Jenkins shrugged. “That’s what it looked like.”
Brodie asked, “How many CID agents in the Fifth MP?”
“In Kaiserslautern, about sixty.”
“That’s not a big group.”
“No,” said Jenkins. “And they’re all gossips. The men worse than the women. Harry’s trips here were the subject of a lot of conversation and speculation. And the problem was, the less he talked, the more everyone else talked.”
“And you’re suggesting that there may have been a woman, but that you don’t believe that would have been enough to take him away from his children in the middle of a divorce.”
Jenkins nodded. “But I could believe him being absent because of a case.”
“A case that his commanding officer and his own partner knew nothing about.”
Jenkins looked at him. “We’re counterterror. We have a narrowly defined mandate. So, he could have gotten involved in something outside of that mandate and that’s why he kept it to himself.”
“Was that in his nature?” asked Taylor. “To go rogue like that?”
Jenkins shook his head. “Harry was obsessive about his work… but keeping me in the dark and doing an end-run around Colonel Trask, that’s something else. So, whatever reason I come up with for Harry’s trips here, I’m seeing a pattern of behavior that doesn’t really fit the man.”
Brodie asked, “Could any of your recent cases have made Harry or you a target?”
“You never know. But with most of our cases, we’re not dealing with pros. We’re dealing with a lot of young, self-radicalized idiots looking for a fast track to fame and their allotted seventy-two virgins in Paradise. So, weprevent fantasies from becoming reality, bad plans from becoming operational, and we try to keep stupid people from getting lucky. Every once in a while you find a radicalized a-hole who has actual high-level contacts in hot spots like Afghanistan, Syria. Mostly al Qaeda and ISIS. Those are the ones you really need to worry about. But CID agents are just not high-priority targets. And all of Harry’s knowledge of ongoing terrorist cases is redundant to mine, and to our commanding officer and in some cases other colleagues. So it doesn’t make sense from a tactical standpoint for a smart or even stupid terrorist to target a CID guy.”
That might be true, but Special Agent Jenkins might also have acquired an exaggerated sense of his own ability to get inside the heads of the crazies he’d spent his career hunting. Brodie said, “Sometimes the driving force is simple revenge. Anything like that?”
Jenkins nodded. “Yeah. We did have one case that was a little different. Two months back, Harry and I got approached by a couple of our CID colleagues who work narcotics. They were investigating a heroin ring being run by a few Arabic translators—Iraqi and Syrian nationals—who worked at the American base in Mannheim. Narcotics looped us in because they’d figured out these guys were wiring money to certain individuals in Baghdad who were members of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which in case you don’t know is a powerful Shi’ite militia group with close ties to the Iranian regime. We usually refer to the group simply as the Khazali network after the founder, Qais Khazali.”
Brodie had never heard of the Khazali network. They might have come along after his time in Iraq. But he did know about other Iraqi Shi’ite militias that received funding, training, and weapons from Iran, and also sometimes acted as muscle for the Shi’ite-dominated government in Baghdad. These militias had also—with Iran’s help—become experts at constructing and deploying the roadside IEDs that had sent hundreds of American soldiers to Landstuhl for reassembly and rehab—or home in body bags. Brodie had seen a few of those blasts up close and personal, and he’d lost a few friends to them. He asked, “Where were these translators selling the heroin?”
“Some on base. But they also had a couple of American accomplices, Army transpo guys who were helping them smuggle the stuff in U.S. military convoys. All over Germany and into France.” He looked at Brodie andTaylor. “This was a big operation. When we made our arrests, we really screwed the terrorist groups relying on that money.”
Taylor asked, “Does this militia have any connection with Hezbollah?”
Jenkins nodded. “One of the Khazali network’s first operations was fighting alongside Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon-Israeli War. And more recently they both fought together in Syria against ISIS.” He thought for a moment and asked, rhetorically, “So, is Hezbollah or the Khazali network under orders to ice the CID agents who put a dent in their funding network? Well, maybe it wouldn’t be the craziest thing I’ve heard lately. But…” He trailed off for a moment. “Doesn’t explain what Harry was doing in Berlin in the first place, in some Muslim quarter of the city, at a park in the middle of the night with his hand wrapped around his M9 like he’s expecting trouble.”
Brodie told Jenkins about the Shi’ite Al Mahdi Islamic Center that FBI Agent Kim had shown them, and the place’s suspected ties to Hezbollah. “Kim expects it’s under surveillance and will be raided soon.”
Jenkins processed that. “An FBI agent volunteering information? That’s a new one.”
“He’s expecting something in return.”
Jenkins looked at him. “The heroin smuggling case is an ongoing investigation. The arrests were reported, but the press hasn’t connected the dots to terrorism and we’re not going to help them do that until it’s wrapped up tight. But the FBI is always trying to stick their noses into our counterterror investigations, so your guy Kim might already know about this. Use your judgment.”
Taylor asked, “Do you know anything about the Al Mahdi Center?”
Jenkins shook his head. “Almost all our cases involve Sunni extremists, people loyal to al Qaeda or ISIS. But I mention the Khazali network because a case like that is pretty rare. The Shi’ites don’t come on our radar so often these days, and it’s harder for me to predict their motivations and behavior. But if Harry was investigating this Shi’ite center in Neukölln, he would have involved me. Even if his jurisdiction was a little… tenuous.”
Scott Brodie knew all about tenuous jurisdiction. The CID mandate was to investigate crimes that involved the U.S. Army, and CID agents occasionally landed in trouble for interpreting that a little too broadly. Mark Jenkinsand Harry Vance had been investigating a narcotics case that involved using Army personnel and Army equipment to distribute drugs in order to fund a militia that was tied to Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism. That was pretty clear-cut. But if Vance had somehow gotten himself involved in an investigation of Hezbollah’s fundraising and recruitment network in Berlin, that was maybe a bridge too far. But even if thatwaswhat he was up to, would it get him whacked?
Killing a cop investigating you was generally a bad tactic, since the ones still standing were that much more motivated to take your ass down. The Italian Mafia understood that and had a rule that law enforcement officers were never to be targeted—unless they were crooked cops in on the game. Brodie doubted that Hezbollah practiced that discretion, but it did raise the possibility that Harry Vance was a crooked cop. Which might explain his trips to Berlin.
Jenkins said, “Just to set the record straight about why we’re meeting in this hotel room, it’s because I’m being followed and I’m linked to Harry, and there’s no reason for you two to be linked to me and get on the radar of the guys who’ve been tailing me.”
Brodie nodded. Mark Jenkins didn’t want his colleagues to think he was hiding in his hotel room to avoid the fate of his partner. In some ways, Berlin could be more dangerous than a lawless place like Venezuela. Why? Because here, in civilization, you could easily let your guard down. And then you were dead. And surprised that you were.
Brodie asked, “Does Chief Inspector Schröder know about this heroin-smuggling case?”
