The answer lies at the real quintessence of intelligence gathering: the concept that information is the raw material out of which political power can be produced. And because political power is something that budget-intensive organizations (which obviously include all the intelligence agencies) do not want to relinquish, forgo, or sacrifice, most of ’em treat their material as wholly proprietary.
Indeed, they’re like only children who won’t share their toys in kindergarten. The unhappy result is that most intel is stovepiped. It’s kinda like all those smokestacks you used to see in the old industrial zones before the tree-huggers outlawed smokestacks. Each existed parallel to the others. Each vented its own hot air (Now that’s an apt image, since this is intel we’re talking about here, huh).
Anyway, since DIA doesn’t get to see CIA’s stuff, and Naval Intelligence routinely tells Army Intel to get fucked, seldom does anything get cross-checked. Male tab “A” is never allowed to be inserted in female slot “B” because the slot and the tab belong to different, and competing, Intelligence organizations.
Moi, on the other hand, is well practiced at male/female slot insertion. And so, just as my old sea daddy, the late (and much lamented) Warrior CNO named Arleigh Secrest had once taught me, I took every shard of information I’d been able to assemble, laid it out, and went over it as if it was a piece of a three-dimensional puzzle, the scope, complexity, and design of which I didn’t know.
Admiral Secrest used to say that if you do this little exercise and there’s even a hint of preconception in your mind, you’ll screw it all up. “Dick,” he’d once growled at me in that wonderful gravelly voice of his, “you have to make your mind a blank, which for you doesn’t happen to be much of a task at all.”
And then, he said, you treat every piece of information as if it were new. You see where it fits, and where it doesn’t fit; you layer it once, twice, thrice, and more if necessary. You look for patterns. You check for coincidence and happenstance, because you know there’s no such thing in the Warrior’s cosmos. And when you’re done (and only you will know precisely when you are done because it will feel right), you will have been able to assemble a holographic image of the problem, and you will instinctively understand precisely how to solve it.
Okay, that’s the procedure. Here’s a bit of what I’d been able to put together.
• Fred’s material indicated a Russkie involvement. That made sense to me, because we’d waxed a bunch of Ivans at the ADM site. But it wasn’t clear what that Russkie involvement was. It could be as simple as imported muscle; it could be as complex as transnational terrorism. This inquiring mind wanted to know.
• From the Nuremberg computer I discovered that No Such Agency had been tracking a series of phone calls from Düsseldorf. One of the NIQs48 was the same as the one the dead Ivan had written on his hand. The identities of the participants were annotated only as FN1,49 FN2, FN3, and so on. But the subject of the conversations, which were larded through with code words and other gobbledygook, led me to assume that NSA had been assigned to help track stolen ADMs. I gave myself a mental note to pass the number to Fred and have him check it.
• Another info-shard, this one from the CIA, hinted that Lothar Beck was selling dual-use equipment to the Russkies, who were reselling it to such gentle and kind sovereign states as Iraq, Iran, and Libya. Dual-use stuff, you will remember, is what can be used to make fertilizer, but in a matter of hours it also can be switched over to make chemical and biological agents. As a student of history, I recalled that just prior to World War II, Nazi Germany did much the same thing: Hitler used the Third World as his weapons lab. It appeared that Lothar Beck was doing the same thing at the dawn of the new millennium.
• Fred had been able to link Lothar to half a dozen ultranationalist organizations inside Germany. The folks at Patch Barracks, e.g., John Suter, were looking at many of the same groups as KSK, because American installations were being probed.
• Wink told me that so far as the Agency was able to find, there was no Peter Grüner in the West German government. That puzzled me. I was certain that Heinz Hochheizer had been telling me the truth when he’d described his former agent, code-named Rottweiler. Still, the Stasi was a formidable opponent during the Cold War, and maybe Heinz had been better under duress than I’d given him credit for being. Maybe “Peter Grüner” was an alias. Whatever the case, I decided to abandon my search. It was a waste of time.
• That was all in the minus column. On the plus side, Wink had been able to determine that Lothar’s contracts with the Ministries of Defense and Interior in Berlin, not to mention agreements with Germany’s newly privatized telephone companies, gave him potential access to fucking boxcars full of confidential information. “This guy Lothar, he’s tight with the deputy assistant underminister of defense, some asshole named Markus Richter,” Wink drawled in his North Philly accent. “Richter spends a lot of time eatin’ an’ drinkin’ onna cuff at Beck’s Schloss in the Mosel Valley.”
