Authors: David Hagberg
Desert Fire (6 page)
“Then you'll help?”
Roemer looked at him. “Did you have something on her, or did she volunteer?”
“We had nothing on her,” Whalpol said.
“What about me? You have something on me?”
“Heavens no,” Schaller blurted.
“Yes, in a manner of speaking, we do,” Whalpol said softly.
Roemer turned on him. “A refreshing dose of honesty from the BND. What is your lever on me, Herr Major? My father?”
“If I said yes to that, Investigator, would it satisfy you that indeed I am a bastard?”
Roemer held himself back from sarcasm. He felt off balance. He was being manipulated. But Whalpol was very good, and in the final analysis, Roemer wondered if he cared.
“You were selected because you are a good cop, but even more than that, because you are honest, conscientious, and no matter who might try to sway your investigation, you would not be moved. And in the end you will find Sarah's murderer ⦠people, policies or governments be damned. And that, my dear Investigator, is the lever I hold. Your own honesty is the fulcrum.”
The bastard was right, and Roemer found himself nodding.
“Now.” Whalpol picked up his briefcase, set it on Schaller's desk, opened it and withdrew two fat file folders. “Are you on the case?”
Roemer returned his gaze. “I will find her murderer.”
“You will report directly to Ernst and ⦔
“I will report to no one, Herr Major. If I need assistance I will call the Prosecutor or you. Other than that you will not hear from me until I have the killer.”
Whalpol considered that for a moment, then nodded. “Fair enough, but you understand that my work will continue. Don't interfere.”
“I'm only interested in Sarah's murderer.”
“You will need these.” Whalpol handed the files to Roemer. “One is a dossier on Sarah, the other a list of everyone on the Iraqi team, including those we've identified as Mukhabarat.”
“Who is their field chief?”
“Her name is Leila Kahled el Zayn.”
Schaller smiled. “You will do a good job for us.”
Roemer saw that the man's hands were shaking.
THE HOUSE WAS dark, Teutonic in its foreboding heaviness, with its thick wooden beams and tall, smoking chimneys. It looked down on the Rhine and the city of Bonn, just now coming alive with the chill, desultory dawn.
In a third-story bedroom, Leila Kahled woke with a start, her heart thumping and perspiration on her forehead. She glanced at the bedside clock, then lay back and closed her eyes.
It was just seven. The same dream again.
Insha' Allah,
how she hated it here. During the daytime she was usually all right, but at night, the memories came flooding back and she relived the horror that had forever changed her.
Insha' Allah,
how she hated it here. During the daytime she was usually all right, but at night, the memories came flooding back and she relived the horror that had forever changed her.
Too much responsibility for one so young, her Uncle Bashir might say. But at thirty-two she had seen and done more than most men twice her age.
She was worried about the girl, Sharazad Razmarah, and Ahmed Pavli. Their relationship was disintegrating.
But the BND would never let the poor woman go. Not until the project was finished.
But the BND would never let the poor woman go. Not until the project was finished.
She had to laugh. Colonel Mikadi was worried about the U.S. or Germany's EC trading partners finding out about the deal. He was rabid about security. In reality the Germans were more interested in security than the Iraqis were. The Germans would make sure it stayed within the country.
In her last report to Baghdad, she'd recommended that Pavli be pulled off the project. Despite the German cooperation, he was becoming a danger. Her request had been denied. Pavli was too important now that the BND was targeting him. What the Mukhabarat wanted the Germans to learn, they would funnel through him.
But Allah in heaven, there was more going on than they had told her. Something else was happening here. Something sinister that most of the time she did not want to think about.
“Find out what they are doing and what they are thinking, but do not antagonize anyone. This is not Lebanon,” Bashir Kahair, the deputy director of the Mukhabarat, had told her. Uncle Bashir, though not really an uncle, was an old family friend.
No, she thought, her eyes closed in the darkness, it was not Beirut. It was Germany. But again the dream came to her, the same awful memories.
She'd been just eighteen and full of idealism, working for Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. Everybody worked for the PLO in those days. You didn't even have to be Arab.
