Jihad

CHAPTER 51

The afternoon sun turned the Rhine a deep, purplish blue, the German river moving majestically past the hills near Karlsruhe. It looked like a landscape painting come to life.

Aesthetics was never one of Tommy Karr’s strong suits, neither could he be called a naturalist. Still, he stared at the river with sharp intensity, his attention focused on the police boats zipping back and forth near the MiRO refinery on the opposite side of the river. Tankers and barges were thoroughly inspected before they were allowed into the lagoon near the refinery’s storage tanks at the northern side of the complex; two large tugboats would block the path of any vessel that failed to stop.

“The analysis showed that was the weak point,” said Hess, the BND officer Karr had been assigned to help. “Exploding a ship near the tanks — I don’t want to think about the effect.”

There were other ways to attack MiRO. Crude oil arrived via two different pipelines, one originating in Italy and the other in Bavaria. The large complex was served by several roads and a rail line. These were all being checked with admirable German efficiency. Even Karr and the BND were ordered out of their car at the main gate so it could be closely inspected, and each had to pass through a metal detector to enter the administration building.

“No guns?” Karr asked Hess as they walked down the hallway.

“Why would we need them?”

The guards, at least, had guns. Blaser 93 LRS2s — fancy tactical weapons popular with police SWAT teams because of their versatility — as well as the ubiquitous Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. The security director was rather proud of his men’s marksmanship scores, and Karr got the impression they could have mounted a pretty good rifle team. What they’d do against terrorists remained to be seen.

The massive complex had once been two different refineries; in an emergency, half the plant could be shut off from the other easily, with smaller sections cordoned off and secured piece by piece. The facility’s emergency procedures had been tested by a large fire a few years before, and regular drills were now held to deal with terrorist threats.

“We crush them like ants in the house,” said the security head as he ended the tour.

As impressive as his accent made that sound, Karr couldn’t help thinking that for every ant you saw, there were maybe a hundred more below the floor.

Besides the refinery, a major German nuclear research facility was located in the general area, and security had been tightened there as well. Given a choice between inspecting security there or having dinner in town, Karr went for the Wiener schnitzel.

German law provided no way of arresting Marid Dabir or even holding the suspected al-Qaeda plotter for questioning until either a crime had been committed or the police had overwhelming evidence that one was being planned. Dabir had no known connection to the local terrorist networks or radical groups on any of the various German watch lists. The Germans accepted the American intelligence indicating he was a terrorist, but for the moment the most they could do was place him under surveillance by the state police extraordinary crime unit and wait for him to commit a crime.

Just as Karr was finishing his veal, Hess received a call indicating that Dabir had boarded a train for Frankfurt am Main.

“I’d like to have a look at him,” Hess told Karr after she got off the phone. “Do you think you could pick him out at the train station if we flew up there?”

“As long as there’s Black Forest cake for dessert,” said Karr, “I can do anything.”

Dabir checked his watch, counting down the seconds as the train approached the stop just over the state border in Hesse. The man who had been trailing him had passed through the coach a few minutes before, undoubtedly to meet the detectives who would take over for him at the state line. As the train pulled to a stop, Dabir pushed the brim of his American-style baseball cap up, then slipped his hand up to prop his head and hunched against the window, feigning sleep. He was careful not to obscure too much of his face.

Having dodged secret police forces in Yemen and Egypt, he found European intelligence services laughingly easy to fool. The German tendency to be precise and punctual made them exceedingly easy to predict, and the raft of laws protecting potential suspects gave plenty of cover.

The train began moving again. Dabir caught a glimpse of two men in brown suits passing through the car — his new shadows, no doubt. He waited four or five minutes, then made a show of rousing and stretching. Precisely three minutes from the next stop, he got up and ambled slowly in the direction of the restroom in the next car. He stood in the aisle, waiting with his back to the train door for the room to clear.

Finally, the man who’d been inside came out. Dabir hesitated for a moment — just long enough for another man to slide in in front of him. Dabir quickly followed.

“The seat is next to the window, in the eighth row. A brown paper bag is in the empty space next to it,” Dabir told the man, a second-generation Palestinian who stood exactly as tall as he did. In fact, when Dabir’s cap was placed on his head and his jacket around his shoulders, he might have passed for a younger brother or even Dabir himself — exactly the idea.

“The train is entering the station,” said Dabir, pulling open the door. “Go quickly.”

Dabir untucked his shirt, then left the restroom, walking forward to the next set of doors as the train came to a halt.

When their helicopter landed in Frankfurt, Karr excused himself and checked in with the Art Room.

“German intelligence thinks Dabir is using instant messaging to pass communications to his network,” Telach told him. “They’ve detected some encrypted instant messages using PGP originating from Karlsruhe. They haven’t been to decrypt them.”

“Can we?”

“If they give them to us. We don’t have them. The problem is, they don’t know we know.”

Karr knew better than to ask how “we” knew. “PGP” stood for “Pretty Good Privacy,” a commonly available encryption system that, as its name implied, was decently secure as well as being fairly easy to use. Pretty good wasn’t good enough as far as the NSA was concerned; most European intelligence services, on the other hand, did not have a good track record with deciphering it quickly.

“So I have to be subtle, huh?” said Karr.

“Remind them that we can help in many ways,” said Telach. “We are working on getting the messages through other means.”

“They told me to remind you we’ll help in any way we can,” Karr told Hess as they drove to the train station a few minutes later. “Any sort of resources you need.”

“Are you going to send a Stealth Bomber?”

Karr, a firm believer that levity should always be encouraged, especially in a country where it was semilegal, laughed uproariously.

“If you want one,” he told her, the car still shaking with his mirth. “And if you need decoding or anything like that, just holler. We’re a one-stop service.”

Hess frowned. Karr let the matter drop.

They found a parking spot at the train station and joined two police detectives coordinating the surveillance operation from a van parked near the tracks. More than a dozen plainclothes policemen and several cars were standing by, waiting to track Dabir when he arrived. A team of state detectives had gone on board near the state border, taking over from the man who had gotten on with him at Karlsruhe.

A pair of nine-inch black-and-white television cameras sat on a small bench at the side of the van, carrying video feeds from the platform where Dabir’s train would arrive. Karr bem down and squinted, examining the pictures.

“Wanna go get some coffee?” he asked Hess, straightening.

She gave him a funny look.

“I’d prefer beer myself, but usually not on duty. We can spot him inside when he gets off the train,” Karr added. “Those screens aren’t going to give you much of an idea of what he looks like.”

“Ah. You were making a joke.”

“No, I really did want a coffee. And maybe a chocolate pig’s ear if they have any.”

Ten minutes later, Karr strolled along the platform as Dabir’s train came in, humming a song to himself and finishing the schweinsoehrchen—a “little pig’s ear” made from serious chocolate — he’d bought from the snack kiosk. Hess stood back by the concourse, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible in her stiff blue suit.

“Gretchen, how are you?” bellowed Karr as the passengers came out. He walked toward a woman in her forties, bent down and kissed her.

The woman stumbled back, blinked her eyes, and unleashed a torrent of abuse. The rest of the passengers hurried by as Karr began to apologize for his mistake. Dabir, followed closely by his two shadows, passed along to the left.

Except it wasn’t Dabir.

Karr pulled his satphone out, pretending to use it.

“Hey, Rockman, you there?”

“Always.”

“We got a problem. Dabir lost his shadow.”