"Rolf, Rudy — are you gentlemen in position?" he asked the two men he'd sent around back of the apartment block, the other half of the third bust team.
"All in order," Rudy's voice came back.
"Then it's a go," Winternitz told all the teams. "Repeat. It's a go. I don't want any heroics, just good, clean police work. Viel glück zum allen. Good luck to you all. Winternitz, out."
The BKA chief clipped a photo ID card to the breast pocket of his navy blue topcoat and worked the action of his Sig-Sauer P226 9mm semiautomatic pistol. He slipped the gun in his right coat pocket, gestured to Hans and crossed Marksbergerstrasse toward the building's entrance.
Less than five miles to the east, on a street in the Mittel district, the blonde girl with the breasts like helium-filled balloons tipped with Chianti corks that had simultaneously given Helmut eyestrain and "der Ständer" — a hardon — was frantically explaining to a bearded man that they had been burned.
"I made them as cops," she told Farook Nasser, one of the three other men in the flat, all of whom had been part of another cell of Al-Kaukji's bomb-making terrorist brigades in Berlin.
"You're seeing cops in your sleep, Nikki," Nasser told the buxom blonde woman. "You're smoking too much hashish, I think. Probably fucking too much also. It's making you paranoid."
"I fuck men for a living. I smoke hash for fun. But I'm not paranoid," Nikki replied, miffed. "I know they're cops because I recognized the one who was ogling me," she told him, straining to appear calm. "He used to work vice when I strolled the Ku'Damm two years ago. My hair was dark then. He doesn't remember me, but I recognized him. He's a filthy pig, that one, a real tittengrapscher. Liked to feel up the girls — sometimes worse."
The three men eyed each other. Al-Kaukji nodded at Nasser. Maybe the bitch wasn't as paranoid as they thought after all. Best to take precautions. Al-Kaukji spoke a few words in rapid street Arabic to his companions. Each went to grab and charge their weapons.
"Starsky" Mauthner rapped on the closed door of the grocery. There was no answer. He gestured to his blond-haired partner to try the basement door. There was no answer there either. Since they both had probable cause, they decided to try to kick the main door in. Also, the door looked fairly easy to smash. "Eminently kickable," was Mauthner's term.
A few heel-and-sole boot smashes later, the two cops were hustling inside on half-crouches, weapons drawn. They found Al-Kaukji's cousin cowering in a corner of the room. He didn't give them any trouble as he was cuffed and read his constitutional rights under German federal law. They found a back room and the grocer let him in.
Mauthner gave out a low whistle. They had found something really interesting in here.
Winternitz walked up the service stairs; a sign on the ground floor elevator said that the lift was out of service. Oyster's flat was on the fifth and top floor of the apartment block and Winternitz had three more flights left to go. He was already beginning to get winded. It was those damned cigarets, that and the creeping effects of the aging process.
He'd been a cop for twenty-four years already, and he had another six years to go before becoming eligible for retirement, four if he opted for early retirement. Perhaps he would, after all, especially if… but he dared not let himself complete the thought. It might interfere with the job ahead. Winternitz was by no means a superstitious man, but after tragedy strikes and logic is proven wrong, superstition tends to creep in.
Some five years before, Winternitz's only child, his daughter Juliana, had been a flight attendant on a Lufthansa flight out of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia bound for the Black Sea port of Odessa. An hour into the five-hour flight, when the plane had reached its cruising altitude of 30,000 feet over the Persian Gulf, and the captain had turned off the seat belt and no smoking signs, a group of Islamic terrorists armed with rifles and grenades had seized control of the cabin and cockpit.
The episode followed the pattern of so many others that had taken place since the first early airline hijackings by the PLO faction, Black September in the early 1970s. In the end a strike by "Die Lederkopfen" — the German counterterrorist strike force GSG-9 — had ended a standoff on the tarmac of Helsinki International Airport.
No passengers were killed in the hijacking, in fact there was only one friendly casualty. This was Winternitz's daughter. She had died long before the Lederkopfen — Leatherheads — took the plane.
Juliana had died while trying to stop the brutal beating of an American onboard the plane. The man's passport had borne what the terrorists had thought was a name that meant "Allah has the genitals of a dog" in the dialect of South Syrian Arabic that one of them, a native of Damascus, spoke. This, the fact that the terrorist assigned to take passports from passengers was somewhat more deranged than his comrades, and the fact that the passenger in question had been carrying military papers, was enough to provoke a rampage.
No one had raised a finger while two hijackers punched, kicked and pistol-whipped the passenger. Juliana could finally stand it no longer, and despite the risks to her own personal safety, she intervened.
She received a bullet in the heart for her trouble. She had died almost instantly, but her efforts probably saved the life of the victim.
The American was one of the survivors. But Juliana, Winternitz's beloved daughter, had returned home in a pine box. Winternitz was shattered by the news and embittered when the man who had pulled the trigger was found to have escaped before the commando raid commenced.
He was later identified as a man named Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni, originally a Palestinian from Gaza whose first career had been as a veterinarian — thus the "Doctor" title — with ties to several terrorist groups.
Dalkimoni had dropped out of sight for years, then reappeared. By now he was an eminence gris among younger terrorists and dubbed by the honorific title of Abu, or father.
Jubaird Dalkimoni, murderer of Max Winternitz's daughter Juliana, was Abu Jihad, the man Winternitz had come here today to arrest — or kill.
Two floors above them, inside apartment number 5-11, as Winternitz and Hans trudged up to the landing of the apartment block's third floor, Jubaird Dalkimoni had pried the last corner of a roughly four-foot square sheet of heavily enameled galvanized aluminum framed by strips of plywood from a section of kitchen wall between the refrigerator and the ornate prewar molding that surrounded the kitchen entrance.
It had not taken Dalkimoni long to work the flat blade of the screwdriver beneath the seam of the rectangle, which had been painted in high-gloss white to match the wall in which it was set.
The emergency exit from the apartment had been Farid Housek's idea. He had noticed the frame when he had moved in the previous year. Because the building dated back to before the Second World War, Housek suspected that the frame was a patch put in to cover what had once been the door of a dumbwaiter shaft.
Since the apartment was about to be repainted anyway, Housek had decided to pry the panel loose and see what was behind it. As he'd suspected, the musty-smelling shaft stretched all the way down, ostensibly to the basement.
Still more surprising, the dumbwaiter itself was still in place, just over his head, moored there probably since the end of the Hitler era. Housek pulled on the heavy chain and lowered the dumbwaiter, finding it still in sound working condition.
Farid Housek decided that it might be useful in the event he needed to make a hasty getaway sometime. He spent the better part of a day testing to see if it would reliably support his weight. This it did, and Housek was in fact able to lower himself all the way down to the basement. Satisfied, he replaced the panel and had not touched it since the painters had come. But he had been incautious in blurting out his secret to Dalkimoni shortly after his arrival.