One night a Phalangist patrol caught her in the hills above Beirut, where she had gone to spy on one of their camps in which it was suspected that some Shiites had been tortured and killed. One by one, all fifteen of the young men raped her.
That night she managed to escape, and she found and killed them all by slitting their throats as they slept. It
was the Arab punishment. The one certain to make them and their brothers understand.
was the Arab punishment. The one certain to make them and their brothers understand.
But the memories refused to fade. At times the brutal rape haunted her. At other times, like this morning, it was the killing of the fifteen young men. It had taken her most of the night. As they strangled on their own blood, the gaping wounds in their throats made horrible gurgling sounds. She would never forget.
The experience had left its indelible mark on her soul.
“You are too hard on yourself, my little one,” her father, General Josef Assad Sherif, had told her some years ago. “You need to care for a man, perhaps a child.”
By then they had left Beirut and enlisted in Saddam Hussein's growing movement. The PLO would never win the struggle against the Zionists, let alone the West. But with a strong Iraq, the region might come back to the law of Allah. The reasonable law of Allah, not the Ayatollah Khomeini's vision of the Koran.
“I can't care for myself, let alone anyone else,” she had cried. “There's nothing left inside of me, can't you see that?”
When Leila was ten, her mother had been killed in an Israeli air raid on the camp where they'd lived outside Beirut. Her father, who was often absent for long periods, took over the raising of his only child with the help of his good friend Bashir Kahair and the local camp women. She loved her father, but she realized she'd never really known him. He was, in some ways, even more distant a relative than her Uncle Bashir.
She opened her eyes. She pushed back the covers and got out of bed. She slept nude. Her skin shimmered in the early-morning light as she padded across the large bedroom to the windows, where she pulled back the curtains and looked out. She was a tall woman with a slight, almost boyish body and long legs. Her complexion was olive, her hair long and jet-black and her eyes wide and intense.
It had rained heavily in the night and the city looked
fresh and clean. Below, in the cobblestone courtyard, her father's chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Mahmud Habash, was stowing a suitcase in the trunk of a gray Mercedes. He closed the lid and looked up.
fresh and clean. Below, in the cobblestone courtyard, her father's chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Mahmud Habash, was stowing a suitcase in the trunk of a gray Mercedes. He closed the lid and looked up.
Leila did not move. For a long time they stared at each other. Of the dozen men here on her father's staff, she liked Habash least. His eyes were cold and dispassionate, yet whenever he looked at her she got the impression that he was imagining her nude bodyâbut clinically, without lust.
The old Beirut, before the fighting, had never seemed so far away from her as it did at this moment. She shivered but remained where she stood. She would not back down, despite how silly and dangerous for an Arab woman this was. Let the bastard have an eyeful! He answered to her father.
The happiest days of her life had been when she was a little girl, her mother was alive, and her father would take them to a fancy restaurant downtown, overlooking the water, or perhaps they would stroll along Hamara Street looking in the windows of all the fancy shops. She felt nostalgia for something she'd never had for long: a sense of belonging with another person, shared emotions.
Habash finally lowered his eyes and disappeared into the house.
For another minute Leila stood by the window, her eyes drifting to the city and the river that wound its way through the plains and hills. She could not imagine Germany as a place of lightness and contentment, even though this country had been their ally from time to time. Germany for some reason was to her a dark, brooding place.
“The Germans have their hands full, Uncle Bashir, they're not the enemy,” she'd argued the afternoon she'd been handed this assignment.
“You're not going there to make trouble, Leila. You're going to make sure there is none. Nothing more.”
“And if there isâwhat then?”
“You report the problem and we will take care of it. You're to be nothing more than an observer for us. A little desert mouse in the corner.”
“The BND will know who and what I am.”
“Almost certainly. They will have their people watching us. Their efforts will be sophisticated, no doubt. It is to be expected.”
Uncle Bashir had come to her apartment near the Tariz Air Base, and they went for a walk in the pleasant evening. He'd come not only to tell her about her assignment in Bonn, but to talk to her about her father, who'd been working too hard. A lot of people on the Council were worried about him, at his age.