I asked how come Richter had blipped on Wink’s radar screen, since he appeared to be nothing more than yet another civil servant in search of a free meal.
“’Cause this particular asshole spent a lot of time recently in Moscow,” Wink said. “An’ I mean, hey, like he goes there on his own. I mean, no official stuff, y’know? Okay, nothing wrong with that. There are some people who like to go to Mogadishu for a vacation, too. But then, this guy Richter has a five-freaking-hour meeting with the Russkie foreign minister. Not just that. Guess where they had their little tête-à-tête? The bubble. The two of ’em spent those five hours in the friggin’ bubble at the foreign ministry. Five hours. No way we could get a hint of what they were talkin’ about. Dick, when I hear about something like that, it just sets my teeth on edge, y’know? I mean, it was bogus.”
• Boomerang broke into IntelNet, the allegedly secure computer network shared by the Departments of Defense, Justice, and State, and typed in Markus Richter’s name. The LEGAT50 in Berlin had written a cable chronicling a series of kickbacks Richter probably took, and his possible involvement with the Russian Mafiya, and Richter’s ties to the German ultranationalists, including one Lothar Beck.
Our ambassador in Berlin, yet another in the State Department’s never-ending supply of pocket-change-jingling, heel-rocking, pinstripe-suited, can’t-cunt bureaucrats, had the cable killed because he thought it might just possibly offend someone, someplace, somewhere. But the FBI agent’s damning memo was still in the system. It didn’t prove anything, but it gave me another avenue to search—and it tied Beck and BeckIndustrie to the Ivans.
Boomerang and I were the tip of the spear. As soon as I’d reconned BeckIndustrie, I’d send for the rest of my men, and we’d do the sonsofbitches some real damage. And so, Boomerang and I flew up Autobahn 61, then swung east at the Mönchen-Gladbach interchange. Just past M-G, I hit heavy traffic and had to slow down (to a mere 180) as we sped Düsseldorfward, cruising across the Rheinkniebrücke into the city. Off to my right stood the huge Rhine Tower, with its big round restaurant, observation deck, and digital clock tick-tick-ticking off the seconds.
I was so intent on the tower that I almost missed what I’d really come to see. At the last second, I swung my gaze to port. There it was, right on the waterfront: the huge steel and glass skyscraper, atop which revolved a ten-meter disk. One side was a huge clock. The other bore the logo BeckIndustrie, superimposed above the same pretentious coat of arms I’d seen on the door of the Mercedes limos at the pasture.
Even though we’d all done our map homework, Boomerang still missed the turnoff for Graf-Adolf StraBe.51 That meant we were carried along by the traffic flow south of where I wanted to be by just over a klik before I could start back. And so we sat in grid-locked traffic for half an hour as we worked our way north through a series of unfamiliar one-way streets, with Boomerang squinting at the tiny print on the map on his lap, pointing one way or the other, and intoning, “I’m fucked if I know where the fuck we be
, Boss Dude.”
But being SEALs, and therefore eloquent in the art of navigation, it didn’t take long for Boomerang to finally eyeball a huge cream and red three-sectioned trolley car that bore the number 91, and the logo HAUPTBAHNHOF. “Follow in that sucker’s wake, Boss Dude,” quoth he. “I can get us where we want to go from the train station.”
And follow in das sucker’s vake I did, even though before I could, it required what in SEAL terms is known as an ill-fucking-legal U-turn followed by a nasty series of hit-or-shit situations mit der pedestrians.
And lo, after a mere six minutes of bustling urban pilotage, we schtood at the intersection of Bismarck StraBe and Konrad Adenauer Platz, directly in front of the wide, modern main railroad station which, in Kraut, is what they mean when they bark, “Hauptbahnhof.” “Now, we face due west,” Boomerang intoned, his narrow nose still buried in the map.
I checked the sun and turned the car accordingly, steering carefully around a traffic cop who vas giving mit der dirty looks. And voilà! There it was. “GrafAdolf StraBe’s right in front of us, my shit-for-brains naviguesser.”
