The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

  A few seconds later, what Carla took for two breaching rounds were discharged, and the door collapsed backwards out of the room. Monize screamed and Carla held her tight to her body.

  When the dust and smoke had cleared, she couldn’t see anyone outside the room. The short passageway and the stairwell were dark and silent.

  After a prolonged pause the same voice said, ‘Stand up. Put the child behind your back. Raise your hands and move forward. Slowly. When you get outside the door, kneel with your hands clasped behind your head. Do not hold onto the child. Do not make any sudden moves.’

  Fury had her left side to the wall nearest the doorway. Carla looked at her and Fury shook her head and raised her free hand: Stop. Carla pushed Monize back onto the couch and covered her trembling little body with her own. Monize began to cry, her chest heaving. Carla smoothed her brow and held her head to her breasts.

  Torch beams darted about. One lingered on Carla’s torso. She saw a red dot there too, and others skittering about the walls and the floor, searching for potential targets. She knew the blast shields would be brought up and she guessed Fury also knew that. Then what? She didn’t know.

  ‘Don’t shoot,’ Carla said. ‘Please don’t shoot.’

  ‘Listen to her,’ Fury said. ‘Now back off. Or I kill girl.’

  Carla shuddered and struggled to keep her fear in check for Monize’s sake. She heard the faint static of radio communication, then whispers just after it. The torches and lasers were killed a second later. Monize whimpered and Carla felt as if her heart was beating at twice its normal rate. Sweat beaded at her temples. She was, she knew, little more than a bystander to the events that were unfolding; they would spell life or death for her daughter, and the thought sickened her.

  She turned her head to where Fury was still standing. ‘Give it up,’ she said.

  ‘Quiet,’ Fury said.

  Now she heard the faintest click of metal, something like a fizzy drink can opening. She heard cylinders rolling across the flagstones.

  Grenades, she thought.

  She hugged Monize tight and turned her back to Fury. But the grenade detonations were two phuts close together. There was a hissing noise and the air began to fill with tear gas, a white smokescreen of the severe chemical irritant.

  She covered Monize’s eyes with her hands, knowing that the German police wouldn’t allow a child to be subjected to its effects for long. In the worst cases, it could result in respiratory disease and blindness. But she’d been exposed to tear gas as part of her training and knew how to protect herself from it, for a while at least.

  Her daughter began to retch and gripped Carla’s forearms as her own eyes began to stream. She felt her face swell, her lungs burn. She heard the Russian woman’s hacking cough. Amid the purposeful disorientation created by the gas’s lachrymatory agents, she had one clear thought. The Russian woman nicknamed Fury would kill her daughter as casually as she herself would swat a bug. She’d threatened to kill her already. To mutilate her. She would come for her one day, because she could recognize her. The missing woman, Francesca Carpenter, had not been seen again, and neither had Charlene Rimes. She suspected the Russian had something to do with both of those disappearances.

  She unfurled her daughter’s little fingers from her arm, ignoring the distress and snivelling, her child’s cries. She stood up, risking a negative reaction from the German police — a life-threatening reaction. She moved through the gas, holding her hand across her mouth and nose and resisting the urge to scratch at her skin and eyes. She moved towards the hacking cough. Slowly. Stealthily. Silently.

  Vaguely, she saw the Russian bent double, fluid dribbling from her nose and mouth, the SIG 9mm hanging low in one of her veined hands. Carla rushed at Fury, snatching the pistol from her curled fingers before stepping back. The Russian twisted towards her, the beautiful features contorted in a visceral snarl.

  The woman lunged forward, still bent at the waist, her movement both lumbering and erratic. Carla brought up her powerful leg, kneeing Fury in the face. She heard a satisfying crack and watched the Russian sink to her knees, her head slumping forward, blood falling from what was an obvious broken nose like glops of jelly.

  She heard the scrambling of military boots over the felled door, the shouts of the police officers. Levelling the pistol to the crown of Fury’s head, she squeezed the trigger.

