This place had come fully furnished, probably sourced from a yard sale after someone’s grandma died. It actually reminded him of his parents’ upstate New York farmhouse where he grew up, which was full of thrift store finds and curbside crap thrown into the family Volkswagen van during weekend treasure hunts.
He smiled to himself as he thought about Arthur and Clara Brodie, two college-educated counterculture refugees from Greenwich Village who’d decided they preferred wide-open spaces and starry nights to their illegal three-room walk-up on Bleecker Street. His dad became a local handyman, and his mom used their sizable plot of land to grow fruits and vegetables that she sold to local grocers. Neither endeavor brought in much money, but it was enough for the mortgage and taxes and enough to take care of one kidgetting a perfectly mediocre public school education. His parents didn’t ask too much of life, and they were never disappointed.
As a teenager Brodie began to resent his folks for being intelligent people who had wasted their potential. His decision to return to the city that his parents had fled and to attend NYU, in their old neighborhood of Greenwich Village, and then after 9/11 to join the Army and enter a world of discipline and rigor, was in some obvious ways a reaction to that resentment.
Miraculously, his parents were still married, which beat the statistical odds. Not only that, but they werehappilymarried. In that respect, they were role models, though Brodie never understood what made them happy. Someday he should ask. Maybe it was the marijuana.
Brodie also thought about his last girlfriend, Theresa, who was a civilian instructor at Quantico’s Marine Corps War College. She taught a class on strategic thinking and had offered Brodie a few thoughts on how the guy she was sleeping with should approach the grand strategy of his career and his life.
Brodie stared at his dull reflection in the fifty-five-inch flat-screen, one of his few contributions to the décor. This shithole was starting to get to him. This overseas assignment had come at the right time.
Brodie got up from the couch and sat down at his desk, where he opened his laptop and ran a Google search for Harry Vance. He didn’t find anything about the murder, which was strange considering the body had been discovered that morning in Berlin, which was six hours ahead of the East Coast. Next of kin had undoubtedly been notified by now, and maybe an autopsy already performed. The only reason he could think of for the press silence was that there was some interagency disagreement about what to report. The medical examiner can be as vague as necessary in an initial assessment and not mention cause of death. In this case, apparent homicide. But if thathadbeen in the autopsy report, maybe the German government was concerned about public reaction from their own people if cause of death was murder, and place of death was the center of Berlin’s Arab refugee community. That would be red meat for the anti-immigration press, politicians, and public, not to mention the neo-Nazis. But in an open society you can only keep a lid on a homicide for so long.
His web search did pull up information on other Harry Vances,including a personal injury lawyer in Tampa and an orthopedic surgeon in St. Louis, and it wasn’t until far down in the search that he found something on Chief Warrant Officer Harry Vance of the Army Criminal Investigation Division—a 2006 article from CBS News entitled, “GITMO INTERROGATORS DEBATED OVER TACTICS,” in which Vance was quoted. The article was about the Criminal Investigation Task Force, an organization created in 2002 by the Defense Department to conduct investigations of detainees captured in Afghanistan and other countries in the War on Terror.
Brodie knew about the CITF, which was a military-wide task force bringing Army CID together with the parallel criminal investigative outfits in the Navy, Air Force, and Marines. According to the article, members of the CITF were present at Guantanamo Bay alongside “separate intelligence investigators”—i.e., CIA and Special Ops—and the military had raised concerns about the interrogation tactics being employed by their Intel brethren, including waterboarding, stress positions, and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The CITF members had sounded alarms with Pentagon officials that these tactics were illegal, immoral, and unlikely to produce reliable intelligence. The CITF guys had been rebuffed by their superiors.
Brodie hadn’t heard about this internal battle, but it didn’t surprise him. It was a classic example of the clashing cultures of the military and Intel worlds. Military investigators were trained to build a rapport with the people they were interrogating as a way to get the most reliable and salient information. It was a method that relied on diligence and discipline. Whereas a lot of the Intel and Special Ops guys were cowboys who made it up as they went along, often with disastrous results. Vance himself summed up this difference perfectly halfway through the article:
Among the CITF investigators raising alarms at the time was Army CID Special Agent Harry Vance, who was present for some of the initial interrogations of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay facility. Vance said, “After 9/11 everyone was scrambling to prevent another attack, but these Intel guys were going about it all wrong. You don’t make people talk. You make people want to talk.”
Brodie finished the article. Vance and his colleagues weren’t whistle-blowers. They hadn’t spoken to the press until 2006, when much of what had gone down at Guantanamo and also at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had already become public knowledge. Brodie wondered if Vance had any regrets about his initial public silence. Brodie, who had agreed to remain silent about what he’d seen and heard in Venezuela, was familiar with that feeling. Regardless, by raising concerns internally to his superiors at the Pentagon, Vance had made enemies in the Intel world. And now he was dead. Coincidence? Maybe. Or was Scott Brodie just projecting his own situation onto Vance? Probably.
Brodie opened the gray folder from Dombroski. Clipped to a short stack of pages was an official color photo portrait of Chief Warrant Officer Harry Vance in full dress uniform. He had been, as Brodie remembered him, a good-looking guy—square-jawed, pale-blue eyes, and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Brodie figured this photo was a few years old because Vance was wearing the CW4 rank insignia on his epaulettes—the same rank as Brodie—but by the time of his death Vance was a CW5.
