was on display to best advantage that morning, canopied by a cloudless sky, the triumphant sunlight em-phasizing the Italianate architecture of the buildings lining the Salzach River. The high, crenellated walls of Salzburg castle crowned a cliff above the city, presiding with sovereign majesty.

The old city was crowded full with Americans, Japanese, and Europeans. Wealthy Russians of suspicious means were the latest addition. They turned the winding length of the Getreidegasse, replete with fashion boutiques, into a battle zone of jostling, sweating, and gesturing figures, inappropriately dressed and girded with cameras and videocams.

Salzburg residents regarded the occupation of their city with stoic fatalism. Tourism, after all, kept Salzburg wealthy and famous. Salzburg profited mightily from the sale of outrageously priced concert tickets and every manner of good emblazoned with the name Mozart or Amadeus. The enigmatic image of young, white-wigged Mozart stared at passersby from rows of coffee mugs and boxes of candy. Like the Lord God of the Salzburg archbishops, Mozart was omnipresent.

Hirter, however, was not wandering the cobblestone passages of Salzburg to take in the sights. He was to meet a CIA officer from the Clandestine Service who would transmit the identities of the murder suspects back to agency headquarters in Virginia for name
tracing. The venue, Hirter had been advised in a brief, cryptic phone call, was the coffee house Tomaseli, located in the old town, not far from the magnificent, twin-steepled façade of the cathedral. The CIA officer would be wearing a yellow polo shirt and prominently reading a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
. Hirter did not need to know anything else.

As it was mid-morning, Hirter found the usually well-visited coffee house only partially filled. The outside tables facing the plaza betrayed no one of the proper description, and Hirter ventured into the cool and dark interior, its gravitas enhanced by heavy oil portraits lining the walls. The air was redolent with the scents of strongly brewed coffee, exotic teas, and rich chocolate. Hirter spotted his quarry, lounging at a corner table with a view of the door and the plaza beyond.

The man in canary yellow appeared to be glancing at the English-language paper, but Hirter knew that his entry had been spotted and that his CIA colleague was checking to see if any activity in the plaza suggested that he had been followed. Through years of surveillance training, Hirter knew the answer to that question was no. He permitted himself the pleasure of deeply inhaling the inviting Tomaseli aromas and moved to his counterpart, taking an empty seat opposite him.

“You’re clean,” the man in Tommy Hilfiger yellow mumbled, putting the paper aside. He looked about forty, ruddy, athletic, and with thinning hair.

Hirter nodded in confirmation, adding, “I didn’t see anyone suspicious behind me during the trip. I’m sure we’re okay.”

This established, the CIA officer in yellow folded his paper with studied care and regarded Hirter with a smile, sizing him up.

“I’m Andrew. Coffee is on me.”

Hirter shook his head. “Coffee would be great.” His interlocutor summoned a harried-looking waitress who, without remark, brought a steaming white porcelain cup of dark coffee, accompanied by a glass of water in the Austrian custom.

Hirter extracted a thin manila envelope from his sports coat and
inserted it into the officer’s folded newspaper. “Here’s everything the police have pulled together. Names, car rental agreement, photos, last known legal addresses, that kind of thing.”

Andrew nodded, satisfied. “Date and place of birth?”

“Yeah. Everything is there.”

The other officer smiled again and took a sip from his mug of hot chocolate. “Great. I’ll get this stuff transmitted and it should be at headquarters by close of business today. I don’t expect it to take more than a day or two to get a response.”

“Okay. Should I wait for another call from you at the hotel?”

The man in yellow cotton shook his head. “No, that would just tie you down. I presume you’re bird-dogging the police and will be out and about.”

Hirter laughed quietly. “A Kommissar, actually. There’s a Kommissar running the case, and I guess I’m getting more into his shadow than he’s comfortable with. So what do you suggest, Andrew?”

Andrew extracted a Nokia cell phone from the pocket of his Dockers khaki slacks and passed it to Hirter. “This is for you. It’s got a prepaid card. It also has robust commercial encryption. I and the station are the only ones that know the number. I’ll use it exclusively to call you, and you can reach me the same way. Check the address book and you’ll find a number listed for Andrew. It all looks perfectly innocent to the casual observer. Don’t lose it, though, it’s an accountable item.”

“Isn’t everything these days?” Hirter replied. “Thanks, Andrew. We’ll be talking.”

Hirter gulped the remains of his coffee and started to leave when Andrew touched his arm lightly. “If we need to have another personal meeting, it should be in Munich; it’s bigger than Salzburg and easier to get lost in. There’s a little restaurant called Torbraeu; you can find the address in the phone book. We can meet there.”

“Fine, Andrew. Torbraeu it is. Do they serve good food there?”

The CIA officer wrinkled his brow. “No, not especially. But it’s located up one story and has a great view of the street in both directions.”

The information on Mohammed al-Assad and Ibrahim Baran was transmitted electronically to CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, from an agency communications facility in Austria. There it waited in queue for someone to read it on a secure PC. The message was one of thousands that inundated the CIA building on that day, as on any day, from scores of undercover locations around the globe.

