The dam broke. Ford talked for twenty minutes, reiterating the initial link between Arshad Kassem and Anthony Mason. To this, she added everything the director had told her earlier —the same information Harper had done his best to keep from her. She went over the links between Rashid al-Umari and Will Vanderveen. She described their involvement in the bombing of the Babylon Hotel, and she mentioned the possibility of an Iranian connection. She went into al-Umari’s background, and she brought up the possibility that the most recent attack in Paris was somehow related. The only thing she left out was the Agency’s involuntary role in the embassy break-in. Crane appeared stunned by the scope of the conspiracy.
“When did you find out that Vanderveen was still alive?” she asked when Ford was done. She didn’t need to ask who he was; a year earlier, the former U.S. soldier had been near the top of the FBI’s most wanted list.
“Nearly two weeks ago.”
“What! Why hasn’t it been circulated?”
“It has been circulated, but only at the highest levels. The Bureau wasn’t told until a few days ago. Don’t you see? The president wanted to keep this quiet, and that meant limiting the number of people in the know.”
“Well, you could have told me.”
“You didn’t need to know, darling,” Ford replied, somewhat disingenuously. “However, the decision has now been made to release the information on a wider scale. He should be back on your top ten in a matter of days, so I didn’t see the harm in giving you a little heads-up.”
Crane was thinking hard, her brow furrowed in concentration. “There’s one thing I still don’t get.
How is Kealey going after Rühmann if he’s out of the Agency?”
“Apparently, he’s taken it upon himself to finish the job. Ryan Kealey is a man of some means himself. He booked a private plane this afternoon. It leaves Upperville for Berlin at seven a.m.
tomorrow.”
“How do you know that?”
Ford smiled. “I have my sources, too, Samantha. The Agency has long cultivated relationships with patriotic, wealthy landowners in Virginia, Maryland, and the District, all of whom have airfields on their property. All it took was a few innocent calls.”
“Hmm.” Crane swirled the contents of her glass thoughtfully, then came back to reality. “It’s an interesting story, I’ll give you that. I have to tell you, though, that the Agency is definitely wrong about one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The Iranian connection. I don’t know why al-Umari was chosen to play a role in Baghdad, given his background, but the hard-liners in Tehran are definitely behind it. All of it. The Iraqi insurgency is not capable of carrying something like this off.”
Ford frowned. “You sound pretty certain.”
“Well, I should be.” Crane lifted her glass and smiled knowingly. “You see, I’ve been working directly with the informant in New York for the past month.”
CHAPTER 36
POTSDAM, GERMANY
The following afternoon, Will Vanderveen and Yasmin Raseen crossed the Luisenplatz in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, angling toward an outdoor café on the far side. The temperature was hovering at 60 degrees, the air heavy and still beneath towering storm clouds.
Having arrived earlier than intended, they had passed the time by seeing the sights. They’d strolled through the gardens of the Orangery in Sanssouci Park, admired the Marble Palace on the Holy Lake, and stopped for coffee in a redbrick café in the Dutch Quarter. The lengthy trek gave them the chance to look for signs of surveillance. Nothing seemed out of place, which meant they had guessed right in London: the surveillance had been placed on Khalil and not on them.
Still, since the courier’s revelations at the Savoy, they had taken nothing for granted. For Vanderveen, in particular, every move from this point forward was fraught with danger.
Knowing his face was posted at Passport Control was especially daunting; boarding the plane at Heathrow had been an exercise in extreme self-control, and he had been secretly surprised when they managed to pass through the airport in Berlin without incident.
Shortly after arriving, they acquired the necessary tools through Raseen’s contact in Dresden, a former Stasi officer who’d since turned his hand to more profitable ventures. The man had come through in spectacular form, supplying all that was needed. As it turned out, he was still very much in the game, which made him slightly more trustworthy than he might otherwise have been. They were banking on the fact that he would not risk his reputation — or something worse
— by cheating them. Vanderveen had taken a chance and wired the funds from London in advance, not wanting to have that much cash on his person when boarding the plane. The chance had paid off, and for an extra ten thousand Euros, the ex-Stasi officer had supplied them with a late-model Mercedes and a Globalstar SAT-550 mobile phone. The car was now parked on the Charlottenstrasse, and the bulky phone was in his jacket pocket. Everything else they had acquired that morning was packed away in the trunk of the Mercedes, which was not ideal, but it couldn’t be helped, and it wouldn’t be for long.
When they reached the café, Raseen left his side, took a seat, and waved for the waiter.
Vanderveen retrieved the satellite phone from his coat and continued around the square. Since the courier’s death in London, everything had gone according to plan, with one major exception.
The previous night, he had placed a call to his contact in Washington, D.C., and there had been no answer. Now he dialed the number again and waited.
“Hello?”
“It’s Taylor. Where have you been? I called yesterday.”
“I know, but I couldn’t get away. Have you reached your destination?”
“Yes. Anything new?”
“Quite a bit, actually…”
Vanderveen returned to the table ten minutes later. The food had arrived: sandwiches for him, yogurt and freshly baked bread for her, coffee for two. He took a seat but left the food untouched, and she noticed immediately. “What is it? What’s happened?”
He leaned forward, dropping his voice to a murmur. “Kealey is already on the way.”
She stopped buttering a slice of bread and studied him carefully. “So he knows about Rühmann.”
“So it would seem. He left a private airfield in Virginia at 6:00 AM eastern time, which means he should arrive sometime this evening. He has someone with him, a woman named Kharmai.
Undoubtedly, they’ll want to talk with our friend.”
“And you think they’ll move tonight?”
Vanderveen thought for a moment. “I think there’s a good chance they will. But that’s not a problem… In fact, it means we’ll be able to leave the country sooner than we thought.”
She nodded her agreement.
“Try and eat something,” Vanderveen said. “We may not get the chance later tonight.”
On the return trip around the square, he had stopped at a newsstand to pick up a few papers. As Raseen dutifully tucked into her food, he unfolded a copy of Die Welt and read the cover story.
The news from Iraq was predictably dire; the day before, a suicide bombing at the shrine to Imam Musa al-Khadam — one of the holiest sites in Baghdad — had resulted in 45 deaths.
According to the Interior Ministry, a secondary device placed in a truck outside the Khadamiya hospital claimed the lives of 32 more as the injured were rushed from the shrine to the hospital in makeshift ambulances. Soon thereafter, angry crowds gathered at checkpoints leading into the Green Zone, and several U.S. military vehicles were fired upon as they tried to leave the American enclave. Sixty-three American casualties had been reported by the Pentagon over the past three days.