“Actually, we should call the police.”
“Later. From a pay phone.”
“Scott—”
“The only nice thing about being fired is that you have nothing left to lose.”
She didn’t reply.
Up ahead were two open doorways that led to rooms illuminated by windows. Brodie signaled for Taylor to take the left, and they quietly walked down the hall. Brodie stepped into the right-hand doorway, into a narrow, cramped kitchen. Dim gray light shone through a small window that faced an alley.
The kitchen was a mess. Dirty dishes and still water filled the sink. Some empty frozen-food boxes were strewn on the countertop, along with an ashtray full of cigarette butts. Dust, grime, and some food waste were scattered over the linoleum floor. Obviously, there was no longer a Mrs. Qasim in the picture, and Tariq Qasim had gone full bachelor.
Brodie moved back into the hallway and walked through the other doorway, which led to a modestly sized living room with two windows that also faced the alley. Taylor was checking a closet. She closed it and shook her head.
Brodie looked around. A tufted sofa sat atop a Persian rug beneath some framed landscapes of what looked like the German countryside that were at no risk of reminding Tariq Qasim of his homeland. On the coffee table were a few Arab-language newspapers and dirty coffee mugs. There was an ugly recliner facing a small flat-screen TV, and a desk tucked in the corner that was piled with papers.
Brodie signaled to Taylor, and they quietly walked through the room to another hallway that featured two doors. One led to a small bathroom that made the kitchen look clean.
They entered the bedroom and Brodie checked under the bed while Taylor checked the closet, looking for bodies, dead or alive. The place was a pigsty; more importantly, it had obviously not been searched.
Taylor said, “I’m going to search the desk in the living room.”
She left and Brodie had a closer look around. On top of an old wooden dresser stood a few framed photos. One of them appeared to be a wedding portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Qasim. They were a good-looking and happy young couple, and Brodie wondered if they’d tied the knot before or after Qasim began his successful career in deploying gases to the masses.
Another framed photo almost made Brodie do a double-take: four Iraqi men in military uniforms stood arm-in-arm in front of a tall archway madeof glazed blue bricks and covered in reliefs of dragons, bulls, and lions. Brodie recognized this as the Ishtar Gate, which stood at one end of the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon about seventy miles outside of Baghdad. Brodie had an almost identical picture of himself and three of his men who had stopped at the ruins during a resupply. This photo featured Colonel Qasim and three of his fellow officers, sporting olive-drab uniforms along with the Ba’ath Party’s standard-issue black berets. They all had Saddam Hussein look-alike mustaches.
Brodie looked closer at the blue Ishtar Gate, which, like much of the current-day ruins of Babylon, was actually a somewhat tacky reproduction commissioned by Saddam for his own glorification. Saddam had even—to the horror of the archeological community—stamped his own name on the bricks used for the reconstruction effort, to mimic the practice of the Babylonian king who had built the original ancient capital. In his delusions, Saddam Hussein dreamed that modern Iraq would become the new Babylon, and he the new Nebuchadnezzar. Instead, Mr. Hussein had wound up at the end of a hangman’s noose. Men plan and God laughs.
Brodie remembered that the original Ishtar Gate was in fact right there in Berlin, at the Pergamon Museum only a few miles from where he was standing. Brodie had seen it with Adam Kogan, who thought they needed to add some culture to their debauchery. Brodie had never imagined, as he’d stared up at the ancient gate, that only a few years later he’d be standing in the ruins of Babylon, in desert fatigues, holding his M4 carbine. A changed man in a changed world.
Brodie moved to the closet, which was full of clothes. A rolled-up prayer rug sat on a small table at the bottom of the closet. He then checked the dresser drawers, which were also full. If Qasim had left town of his own volition, then he’d certainly packed light. Definitely a snatch job.
Brodie opened the drawer in the bedside table, which contained a leather-bound Quran. It looked like an antique, with gilt inlays on the cover and handwritten calligraphy illuminated by gold frames on every page. Likely worth at least a few thousand bucks, and not the kind of thing you’d leave behind. Brodie knew that Saddam Hussein gifted Qurans such as this to his favored politicians and military commanders.
He returned the Quran to the drawer and doubled back to the livingroom, where Taylor was still looking through the desk. He said, “Don’t leave any fingerprints or DNA that can be traced back to you.”
“A little late for that, Scott. We’re up to our asses in unauthorized activities.”
“We’ll be okay. Nothing succeeds like success.”
“Are we in the same Army?” She picked up an envelope that looked like junk mail and handed it to him. On the back of the envelope were a few handwritten words in Arabic script.
She pointed to the handwriting. “This says ‘jamra,’ which I’ve heard used to refer to coal. But I looked it up, and it can also mean ‘ember.’ As in, Ember Berlin. The hookah lounge where Harry was before his murder.”
That sounded like a stretch, except for the fact that Vance had been looking for this man Hamdani, and based on Harry’s described behavior at Ember Berlin he very well could have set up a meeting there that was then canceled, or relocated to the park.
Taylor pointed to the next word. “This says ‘Storkow.’ I ran a search and it’s a small town southeast of here. I found this article.”
Taylor handed him her phone, displaying a 1991 article from theBoston Heraldtitled, “EAST GERMANS ASSISTED IRAQIS WITH BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL ARMS AT BERLIN SITE.”
Taylor continued, “It says that in the 1980s, the East German Army trained Iraqis in the use of biological and chemical weapons at a facility located outside of Berlin, in the town of Storkow. Iraqi officers used Storkow as a model to build their own WMD training facility in Iraq.”
“Okay. And?”
“This is it, Scott. This is the connection. Harry was looking for an American double agent working for the East Germans—Odin. And he was also looking for an Iraqi military Intel officer who specialized in biological and chemical warfare. That would be Tariq Qasim, now known as Abbas al-Hamdani. Qasim was most likely trained at this East German facility. And I’d bet you anything that Odin was there. Maybe they met. Maybe they worked together. Qasim could have IDed Odin, which is why Harry Vance was looking for him.”
That was a lot of conjecture on Ms. Taylor’s part. Just because Odin was spying for the Stasi didn’t mean he would have any reason or desire to visitan East German military WMD facility. On the other hand, Brodie and Taylor were trying to find a connection between Harry’s two extracurricular activities here in Berlin—finding Odin and finding Tariq Qasim—and this facility in Storkow could be it.