The first page of the briefing material was a short bio. Vance was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He graduated magna cum laude with a degree in international studies from Johns Hopkins, then spent a year as a State Department staffer in DC before enlisting in and attending the Military Police School, followed by Army CID Special Agent training. He was stationed for a few years at Fort Benning, Georgia, before being transferred to the 5th MP Battalion in Germany where he worked in the Field Investigative Unit and then in the Terrorism and Criminal Investigation Unit. His first major terrorism case was investigating the 1998 al Qaeda bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. There was no mention of his experiences at Guantanamo, which wasn’t surprising.
The next page was a brief report prepared by the Legal Attaché Office at the American Embassy in Berlin that described the circumstances around the discovery of Vance’s body. A dog walker—unnamed in the report—had found the body at 6:15A.M.local time in a park called Körnerpark in the Neukölln neighborhood. Vance was found face up in the grass with a single gunshot wound to his right temple. No signs of struggle. His wallet was in the pocket of his slacks containing more than two hundred euros in cashas well as credit cards, a German driver’s license, and his CID badge. He was wearing a watch. No other jewelry. His right hand was in the pocket of his topcoat, holding his Army-issue Beretta M9 pistol. The embassy was still waiting on ballistics results from the German police to learn whether the pistol had recently been fired. The deceased also wore his empty pancake holster, and he had no cell phone on his person. No bullet casings were found in the immediate vicinity of the body. Initial blood splatter analysis and other forensic evidence indicated that he was shot and died where the body was found.
The only other document in the folder was a photocopy of a typewritten report by the Berlin Polizei—the city police who were the first to be contacted after the discovery of the body. Brodie couldn’t read a word of it but assumed the information was the same as what was included in the embassy’s report.
Well, not much to start with. But there was more to learn in Berlin. He closed the folder. Brodie expected that ballistics would come back indicating the murder weapon was a long gun that could be fitted with a scope. Otherwise, he saw no way that a trained agent who was wary enough to have his weapon unholstered and in his grip would not have been alerted to a danger right in front of him.
Obviously, this wasn’t a robbery, nor did the killer feel the need to even make it look like one. It would have been easy enough to steal his wallet, or at least the cash, along with his pistol and wristwatch if the killer wanted to stage a robbery.
As for his cell phone, no agent would leave home without it. So his phone wastaken. The killer—or an accomplice—had searched the body and wanted the phone, which would contain GPS tracking information on where Vance had been in the hours and days before his murder. The phone could also contain any communications that had culminated in his presence at that park in the middle of the night. Clearly, someone needed to cover their tracks.
Brodie ran a web search for Körnerpark. It was a small park, about the size of a city block, right in the middle of Neukölln. He pulled up some pictures and saw that it featured paved paths and formal landscaping, lots of open spaces and not much natural cover. Interestingly, the park was sunkenbelow street level. On the one hand, this layout allowed Vance to see someone approaching from any angle. But a shooter looking to snipe him from a distance couldn’t have asked for a better perch. Vance had been a sitting duck.
If this was an act of terrorism, Harry Vance was a prime target due to his work. A terrorist could have posed as an informant to lure Vance to a location where it would be easy to take him out. There was plenty of precedent for that in cases of murdered journalists and investigators—people who met unknown people in strange places. And that was one of many reasons why agents were supposed to have backup in the form of their partners.
And that was the other mystery. If Vance was working a case in Berlin, why keep it secret from his colleagues and commanding officer? If there was a woman in Berlin, and he was worried about appearances because he was still married, official CID business could only help to justify his presence there, and he could have stayed for longer stretches. This wasn’t adding up.
Brodie switched gears to think about Harry Vance the man, not Harry Vance the murder victim. Usually the first time a homicide investigator sees the victim, he or she is a corpse at the scene of the crime—or at the morgue. But Brodie could close his eyes and remember the guy. How Harry Vance carried himself, the sound of his voice. When Brodie took the Special Agent Course in 2005, Vance’s counterterrorism class was one of the most popular. Morale around the War on Terror was still high, and every CID recruit fantasized that they might be the one to end up in an interrogation room with bin Laden or one of his lieutenants, putting their nuts in a vise.
But Vance was something of an eccentric—a serious and somewhat reserved guy who did not feed into the rah-rah military mentality and who refused to play to his student audience. He told the class that what they needed above all to be successful interrogators was empathy. The relationship between an investigator and a suspect is inherently adversarial, he’d said, but the job of the CID agent is to undermine that dynamic as quickly and effectively as possible. Show them that you see them as human beings. Respect their motives and desires. Do whatever you can to get them to lower their guard and talk.
This wasn’t kumbaya bullshit from a guy who didn’t understand the stakes. On the contrary, as Vance made clear in class, in the world ofcounterterrorism getting the right intelligence at the right time could mean the difference between thousands of people living or dying. Brodie didn’t know it at the time, but Vance must have been recalling his experiences at Gitmo.
In retrospect, Brodie wondered if Vance was bitter. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, his career had been on the rise, and his expertise in counterterrorism was needed like never before in modern American history. Then he and his military brethren got sidelined for criticizing the controversial interrogation tactics of their supposed colleagues in the Intel community. Brodie wondered what that had done to him.
What were you doing in Berlin, Harry?
The answer to that question might answer all the others.
Brodie was eager to get to work, but he also knew it was a waste of time and effort to play desktop detective. He was about to close his computer when he saw a new e-mail come in.
It was from the Quantico travel office, an older woman named Joyce whom Brodie had become friendly with over the years:
