SIXTY-NINE
Zack Hightower stopped the BMW 5 Series at the checkpoint on the corner of Clayallee and Finkenstrasse and rolled down his window. In the front passenger seat, Court Gentry pulled his credentials and passed them over, and a uniformed police officer looked at them, then scanned them with a cell phone.
A second officer, this one wearing a shotgun around his neck, stood by the front passenger window. Court made quick eye contact with the man, who only nodded back his way, then continued scanning the vehicle.
Zoya was in the backseat next to Hanley, and she passed her ID over to him, while he rolled down his window and proffered both their credos and his invitation.
While an officer checked Hanley’s invitation and scanned the two IDs of the backseat passengers, Zack was instructed to pop the trunk and the hood. Men searched both for explosive devices, while yet another man used a mirror on a pole to look under the car.
The Germans did all this efficiently; there were a lot of diplomatic functions full of VIPs in Berlin, after all, so they had plenty of experience.
That was not to say this was a normal day for those charged with the security of the event. The American CIA had told the Germans they were worried about tonight at the ambassador’s residence specifically, although the Agency people in the American embassy had admitted to their counterparts that they had been wholly unable to convince the ambassador to delay or cancel the event. Still, the normally robust security for a function like this had been doubled, and the police were on alert throughout the city.
When the BMW was waved on down Finkenstrasse to the next stop, the four people in the vehicle began talking about what they all saw.
“Eight city cops at the first stop,” Zack said.
“That’s my count,” Zoya added.
Court was looking into the park on their right. “Looks like a half-dozen radio cars, two uniforms at each, parked on the southern side of the road. I see flashlights out in the trees, assume some foot patrols.”
Hanley said, “Also assume checkpoints in the other direction, so double our counts for the total external ring security force.”
Zack said, “Nursing home on the left.”
Court quipped, “Matt, does Zack have time to run in and get a brochure?”
“Watch it,” Hanley said. “I’m older than Romantic.”
The man behind the wheel groaned. “I really hate that code name, sir.”
Hanley didn’t respond to this. Instead he leaned against the window and looked up into the dark sky. “I don’t see any air. The Germans should have a helo or two up for this.”
They stopped at a second checkpoint on the road right in front of the front gate, and here all four were asked to step out of the vehicle by an armed man in a black windbreaker. Once standing in the road, they were quickly wanded for weapons by Germans who looked like they might have been part of the Regional Security Office, local security officials who helped the embassy with such tasks.
A valet took the keys from Zack and drove the BMW to a parking lot in Finkenpark, while the four new guests walked to the guard shack next to the driveway, passing the open iron gate.
Court put his hand on the metal bars idly as he passed, and he judged them to be heavy-gauge iron and able to stop most any vehicle that might try to ram its way inside.
But only if the gate was closed.
The shack was manned by a half-dozen uniformed Diplomatic Security Service personnel with MP5 submachine guns. Hanley and his small entourage waited in a short line behind other well-dressed guests, and finally their invitations and credentials were checked over a third time and they were welcomed to head up the driveway to the main house of the two-acre property.
The exquisitely manicured front garden had male and female security personnel standing around, all in suits and carrying subguns, shotguns, or pistols. Court could see their wired earpieces and the radios on their belts, and he was comfortable they would be in comms with the local police, the Regional Security Officers out front, and the personal protection detail of the ambassador inside.
On the roof of the old white mansion he could see movement, and he knew these would be DSS snipers, or perhaps U.S. Marines.
They walked as a unit. Zoya, Court, and Zack were supposed to be Matt’s bodyguards, after all, so they were close enough together to speak without being heard.
Zoya said, “Easily seventy-five armed security personnel, when you include the polizei. Maybe one hundred.”
“Yep,” Hanley said. “But al-Habsi would know that already, and Mirza will be ready for it.”
Zack said, “How the hell can Mirza get through this? I mean, unless he’s already here.”
Just then, a police helicopter flew overhead, and it shined a spotlight somewhere in the park across the street before flying off.
“Air. That’s a positive development,” Court said.
Zack threw some cold water on this, however. “Local police. They should have GSG9 in the sky and ready to hit.” Grenzschutzgruppe Neun was Germany’s elite special mission unit, some of the best paramilitaries on Earth.
They entered the front door of the massive, restored early-twentieth-century mansion at ten after nine, and they placed their covert earpieces in their ears, putting themselves in communication with one another, no matter where in the building they were.
Ingress complete, they began working on phase two of tonight’s operation. They had to keep Hanley away from Ryan Sedgwick, or anyone who worked with Sedgwick who would recognize Hanley, and they had to do it while preparing for the potentiality of a terrorist attack.
Stage three was to eyeball every single person in the building and evaluate them as a threat.
And stage four was to stop a terror attack.
It was going to be a long night.
Zoya had been looking through the faces in the crowd in the living room, and she saw something that caused her to whisper into her mic. “I spy the Russian ambassador. He’s here with a pair of security. They appear unarmed.”
