The woman rose to her feet. “Understood,” she said again quietly into the throat mike hidden by her abaya. “Source One and I are coming in.” She motioned Khalifa ahead of her with the Beretta.
Inside the house, bodies littered the tiled floors, along with spent shell casings. Most had been shot while reaching for their weapons ?a mix of Soviet-made assault rifles and pistols. The faintly metallic smell of blood blended with other odors, harsh, unfiltered tobacco, cheap aftershave, and boiled chicken. A radio somewhere still played music.
With Khalifa in tow, she took the stairs up to the second floor two at a time and made her way to an expensively furnished room at the back of the house.
Thick carpets covered the floor. There were imported teak tables, chairs, and a desk topped with a softly humming portable computer. The machine appeared undamaged. She smiled.
One man wearing a robe and slippers lay facedown on one of the carpets with his hands bound behind him with strong plastic twist ties. Two of the attackers stood close by, covering their lone prisoner with their submachine At her signal, they rolled him over.
The woman stared down intently, mentally comparing the hawk-nosed, bearded visage before her with the file photographs she had studied. Angry, red-rimmed eves stared back at her. She nodded in satisfaction. They had captured Major General Hussain Azziz al-Douri, onetime commander of the Mukhabarat’s Eighth Directorate, the unit directly responsible for developing, testing, and producing Iraq’s biological weapons.
“Good evening, General,” she said politely, with a faint smile on her lips.
He glared back at her. “Who the devil are you?”
The woman flipped back the hood of the abaya, revealing her short blond hair, straight nose, and firm chin. “Someone who has been hunting you for a very long time,” CIA officer Randi Russell told him coolly.
Large flakes of wet snow drifted down from a dark, overcast sky. Spinning lazily in the calm, cold air, they settled softly across the plaza surrounding Dresden’s floodlit Semper Opera House. A thin white blanket softened the stark outlines of the equestrian statue of King Johann of Saxony rearing high above the open square.
People bundled up in overcoats hurried across the plaza with their umbrellas hoisted high to ward off the falling snow, joining the excited crowds gathering outside the brightly lit entrance to the Opera House. Placards and banners posted around the city announced this evening’s premiere of a new, ultra avant-garde version of Carl Maria von Weber’s Freischutz, the first real German opera.
Jon Smith stood in the shadows near the long-dead Saxon king’s statue, carefully observing Dresden’s self- anointed aficionados of high culture stream across the square. Impatiently, he shook the wet snowflakes out of his dark hair. He hunched his shoulders, feeling the cold bite through his thin windbreaker and black turtleneck.
He had arrived on the city’s outskirts roughly an hour before, dropped off by a Hamburg-based truck driver from whom he had bummed a ride all the way from Prague across the Czech-German border. Two hundred euros in cold, hard cash had more than satisfied the trucker’s curiosity about why an American businessman needed so long a lift. He had allowed Smith to ride in the sleeping berth at the back of his cab, safe from any prying official eyes.
Fortunately, crossing the frontier had proved uneventful. Now that the Czech Republic was part of the European Union, there were very few active checkpoints between the two countries.
But moving any deeper into Germany or getting a plane back to the States or anywhere else would take a lot more than luck. The murderous ambush on the road to Prague’s airport had cost him both his laptop computer and his carry-on bag. European hotelkeepers and airport security officials alike frowned on people arriving without luggage. More important, he needed new identification. Sooner or later, the Czech authorities would start casting a wider net for the American doctor and army officer who had missed his plane to London and vanished so mysteriously. They might even tie him to the bullet-riddled corpses found near the road to the airport.
Smith spotted a short, bearded man in evening dress and a bright red scarf walking slowly toward the statue. He wore a pair of thick glasses that reflected the dazzling lights silhouetting the Opera House. The newcomer also carried a colorful program for Mozart’s Don Giovanni conspicuously beneath one arm.
Jon moved out to intercept him. “Are you here for the performance?” he asked quietly in German. “They say the maestro is in top form.”
He noticed the little man relax slightly. Maestro was the recognition word Fred Klein had given him when Smith called to arrange this emergency rendezvous.
“So I understand,” the short, bearded man replied. He tapped the program under his arm. “But I prefer Mozart to Weber myself.”
“That’s quite a coincidence,” Smith said pointedly. “So do I.”
The little man smiled tightly. His blue eyes were bright behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “Those of us who love Europe’s greatest composer must stick together, my friend. So take this, with my compliments.” He handed the taller American his Don Giovanni program. Then, without another word, he turned on his heel and walked away, vanishing into the crowds milling around outside the Semper’s arched entrance.
Smith headed in the opposite direction. While on the move, he flipped open the program and found a thick manila envelope clipped to one of the pages. Inside it, he found another American passport, this one made out in the name of John Martin. It bore a current German customs stamp and his picture. The envelope also contained a credit and debit card in the mythical John Martin’s name, a train ticket to Berlin, and a numbered tag from the left luggage kiosk at Dresden’s Neustadt station.
Jon grinned to himself, reassured all over again by this evidence of Fred Klein’s levelheaded thoroughness. He pocketed the various documents, discarded the opera program in a trash bin, and then strode briskly toward the gleaming lights of a nearby tram stop.
Half an hour later, Smith jumped lightly down from the rear door of a yellow electric tram. He was just across from the Neustadt Bahnhof. A pyramid of modern steel girders and glass rose high above the weathered, pollution-stained stone facade of the original railway station. He dodged a pair of taxi-cabs that were crawling along the snow-choked street looking for fares, and entered the almost-deserted station.
At the left luggage kiosk, a sour-faced night clerk took the tag from him, rummaged through the back room, and came grumbling back carrying a brand-new overnight bag and a laptop computer case. Jon signed for them and moved off to the side of the counter to inspect his new acquisitions. The overnight bag contained an assortment of clothing in his sizes, including a warmer black wool coat. Gratefully, he shrugged out of his battered windbreaker and donned the heavier coat. The computer case included both a rugged, high-speed laptop and a portable scanner.
Smith glanced up at the departure board. He had almost an hour before the next train to Berlin was scheduled to leave Dresden. His stomach growled, reminding him that it had been far too many hours since his last meal ?a couple of pieces of dry toast and jam at the police station in Prague. He closed both cases, slung them over his shoulder, and walked through the station to a small cafe located near the platforms. A sign in German, French, and English invited patrons to make use of the restaurant’s wireless Internet connection while enjoying coffee, soup, and sandwiches.
He had just enough time to kill two birds with one stone, he thought gratefully. He seated himself at an empty table in the corner and ordered black coffee and a bowl of Kartoffelsuppe, creamy potato soup flavored with marjoram and slices of pork sausage.
Smith waited for the waitress to leave and then powered up the new laptop and scanner. While sipping his coffee, he pulled out the identity card he had retrieved from the corpse of the broken-nosed man in the Divoka Sarka and studied it closely. The name on the ID card meant nothing, he suspected. But in the right hands the photograph might yield useful information.
He flipped open his phone and hit the preset code for Covert-One’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.
“Go ahead, Colonel,” Klein’s calm voice said.
“The RV went off without a hitch,” Smith reported. “I’m at the station waiting for my train now.”
“Good,” the head of Covert-One said quietly. “You’re hooked into the Hotel Askanischer Hof, right on the Ku’damm. You should be able to rest up there inconspicuously for a day or so while we consider how to proceed.”
Smith nodded to himself. The Kurfurstendamm, once the heart of West Berlin, was still a bustling center of commerce and tourism. Even in the winter, it should be easv enough to blend in discreetly with the other travelers