Boomerang peered over the top of the big map, squinted, then flashed his big, nasty grin. “Jawohl, Herr Schwanzkopf BoB Dude.”
A mere three of east-west traffic minutes later, we found ourselves directly across from der Holiday Inn’s green-and-white marquee. And after one last illegal U-turn, I pulled down the tight circular driveway and into the subterranean garage.
They gave us a big double room on the sixth floor, looking out across Düsseldorf’s skyline. Off to the starboard lay the Königs-Allee, the long shopping street with a canal running down the middle known as the Kö. Dead ahead was the Altstadt, where the beer never stops flowing. And lying to our port, dominating the skyline, was the huge BeckIndustrie tower, its rotating clock ticking off the hours, minutes, and seconds. Most Düsseldorfers checked their watches against the BeckIndustrie clock. So far as I was concerned, that clock would provide the countdown until Lothar and Franz met a timely demise.
I’d given serious thought as to how I was going to approach this problem, and decided to attack things head-on. There was no need to contact Heinz Hochheizer’s agent Peter Grüner, aka Rottweiler, and work our way up the food chain. We already knew who was at the top of that chain: Lothar Beck. Besides, Franz Ulrich had already run a check on me. He knew I was prowling and growling somewhere in the neighborhood, and if he knew, Lothar knew. There was no use in trying to be stealthy; no tactical advantage to playing coy.
Indeed, the best way to execute a successful mission in a situation like this one is to attain the offensive. Here is the Rogue’s First Law of Warfare: attack, attack, attack. This is something basic to Warriordom. The Warrior, after all, does not give up ground. The Warrior takes ground. The Warrior occupies your fucking space and drives you backward; the Warrior does not retreat. The Warrior forces you to retreat. And what if you have set up an ambush? The Warrior will sense it, and he will counterattack with such ferocity that your attempt to defeat him will fail.
Now, the tactics I have described above can be achieved in the boardroom just as effectively as they can be on the battlefield, so there was no reason NOT to use them here, against Lothar Beck, on his home turf.
Besides, I have discovered in the past that by confronting one’s opponents (and I do mean CONFRONTING them, not just meeting with them), I put them at a disadvantage, knock them off their game plan—and I prevail. And so I am a practitioner of what might be called an old-fashioned, snout-to-snout, full-tilt, boogie-aggressive, rock-and-roll Roguish disorientation process. Or, to put it in the terms first defined by Roy Henry Boehm, godfather of all SEALs, I will totally fuck the fucking fuckers. First I fuck with their minds, then I fuck with their bodies. And I know that if I am consistent, and aggressive, and properly Warriorlike, I WILL NOT FAIL.
And so, I talked myself out of a quick tour of the Altstadt and its breweries. Instead, I picked up the palm-sized, untraceable, Motorola cell phone Fred had given us and punched in the number Baby Huey had taken off the dead Russkie’s hand. Yes, I realize that I’d forgotten to mention it to Fred. But I figured WTF: here I was, and it was a local call. And so, I taptap-tapped the number onto the keypad, pressed the transmit button, and waited. The phone bring-bringged twice. And then a voice answered. “Ulrich—”
I slapped the Motorola shut. You know as well as I do that Franz had just signed his own death sentence. But everything happens in its own good time, and now the time wasn’t right (after all, this book is just a little bit more than half over, and the bad guys always get killed off last), and so I hung up without saying a word, and then I marched Boomerang eins-zwei, einszwei, to the far end of the Kö where, at the same Schadow Arcade department store the late and unlamented Russkie bandity had done their shopping, I bought each of us a suit, two shirts, two ties, and all the other appropriate furnishings.
An aside: the ability not to have to wait for alterations is one of the better things about some European department stores. At the biggest of the chains, whether you are in Paris (Galeries Lafayette), London (Marks & Spencer), or Düsseldorf (Schenks), trousers come presized by short, medium, and long inseam, and if you’re not too concerned about how the cuffs drape, you can walk in and ten minutes later emerge ready to do trendy beeziness.