  Fury’s head seemed to catapult backwards against the wall under the bullet’s impact, her arms flailing briefly like a puppet’s above her flat stomach. Carla flung the pistol behind her and raised her hands over her own head.

  She watched as the woman slid sideways, her head oozing blood, her tongue hanging out of her twitching mouth. Like some great bull dying under the Spanish sun.

  105

  The farm.

  Gabriel heard the swish-swish of fluid as it was slopped about in the room above him.

  A few seconds later, he saw an uncapped jerrycan appear above the lip of the hole. Gas was tipped down, the smell, even when mixed with the reek, unmistakable, the liquid’s consistency confirming it. The flammable liquid trickled down one side of the wall and with it the last semblance of hope drained from him.

  They’re going to burn us alive, he thought.

  He trembled.

  He heard the jerrycan clattering to the concrete floor and the footsteps of the old man and Vezzani exiting the room. The first flames roared then.

  Within seconds, they flew over the lip and ignited a portion of the wall.

  He braced himself for the ascent, forcing the horrendous consequences of failure to the back of his mind. But he had no nylon climbing rope to stretch to absorb the shock of a fall, no belayer to help arrest it, no bolts in the rock face to secure it to, even if he had. He couldn’t top rope around a tree or a rock. There was no protection in the form of wedges or hexes. He had no fingerless gloves, harness, karabiners, chalk for the hands or rubber shoes, which meant less stickiness and more difficulty in directing his centre of gravity away from the stone as he attempted to put the strain on his feet.

  He could not do what the well would naturally demand for an ascent, either: stemming. Then he would’ve pushed his right foot into the surface in front of him and his left into the surface behind him, as if he was climbing the inside of a chimney, his rubber shoes generating an upwards frictional force, opposing gravity and propelling him. His bare feet and the flames negated that option.

  He’d traversed overhangs at a thousand feet, using thin fissures and outcrops, the wind howling about him, the sleet whipping at his face. He was used to climbing in the dark to take advantage of the cooler temperature, but with a headlight. The fire was something else.

  He reckoned it was a 5.12 level climb at least, which only the top ten per cent of climbers could achieve. The current conditions made it a 5.13. He hadn’t climbed at that level before, and his usual nimble body, with the strength and flexibility of woven bark, was depleted. But there was no other option left open to him.

  He reached up to the nearest precarious fingerholds, pushed up with his bare feet, keeping his weight evenly balanced over them to remain stable. He pushed off with his feet again, using his arms and hands for extra balance and positioning only.

  As the stone became smoother, it became harder to stay in this balanced position. Still he climbed, his wits and agility taken to their limits. The holds were little bigger than a matchstick, allowing access only to the tips of his fingers, where he held all his bodyweight, his skin beginning to shred. He searched out each lump, nub, rough edge, any irregularity.

  He balanced on his feet now on the narrowest of jutting-out stone and reached up and held himself firm with his fingertips. He pushed up with his feet, grabbing the wall above him, finding a tiny gulley. The fire licked about him from the other side of the wall and was a foot-high furnace beneath him. Still he climbed.

  The last of the fog that was the drug lifted, even as the smoke rose about him. His fingers bled and swe
at filled his eyes, stinging them as chillies might. His forearms and calves ached, craving release. But the memory was there, the skills, the will.

  He found a slippery cleft, a dryer fissure. He choked on the smoke as it entered his mouth and lungs. Still he climbed, finding the smallest nodule, the tiniest indent in the darkness.

  Now his hands were slick with sweat, and he had almost no friction between his feet and the stone. The wall was not polished marble, but the cracks, lumps and rough edges were becoming increasingly hard to find. He stood on a tiny ledge, but without his tight-fitting, high-friction rubber shoes, he felt precarious, his heart rate going off the scale, his self-belief ebbing fast.

  He lost his foothold and hung above the flames by three bleeding fingertips, the smoke all but asphyxiating him. His body was drenched in sweat from his exertions and he ached in every muscle, in each joint.

