Taylor considered that. “We need to stay focused on motive. Not just of the killers, but of the victim. Harry was looking for Odin, and he was also looking for Tariq Qasim. We don’t know if those two things are linked, but one of them has got to be connected to his murder.”
“Right. And if locating Tariq Qasim—or other Iraqi military Intel people—was part of an official counterterrorism investigation, Mark Jenkins would have been looped in. There’s something else going on.”
Taylor gestured at her satchel. “Maybe the Stasi report from Ms. Albrecht or the law enforcement reports we received from Whitmore will give us some answers.”
“Save the reading for the flight home. I think we’ve got a few hours at most before Hackett tells Dombroski to yank us. Meanwhile, we have time for maybe one more play.”
She looked at him. “You, Mr. Brodie, are a bloodhound without a scent. Or, to put it in military terms, a homing missile without a heat signature. We need more information before we can make another move.”
She had a point. He pulled out his phone and ran a Google search for Abbas al-Hamdani, Tariq Qasim’s alias. He got a few hits for listings in the German white pages, but only one with an address in Berlin, an apartment on Stuttgarter Straße. Was this their guy? Possibly. Colonel Tariq Qasim wanted to live an anonymous life, and he probably assumed that taking analias would offer enough protection from his past, and had not thought to make sure that alias was delisted from the online phone directory.
Taylor asked, “What are you doing?”
“Picking up a scent.” He entered the address in his GPS and saw that Mr. Hamdani lived on a small street on the eastern edge of Neukölln. He checked his watch. “It’s eleven thirty-five. Based on Whitmore’s timeline, she couldn’t have spoken to Kim more than an hour ago, which is when she would have received the FBI file on Qasim and then passed it on to the BKA. We might be able to check Qasim’s apartment before Schröder’s people get the same idea.”
Taylor thought for a moment. “You seem determined to make this a race between getting sent home or being arrested by the Germans.”
“There’s a third option. Cracking this case before anyone else.”
“You’re delusional.”
“I’m motivated.”
“Yes, but by what?”
“Same as always. Duty and justice.”
“I was thinking spite, arrogance, and a nose-diving career.”
“Whatever gets the job done.”
CHAPTER 27
They took a taxi to Neukölln, and as they rode, Taylor pulled out the FBI file on Tariq Qasim and looked it over. She read aloud in a low voice, “Qasim was an ambitious young officer and fierce Saddam Hussein loyalist throughout the 1970s. When Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, Colonel Qasim was ideally positioned to take on a prominent role in the war effort. He was instrumental in devising the most effective methods of deploying sarin gas, mustard gas, and other deadly chemical agents against Iranian military units and Iranian civilians in villages near the Iraqi border. Qasim’s efforts were bolstered in the final years of the war in part by the exploitation of dual-use materials supplied by the United States and other allied nations.”
Brodie absorbed that. “Dual-use” was political doublespeak for military tech that could have peaceful, civilian applications, but could also be weaponized. If the U.S. was sending “dual-use materials” to a guy like Colonel Qasim in the middle of a brutal war with the Iranians, it probably wasn’t Kevlar vests.
Brodie said, “It’s no secret that we gave Iraq assistance during that war. But I assumed it was things like military intelligence, maybe conventional munitions. This sounds like something else.”
Taylor added, “The Soviets also supported Iraq in the war. In fact, the Iran-Iraq War is one of the only Cold War–era conflicts I can think of where the U.S. and the Russians were on the same side.”
Brodie nodded. “Everyone was freaked out by the crazies in Iran. So, Colonel Qasim was getting clandestine WMD assistance from our government. And possibly from the Soviets as well.”
“Right.”
Brodie couldn’t quite get past the fact that the United States had assisted Saddam Hussein with his WMD program—the same WMD program that Scott Brodie and over a hundred thousand other American soldiers were sent to Iraq decades later to destroy. Of course, it turned out that Saddam had done the job of destroying the weapons himself throughout the nineties, while simultaneously encouraging the impression that he’d secretly held on to some of them, in what he thought was a clever ploy to deter the Americans and their allies from launching an invasion—but was actually a green light for the gang of warmongers in Washington thirsty for blood. Wrong move, Saddam.
Brodie tried to refocus on the case. The truth was, he’d never imagined this murder in Berlin would bring up so much Iraqi history, which in turn brought up a lot of Scott Brodie history. He said to Taylor, “The takeaway is that our person of interest in this case, Colonel Tariq Qasim, was using some nasty stuff, and some of it was supplied by our own government. Is this relevant to our homicide investigation?”
Taylor thought for a moment, then said, “We don’t know yet. But maybe.”
Brodie looked out the window as the taxi wound through the streets of Neukölln. Traffic was light but the cars were slowed by the snow, which was becoming heavier. Only a few pedestrians were out and about.
They passed a mosque, with a Berlin PD van parked out front and two officers with assault rifles flanking the entrance. By now reports on the nearby explosion would be all over the news, though undoubtedly with some key details missing. Brodie had a feeling that Neukölln and other Muslim neighborhoods were going to be under the eye for a while.
The cabbie turned onto Stuttgarter Straße, a tree-lined cobblestone street, and stopped in front of a dilapidated postwar apartment block covered with peeling mustard-yellow stucco and graffiti. “Wir sind da.”
Brodie paid the driver, and they exited the taxi and approached the building where Tariq Qasim, a.k.a. Abbas al-Hamdani, lived—if he was still alive.
