In the Dark

by Andreas Pflüger

  When she leaves the lift upstairs there’s a minute left. Helmchen runs up to Demirci. ‘The Regional Interior Ministers, the president of the State Attorney’s Office and the president of the Federal Police are holding a video conference and are asking you for a statement.’

  ‘Since when have they been asking?’ she asks, as she strides down the corridor, and Helmchen has trouble keeping up with her.

  ‘What shall I tell them?’

  ‘To wait.’ Demirci opens the door of operation headquarters. She sees right away that the most important person is missing. ‘Where is Miss Aaron?’

  Blank faces.

  ‘Call her straight away. And Mr Kvist.’

  Demirci shivers for a second: it’s all she can do to keep from shouting. The door flies open. For a heartbeat she hopes it’s Aaron, but it’s Peschel. ‘Yes, we’ve located the coach. Outside the maths institute of the Technical University on 17 Junistrasse. A drone found it.’

  ‘Are there police on the spot?’

  ‘No. But they’re on their way. There will be patrol cars there in two minutes. Pavlik has already got going. The drone should be sending a picture at any moment.’

  Demirci looks at the second hand of the big clock.

  Three, two, one. Holm’s call is put through.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘We’ve got the money and your brother.’

  ‘Didn’t I say I’d only talk to Miss Aaron?’

  ‘She’ll be there any minute.’

  ‘She’s got thirty seconds.’

  Delmonte tells Demirci that she can’t get through to either Aaron or Niko. The shaky picture from the drone appears on the video wall. It’s circling at an altitude of about fifty metres, above the coach. A man jumps out. He looks up, his face covered with a balaclava. They see the flash as he fires with a short-barrelled submachine gun. The picture dissolves.

  ‘The thirty seconds are up.’

  ‘Miss Aaron isn’t available.’

  ‘I’ve got one more condition,’ Holm’s words hammer into the silence. ‘Miss Aaron gets into the car with my brother. As an additional hostage swap.’

  No one breathes. Everyone is looking at Demirci.

  ‘Out of the question.’

  The speakers transmit the sound of a helicopter.

  ‘You must know by now that there are twenty-seven schoolchildren and two teachers in the coach.’ Holm takes his mouth away from the microphone. ‘Say your name.’

  A whimper. ‘Magnus Sørensen.’

  ‘Either you confirm right now that Jenny Aaron is on her way, or I shoot this man and throw the corpse into the road. After that I will kill a hostage every minute until you change your mind.’

  They are the hardest words she has ever had to say. ‘I will never let you have Miss Aaron.’

  *

  Sørensen kneels down in front of Holm. When he turned around by the Holocaust Memorial and looked into that man’s eyes, he knew what was going to happen. But he didn’t want to die without showing courage once in his life. In vain. Since Holm made him tell the whole class that he was sleeping with Lena, Sørensen has said farewell. To his wife. His daughter. Everything. He has so many regrets. Marrying too young. The fact that the years were whipped away as if by the wind and he didn’t have the strength to resist. Not being a good father. But mostly kissing Lena in the staff room.

  *

  The shot rings out. Its echo is visible on the faces of Demirci and the others.

  ‘It’ll be a kid’s turn next.’

  ‘You may get away with it today,’ Demirci says, and at that moment everyone in the room is terrified of her. ‘But I will hunt you down. However long it takes: I will find you.’

  ‘Excuse me for a moment, we have visitors.’

  They hear the coach door opening. Police sirens. The helicopter. The same hissing sound again.

  ‘There’s someone here for you.’ Holm passes her the phone.

  Aaron’s voice comes from the speaker. ‘When the plane landed in Aden, Captain Schumann was allowed to leave the Landshut to inspect the landing gear. He could have run away. Instead he went back to the plane. Why do you think he did that?’

  Demirci closes her eyes.