  His hand began to shake. He knew that he was going to lose the perilously little hold in a matter of seconds. He felt his feet begin to blister and burn, the agony so great that he cried out. It threatened to make him faint. If he didn’t do something now, he knew they would be both lost to the flames.

  He shifted his hips away from the wall, executing the so-called rose move, his raised legs and body turning from left to right, the energy used all but his last, and he propelled himself to that portion of the wall further over.

  Grabbing onto a larger nub a foot higher there, he winced, the surface rendered red-hot already by the flames. There was a jutting out stone and he wedged his knee and front thigh under it while causing sufficient tension with his foot, which was pressing against a nodule below. He thrust himself up, his eyes scrunched with pain, his right hand reaching over the lip.

  He hung there for a few seconds, coughing, his neck beginning to burn, the skin to bubble.

  He hauled himself up with enormous effort, his elbows exploding in agony as the flames ignited his shirt sleeves. He crouched and ripped the shirt from his body and clapped out the flames. He wrapped the shirt around his mouth and nose and launched himself forward into the darkness and the smoke and the flames, heading for the light outside the door, praying that they hadn’t moved Sangmu further into the room.

  His left knee impacted with one of the wheels of the chair, and he grabbed the armrests and heaved the chair back, his arms extended, using all the power in his legs to drive her from this room of death.

  In the artificial light, Gabriel could just see that his feet and legs were badly burned, burned to the point that skin was sliding off them. He fought to stay conscious, hacking like a man from another time and place with consumption, half blinded by the smoke.

  Sangmu had burns, he could tell, but the drug had saved her from the pain of it and the flames hadn’t reached her upper body. He gulped for air, his head spinning, the pain coming in excruciating waves, and then he collapsed.

  *

  The old man and Vezzani had walked out into the night air, hearing the helicopters above, seeing the dark shapes of the assaulters moving towards them. Torch beams and red dot lasers had scanned their bodies and Vezzani had been shouted at to drop his weapon.

  The old man had held up his hands, but Vezzani had raised his pistol, unable to face prison again, the old man had guessed, or just because he was still a soldier at heart and had decided his time had come and he wanted to go out in a blaze.

  The first bullet hit Vezzani in the shoulder, spinning him to his left. The second tore off his jaw as he’d tumbled sideways. The third penetrated his right eye after he’d hit the stone pathway.

  The old man had stood still throughout, without a smidgen of fear or regret. His mind had retreated to the time when countless men and women and children had died in precisely the manner Vezzani had.

  That time had never ended for him.

  106

  Berlin.

  Gabriel touched Sangmu’s little hand with his bandaged fingers. The lightest of touches, a mere brush. The back of her head was deep in a duck down pillow, her body lying on top of fresh bedsheets. Her legs were held at ninety degrees by a pulley, her arms impregnated by intravenous and saline drips, by tubes attached to monitors and machines that he could not name. The brightness of fluorescent light reflected off walls of white gloss paint. He bent forward, wincing at the pain that rippled through his body. He kissed her on the forehead and her eyelids fluttered.

  They were recuperating at the Unfallkrankenhaus Berlin, theburns and plastic surgery centre that was state-of-the-art and catered for both children and adults. For him there was no memory of being stretchered from the farm, or of his first week here, but he’d insisted on seeing Sangmu every day since, and his insistence had been respected.

  He was thinking now of what had happened after he’d regained consciousness. He had given a statement to the police, detailing the evidence against Joseph Kazapov, including the man’s confession. But Kazapov could not be identified as the man in the monk’s robe and the death mask in the DVD found in Hockey’s flat, or any found subsequently at the ghost house. There’d been no convincing evidence against him in respect of the murders of Johnny Hockey, Charlene Rimes and Billy Joe Anderson. Likewise, Finkel. The only DNA that had been found from any of the victims had been on the cadavers of Anna Belova, known as Fury, and two of her three Russians. Kazapov claimed that Vezzani had killed Robert Dubois and no one had been able to testify to the contrary.

  There had been evidence against him in respect of the murder of Brigitte Bayer though, and no one had been able to change that. Barbara Murray had agreed to give evidence via a video link; she couldn’t handle being in the same room as her biological father. He was toxic, she said.

