THERE. THERE was Mahmoud. Looking the other way. Good, Fa’ad thought, maybe he could surprise his colleague, and have a joke for the day. He stopped on the sidewalk and scanned the miniroad for traffic before dashing across the street.
OKAY, RAGHEAD, Brian thought, closing the distance in just three steps and—
OUCH, FA’AD thought. It was quite literally a slight pain in the ass. He ignored it and kept going, cutting through a gap in the traffic on the street. There was a streetcar coming, but it was too far away to be a matter of concern. Traffic was not coming from his right, and so . . .
BRIAN JUST kept walking. He figured he’d go to the magazine stand. It would give him a good chance to turn and watch while he ostensibly made a purchase.
WEBER SAW the idiot making ready to dash across the tracks. Didn’t these fools know only to do that at the Ecke, where he had to stop for the red lights like everyone else? They taught children to do that at the Kindergarten. Some people thought their time was more valuable than gold, as though they were Franz Josef himself, risen from the hundred-year dead. He didn’t change his speed. Idiot or not, he’d get well clear of the tracks before—
—FA’AD FELT his right leg collapse under him. What was this? Then his left leg, and he was falling for no reason at all—and then other things started happening faster than he could understand them, and as though from an outside vantage point he saw himself falling down—and there was a streetcar . . . coming!
MAX REACTED a little too slowly. He could hardly believe what his eyes told him. But it could not be denied. He tromped his foot down on the brakes, but the fool was less than two meters away, and—lieber Gott!
The streetcar had a pair of bars running horizontally under its nose to prevent exactly this, but they hadn’t been checked in several weeks, and Fa’ad was a slender man—slender enough that his feet slid right under the safe bars and his body then pushed them vertically upward and out of the way—
—and Max felt the dreadful thump-thump of his passage over the man’s body. Somebody would call for an ambulance, but they would be far better off calling a priest. This poor schlemiel would not ever get to where he was going, the fool, saving time at the cost of his life. The fool!
ACROSS THE street, Mahmoud turned just in time to see his friend die. His eyes imagined more than saw the streetcar jump upward, as though to avoid killing Fa’ad, and just that fast his world changed, as Fa’ad’s world ended for all time to be.
“JESUS,” BRIAN thought, twenty yards away, holding a magazine in his hands. That poor fucker hadn’t lived long enough to die of the poison. He saw that Enzo had moved down the opposite side of the street, perhaps figuring to pop him if and when he’d gotten across, but the succinylcholine had worked as advertised. He’d just picked a particularly bad place to collapse. Or a lucky one, depending on your point of view. He took the magazine and crossed the street. There was an Arab-looking guy by the drugstore whose face was even more upset than the citizens around him. There were screams, a lot of hands to mouths, and, damned sure, it was not a pretty sight, though the streetcar had stopped directly over the body.
“Somebody’s going to have to hose down the street,” Dominic said quietly. “Nice pop, Aldo.”
“Well, I guess a five-point-six from the East German judge. Let’s get moving.”
“Roger that, bro.”
And they headed right, past the cigarette store, toward Schwartzenberg Platz.
Behind them there was a little screaming from the women, while the men took it all more soberly, with many turning away. There was not a thing to be done. The doorman at the Imperial darted inside to summon an ambulance and the Feuerwehr. They took about ten minutes to arrive. The firemen got there first, and for them the grim sight was immediate and decisive. His whole blood supply, so it seemed, had spilled out, and there was no saving him. The police were there, too, and a police captain, who’d arrived from his station on nearby Friedrichstrasse, told Max Weber to back his streetcar off the body. It revealed much—and little. The body had been chopped into four irregular pieces, as though ripped apart by a predatory creature from prehistory. The ambulance, which had come, was stopped not quite in the middle of the street—the street cops were waving the cars along, but the drivers and passengers took the time to look at the carnage, with half of them staring with grim fascination and the other half turning away in horror and disgust. Even some reporters were there, with their cameras and notepads—and Minicams for the TV scribblers.
They needed three body bags to collect the body. An inspector from the transit authority arrived to question the motorman, whom the police already had in hand, of course. All in all, it took about an hour to remove the body, inspect the streetcar, and clear the road. It was done rather efficiently, in fact, and by 12:30 everything was back in Ordnung.
Except for Mahmoud Mohamed Fadhil, who had to go to his hotel and light up his computer to send an e-mail to Mohammed Hassan al-Din, now in Rome, for instructions.
By that time, Dominic was on his own computer, composing an e-mail for The Campus to tell them of the day’s work, and ask for instructions on the next assignment.
CHAPTER 22
SPANISH STEPS
“YOU’RE KIDDING,” Jack said at once.
“God, grant me a dumb adversary,” Brian responded. “That’s one prayer they teach at the Basic School. Trouble is, sooner or later they’re going to get smart.”
“Like crooks,” Dominic agreed. “The problem with law enforcement is that we generally catch the dumb ones. The smart ones we rarely even hear about. That’s why it took so long to do the Mafia, and they’re not really all that smart. But, yeah, it’s a Darwinian process, and we’ll be helping to breed brains into them one way or another.”
“News from home?” Brian asked.
“Check the time. They won’t even be getting in for another hour,” Jack explained. “So, the guy really got run over?”
Brian nodded. He’d gone down and been run over like the official Mississippi state animal—a squashed dog on the road. “By a streetcar. Good news is that it covered up the mess.” Tough luck, Mr. Raghead.
IT WASN’T even a mile to the St. Elizabeth’s Krankenhaus on Invalidenstrasse, where the ambulance crew carried in the body parts. They’d called ahead, and so there was no particular surprise at the three rubberized bags. These were duly laid on a table in pathology—there was no point in their going to casualty receiving, because the cause of death was so obvious as to be blackly comical. The only hard part was to retrieve blood for a toxicology scan. The body had been so mauled as to be largely drained of blood, but internal organs—mainly the spleen and brain—had enough to be drawn out with a syringe and sent off to the lab, which would look for narcotics and/or alcohol. The only other thing to look for in the postmortem exam was a broken leg, but the passage of the streetcar over the body—they had his name and ID from his wallet, and the police were checking the local hotels to see if maybe he’d left a passport behind, so that the appropriate embassy could be notified—meant that even a broken knee would be almost impossible to discover. Both of his legs had been totally crushed in a matter of less than three seconds. The only surprising thing was that his face was placid. One would have expected open eyes and a grimace of pain from the death, but, then, even traumatic death had few hard-and-fast rules, as the pathologist knew. There was little point in doing an in-depth examination. Maybe if he’d been shot they could find a bullet wound, but there was no reason to suspect that. The police had already talked to seventeen eyewitnesses who’d been within thirty meters of the event. All in all, the pathology report could just as easily have been a form letter as a signed official document.
“JESUS,” GRANGER observed. “How the hell did they arrange that?” Then he lifted his phone. “Gerry? Come on down. Number three is in the bag. You have to see this report.” After replacing the phone, he thought aloud, “Okay, now where do we send them next?”
That was settled on a different floor. Tony Wills was copying all of Ryan’s downloads, and the one at the top of the download file was impressive in its bloody brevity. So, he lifted his phone for Rick Bell.