FIFTY-FOUR
Haz Mirza sat on his bed in his little flat at Gielower Strasse 41, doing his best to control his breath, to calm himself. Finally, he picked up a burner phone tucked in the sheets in front of him and tapped the icon to open Threema, the end-to-end-encryption private messaging app he used to communicate with the phones owned by members of his sleeper cell.
Mirza was using a solid approach to private communications, but he was unaware that Annika Dittenhofer had had him tailed months ago by a coordinated team of her denied assets. Through this she learned that he bought his burners at a small Chinese-run electronics shop in the eastern Winsviertel neighborhood, far from Mirza’s apartment in Neukölln.
And then, after winning a fight with Rudy over the cost of the operation, Annika purchased one hundred of the phones, then had them specially altered. The new phones she repackaged in shrink wrap, so that they were indistinguishable from models for sale on shelves around the city.
She then had them slipped into DHL shipments heading to the electronics store. The Shrike-altered phones had an actual digital transmitter implanted in them, with a tracking device and audio pickups that allowed whomever was monitoring the line to hear both ends of a phone conversation. There was also a keystroke logger installed, and this gave her the ability to read the owner’s outgoing text messages.
The operation had been a resounding success. Less than a month after the units were put in place, one of Mirza’s men entered the store and bought eight of the burners.
Within two weeks, Haz Mirza himself began using one of the eight.
Now four of Mirza’s nine subordinates carried Annika’s phones, giving her incredible access to the cell. Sometimes Mirza placed his phone in a Faraday cage, a small box used to block electromagnetic fields, and when he did this, he went dark, but he had to take the phone out to use it, so she always picked him up when he made calls or texts.
A similar operation, inspired by Annika’s work, was conducted by another Shrike intelligence officer, and this endeavor put phones in the hands of sleeper cells in three other European countries.
With these two initiatives, Shrike now had deeper knowledge of Quds sleepers in Europe than the Germans or the Americans by a wide margin.
Haz Mirza was unaware of all this, of course. He’d been here in Germany for over two years; if anything, as far as he was concerned, there was less heat on him now than when he arrived. Today he simply sat on his bed and smoked while he waited for the other end to answer the Threema call, with no concerns whatsoever that he was being listened in on.
And as soon as he placed a Threema call, Annika, Moises, and Yanis all sat up straighter in the moving truck three blocks away, and they scrambled to put on their headphones.
After several rings the call was answered. “Hello?”
“Babak?”
“Yes.”
“Hello, brother,” Mirza said. “It’s me. We have a green light for today.”
There was a long pause. “What? I thought we were to stand down.”
“New orders.”
A long pause. “What . . . what is the target?”
“The embassy. Pariser Platz. Five p.m. There is a change to the Marine guard force then, and it is also when many embassy staff are leaving work.”
Mirza could only hear breathing over the phone for several seconds. Finally, the other man said, “We don’t stand a chance, Haz.”
“We will throw our bodies on the barbed wire so others can cross over us.”
A pause, then, “What does that mean?”
“I am saying that we will die in our attack, for certain, brother. I will not lie. But we will, by our actions, cause an uprising in the West.”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
Mirza stood from his bed, began pacing around his room. “What don’t you know? You don’t know if you will follow an order from Tehran? You don’t know if you will follow an order from your leader? What don’t you know?”
The phone clicked off. “Babak? Babak? Coward!” he muttered to himself before hanging up.
He dialed the next man.
As soon as Yanis relayed the conversation in full to Dittenhofer, she exited the van and stormed south on the gritty street, in the opposite direction of Mirza’s flat and in the direction of the streetcar stop. She yanked out her own phone and initiated her own end-to-end-encryption app as she walked at a brisk, almost frantic pace.
She dialed Spangler, who was by now used to hearing from his star employee multiple times in an hour.
Dittenhofer spoke softly. “Haz Mirza has been told to stand down.”
“You told me that.”
“Ja. But he is going ahead anyway. He is planning an attack on the American embassy.”
“When?”
“Five p.m. It seems he’s having some problems getting his personnel together, as usual, but he’s a zealot. He’ll do it alone if he has to.”
Spangler said, “I understand.” He thought a moment.
“Say something! What is there to consider? We have to notify the Americans.”
“No, we have to notify our client. He will take the necessary steps.”
“We don’t have time for that.”
“Annika. Darling. Just trust me. Our client is here in Berlin. I will be speaking with him in moments.”
Dittenhofer stopped walking, right in front of a Thai massage parlor and a low-end coffee shop. “Why is he here in Berlin?”
“For a meeting with me.”
“Was the meeting planned before the Rajavi assassination?”
“Yes. He told me the day before yesterday.”
She gasped. “Our client knew about the hit on Rajavi. Obviously.”
“Nein, Annika. Our contract is drawing to a close; he wanted to come and wrap things up. That’s all.”
She continued like she didn’t hear him. “But the client is Israeli, not American. Right?”
“We don’t know that.”
“Bullshit, Rudy. We now have actionable intelligence about an imminent terror attack hours from now, one that will be carried out by a cell we have under surveillance.”
“And our client will stop that attack, I assure you. Now, I’m just getting to the meeting. I will call you after lunch.” Spangler hung up, but not before Annika heard some background noise. It sounded like a car door shutting, and then she heard other street sounds in the background.
She hung up the phone, walked with it in her hand for a moment, then decided on a course of action.
Quickly she placed another call.
Court had been surprised to see Dittenhofer through the grimy café window, but he’d simply looked down at his coffee cup after doing so, counting off seconds in his head. When he reached ten, he stood, turned for the door, and exited fifty yards behind his target.
She’d made a relatively short stop at the surveillance vehicle, less than a half hour, but Court didn’t know the significance of that, nor did he really care. He wanted a quiet place to snatch her off the street, but he didn’t see an opportunity now, so he just followed.
The woman headed over to Fritz-Reuter-Allee, her phone to her ear, and Court assumed she was returning to the streetcar stop. But instead Court watched as she tried to flag down a taxi. It passed her by, but she immediately began looking for another.
Shit. Court turned away and began frantically searching for some means of transportation for himself.
Annika Dittenhofer held her phone to her ear, willing the other end to answer. She was reaching out to Spangler’s driver, Wolfgang Wilke, whom she knew well enough to call, but perhaps not well enough to successfully socially engineer like her hasty plan called for.
He answered, as Germans do, with his surname. “Wilke.”
“Guten Morgen, Herr Wilke, it’s Miriam.”
“Hallo, Miriam.”
“Sorry to bother. I know you just dropped off Herr Spangler. I have something I need to bring to him, but forgot to mention it when we spoke. He must be heading into his meeting because he’s not answering. If you tell me where you are, I can bring the package to you.”
Wilke obviously had no suspicions at all about the request. “He’s at Charlotte and Fritz in the Regent. I’m out front. He expects an hour or so for the lunch; will you make it by then?”
The Regent hotel was the same hotel she’d met Rudy at for breakfast just days earlier.
“I’ll try. If not, I’ll get it to him later.”
On her third attempt, Annika Dittenhofer successfully flagged down a taxi and told the driver to take her to the Regent on Charlottenstrasse.
Today, she told herself, she would finally meet the client whose bidding she had been doing for the past two years.
Rudy wouldn’t like it, this she knew, but right now, she didn’t care.