  ‘Well put,’ Holm says. ‘“True courage means living when it is right to live and dying when it is right to die.” For the Samurai mercy and courage belong together, perhaps that’s what she’s hoping. But she will have no mercy from me. I will give you ten minutes for my brother and the money.’

  He hangs up. Footsteps. Demirci opens her eyes. Niko is standing in front of her. His eyes are empty and grey. She takes his gun from its holster. ‘Mr Kvist, you are under arrest.’

  19

  ‘You. Aren’t. Going.’ Demirci’s words were lost in the infinity of footsteps it took Aaron to reach the lift with Niko. They hid their thoughts from one another. The door closed. The lift shook as they went up. Niko’s hand bumped against hers. She wanted to reach for it, but he pulled it away.

  Roof terrace. The door opened. She positioned herself inside it and blocked the sensor. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘You know where.’

  Snow blew into her face and melted away immediately.

  Niko said nothing as time rushed by.

  ‘Let me go.’

  ‘How can you think I would do that?’

  ‘Otherwise he’s going to kill them all.’

  ‘He only wants his brother and the money. He’ll get it.’

  ‘He wants me.’

  ‘You’re imagining that.’

  ‘Holm told Sascha what he was to say. He knows that Demirci will refuse to send me. Holm has put the fates of thirty people in my hands. And now yours too. If you don’t let me go, the guilt for this will destroy us both.’

  ‘You want me to help you sacrifice yourself?’

  ‘I want you to save thirty people.’

  ‘You want that for a different reason.’

  ‘Say I wasn’t a coward in Barcelona.’

  The wind answers for Niko.

  ‘I convinced myself that I might be able to live with it for so long that I ended up believing it myself. I tried to tell myself that time would help. That one day I would forget. But my father was right: I never will.’

  The lift shook slightly, even though it wasn’t moving.

  ‘There was nothing you could do for me. It was right.’

  ‘You gave me a bag of hot chestnuts. I kissed you. We made love. The next morning I asked you for something.’

  ‘Don’t do this to me.’

  ‘I made you promise never to lie to me. I’ve never freed you from that promise. If you think only a single one of those children might get away, go down there with me now, and what we’ve just talked about will be our secret for ever. If not, get out now.’

  The wind.

  Her heart.

  Police sirens.

  She yearned to see Niko one last time.

  She said: ‘It’s sisu.’

  For thirty seconds Aaron didn’t breathe. Then she reached for the buttons. She pressed for the ground floor. The door closed. She still wasn’t sure that Niko had gone. She reached her hand out, searching. No one. She called the taxi number, said she was blind and the driver was to speak to her outside the building.

  Aaron waited in the cold.

  Seventeen steps to my father’s grave.

  Six to my mother’s.

  Seventeen over six.

  ‘Pure Maths,’ Holm said.

  The Mathematics building of the Technical University on 17 Junistrasse.

  Two kilometres. So close.

  Aaron heard a helicopter. She didn’t have much time. The taxi came. She asked the driver to hurry.

  ‘I don’t want to get a speeding ticket.’

  A hundred Euro note changed his opinion. He put his foot to the floor.

  Every word she said to Niko had been completely honest. Just as the third reason for going w
as honest: Holm had the power over the fire that raged in her.

  And the power to extinguish it.

  He was in control of those minutes in the warehouse in Barcelona. He alone could give her that memory. Then she would understand. Why she ran away. Why Holm was tormenting her. Why he had waited five years, when in all that time he needed only to reach out a hand. He would redeem her. Perhaps it would involve her death. Even that admission was honest. But even if he understood her only at the very last second, at that moment she would be on the top of a high mountain, looking at her whole life spread below like a wide landscape in which she knew every stone and everything that lay underneath.

  She heard a quiet staccato sound. Uzi. Silencer. The taxi driver probably wouldn’t recognize the noise as gunfire.

  The drone being shot down.

  ‘Here it is.’

  ‘Can you see a coach anywhere?’