“Kind of like us,” quipped Court.
Two unmarked and massive semi-tractor-trailers rolled north up Clayallee shortly after nine p.m., under heavy cloud cover that made the evening dusk near black. They passed the Museum of the Western Allies in Berlin and followed along with the speed of the light evening traffic, staying several lengths apart.
No one on the road paid any attention to the big trucks, not even when they slowed and made a left onto a two-lane, unlit wooded track. The vehicles rumbled at slow speed into the trees of Grunewald, the largest green area in the city of Berlin, leaving the lights of Clayallee and the mansions along the road behind, and continuing on through the trees for a hundred meters.
Both vehicles then slowed and pulled as far as they could to the right, onto the narrow shoulder, just steps from the parking lot of a Swiss restaurant. The pneumatic brakes on both vehicles hissed air as the trucks parked. Two men in the cab of the rear vehicle leapt out and ran to the back. The rear trailer’s tail pointed away from the woods and back towards central Berlin, and when the men opened the heavy doors, they peered inside and saw nothing but darkness.
But only for a moment. Haz Mirza stepped out of the cab of the front truck, and he jogged back to the open doors of the second vehicle. He wore a small laptop computer on a sling so that it was propped against his chest; there was a tiny joystick attached to the USB port on the side, and once he had stopped jogging he focused his attention on the screen in front of him. He tapped some keys and soon dozens of little red lights began glowing inside the trailer.
The lights switched, one by one, from red to green.
Mirza looked back up the wooded road and towards Clayallee in the evening dim. There were a couple of cars heading this way, but nothing that looked threatening to him or his operation.
And if there were threats out here, Mirza knew the two men with him both carried short-barreled, folding-stock AKs under their light jackets.
He reached down to his keyboard, took a deep breath, and said “Allahu akhbar” while pressing a pair of command keys.
The high-pitched sound of one hundred sixty spinning motors echoed out of the large trailer, the buzzing so loud it was almost painful. He checked the road again and found the coast clear enough, so he tapped a few more keys.
At nine fifteen p.m., one at a time, weaponized quadcopters automatically disengaged from metal racks lining the side walls of the trailer and began flying slowly out the back of the truck.
The first meter-wide craft moved past Mirza and the two other men’s heads at walking speed, and then it climbed just as slowly. There was a canopy of trees over the road, but the forest was well kept, and the limbs didn’t cross the road until they were fifteen meters high.
The first drone stopped its climb at a height of just ten meters, and behind it, at a separation of twenty horizontal meters, the second drone flew out of the trailer.
Other than a small green light, visible only on one side of the quadcopter, the devices were all but invisible in the day’s dying light, and they flew straight along the wooded road, passing over cars without anyone taking notice.
Mirza kept checking his computer, watching the camera view of the lead vehicle, which he called “the eye.” This first drone would be Mirza’s reconnaissance craft. Though all Kargu drones had cameras, this one unit would be kept above the flight, helping orient him as he organized the nonautomated portion of the attack to help him send each vehicle to exactly where it could do the most damage.
At this point Mirza was not piloting all the little aircraft himself; he was only commanding them to fly a prearranged pattern, with a series of execute commands. He could take over an individual quadcopter at any time and get it to do whatever he wanted it to do, but for now he was more a spectator to the programming Tarik’s people had input.
Once out of the woods, the first drone made a left above Clayallee and shot almost straight up to 120 meters, then began moving horizontally at nearly fifty kilometers an hour.
Behind ship one, others came, each twenty horizontal meters apart, each churning the air with small plastic rotors.
With the sounds of traffic, even over this relatively quiet street, the quadcopters could not be heard at this altitude, and they were extremely hard to see under the clouds at this time of the evening.
It took over two minutes for all forty of the quadcopters—two squadrons of twenty—to leave their racks and fly off towards their destination, but the second they had done so, the rear trailer’s doors were slammed shut. The two men who had come from the cab secured the latch, then headed back to the front of the rig, but not before Mirza embraced them both with a firm hug and a wide smile.
He said, “Paradise awaits,” and the men responded in kind.
Then Haz Mirza ran up the street and climbed into the first vehicle, which, like the other, had been kept running. This vehicle had a sleeping berth, and Mirza crawled his way back to the small workstation he’d built there. Taking the laptop from around his neck, he put it on a table and plugged it back into the power and the three monitors secured to the wall in front of the bunk bed. Immediately he focused attention on the center screen to watch the eye drone’s progress up Clayallee.
Both semis began rolling forward simultaneously, then pulled into the parking lot of the Swiss restaurant and turned around to follow after the two squadrons of attack drones.
Court wasn’t here for the party—he wouldn’t know a good party from a bad one—but he did have to admit to himself that everyone around him seemed to be having a good time.
The three Poison Apple contractors had done their best to stay near Hanley but not to loom too closely, while Hanley continued to do his best to avoid Ambassador Sedgwick as the Kentuckian walked through the large two-story residence shaking hands.