Another aside: maneuvering Boomerang all the way down the just-under-half-mile-long Kö was not easy. The Kö is one of the most fashionable shopping streets in all of the world. From Hermés to Gucci, Fendi, Bally, and Joop, there are stores. The chocolates go from fifty to seventy-five dollars a pound. The women are much more expensive than that. And the women who shop there tend to wear very short skirts and have great legs and outstanding tits, so walking gets difficult when your companion keeps smacking into lampposts, telephone booths, and other sundry obstacles because he is disfuckingtracted by all the beautiful fräuleins.
Asides finished, I selected a couple of boss Boss suits for us. A slate gray double-breasted for me (a mere nineteen hundred bucks), and a sixteen-hundred-dollar fawn-colored single-breasted model for Boomerang’s extralong frame. And while we tried them on, I made small-sprechen mit der salesman, a loquacious, amiable chap inappropriately named Fred. I mentioned I was here because ten of my friends had recently bought Boss suits just like the one I was wearing.
He said he remembered my “pals.” His expression told me that he hadn’t liked them very much.
“A little loud, aren’t they?” I asked.
He retained his salesman’s demeanor. “Oh, the Russians are not so bad,” Fred said, rolling his eyes. “The Japanese are far worse. At least these gentlemen had some manners. They waited in line for the changing booths. The Japanese . . .” He threw his arms into the air. “Impossible.”
I kept him talking. It didn’t take long to discover that the Ivans had been shepherded by a Kraut, who’d paid for their clothes in cash. “A German with a scar?” I wild-guessed, my index finger tracing a jagged line across my cheek.
“Ja, mit ein Narbe,” Fred nodded, his finger mirroring mine on his own cheek.
Talked out, we double-timed back to the hotel, changed, and hit the street. This time we stayed away from the Kö, walking north until we reached Karl Platz, then veering off toward the Rhine, past Saint Maxim’s church, took a hard left onto the Berger Allee and a hard right onto Thomas StraBe.
The main entrance to BeckIndustrie lay directly ahead. One could drive in by going past a primer-colored security gatehouse occupied by three blue-blazered young men. I took a closer look at the narrow glass panes and knew from their color and thickness that we were talkin’ class III-A bulletproof material here. Attached to the back side of the gatehouse was a red-and-white-striped pole on an electric arm, the same kind of barrier that they use at toll plazas, which won’t even stop a bicyclist. Beyond it, however, I picked out a heavy, hydraulically operated solid steel, with eight feet of concrete footing, antiterrorist barrier, the type they are current
ly using on Capitol Hill back in Washington to prevent truck bombs from accessing the Capitol’s East Front Plaza and blowing up the House of Representatives and the Senate.
BeckIndustrie itself was an architectural wonder. The thirty-plus floors of glass and steel sat atop a series of ten-foot-in-diameter, twenty-five-foot-high pilings. The only access was by going up three narrow escalators leading to three separate entry doorways on the first floor. The right- and left-hand escalators were currently shut down by thick wire-mesh grates at the top end, so that access could be shut down in a matter of seconds.
Visitors were shuttled to the center escalator, where a large sign said EINFAHRT, which is not an invitation to break wind once, but actually means entry. Boomerang and I rode up, walked three meters to a thick smoked glass door, and pulled it open.
I’d expected to find the sort of big, two-story foyer one normally sees in office buildings. But this was almost like the kind of cramped portcullis you see in medieval castles. We were trapped inside a narrow passageway. Behind us, I noted that the doors had electronic locks—and they’d clicked. Ahead was a one-at-a-time full-length revolving door made of steel. The door could be made to work by running an entry card through an electronic reader. For the rest of us, there was a fish-eye camera lens secured behind thick glass and steel plate. Below it was a button that activated a buzzer, or a speaker. Above was a sign that read: ANMELDUNG, which is not a quaint way of saying horse, cow, or pig shit, but means announcement in German.
When asked, I announce. No shit of any kind. I pressed the button. “Hello.”
An almost unintelligible voice, muffled by the muted metallic timbre of the small, weather-proof speaker, came back at me. “Bitte?”
Why waste time? “Dick Marcinko to see Lothar Beck and Franz Ulrich.”
There was a click, and then silence. We waited one minute, then two, then three. Finally, I heard a soft electronic whine, and saw that that camera lens was moving. There was another wait. This one was less than two minutes. The disembodied voice mangled something that I took to be, “Please pass through the gate one at a time,” and then I heard an electronic click.
Option Delta Page 18
