Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 13

Bobojon Simoni stood by the curb, looking up and down Yorkstrasse for a cab. Behind him, like a page from the comics, a wall of graffiti showed George Bush hanging from a streetlight, while New York burned on the bricks behind him.

In lights above the bank across the street, a sign blinked the time and temperature: 4:03 0°. Twilight and freezing. At least officially. In reality, it was raining one minute and snowing the next. Then it would turn into something in between, a sort of flying slush. Whatever it was, it stung his eyes as he gazed into the wind, screwing his face against the ice, blinking hard.

It was his own fault. He’d forgotten to bring the book, and now he was paying for it. He could see it, almost as if it were right in front of him, sitting on the table in the kitchen: a solid rectangle, neatly wrapped in brown butcher’s paper, taped, and tied with string. Addressed to the shop in Boston, all the book needed was a couple of stamps and a Customs form, and it could go on its way. Only now, because he’d forgotten it, he’d have to go back to the apartment and pick it up.

He’d left about forty-five minutes ago, with a list of errands in his head: uskadar post office toilet paper prayers. The idea was to have a cup of coffee at the Uskadar, a small cafe on a side street not far from the mosque. Like most of the cafe’s customers, the coffee was Turkish, and it wasn’t very good. But the owner was a “Bosniak,” and like Bobojon, he loved football. So there was always a match on the TV, high up on the wall behind the counter, and workmen watching.

The cafe itself was less than a mile from his apartment, but if he walked back home to get the book, the post office would be closed by the time he returned. Finding a cab could be difficult, though, especially since it was raining. Taxis were never plentiful in “SO36” – the down-at-heels neighborhood that Bobojon shared with nearly two hundred thousand “guest workers,” mostly Turks and Kurds. It was the old postal code for the eastern half of the Kreuzberg district, where Checkpoint Charlie was a tourist attraction.

He might as well go back to the cafe. He could mail the book in the morning and no one would care. The decision made, he was turning to leave when, out of nowhere, a taxi sluiced up to the curb, windshield wipers thudding back and forth. The driver leaned across the seat to the window, and looked up at him. “Wo zu?”

Jurgen preferred to work alone, and he usually did. But today was different. Today, he needed a partner.

They had been waiting outside Simoni’s building for twenty minutes, sitting half a block away in a black BMW with a broken defroster, windows dribbling with steam. They did what they could to keep the windshield clear, wiping away the fog with the front page of Bild, a tabloid newspaper. The headline read “Turbo Orgasms” and came with the picture of a brunette who appeared to be having one.

It was all a little embarrassing. And that was unfortunate, because Jurgen wanted to impress the woman in the seat beside him. Clara was new to the BfV. What must she think? First the defroster and then this turbo person! Of course, she pretended not to notice, but… mein Gott!

In the end, they just rolled down the windows, pulled their coats close, and froze.

The thing about today was, they didn’t know what the target looked like. All they had was a name (Bobojon Simoni), an address, and a telephone number. For all they knew, Herr Simoni was twenty years old. Or forty. Or sixty. He might be tall or short, fat or thin. Well dressed and bearded. Tie-dyed and clean-shaven. But a Bosnian – or someone traveling on a Bosnian passport.

Jurgen couldn’t work it alone – there was just no way to be sure the flat was empty. Sometimes people didn’t answer their phones. Sometimes they sat in the dark or napped on the couch. So he’d use the Wachtturm ploy. Go up to the door, and knock three times. If someone opened the door, he’d give him a handful of tracts and a copy of the der Wachtturm. Then Jurgen would launch into his spiel about Jehovah’s Witnesses and the end-times. Most of the time, the door would slam shut in their faces, and that would be the end of it. But not always. Wind him up with a couple of beers, and Jurgen would tell you how he’d converted a member of the Red Brigades to Jesus.

He checked his watch. Five after four. It would be dark soon. He dialed the flat for the third time. Again, no answer. He turned to Clara. “Shall we?”

She made a face.

“C’mon,” he said. They got out of the car.

She was a pretty woman, maybe ten years younger than Jurgen himself, and he wanted her to think well of him – and of the BfV. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution was an elite intelligence service whose main responsibility was tracking extremists – left, right, and religious. Clara’s former employer, the BKA, was the criminal police. The BfV was different. Sexier, somehow.