The home had been built in the 1920s for a wealthy German industrialist. It had been all but destroyed in the Second World War, but it was rebuilt as West German capitalism cleaned up everything to the west of the Brandenburg Gate. Composed of an entryway on the northern side leading to a long wide gallery going east and west, with the main living spaces of the home in the back, in the wings, and on the second floor, the home’s wide and tall rooms were a perfect exhibition space for an art show, and Ambassador Sedgwick fancied himself an energetic supporter of the arts.
The home was nearly filled with artists, dignitaries from around the world who called Berlin home, and local elites, along with a security presence that did not go unnoticed by the gathering crowd. Court heard people commenting on all the armed guards, speculating it had something to do with the attack on the U.S. embassy earlier in the week, though no one seemed at all concerned about anything more than getting a good look at the art and snagging another flute of champagne off the next sterling silver tray that passed by.
Hanley walked through the long gallery, pretending to examine the artwork on the walls and on easels in the middle of the room, a collection of minimalist paintings by the late American artist Robert Ryman, while his three operatives scanned the crowd for threats.
In addition to the ambassador, there would be others here in the crowd who would recognize the deputy director for operations for the CIA, so Court half expected Hanley to get either pulled into a room by Sedgwick himself or asked to leave by one of Sedgwick’s people, but so far the big DDO had managed to eat two plates of hors d’oeuvres while standing out in the evening air in the back garden.
The three Poison Apple operators weren’t eating—it would have been off for bodyguards to snack while on the job—but while Hanley looked over the canvases, all some version of white with only faint shades of gray here and there, Zack, Zoya, and Court searched the crowd.
They were looking for Mirza, of course, but they were also looking for pre-attack indicators from others. The man passing the canapés, the woman walking by with the tray of champagne, the local security hired to stand near the pieces of art in the long living room or the main hall gallery.
Anyone could be involved in this.
Zack whispered into his mic for all three to hear. “Where’s the art?”
Court felt the same as Zack. The paintings looked more like blank canvases that had collected dust to him, though he was no art critic.
Zoya was obviously annoyed with Zack, and she responded, “I think it’s brilliant. Subtle, yet powerful.”
“What do you think, Six?” Hightower asked.
Court cussed under his breath before responding, “I kinda like it.” He didn’t. But he didn’t want Zoya to think he was a Neanderthal like Hightower just because he didn’t see what the big deal was about a bunch of off-white squares.
Hanley had been listening silently to the discussion. He whispered but his voice was broadcast in their earpieces. “Stop looking at the damn art and start looking for our damn target.”
“Sure thing, boss,” Zack answered back.
Hanley’s earpiece beeped, letting him know a call was coming through. He told the others to keep doing what they were doing and he tapped his finger to the little device. It was Brewer; she was filling him in on the German investigation.
She told him that a hard drive recovered from Mirza’s little apartment revealed that notes the man made to himself on the day of the first attack seemed to suggest that the second wave would be at the embassy itself, and not here at the residence, some seven miles away.
Hanley reluctantly ordered Brewer to task Chris Travers and his team to the streets near the embassy. He thought the evidence found might have been a plant, but he did have to admit the security situation here at the residence seemed to be well in hand. Nothing short of a flight of attack helos could defeat one hundred security men, and he doubted Mirza had access to that.
He had warned the Germans, warned his CIA staff, warned the ambassador of a terror attack. He wasn’t sure what else he could do.
He switched back to the previous channel on his earpiece and filled in the Poison Apple assets on his call, and to this Zack said, “All the evidence the Germans got from the sleeper cells points to another attack at the embassy. This might be a dry hole. Empty like these shitty paintings.”
Hanley said, “We can only hope they hit the embassy. That place is on lockdown. Nobody for them to go up against but Marines in Pariser Platz, and I’d rather the jarheads dealt with Mirza now than a bunch of consular affairs folks a week from now.”
“Roger that, boss,” Zack said.
Zoya spoke with sarcasm. “So we pray for an attack on the embassy. That’s the best-case scenario?”
“It is,” Hanley confirmed.
“What is worst-case?”
“Stay tuned. We might all find out together.”
No, they hadn’t been able to locate Spangler, and no, Sultan al-Habsi had not been detained and interrogated, but Hanley didn’t put much weight into either of these two losses. He felt strongly that Spangler had just been a local errand boy for al-Habsi’s plan and wouldn’t know details of any attack planned by Quds Force operatives in the city.
And Hanley also knew that he absolutely, positively, without question could not haul the deputy director of ops for the Signals Intelligence Agency of the United Arab Emirates, son of the ruler of Dubai and the crown prince of the nation, into a fucking black site and beat the intel out of him.
No, Hanley figured he was doing the right thing, in the right place, for right now. He was with his troops in the field, waiting for a potential enemy attack. He couldn’t stop it, he couldn’t do more to warn others, but he also would not run away from it.
He ordered his team to split up to cover more ground. Court and Zoya went back into the building, while Hanley and Hightower went down the stairs to the back garden and separated.