Caroline O’Kendell had gotten to the CIA compound early that morning in an attempt to beat the choking beltway traffic. Finding an empty space for her Audi in the west parking lot, she walked to the New Headquarters Building, constructed during the Reagan presidency, and entered a personal recognition code and ID card pin number at security. She smiled a good morning to the three armed guards and took the escalator down to the coffee shop where she picked up a large Starbuck’s and a cinnamon roll. She would work the calories off in the gym later, she assured herself. Her heels clicked against the polished marble tiles as she made her way back to the atrium, past the potted trees and under the black, large-scale model of a U-2 CIA spy plane. Sipping the hot coffee, she took an elevator to her office in the north tower.

Caroline liked arriving early. She would be one of the first in the vault, aside from a secretary or two. She entered the cipher code on the door and stepped in. As expected, the spaces were nearly empty. Fluorescent lights glowed from the ceiling overhead, and she made her way past fabric-sided cubicles to her office with its view of the agency loading docks. At least she had a window, unlike many of her colleagues, allowing a glimpse of the Virginia countryside. The
site had been rural once, having originally been acquired when avuncular, pipe-smoking Allen Dulles was director of Central Intelligence all those decades ago. Eisenhower had been president, and on his behalf, Dulles and the agency had sought to penetrate what had been called the “Iron Curtain” over Eastern Europe. Back then, McLean had been a perfectly isolated spot for an espionage agency that valued privacy—its own, not that of others. Now, past the treeline, the agency buildings were surrounded by mansions.

After a sip of coffee, its temperature now tolerable, Caroline entered her password into a secure computer and began to troll the classified traffic that had arrived overnight. It was the morning ritual, as there might be an operational message from overseas requiring quick response. This morning’s traffic appeared staid. There were reports of meetings with foreign counterterrorist specialists in several countries, a request for funds to enlarge a surveillance team in Asia, an account of a meeting in Cyprus between a case officer and a Lebanese who claimed to have access to Hezbollah. Might be real, but he was probably a fabricator looking to pry cash or a green card from the Americans. She did not fancy herself a cynic, but had seen enough of human nature to make her suspicious of motives and skeptical about altruism.

Another message caught her eye, from Austria. It was a name trace request, a query for information on individuals with Arabic names. She vaguely recalled the case. A fellow Clandestine Service officer whom she had met on a few occasions was involved—Robert Hirter. The circumstances were depressing. Hirter’s brother had been murdered while on vacation in Germany. No suspect had been identified. Robert had taken leave and traveled to Germany. She knew that he had been out of touch for a while before making contact with another field officer a day or so ago. That field officer had authored the cable she was reading.

Caroline let her gaze move down the screen to the Arabic names. The information seemed sufficiently complete to permit a trace. An attachment contained photographs of the individuals. In the photos, both of the dark-haired, bearded suspects stared sullenly into the
camera, their eyes no more expressive than those of a shark, their faces ciphers.

“Let’s see who they might be,” she whispered to herself, punching a button on her keyboard and sending the cable to a printer at the far end of the vault. There were other things she could be doing this morning, she reasoned. Still, she knew Robert Hirter a bit, and found the task of aiding a murder investigation worthy of her attention. True, a police investigation was a law enforcement matter, not really something for an intelligence agency’s resources. Nonetheless, she had an intuitive sense that the massive CIA database might harbor useful information on the two severe-looking faces staring at her from the computer screen.

The Clandestine Service database was a vast and venerable repository of information, Caroline knew. Once, the holdings comprised paper files. Retired agency officers had told her how, decades removed, they had journeyed to the headquarters basement, a windowless and dim expanse, and returned with arms straining under bursting manila folders, to sort the contents at their desks. How archaic that seemed now, when a trace request could be processed via desktop computer. Still, she thought, there was a loss of atmosphere; the tactile sense of hunting through rustling paper documents was gone.

Even devoid of atmosphere, the database was impressive. It contained information dating back to World War II and the CIA predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services, OSS. Most of the information had been covertly collected—stolen, purchased, elicited from the unwitting or extracted during interrogation. The ranks of subjects included legions of dubious characters from every country on the globe. The files held details on thousands of criminals, narcotics traffickers, information peddlers, arms dealers, terrorists, mercenaries, and extremists of every stripe.

All of which meant that it was possible that CIA headquarters might possess some threads of information on the Arabic subjects living in the alpine fastness of Bavaria. She hoped the trace would turn up something of use to her colleague.

Andreas Niedermeier had stumbled, as he often stumbled after finishing off a bottle of discount schnapps. An avalanche of the boxes and cartons that filled the poorly lit storage room had tumbled noisily to the concrete floor, upending him in the process. “Shit,” he muttered as he eased himself up, sore from the unexpected fall. He exhaled sour breath into his rampant, graying beard and stood upright, surveying the damage. Most of the boxes seemed empty and there had been no sound of breakage; for that he was grateful. He would rearrange the crates in a semblance of order and leave well enough alone. Nothing would betray his little accident.

He had used the warehouse often in the past as a dry place to sleep off the effects of binge drinking and he did not want to foul the nest. Although Niedermeier did not engage in anything approaching future planning, he knew that he would continue to drink heavily whenever he could put together enough change for a bottle and would, accordingly, require these gratis accommodations in the future. Having discovered the weakness of the rusty door lock years ago, he did not want to be forced to find an alternate warehouse to protect him from the elements. There were always the wooden benches at the train station as a last resort, but the police showed up unpredictably and demonstrated little tolerance for his situation. He burped wetly and set about stacking the boxes with tremulous hands.