Jihad (19 page)

“They tried. Besides,” she added, coming close and kissing him. “I promised you this.”

DEAN WAITED WHILE the overnight desk clerk called upstairs to Ramil’s room, his eyes soaking in the bright yellow of the reception lobby. Ramil answered immediately.

“Doctor, an emergency with a patient this morning,” said Dean.

“What?” muttered Ramil.

The clerk politely left the room, pretending to be dealing with some business matter.

“It’s Dean. We need you.”

“Yes, yes. Okay. I’ll be right there.”

Dean returned the phone to its cradle, then walked up the stairs to Ramil’s room. When he knocked on the door, he heard Ramil rushing over, muttering to himself. He was dressed only in his pants and undershirt.

“Let’s go, doc,” Dean told him. “Asad’s complaining about bleeding from the wounds.”

“Bleeding? All right. Nothing to worry about—it’ll be seepage. Nothing.”

“He also has a headache and feels faint, short of breath. He’s meeting us at the clinic in forty-five minutes. You need some coffee?”

“Coffee, all right.”

“I’ll find some. Come on.”

The “clinic” was located in a suite of offices two blocks from the hospital where Asad had been bugged. Lia dropped them off around the block so they could go in the back way without being seen. The doctor coughed loudly as they walked up the dimly lit staircase; he was wheezing by the second floor, nearly hyperventilating.

“I’m okay,” he said between breaths. “I’m really okay.”

“What’s wrong with Ramil?” asked Chafetz, the runner on duty in the Art Room. She could see and hear them through a surveillance system installed by Desk Three when they rented the clinic.

“He just needs some water,” Dean told her.

Dean left Ramil to catch his breath in the examining room while he made his way to the water cooler in the reception area. He was just filling a cup when Lia warned him that Asad had pulled up outside. A moment later the downstairs buzzer rang.

“There are two bodyguards with him,” said Chafetz. “One of them is the one who was in the hospital. Abd Katib is his name. He seems to be the chief bodyguard.”

“All right.” Dean started back with Ramil’s water.

“Charlie, you have to let them in when they ring,” added the runner. “You have to buzz from the front room there.”

“I’m going to, Sandy. Once I get Ramil ready.”

“Charlie—they’re forcing the downstairs door open.”

CHAPTER 53

TOMMY KARR TOLD the BND agents that Dabir must have figured out he was being shadowed and arranged to trade places with a double; the al-Qaeda organizer almost certainly had planned to take advantage of the jurisdictional hassles that routinely made the police change surveillance teams at the state borders.

He could be anywhere, but the most logical place to look for him was in the Karlsruhe area. Still forbidden to mention the IMs, which might contain useful information, Karr had to settle for reminding his host that he could help in numerous ways, especially by supplying decryption services. The offer was met with a cold stare.

He went back to BND headquarters with Hess, trying not to eavesdrop as she dissed the state police to her boss over her cell phone, using the most colorful German Karr had ever heard. Inside, he hung around just long enough to see that he wasn’t wanted, then asked to be driven to the hotel where his bags had been sent when he arrived earlier in the day.

“Call my satphone if you need me,” he told Hess as he left. “And don’t forget—”

“Yes, you can help in many ways. We’ll keep that in mind, Herr Karr.”

Karr checked into the hotel, determined that he wasn’t being trailed—a nice gesture of trust, he thought—then, without going up to his room, had the front desk call him a taxi. He made the train station just in time for the last train to Karlsruhe.

CHAPTER 54

DR. RAMIL’S CHEST FELT as if it were being poked by a thousand sharp pins. He bent over in the chair, trying to slow his galloping lungs.

The stress was just too much. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t. He was losing his mind and all control over his body.

“Come on, doc. Asad’s downstairs,” said Charles Dean, looming above him.

Ramil forced himself to look at Dean. His head seemed to weigh fifty pounds. “I—I don’t know,” he stuttered.

“You all right?”

“I—”

Ramil grabbed at his chest, trying to make Dean understand. He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t do it.

“Come on, doc. Up,” said Dean, taking hold of him. “With me. Come on.”

Ramil’s legs refused to move. Suddenly he felt himself being lifted.

