Taylor noticed two long topcoats on a coat tree. She gave one to Brodie and they each put one on. Both coats had bullet holes from Brodie’s aggressive entry into the room, but these were less noticeable than his blood-soaked camo shirt. He put the flashlight in his coat pocket.
Taylor retrieved the pistol that had been fired by the dead scientist and handed it to Brodie. It was an HK 9mm, and he slipped it into his other coat pocket.
Taylor said, “Let’s go. We’ll get our hands on a phone and call the cavalry.”
Brodie said, “We need to find Granger.”
“We don’t know where he is or what he’s up to. But a police raid on Titan Genetics might tell us.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Something is going to happen in a couple hours, according to Steve.”
“He could have been screwing with us.”
“What if he wasn’t?”
Taylor did not reply.
Brodie looked at the television. A helicopter shot showed thousands of people marching down a nighttime street in the middle of a snowfall, many carrying signs. On the German-language chyron was the wordNEUKÖLLN. The image cut to a ground-level shot of the marchers, and Brodie recognized the street as Karl-Marx Straße. Throngs of people carried signs in German and Arabic, while others held aloft flashlights, candles, lighters, and smartphones. Brodie also saw several people holding up photos of Hasan, the murdered Iraqi immigrant. It was a vigil, and a protest.
Brodie said, “They like a good show.”
“Who?”
“Harry Vance’s words, on terrorists. Ask yourself, why would Reinhard Dorn and his engineers make the pathogen have a shorter incubation period?”
“Because it’s harder to treat. More deadly.”
“On the individual level, yes. But it’s also much harder to spread if the infected get sick and die quickly. You don’t have asymptomatic carriers walking around spreading the disease.”
“What are you getting at?”
“These bastards want to make a statement. They are planning aterrorist attack, not a covert dispersal of the plague pathogen. They want Armageddon. Götterdämmerung.” Brodie pointed to the vigil on the TV. “They are going to launch their biological attack into the heart of Neukölln, into the middle of a march that they knew would happen tonight because of the murder of Hasan al-Kazimi that they themselves committed.”
Taylor thought about that. “The cluster bombs.”
Brodie nodded. “I’ll bet the German authorities didn’t find them in the NordFaust raids today. Because they are in the hands of a man no one suspects: retired U.S. Army Colonel Charles Granger—an esteemed Cold War intelligence officer who helped defend the West against the threat of unconventional weapons. Granger could have packed the cluster bombs’ submunitions with the bacteria.”
She looked again at the marchers on the TV.
“And then, who knows? Hold the country hostage with the threat of another bioweapon attack? Use NordFaust to storm the Reichstag? Demand that all Muslims leave the country? We don’t know. And right now it doesn’t matter. Because whatever their plan is, it starts here in Berlin, and it starts soon.”
Taylor took all that in. “It’s a real Day X and Black Harvest, but much worse.”
“Right. And we are dealing with portable mortar-fired cluster bombs. They could be launched from anywhere.”
Taylor thought a moment. “What is the maximum range of that type of mortar?”
He considered that. Some of the vehicles in the 3rd Stryker Brigade had carried 60mm and 81mm mortars for dismounted maneuvers, but he was never part of a crew that operated them. The MAT-120 cluster bombs that Trent Chilcott had claimed were in the hands of NordFaust were, per their name, 120mm, which were considered heavy mortars andgenerally had longer ranges because they were packed with more propellant. Though a mortar filled with cluster munitions might be even heavier than average…
“Brodie?”
“I’m going to guess somewhere north of three miles. Maybe a three-and-a-half-mile maximum effective range.”
Taylor grabbed a marker off a desk and walked to the map of Berlin on the wall. She located Körnerpark, then moved her finger east to Karl-Marx Straße, which was named something else in the Berlin of the Third Reich. She tapped the street. “The vigil is around here.” She referenced the distance scale at the bottom of the map, then drew a rough circle. “There is our potential attack radius.”
Brodie looked at the map. The circle encompassed an area stretching south from Neukölln to the edge of the city, east into neighborhoods on the opposite bank of the Spree River, and north into parts of the central district of Mitte. In fact, this was completely useless information, even if his range calculation had been better than an educated guess.
Brodie then spotted a huge green expanse just west of Neukölln that appeared almost twice the size of the Tiergarten and was well within the radius. He looked closer and read aloud: “Tempelhofer Feld.”
