Collision of Evil (40 page)

“It’s got to be one of them,” Markus yelled at his partner as Sayyid bolted through the crowd. Both men simultaneously reached for the automatic pistols under their jackets, but realized they had no way of employing the weapons without inflicting innocent casualties.

“Shit,” Markus shouted, “we have to get closer to him.” They slammed two protesting teenage girls aside as they began their pursuit, keeping their target in sight.

“Shoot to kill,” Tobias reminded his companion.

“Only if we get a clean shot.” Pushing through the crowd, they began to make headway toward the dark-haired man.

Sayyid turned and saw with rising panic that the duo was gaining on him. He felt ill and wanted to vomit. Everything had gone unexpectedly, completely wrong in the span of a few seconds. He did not believe that he would reach the Oktoberfest grounds. He began to sob with the realization that he would not accomplish his sacred mission, would not be remembered as one of the
shahid
who had struck at the enemy.

He propelled himself forward, clutching in both hands the bag concealing the Sarin. As he darted down the street, he noticed that the Rote Adler, the hotel he had just vacated, was only fifty yards away. Lacking any other goal, Sayyid decided to reenter its familiar surroundings. He cleared the last group of festival goers and pushed into the revolving door opening onto the lobby.

“The hotel,” Mauer yelled to his partner, his voice strained from running. Both men had their pistols drawn, safeties flicked off, and a round chambered as they closed on the unimpressive façade of the Rote Adler.

Mauer tore a police phone from his jacket pocket and hit the button that connected him with the task force in city hall. “Mauer here. We found one of them. He’s trying to evade pursuit and is inside the Rote Adler Hotel. Send reinforcements.”

Mauer was the first of the two through the finger-smeared revolving glass door.

Sayyid found the lobby empty save for the elderly desk clerk and one of the sluggish Turkish waiters from the restaurant who happened to be passing through the room. Both of them stared at the fear-stricken face of their former guest.

Sayyid knew that his pursuers would be upon him any minute. Barely thinking coherently, he plunged a shaking hand into the plastic bag and ripped the top from the cardboard container within. His hand found the activation plunger housed in the center of the dispersion mechanism. Sayyid pressed it down and heard the canister emit a soft hiss as the spray valve engaged. He heard the door behind him spin open and he turned. His mind had become a seething mess of confusion, torn by competing sensations of fear, anger, and self-loathing. He pulled the polished canister free of the bag and held the shining form close to his chest. His nose began to run.

Mauer entered the weakly lit lobby, weapon first. The cornered man stood in the middle of the room holding a metal object. The policeman spotted the two hotel employees and determined they were out of the line of fire.

The second policeman, Henkel, burst through the door just as his partner shouted at the suspect. “Police. Drop the cylinder. I won’t ask twice.”

Sayyid did nothing but stare balefully at the policeman and Mauer fired a round, the noise magnified enormously by the confines of the lobby.

The first bullet hit the target squarely in the chest, knocking him off his feet and sending him crashing backward. The canister pitched off to one side, hit hard, and rolled along the tile floor.

Sayyid had landed on his back, from which a dark liquid pool began to emanate. With a low moan, he tried to pull himself up. He had nearly achieved a sitting position when the second round, this from Henkel’s pistol, punched a small hole into his forehead just below the hairline. The exit wound was substantially larger, tearing off the back of Sayyid’s cranium in a shower of blood and brain tissue. The reverberation of the shots died away, and the lobby was again quiet. The clerk and the waiter had sought cover behind the reception counter and now slowly reemerged, gaping at the carnage.

Henkel and Mauer approached the prostrate form with their weapons still trained on the center of mass. They stared into dead brown eyes. The bullet hole in the victim’s forehead emitted little blood.

The desk clerk and the waiter approached them with hesitating steps. “He just checked out of here a while ago. His name is in the registry,” offered the clerk, eyes bulging and face flushed. The policemen nodded and urged him away from the corpse.

“At least he didn’t have time to explode the device,” Mauer advised his partner.

“Right, thank God,” Henkel responded, moving to retrieve the canister from the spot where its rolling journey had ceased. As he approached it and reached out a hand his ears detected a faint sibilance. “Shit,” he yelled, jumping back from the device. “Tobias, have them get everybody out of the hotel, it’s doing something. Don’t let them exit through the lobby for God’s sake.”

Mauer turned to instruct the elderly desk clerk to evacuate the
building and noticed that the old man had a trail of mucous stretching from his nostrils to his chin. The clerk fixed the policeman with a vague look and weakly announced, “I don’t feel well,” before starting to twitch and pitching to the floor. Tobias grabbed the shaking, wheezing man by the arm and started pulling him toward the lobby door. He heard a crashing sound and looked up to see that the lanky waiter had also collapsed.

“Markus, we need to use our atropine,” he yelled to his companion. Mauer watched helplessly as the clerk’s brown eyes rolled back in his head and he began gasping for air like a fish yanked from a stream.

Mauer himself felt dizzy and pulled a small red tubular plastic container from his trouser pocket. Removing a cap at the top, he withdrew a hypodermic needle and prepared to plunge it into his thigh through the clothing. At precisely this instant, he noticed that his hands had begun to shake uncontrollably and his clenched fist opened involuntarily, the needle falling to the tiles. A blast of pain exploded behind his eyes, which refused to focus. He felt his muscles spasm and he went down hard, his legs denying him support. The convulsions intensified and his respiration became ragged and then failed altogether. A few feet away, his partner was already dead, lifeless eyes pointed at the hotel ceiling.

Green and white vehicles marked
Polizei
were arriving in front of the hotel, lights flashing. Uniformed officers disgorged from the fleet of Opels and Mercedes and cleared the area, setting up a cordon around the hotel. Inside the lobby, there was no movement at all.

Waldbaer was easing himself from his unmarked car and preparing to join the others on the festival grounds when the radio banter took an ominous turn. He listened raptly to the initial call from officer Mauer alerting them to the pursuit of a suspect into the Rote Adler, which Waldbaer recalled was near the main train station; he had driven past it the previous night with Hirter. Waldbaer listened to the terse call-ins from cruisers reporting their progress to the hotel.

Minutes later, an officer reported from directly outside the hotel that, as seen through the front window, there were several bodies strewn across the lobby, all apparently lifeless. The officer also reported that a peculiar-looking object could be detected on the floor. “It looks like a stainless-steel thermos bottle. It has some attachment on top. It could be what we’re looking for.”

The voice of another officer intervened, announcing that hotel guests were being evacuated from the back of the building.

Waldbaer punched a button on the steering wheel of his car permitting him to transmit. “Make sure no one goes into that lobby, no one. Once you get a team there in protective suits, they enter unaccompanied. They know what to do. For God’s sake, don’t let on to the media what’s happening. Tell them the cruisers are there due to a fire alarm. Everybody copy?” The radio crackled with affirmative responses. Tense but energetic, Waldbaer bounded from his vehicle and headed to the Oktoberfest entrance.

Al-Assad rode the escalator from the underground station to the
Wies’n
. He held the bag containing the Sarin at his side, feigning a casual stance. The Germans surrounding him were irritatingly loud, but despite his annoyance, al-Assad fixed a grin on his face. He wondered how many of those around him would end up in the same tent as he and suffer the lethal consequences. His grin became more authentic.

Emerging into the sunlight, al-Assad squinted until he acclimatized to the prevailing brightness. He was propelled along by the force of the crowd, but managed to squeeze free and take up a position at a small roasted nut stand. Ordering a paper bag of almonds, he turned and observed the stream of humanity emerging from the U-bahn station he had just exited.