God has taken pity on me by striking me dead, Ramil thought. But it was just Dean lifting him up, chair and all. He carried him to the back door and slid him into the hallway.

“WHAT’S GOING ON, Charlie?” asked Chafetz.

“Ramil’s having some sort of freak-out. He’s hyperventilating and paralyzed.”

Dean went to the closet and grabbed a white coat.

“Get out of there, Charlie,” warned the runner. “They’re almost at the door.”

“No, it’s all right. I’ll do it.”

“Charlie—”

“Get the translator and a doctor ready. We’ll start by talking Turkish.”

A stethoscope and a thermal thermometer sat on the desk. Dean grabbed them, stuffing them both in his pocket. He could hear Asad’s men pounding on the door.

“Charlie, this is Telli Kabak,” said one of the translators. “How do you want to handle this?”

“I’m Ramil’s assistant, same deal as the other day. He called me and sent me over here. These guys don’t speak Turkish or Spanish. I don’t speak Arabic. We use English, like everybody else in Istanbul.”

“Okay.”

Dean pushed through the door to the reception area without waiting for an answer. A large man stood behind the glass entrance to the clinic, slapping a meaty hand against the door frame.

“Merhaba,”
muttered Dean as he turned the lock. “Hello.”

The man pushed the door open, snapping it out of his hands. Dean hesitated. He didn’t want to seem meek, but he also needed to come off like a doctor rather than a fighter. He took one step back, then held his ground as the bodyguard shoved his face into his.

“You are the doctor?” demanded the man in Arabic.

“Anlamiyorum.”
said Dean in Turkish. “I don’t understand.”

The man said in Syrian-accented Arabic that he had an important patient with him, and that, with God as his witness, if Dean made the slightest move to harm him, his skin would be slit open and his organs turned inside out. Once again Dean protested that he did not understand, this time adding a stutter to his Turkish.

“You’ve frightened the doctor,” said Asad in Arabic from behind the bodyguard. “Stand away.”

Dean held the bodyguard’s stare a few moments longer, then turned to Asad. The terror leader looked older than he had the other day. His head was bent slightly; he seemed to be in some pain.

“Doktor?”
he said, speaking Turkish. “Do I know you?”

“D-d-dün,”
stuttered Dean, as if he were truly shaken.
“Hasteen.
The other day at the hospital.”

The translator caught on, and gave Dean the Turkish phrases to explain that he had treated him yesterday at the hospital. Except that it wasn’t yesterday—she added an apology and a correction. Dean rushed through the words, slurring his pronunciation and then switching to English. Asad turned to his bodyguard and berated the man for frightening the doctor, saying he could now barely talk.

“Charlie, you’re doing very well,” said William Rubens, suddenly coming onto the circuit. “Continue in this vein.”

“This way, come on,” said Dean, starting toward the examining room.

The bodyguard grabbed his arm. As Dean turned in his direction, the man pushed the nose of his Beretta pistol into his neck.

“We check the other rooms first,” said the bodyguard. “If anyone else is here, you are a dead man.”

CHAPTER 55

KARR HAD INTENDED on going to the detectives responsible for watching Dabir and pointing out that, while they might not be able to search the places the al-Qaeda organizer had been, he could. He figured he had even odds of being escorted to Dabir’s safehouse or the local jail.

He didn’t get a chance to test them. Twenty minutes from Karlsruhe, Telach told him that one of the instant messages had been traced to a chemistry teacher in Karlsruhe. The man had come from Pakistan two years before; he had spent time at one of the religious schools there that doubled as terrorist indoctrination centers. His school computer included a satellite picture of the MiRO refinery. The computer also showed that he regularly received IMs—instant messages—from more than a hundred sources, all of which Desk Three was working furiously to track down.

Since German intelligence still had not handed over Dabir’s IMs for decrypting, the best Karr could do was call Hess with the information that the U.S. had identified another member of Dabir’s terrorist cell. Hess had gone home, and Karr’s call went to a night duty officer. By the time Hess got back to him, Karr was sitting in a late-hours bar frequented by students from the local university, listening to a debate about the best way to curb resurgent Nazism among the police.