“He won't listen to me,” Uncle Bashir said. “Calls me an old woman.”
Leila laughed. She could hear her father saying it. “But he's not an old man, Uncle Bashir. He's just fifty-four.”
“The president has taken a personal interest in his well-being.”
“I'll go over and slow him down, if that's what you really want. But you know how he's always been.”
“This is so important to us, Leila. Your father may have discussed it with you, considering your ⦠position.”
She shivered. Since she had separated from her husband, she'd taken care of her father's household. She had become the son he'd never had, and assumed the responsibility of mistress of the household for a man who was rarely home.
“You know how delicate this is,” Uncle Bashir went on. He was a tiny, birdlike man with a mind as sharp as anyone's in Iraq.
“The Germans are selling us nuclear technology and no one must know about it. I'm not completely lost in the forest,” she said.
“If it gets out, there will be a lot of trouble for us,” Uncle Bashir said. “In Washington, in Tel Aviv. Everywhere.”
“I understand.”
“Your father is a presence.”
“I'll slow him down, Uncle Bashir.”
“There's been criticism from the Council because your father was not born in Iraq, yet he's chief negotiator.”
“Have there been questions about his loyalty?”
“Some,” Uncle Bashir admitted. “But President Hussein is behind him for the moment. So long as no mistakes are made.”
“I see what you mean,” Leila said, and she was sick at heart. But these were horribly strange times for all of them since the war. She wasn't even sure that they were doing the correct thing.
They started back up the hill toward Operations. Uncle Bashir looked at her shrewdly, and smiled. “You need a vacation from the foreign desk in any event, I suspect.”
Leila had to laugh. “It shows?”
“It shows.”
Six months, she thought. All during that time her father had shuttled back and forth between Bonn and Baghdad, and sometimes he disappeared for days at a time. Just like the old days. Now, in Germany, she was left behind again to maintain the household they had borrowed from one of the Krupp steel magnates across the river. And always there was the secrecy.
She turned away from the window and went to her desk, where she switched on a small lamp. Papers and files were strewn everywhere. Last night she'd gone to bed early, ignoring the report to Baghdad. First she wanted to speak to Pavli before she made another, stronger recommendation that he be removed from the team.
The telephone on her desk buzzed and she picked it
up. Her father was on the house line.
up. Her father was on the house line.
“Good morning, little one, you're up?”
She smiled. “Just. Are you leaving again?”
“I'll be back tomorrow afternoon. You'll have to cancel our dinner engagement tonight ⦠unless you want to host it alone.”
“It's no one important,” Leila said. “I'll reschedule for next week. But just a moment, I'm coming down.”
“Don't bother,” her father said. “I have an airplane to catch. I'll see you when I return.”
“I'll be just a moment ⦔
“No.” Her father cut her off harshly. “I'm leaving immediately. But listen to me, Leila. I don't want you parading around at the windows ⦠naked.”
Leila stifled a laugh. Habash had told on her. What a bastard. Her father was, for all his world travels, still an Arab.
“Yes, my father,” she said at length.
“'As-fa,”
I'm sorry.
“'As-fa,”
I'm sorry.
“You can never tell about the bastards in this country,” he said.
“Have a good trip, Father,” she said. “With Allah.”
He hung up. A moment later Leila put down her phone and stared at it. Her father sounded exhausted. He was working too hard, just as Uncle Bashir had warned her. She would speak to him about it when he got back. Not that it would do any good. She felt further apart from him than ever before.
She went back to the window, now parting the curtains only a crack, and looked down. Her father and Habash came out of the house. They seemed to be arguing. She could see that her father was angry.
They got in the car, and a minute later they were down the long driveway and out the gate, hidden from view by the trees that lined the avenue down to the Ronner-strasse.
She felt a sudden, overwhelming sorrow for her father,
and for herself. Neither of them had anyone except the other. He'd lost his mate, and she had never really had one.
and for herself. Neither of them had anyone except the other. He'd lost his mate, and she had never really had one.
Turning away from the window, she could almost envy Ahmed Pavli and Sharazad Razmarah. At least they thought they had love.
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