As they crossed the street to Simoni’s building, heads down against the weather, it occurred to Jurgen that most people would take them for social workers, what with their battered briefcases and woolen overcoats. And that was good, because nothing could be more ordinary. Social workers were to Kreuzberg as steelworkers were to the Ruhr.

She would install the bug while he searched for a computer. If he found one, he’d clone the hard drive to the laptop in his briefcase. The whole business shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, but of course, it would seem like hours. It always did.

The only question mark was Simoni himself. They had no idea where he was or when he’d return. Two days earlier BfV had received a query from Malaysia, a flash cable from the CIA station chief in Kuala Lumpur. During a recent debriefing, a foreign national detained under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act indicated that an attack on U.S. property and personnel was imminent. Simoni was implicated in a communications capacity.

The BfV got to work immediately. Within twenty-four hours, they were able to establish that Herr Simoni had entered Germany on a Bosnian passport. He’d come to Berlin from Beirut about six months earlier, and rented a two-room apartment at Oranienstrasse 54. Soon afterward, he opened a passbook account at a local branch of the Dresdner Bank, where his monthly balance averaged 936 euros. Though he did not appear to have a job, neither was he receiving public assistance. None of the informants at the Mevlana mosque were familiar with a person of that name. Inquiries were continuing.

The flat turned out to be a walk-up on the third floor. Jurgen was puffing when they got to the door, so it took him a second to catch his breath. When he was ready, he opened the briefcase he was carrying and took out a handful of religious tracts. He gave a couple to Clara, then broke into as bright a smile as his tobacco-stained teeth would allow, and rapped smartly on the door. As far as they knew, Simoni was living alone, but you could never be certain. Maybe he got lucky the night before. Maybe he had a dog. Maybe… nothing.

The flat was quiet as a stone. Jurgen gestured for Clara to step aside, and when she did, he got out his kit and picked expertly at the lock. A few seconds later, and they were in.

“I’m right back!” Bobojon declared. “I get package, we go post office!” The driver shrugged. Bobojon climbed out of the cab and bounded up the steps to Oranienstrasse 54.

Inside, the smell of cabbage hung in the stairwell, buoyed by an updraft of Arab music flowing from the janitor’s apartment in the basement. Bobojon didn’t mind the smell. If anything, it reminded him of home.

He took the first three flights of stairs two steps at a time, then paused to catch his breath. He was in okay shape. Not like when he’d just gotten out of prison, but not bad, either. He walked everywhere in Berlin, even in the winter, and worked out at a kickboxing studio four nights a week. So it only took him a moment to get to his door.

He fumbled for the key in the pocket of his coat, came up with it, and turned it in the lock. To his surprise, the door didn’t open. So he turned the key again, the other way, and then it did. For a moment, he stood where he was with a frown on his face, thinking he must be losing it. How could he go out without locking the door? And then the answer came to him: He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. So he pulled out the little gun that he carried, a Makarov, and stepped inside.

A young woman – maybe twenty-six, nice-looking, short brown hair, net stockings – was standing frozen at the kitchen table with a look of horror on her face. The telephone was on the table in front of her, disassembled, the speaker and earpiece next to the handset. Beside the phone was his package. He didn’t stop to think about it. His gun came up and, almost as a reflex, he shot her in the face, tearing a hole in her cheek, then fired again as she fell, blowing a chunk out of her neck. She did a sort of pirouette before she fell. Suddenly, blood was everywhere – on the walls and the floor, on the side of the sink. Clawing at the linoleum, dying to get away, she was at the epicenter of it all. And Bo felt sorry for her, he really did. But he shot her again, this time in the back. Finally, she lay still. By then, his heart was a jackhammer, so loud in his ears that he almost didn’t hear the gasp that came from his left. Turning toward the noise, he saw what looked like Christian religious tracts falling to the feet of a man with a Glock. There was no time to react. Bobojon could almost feel the man pull the trigger. It didn’t even take a second, but the moment lasted forever and, in it, Bobojon realized where he’d seen the tracts before – in Allenwood. Then the Witness pulled the trigger a second time. Bobojon felt the side of his face explode as the bullet spun him around and sent him staggering. For a moment, he was bright with pain. Then his legs gave way and he sank toward the floor. The Witness kept firing, tearing new holes in him, but by then, Bobojon could feel his body shutting down. The gunshots sounded farther and farther away as a red mist fell like a curtain behind his eyes. Oh shit, he thought, I’m dying…