“How did you get to Karlsruhe so quickly?” she asked.

“Took a train.” Karr held a hand over his ear so he could hear the phone better. “There’s a chemistry teacher at Karlsruhe you might want to check out. He’s sitting across from me in the ratskeller here. Keeps looking at his watch and going out to the john,” added Karr. “Which wouldn’t be unusual, except that he’s not drinking anything.”

“Do you have any reason for me to check him out?” Hess asked.

“We’ve linked him to Dabir.”

“Beyond that?”

“Superstitious hunch?” said Karr.

“I need evidence of a crime.”

The chemistry teacher got up. Karr watched for a second, making sure he was heading toward the men’s room.

“Well, hurry up and get down here, or you may have more than you want.”

Karr clicked off the connection, then pretended to redial. As he did, a good-looking blonde, twenty-one or twenty-two, plopped into the chair across from him.

“Hello,” he said.

The girt, several shades beyond drunk, smiled.

“You talking to me?” asked Rockman from the Art Room.

“Our friend’s headed to his office,” Karr told him, returning the blonde’s smile.

“Yeah, we’re looking at him through the bugs you planted. Hang on.”

“You’re very intriguing,” said the woman, half in English, half in German.

“Danke,”
said Karr.

“Lass uns einen heben.”

“I think you’ve had enough
heben
for the night, don’t you?” answered Karr, turning down her offer to “lift one together,” slang for “have a drink.”

“All right, he called the same number he called before,” said Rockman. “He hung up as soon as the answering machine picked up. Didn’t listen to a message.”

“Well, that’s different, isn’t it? Last time he hung up after three rings. So that’s the message.”

“Could be,” said Rockman. “But the only message on that machine is ‘oops, wrong number’.”

“You track the call?”

“Pay phone in a cafe on the other end of town. Called a taxi immediately after it.”

“Talk to you outside,” said Karr.

He closed the phone and smiled at the girl. She blinked and told him in English with a drunk German accent that not only was he was very handsome but he was very strange.

“Thanks. Let me buy you a drink,” said Karr. As he got up, he stumbled and fell flat on his face—right under the table the chemistry professor had returned to. By the time Karr crawled back to his feet, the girl had turned her attentions elsewhere. Sheepishly, he headed for the door.

The taxi driver he’d paid to wait was around the comer, leaning against his cab. Karr dished out a fifty-euro note as a good will gesture, then got in the back.

“Sounds like he’s moving,” said Rockman. “What’d you do, put the fly on his shoe?”

“It was easier than getting it into his pocket.”

The chemist picked out his bicycle from a rack down near the front door and started biking in the general direction of the river. Karr, who’d put a tracking device on the bicycle earlier, directed the cab driver to follow at a safe distance, using the PDA to direct him.

Karr expected that the chemist would take him either to a rendezvous or a safehouse where Dabir was waiting. Instead, he went to a small bait and tackle shop on the waterfront, opened the lock at the gate, and left. Flummoxed, Karr followed him to a second bar.

“Hang for me here,” Karr told the driver.

His American slang may have been difficult to decipher, but another fifty-euro note made his meaning clear. Just as he had at the last bar, the chemist was sitting by himself at a table in the middle of the room, drinking a Coke.

“Ack,” said Karr, hustling back outside to the cab after he planted a video bug to watch him. “Get me back to the tackle shop—tackle shop—Rockman, how do you say that in German?”

Angelgeräte—
“fishing tackle”—was the word Karr was looking for, and it was featured in very big letters on the fence Karr found had been relocked by the time he arrived.

Had the shop been used to get down to the water?

Perhaps, but there was a landing not fifty feet away.

Then Karr noticed another sign on the building near the door, right under one advertising Purglas casting rods.

OXYGEN TANKS FILLED, it said in German.

Karr went back to the cab. “I’m just about done here,” Karr told the driver. “But would you happen to have a crowbar handy?”

“Nein
,
”
said the driver.

Karr looked back at the fence. “A really strong tire iron will do, then.” He took out another hundred euros. “Pop your trunk, close your eyes, and when I say go, take off. I don’t have enough money to pay to you be an accessory to a crime.”