concrete. A sign over the doorway read: FAKULTAT FUR PHYSIK. Despite the evening hour, there were still lights on in the building and students with backpacks walking or bicycling along the paths. They went up the stairs and down a long hallway to Reimert’s office.
Ulrike turned on the light and sat down at the computer. After a few moments she turned to Scorpion. “How many students?” she asked.
“Just three,” Scorpion said, handing her a slip of paper with the names.
“Ulrike was my unterrichtassistent,” Reimert said. “Now she’s an administrator. Better for her to do it. She knows the system better than I.”
“Here’s the first,” she said, bringing up a student record. “Sermin Bayat. Here’s his transcript. Emigrated from Ankara in Turkey fourteen years ago. Diplom in biotechnologiewesen, after which he did his doktorat at Bonn University, where, yes, he is on the faculty. Here’s his address in Bonn.”
“Could you call him?” Scorpion said, looking at the face in the file photograph from ten years ago.
“Why?”
“To confirm. It’s standard. Tell him you’re from the alumni office just verifying his address.”
“If you insist,” Ulrike said, clearly annoyed. She dialed a number and spoke briefly in German, said, “Entschuldigen sie mich, bitte,” then slammed the phone down. “He wasn’t so pleased. He was watching the football highlights on the television. Is that sufficient for you?” she said, looking sharply at Scorpion.
“What about the next?”
“Dieter Bockmeyer. He doesn’t sound Muslim,” she said, typing on the keyboard. “There it is,” bringing up the file. “Diplom in informationstechnik. After graduation, went to work for Siemens in Munich, then transferred to the Siemens office back here in Karlsruhe. Secretary of the Alumni Association. Shall I call?”
“Please.”
She called the number and listened for a moment. “It’s asking for a message.”
“No message,” Scorpion said. “Try the next one.”
She typed in Bassam Hassani and waited while the screen took longer than usual to display. When it did, except for a single line, the screen was blank.
“What is it?” Reimert asked.
“Impossible,” she said, staring at the nearly empty screen. She typed another search on a wider database and the same screen came up again. “Nothing. No records, no transcript, no application file, no forwarding address. Just a single line. Diplom in chemieingenieurwesen, chemical engineering, nine years ago. It cannot be.”
“It’s been deleted,” Scorpion said, his heart beating faster. “You don’t have a photograph, anything else on this man?”
“There’s nothing. I don’t understand,” she said, looking at Reimert.
“Nine years ago?” Reimert mused. “In chemistry. I seem to remember something.” He looked at his wife. “Do you remember Keck? Bernhard Keck?”
“Must’ve been before my time. Or maybe when I was a freshman,” she said.
“Yes.” He tapped the desk with his finger. “I remember something about heat transfer. Look up Keck in the Universitat Karlsruhe Journal fur Anorganische und Allgemeine Chemie. Now.”
She typed it in and a number of links came up. There was nothing of use in the first two, but when she clicked on the third link, it brought up a nine-year-old article in the university’s chemistry journal with a photograph of a research team that had apparently come up with a breakthrough on explosive chemical heat transfers. The caption identified one of the team in the photograph as Hassani.
I’ve got you, you bastard! Scorpion thought. “Could you please make the photo bigger?” he asked as he intently studied the face of the man identified as Hassani in the caption. It was a young man’s face, dark-haired, with dark serious eyes, good-looking enough, if he were interested and not so serious, to be able to beat women off with a stick. Nine years was a long time. It would be better if he had a more recent photograph, and then he realized that of course there was a more recent photo. “Look, could you please send the link to that file to Rabinowich? It’s urgent.”
“I’ll do it right now,” Ulrike said, typing. “There you are. It’s done.” She looked at Scorpion. “This is very strange. I can’t understand why whoever deleted the record left the single entry about the diplom.”
“Vanity perhaps,” Reimert shrugged.
“Or credibility among his own. Whatever the reason, it’s a break for us or we would never have found him,” Scorpion said.
“I prefer vanity as an explanation. It’s more Greek,” Reimert said.
“You’re a romantic, a Sorrows of Young Werther type,” Scorpion said, smiling.
“You found him out,” Ulrike laughed. “When we first met, he presented me with a copy of that book. I wasn’t sure whether he wanted to have sex with me or kill himself.”
“Sex. Believe me, sex,” Reimert said, kissing her cheek. “This man,” meaning Hassani, “he is dangerous?”
“I know of at least six people he’s already killed. I have to go. I know you may not believe me, but what you did tonight was important.” He started to get up when suddenly he had an idea. “Can you access the university’s exchange servers?”
“I don’t know how,” she said.
“May I?” he said. She got up, and he sat at the computer and logged her out. He plugged in the NSA flash drive and was shortly on the network with administrator privileges.
“How do you say ‘exchange mail server’ in German?” he asked.
“Austauschcomputerbediener. What are you looking for?” she asked.
“E-mail inquiries,” he said, typing on the keyboard.
“Wouldn’t whoever deleted the record have deleted any e-mails too?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, logging onto the mail server. He opened the header log files and began searching. After several minutes he found what he was looking for. Two entries to the mailbox, one incoming, one outgoing. Someone had sent an e-mail query for information on Hassani. The messages themselves were not there, but the records contained the date, time stamps, and IP addresses of the sending and receiving machines. Scorpion mentally calculated the date. Four weeks before the Budawi assassination. He used his cell phone and an RSA key to access the restricted URL of the NSA’s Whois database of classified IP addresses worldwide, and there it was.
The e-mail inquiry had been sent from the Egyptian Bureau of Educational Tourism, a front organization for the Egyptian Mabahith. That was the real reason Budawi had been assassinated! If Budawi had learned the Palestinian’s actual identity, it would have imperiled Hassani’s entire mission. Budawi had to be eliminated. Scorpion logged off the computer and stood up.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Ulrike asked.
“More than you know, danke,” he said.
“Come. We’ll take you back to your auto,” she said, shutting down the computer and getting up. They barely spoke on the short drive back to where he had parked his car near their house.
“Auf wiedersehen,” she said. “This has been a strange evening. I did not expect this.” She looked at him oddly as he got out of the car.
“It is a disturbance to think that one of our students may be a terrorist. He was not a student of mine, but still…” Reimert trailed off.
“Don’t ever speak of this to anyone,” Scorpion said. “If anyone ever asks, even the Bundespolizei, say nothing. For your own safety, please, what you saw tonight never happened.” He started to go, then turned back. “Vielen dank. I’ll tell Rabinowich he owes you a favor.”
They watched him walk back to his car, and after a moment the car lights came on and he drove away.
Scorpion drove to the A5 autobahn to get back to Frankfurt. While on the highway he called Rabinowich on his cell phone, told him about the Budawi e-mail query, and they discussed ferreting out more information on Hassani, whom they code-named ‘Hearing Aid’ from the phrase ‘engine ear’ for ‘engineer,’ and most critically, they also discussed getting a more recent photograph. The odds were high that Hearing Aid had been in the U.S. at least once, probably more than once, in the last six months, which meant that Homeland Security had a photo and fingerprint on file. It would be under a different name, but hopefully, facial recognition software might find a match.
