Games of State - Tom Clancy [26]
"Gotcha," Herbert said. "Have you got anything on this woman's contacts, hideouts, habits?"
Liz scanned the document. It was broken into sections labeled "vital statistics," "biography," and "modus operandi."
"She's a loner," Liz said, "which in terrorist terms means she always works with a small group. Three or four people, tops. And she never sends anyone on a mission she wouldn't undertake."
"That's a match with today's attack," Herbert said. "Any known hits?"
Liz said, "They never claim credit--"
"Also a match with today."
"--but witnesses have tied them to the firebombing of an Arab-owned shopping mall in Bonn and the delivery of a grenade-rigged liquor carton to the South African Embassy in Berlin, both last year."
"Ruthless too," Herbert said.
"Yes," Liz said. "That's part of her appeal to the hardcore neo-Nazis. Though it's strange. The store she attacked was a men's shop, and the liquor was delivered to a bachelor party."
"Why is that strange? Maybe she hates men."
"That doesn't fit in with Nazi ideology," Liz said.
"True," Herbert agreed. "In war and genocide, they were equal-opportunity killers. This may be good news for the American kid, if she is a hostage. Maybe they won't kill her."
"I wouldn't bet the ranch on that," Liz said. "Sparing women isn't likely to be a commandment, just courtesy. It also says here that two of those witnesses who tried to I.D. her personally died within days of talking to the authorities. One in a car crash, one after a mugging. The crash victim was a woman. One woman who tried to quit her group Feuer-- Fire-- was also killed."
"Watched and whacked," Herbert said. "Just like the mob."
"Not quite," Liz said. "The retiree was drowned in a toilet after being beaten and slashed. This is one sick little schatze. Anyway, so much for sparing women."
Liz scanned back to Karin's biography.
"Let's see if we can see where Ms. Doring is coming from," Liz said. She began reading, then said, "Here we are. Her mother died when she was six and she was raised by her father. Bet you dollars to pesos there was some nasty business going on there."
"Abuse."
"Yeah," Liz said. "Again, it's a classic pattern. As a girl, Karin was either beaten, sexually abused, or both. She sublimated like crazy as a kid, then looked for a place to put her anger. She tried Communism, didn't like it for whatever reason--"
"It was dying," Herbert contributed.
"Then she found the neo-Nazi movement and assumed the role of father figure, something her own father, never did."
"Where is Papa Doring now?" Herbert asked.
"Dead," said Liz. "Cirrhosis of the liver. Died when Karin was fifteen, just about the time she became a political activist."
"Okay," said Herbert, "so we think we know who our enemy is. She's happy to kill men, willing to kill women. She assembles a terrorist group and roams the country attacking foreign interests. Why? To scare them off?"
"She knows she can't do that," Liz says. "Nations will still have embassies, and businesses will still come. More likely it's the equivalent of a recruitment poster. Something to rally other aggressive misfits around her. And by the way, Bob, it obviously works. As of four months ago, when this file was updated, Feuer had thirteen hundred members with an annual growth rate of nearly twenty percent. Of those members, twenty active, full-time soldiers move with her from camp to camp."
"Do we know where any of these camps are?"
"They keep changing," Liz said. "We've got three photographs in the file." She accessed them in turn and read each caption. "One was taken at a lake in Mecklenburg, the second was shot in a forest in Bavaria, and the third was in mountains