He wanted to ensure that Taamir, the next to leave the hotel after him, was safely on the festival grounds. Slowly consuming his purchase, al-Assad was relieved ten minutes later to see Taamir spill onto the
Wies’n
, the plastic bag with its deadly cargo inconspicuous by his side. Excellent, al-Assad concluded, things move as they should. Aware that Taamir would be going to the Augustiner tent, al-Assad popped the last almond into his mouth and began his journey to the Hofbräu tent, easing once again into the river of people flowing by.

Taamir moved at the pace of the crowd past souvenir stands and an establishment selling smoked fish. The main pedestrian street called the Wirtsbudenstrasse, where the beer tents were located, loomed
ahead. Taamir considered the scene and concluded that it represented unalloyed decadence. There was no reason why those who chose to come to such a place should be permitted to live. The entire scene was an affront to the values that ordered Taamir’s life. It would be a pleasure to engage the device secreted in the plastic bag gripped in his hand.

Entering the festival avenue, Taamir recalled the Oktoberfest map he had studied in the hotel. The Augustiner tent was located to his left. Navigating through the crowd, he maneuvered in that direction. A few minutes later he spotted the brewery tent, painted bright white and deep blue and bearing the golden emblem of a bishop’s curling kreutzer.

Alert to potential danger, Taamir scanned the surroundings for any trace of police. He noted the line of sturdily built men at the entrance to the tent, monitoring the crowd that slowly snaked its way into the enormous beer hall. Through the bobbing figures ahead of him, he saw as well that these civilian security guards, intended mainly for crowd control, occasionally asked to inspect a person’s backpack or handbag. This was not unexpected, and Taamir felt confident that his redhead appearance and souvenir bag would pass muster. Feeling tense nonetheless, he knew that if he were discovered, he would activate the device where he stood. Taamir moved forward resolutely.

“Sir, please open your bag” a baritone voice said in German. Taamir glanced to his right and saw the broad-shouldered bulk of a security guard sporting a crew-cut who was, in fact, an undercover special police officer.

Taamir smiled vacantly as if to suggest that he had already had a beer or two. “No problem,” he replied. He held up the plastic souvenir bag and opened it for inspection.

The guard peered into the proffered bag through dark sunglasses. His eyes scanned the contents rapidly, taking in a couple of candy bars and a cardboard container decorated with a Munich scene. Before Taamir could react, the guard reached a large hand into the bag and flipped open the cardboard container, revealing a smooth, shining
tubular surface. Not a beer stein, the policeman noted, it looked like a thermos. There was no end to the type of souvenirs they were selling, he thought to himself.

“Thanks sir,” the guard intoned robotically, his eyes moving away from the red-haired man and again scanning the crowd.

Taamir passed through the tent entrance. He was inside. A scene unlike any he had previously experienced confronted him. Thousands of people were seated on benches at long wooden tables. A cacophony of voices produced a background roar, but even this was subdued by the amplified oompah music originating from a band seated on a dais at the center of the tent. Fleets of waitresses in dirndls moved at cruising speed through the tent, carrying their cargo of heavy glass beer mugs. Wandering vendors plied their wares of pretzels, salted radishes, and cigars. The air was gray-blue with smoke and redolent with spilt beer. Taamir took in the scene for a moment only and then made his way toward its epicenter, where he would be sure to kill the maximum number of people.

Not far away, Jawad entered the festival grounds through a different gate, arriving by foot rather than underground train. He was sure he had not been noticed and was careful to attach himself to groups of festival visitors to mask his profile. Moving at the pace of the crowd, he set out for the Löwenbräu tent. First the tent, he reminded himself, and then paradise.

Waldbaer was troubled by the reports from the Rote Adler. Sarin casualties. One of the terrorists was dead, but there was no sign of the other three. They were presumably already on the
Wies’n. M
ore troubling, the dead terrorist had concealed his nerve agent weapon with some creativity, not in a backpack, as expected, but in a simple plastic souvenir bag, of which there were hundreds, if not thousands, on the festival grounds.