Pinnacle Event by Richard A. Clarke Page B

them are even living in South Africa anymore. And besides, their warheads all went to Israel or were dismantled.” Moe looked at the man who had paid him for information for years. “Maybe it was North Korea. They do odd things.”
    Ray smiled at his old source. “Yes, they do.” He signaled for their check. It was always hard to get them to give you a bill in Vienna. “Jonas, tell me one more thing if you will. The Israelis. Did you or anyone in the IAEA ever ask them whether they were given the warheads or what they did with them?”
    Jonas Moe stood to leave. As they shook hands, he spoke in a low voice, his mouth near Ray’s ear. “The Israelis would not talk to us. They never did, until they started giving us information about Iran lately.” He picked up his pack of Marlboros and moved quickly to a side door in the back of the room, a door Ray had missed when he first entered the caf é .
    He had chosen the caf é so that he would be close to his next meeting, but it took Ray Bowman another fifteen minutes to get the check and leave the caf é . He had to hurry through the rain to his appointment two blocks down the narrow Herrengasse in the Palais Modena, the two-hundred-year-old headquarters of the Bundesministerium f ü r Inneres, the BM.I, Austria’s secret police.

 
    5
    WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19
    PALAIS MODENA
    VIENNA, AUSTRIA
    After showing a passport to the guard at the front door, he was escorted upstairs to the office of Gunter Rosch, Deputy Director of the BVT, the Bundesamt f ü r Verfassungsschutz und Terrorismusbek ä mpfung, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism. Apparently the Austrians thought those were two distinct missions, but close enough for one agency to handle.
    Rosch’s office had been a salon when the Modenese Duke lived in the Palais. The ceiling was twenty-two feet high and decorated in a rococo style. The computer terminal on the Deputy Director’s desk seemed incongruous, like a visitor from the twenty-first-century future appearing in the middle of a nineteenth-century present. “Great to see you, Ray. Welcome back to Vienna” Rosch boomed as he crossed the large expanse of his office. “I am told you are here as a tourist and I should not tell your embassy on Boltzmanngasse that you are in town. Special project or something?”
    â€œI didn’t tell the U.S. Embassy that I was coming,” Ray said, shaking the firm hand of the tall, broad Austrian. “It’s kind of an off the books project.” Herr Rosch guided him to two oversized wingback chairs by a working fireplace. “That warmth feels good on a wet autumn day,” Ray continued. “I am afraid Gunter that I can’t tell you a lot about why I am asking the questions I have, except to say that they could be related to saving a lot of lives.”
    â€œRaymond, I trust you. Our relationship has been tested. With all of the investigation of the U.S. drone strike on the terrorists here in Vienna, it never came out that we had tipped you to their presence,” Rosch recalled. “And it never came out that we suggested that you might want to act unilaterally, since our laws did not permit us to do anything.”
    â€œIt was a bit messy,” Ray admitted, “but I do still believe that we prevented bombings on your subway and on U-Bahns in Germany.” A white-coated young man entered the room with two small silver trays, each with a glass of water and a cup of the thick sludge that the Viennese think of as coffee. Ray paused in his conversation.
    â€œDon’t mind Konrad. He is a sworn officer, indeed an armed officer, whose real job is to provide protection to my office suite and the Director’s,” Rosch explained. “In the unlikely event that the Ottomans or the Mogul come back and get through our first three lines of defense.”
    Bowman sipped briefly at the sludge