  But Joseph Kazapov had been judged unfit to stand trial. Competency was different to the insanity defence, Gabriel knew this only too well. The latter was decided by the mental state of the accused at the time the crimes were committed, the former at the time of the trial.

  Gabriel had just managed to attend the first hour of the hearing, but Kazapov had benefited from the expert evidence of three physiatrists, all of whom agreed that he was incapable of understanding the nature and consequences of the criminal proceedings that would have otherwise begun, and that he’d be unable to assist in his own defence. This had also negated any extradition proceedings to the US, and Kazapov had been sent to a secure mental health facility, where he would be evaluated periodically. Gabriel had decried it as an elaborate hoax, but to no avail.

  He’d consoled himself with the thought that he had achieved what he’d so recklessly and haphazardly set out to do: find Sangmu and stop the old man from killing. He’d been responsible for putting him behind bars of sorts, too.

  Carla had escaped a separate federal trial, due to lack of evidence, in the sense that no one had seen her execute Fury, and the Germans had judged it to be self-defence. She’d told Gabriel this in the days after the chaos.

  She was receiving counselling now, he’d heard. He forgave her for her betrayal; he knew Monize had been threatened and that there’d been no other choice. In a telephone conversation she told him she’d left the FBI and had thought about returning with Monize to São Paulo. But her daughter needed her father and she’d stayed in DC. As for the deaths of Finkel and Robert Dubois, it had been generally agreed that she’d given Kazapov their names under extreme duress and while her mind had been in a temporary state of disorientation.

  Gabriel’s sister, Sangmu’s adoptive mother, was staying at a nearby hotel with her husband until Sangmu was well enough to fly back to the States. They didn’t speak much. They never had.

  He returned to his small room now and settled himself on his steel bed, shooing away a bright nurse who berated him for overdoing it. He took a cocktail of drugs daily and they made him woozy. There were skin grafts on thirty per cent of his body.

  He poured himself a plastic cup of filtered water, from a jug on a swing-around table top that stood beside the bed. It had taken him almost ten seconds to complete this
simple feat. Every night, he slept the sleep of a man who was adrift on a black ocean beneath a starless sky. Fretful and disorientated.

  *

  A week before Gabriel was due to be discharged, he raised the top section of the bed remotely and turned on the satellite TV: CNN International. He watched grim images of terrorist attacks, of famine and political upheaval.

  Then there was a breaking news story. The shooting of a patient. The patient had been murdered in the grounds of a secure hospital, in a valley in north Rhine-Westphalia near Bonn. The victim was an old man whose name was Joseph Kazapov.

  Gabriel didn’t react. He didn’t know how to react. He was too tired to react. He just watched, unblinking, as the story unfolded. An American was in police custody. A man’s face appeared, the alleged perpetrator who’d given himself up to the police afterwards.

  Gabriel blinked now, wondering if the drugs were distorting reality as in a dream, playing with his memories such that his brain was making a bizarre film out of them. He rubbed his face with his bandaged palms and pinched the skin on his right cheek, wincing at the pain it produced. But he knew that the moving images were relaying facts.

  The man in custody was the old Jew, Bronislaw Stolarski.

  107

  Bonn.

  Bronislaw Stolarski was sitting, unfettered and unattended by prison guards, in a white cinder-block interview room. It was brightly lit and smelled of the fresh fruit juice that sat in the plastic bottle on the plastic table, and the scented tissues — placed there to mop his tears, he imagined. He guessed that his age and infirmity had prompted his sympathetic treatment.

  He’d read of the liberalism of the Federal Republic of Germany. The people once obsessed with ethnic cleansing and then with genocide had become the ones that had welcomed the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the war fleers and orphans. Those seeking a Western dream, just as he had. And, just as with those that had travelled west with him in his time, there’d be the criminals, the idle, the thieves and the corrupt. The world was not black and white, but rather various shades of grey, he knew. Where did good end and evil begin in such a world? No one knew that.