"What happened up there?"
It was Rudy, one member of the stakeout team from the back. Winternitz had forgotten all about the two men he'd placed there.
"Blower got away," Winternitz told them. "He had a back way out. Through the basement. But he's still got to be somewhere close. Fan out. Cover the neighborhood. Be damned careful."
"Right, chief," Rudy said, he and Rolf already in motion.
Winternitz began running toward the streetcorner. But it was useless, he knew. Dalkimoni had outwitted him. He should have had a team of fucking Lederkopfen hit the place from all sides. Helicopters, APCs, the whole works. But there was no point in blaming himself. Felons sometimes evaded the tightest dragnets.
The cop slowed to a lope as he moved through pedestrian traffic on the avenue, his eyes tiredly scanning the gathering crowds for any sign of his quarry.
Suddenly Winternitz saw the dark-haired man crossing the street near the corner of Furstenstrasse, a half block down, right by the U-Bahn or subway station entrance. It was only a fleeting glance from a sizable distance, but Winternitz was hit by a gut feeling. He began running toward the man who, sighting him in pursuit, turned suddenly and then began running himself, racing pell-mell through rush hour traffic toward the subway entrance.
Winternitz didn't care if he had a heart attack. His entire being, body and soul, was fixed on catching up with the perp he'd just glimpsed.
Fortunately, the heavy traffic was making it hard for the escaping terrorist to cross to the other side. Cars were honking and drivers shouted at him as he made for the U-Bahn entrance. Winternitz held up his badge at one of the irate motorists and continued to give chase to the perp.
Dalkimoni hotfooted it down the concrete steps, shoving commuters out of the way in his haste to evade pursuit. Winternitz reached the top of the stairs seconds later. A crowd of passengers just disembarked from an arriving train were now rushing toward him up the steps. Despite his detective's ID, Winternitz had to fight them to the mezzanine level at the foot of the stairway.
Directly ahead, he now saw a maze of passenger tunnels, three of them branching off in different directions. The cop ran to the center tunnel and spotted a man running along it about twenty yards dead ahead. Winternitz took off after him. Putting on a final burst of speed that he feared would burst his overtaxed heart, he finally closed within shouting distance of the perp he'd chased to ground.
"Abhalten!" he cried out. "Polizei!"
But the man kept on booking and wouldn't stop. Ignoring the pursuing cop he knocked passengers out of the way, emptying his pockets on the run. Winternitz gave chase and finally caught up with his quarry after another brief sprint.
With his last remaining reserves of strength, the cop launched a flying tackle at the perp, managing to lock his arms around his calves and bringing him down to the hard floor of the subway tunnel.
Now both men went sprawling onto the concrete, Winternitz landing on top of the smaller, slimmer man. Fueled by adrenaline, Winternitz pulled out his spare cuffs and secured the suspect's wrists behind his back. He turned him over and immediately knew something was wrong.
The man was not Blower. He had fucked up. The scars on his arms marked him immediately as a junkie, probably an immigrant from Turkey or Morocco who had brought his habit with him and was spreading it around in his adopted homeland. Glassine envelopes, crack vials and drug works littered the dirty floor of the subway tunnel like bread crumbs from a Teutonic fairy tale.
The bomb-maker had given him the slip. Winternitz had collared himself ein Rottler — a two-bit hype.
On the S-Bahn elevated express to which he had transferred from the U-Bahn heading toward the commuter lines servicing the Leipsig rail junction, Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni stood grasping a handhold in the center of the crowded passenger train. He kept his face turned toward the advertising placards above the windows. Though sure he was safe, there was no sense in breaking tradecraft. Ever.
At the next stop, he got off, switched to another S-Bahn line, rode it three more stops, and then went up to street level amid the crowd of emerging commuters.
There, at the kiosk on the corner, he spotted a municipal transit bus arriving. The terrorist went onboard and paid his fare. He knew that the bus was going in the general direction of one of the safe houses maintained by MISIRI, the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and he had been given emergency passcodes to gain acceptance and aid from other cells if the operation went sour.
That was all, for the moment, that he needed to know.
Chapter Four
It was ten A.M. in the Berlin Tiergarten. Max Winternitz sat feeding the pigeons that clustered around his legs, cooing and pecking.
There was an aging hippy who sold postcards, souvenir knickknacks and bags of seed at one of the entrances to the sprawling park and Winternitz was in the habit of buying a bag from him for a half euro. He'd seen him there for years, a fixture of the park as much as the trees were.
Winternitz liked the pigeons. Though they squabbled and pecked at one another, he'd never once seen them draw blood. Less could be said about human beings.
A week had passed since the bust of Farouk Al-Kaukji and his bomb makers, and still the main actor, Jubaird Dalkimoni, was nowhere to be found. Unofficially, Winternitz had good reason to believe that he had made good his escape and was now safe in the Iranian capital, Tehran. Officially, though, the Arab terrorist chieftain was still at large.
Winternitz knew better. At the same time, the scum that his cops had rounded up in the raids were vanishing into the ground like earthworms.
One by one, their lawyers were getting them released on various legal pretexts. Insufficient evidence, improper search and seizure — any legal dodge seemed to suffice.
The Strike Day Investigation Report, compiled by the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the Strike Day terror attacks, and the US-instigated extraditions and trials that had ensued, had subjected European governments to outside pressures from all sides that they would rather not see repeated in any way.
The word had come down from Bonn — no one was to be tried. The problem was to be made to simply evaporate. And one other thing; the Americans were to be kept out of the picture.
Winternitz was in the Tiergarten to do just the opposite. Let them sack him if they liked. Not that they would.
There were factions in the BKA that were pro-and anti-CIA. Winternitz was representing a circle which was friendly to US intelligence and formed a nucleus of backchannel intelligence sources from inside the German intelligence and police establishments.
Winternitz flung the last handfuls of millet seed at the moving mass of gray, brown and white feathers on the octagonal cobbles of the pavement. When he looked up he saw a man approaching down one of the walks.
Winternitz lit a cigaret. Continuing to toss handfuls of seed to the pigeons which cooed noisily as they pecked it off the cobbles, he studied the man with a feigned casualness perfected over a lifetime of police work.
Colonel Stone Breaux took a seat on the park bench beside Winternitz and sat watching the pigeons pecking at their lunch. He'd been briefed on the meet by the spook Congdon — the same Congdon who had ordered the team into combat to locate and destroy classified advanced technology components of a crashed stealth aircraft a few months before, or at least one claiming to be the same intelligence agent.