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.
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.
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.
Then it began ticking. Clicking the knob back would not stop the sounds. The stereo receiver was presumed to contain a bomb.
Sonntag filled Ettinger in on the rest as the two grabbed their coats and went out the door of their office. The delivery boy arrived to an empty room. He shrugged, left the paper bag on top of a pockmarked steel work table and went back to the restaurant.
The Kevlar suits were designed to protect them against the effects of premature detonation of up to three tons of force per square inch. But Sonntag and Ettinger knew that nothing could guarantee their safety against the range of explosive devices that it was possible to manufacture, even using off the shelf components. They stood in the cinderblock-walled room and looked at the problem.
"Well, Siggie, what have we here?" Ettinger opined, "a bomb maybe?"
"Could be, Fritzl," Sonntag replied. "At least it makes a ticking noise like a bomb, jah?"
The stereo receiver lay in the middle of a steel table that was bolted to the cement floor. It was clearly, though faintly ticking, which meant that the bomb, whatever it was made of, was connected to a simple mechanical clock timer.
Sonntag and Ettinger pulled down the tempered Plexiglas face shields on their helmets and got to work. Throat mikes and armored videocams mounted on two corners of the walls recorded what they did and allowed other technicians in an adjoining room to feed back their comments.
"Have you ever wondered, Siggie," Ettinger said as he began to work on the screws holding the L-shaped top of the cabinet in place along the rear and sides of the receiver, "why anybody in their right minds would want to do our jobs?"
Hansl watched his partner intently as he unthreaded two, three, then four black carbide steel screws and set them on the tabletop, then set down the screwdriver and prepared to lift up the top section.
"Nobody in their right minds would want to do this work," Sonntag answered. "This is obvious, jah?"
"I guess we should have our heads examined, eh Siggie?"
"You are right about that, Fritzl," replied Sonntag. "We are both certifiable lunatics."
"But we enjoy it, don't we?"
"Jah, but not as much as a good piece of ass," Siggie told Hansl. "We are not that crazy."
"Nobody is that crazy," Siggie, Fritzl answered with a laugh.
The banter stopped as the job started getting hairier. Not finding a motion sensor the bomb disposal experts determined that it was safe to open the case. Ettinger gingerly held the metal cover about a half inch above the base of the receiver unit.
The ticking was audibly louder now and the two cops could see colored wires that had no place in a stereo set around the edges. Sonntag already was in position with a fiber optic probe attached to a video monitor, and he now moved the glowing tip of the probe along the interstices of the receiver.
The swing-mounted monitor on the wall showed them a magnified view of the guts of the set. On it they could clearly discern the main components of the bomb.
They could see the main charge, a four hundred gram cylinder of rolled Semtex plastique. The Semtex had been covered with foil and festooned with a bar-coded label to make it look like a legitimate part of the set. Colored wires trailed beneath a nearby circuit board to an "ice cube" timing device linked to a chemical initiator, all of which bore phony bar-code labels like the Semtex.
The components were connected to a travel alarm clock, hence the ticking, and a cluster of nine-volt batteries. It was a classic two-step bomb lash-up. Once the clock timer closed an electrical circuit, a pulse of power would heat the ice-cube — actually a cube of solid incendiary component — which would combine with another chemical to initiate a thermite flash hot enough to detonate the Semtex.
Apart from this, they found nothing — such as a mercury tilt switch or other motion-sensing device — to indicate that the bomb was booby-trapped against tampering, apart from the on-off button that had been rigged to start the bomb ticking if depressed. Ettinger breathed a sigh of relief. He now lifted the top of the bomb completely clear of the base and set it down on the work table beside it.
Suddenly the ticking stopped.
Ettinger and Sonntag had only a moment to look at each other before the approximate pound of Semtex went off with a tremendous bang. In the enclosed space of the room, the force of the explosion was magnified as it bounced off the cinderblock walls and the reinforced concrete floor and ceiling, blowing the steel-plate blast door clean off its hinges and out into the hallway. The blast ripped the two cops limb from limb, flinging pieces of their bodies against the walls, ceiling and floor despite their protective clothing.