  ‘I’ll have to take a look.’

  Valuable seconds passed. Flap flap flap. The helicopter was above their heads. The police sirens could be heard even from far away.

  ‘There’s one. On the other side, in the car park.’

  ‘What does the coach look like?’

  ‘Like a coach. The windows are covered over. With something light-coloured.’

  ‘Drive over there and stop right in front of it.’

  ‘I can’t get across there.’

  Aaron held out another fifty. Foot down. She was thrown against the door as he sped down the road. Metal crunched. Cars bunched together, they hobbled over a kerb, the chassis scraped, the tyres spun, the taxi skidded.

  Hard brake. The driver grabbed the banknote. ‘Bit of cross-country riding for you there.’

  Aaron heard a single shot fired without a silencer.

  Too late, too late.

  She got out. The taxi roared away. The helicopter came lower. The sirens were so loud now that they drowned out the noise of the traffic. She stood there motionless and stared into the sky.

  Bushidō requires you to travel the journey to the end, and says that death is a relief, salvation from shame. The sovereign’s final favour was seppuku, honourable suicide.

  Her sovereign, on the other hand, was truth. It alone could sentence Aaron to death. But only if she knew the truth. Until then she would fight for her life. If Aaron got the chance to flee, she would. If she was able to give the Department a clue about Holm’s plans, she would. If she had the chance to kill Holm, she would.

  The first virtue: Gi. Honesty.

  Here I am.

  Heal me.

  Take my body.

  You won’t have my soul.

  The sirens were only a hundred metres away. Something fell at her feet. Aaron knew it was a corpse. She was grabbed and dragged several metres, flew up a step. The coach door closed with a hiss.

  Holm said: ‘At last.’

  20

  Close to the Europa Centre they end up in a traffic jam. Pavlik is at the wheel of the BMW, with Kleff next to him and in the back Rogge and Sascha. They are wedged behind the two black Fords whose sirens are no use at all. Cars are crammed in front of them, bumpers bashing against each other, unable to get out of the way because the bus lane is full of lorries. Sascha’s grin appears in the rear-view mirror. Pavlik’s right earpiece is connected to the radio, through the right he’s on the phone to Demirci.

  A pedestrian squeezes past. He stops with a jolt when he sees the balaclava-masked faces of Kleff and Rogge. Pavlik gestures to him to keep going. The pedestrian flees as fast as his legs can carry him. The balaclavas serve to protect both of them. Sascha isn’t supposed to know what they look like, so that he can’t take his revenge on them. The men who transported him from Tegel airport to the Department wore balaclavas for the same reason.

  Pavlik doesn’t need all these precautions. Demirci tried to tell him to put on his balaclava before he went into the interrogation room. But he refused, and showed Sascha his face to tell him he wouldn’t live to see another day. The message got through quite clearly. If Sandra knew she’d flip.

  Demirci calls and drags him from his thoughts. ‘Holm has shot the first hostage.’

  He forces himself to ask: ‘A child?’

  Kleff’s glance.

  Rogge’s quick breathing.

  ‘One of the teachers. But that’s not all.’ The vain, unthinkable, definitive fact lies in her next sentence. ‘Kvist let Aaron go.’

  Pavlik has endured the silence of a man whose loved one was killed by his motorbike. He has spent three days waiting with Sandra for the result of a mammogram. He has had friends die, and sat by Aaron’s bed. Nothing was as terrible as this.

  ‘I should never have left her alone with him,’ Demirci says.

  Pavlik looks in the rear-view mirror.

  Sascha smiles mischievously.

  You don’t know me. And you don’t know Aaron either. You’ll find out who she is. But not in the way you expect.

  ‘Holm knows you’re on your way.’

  They’ve been sitting there for a minute. He activates his throat mic and issues an order to the two Fords: ‘On to the pavement!’

  The leading vehicle forces its way among the trucks being unloaded in the bus lane; the second Ford follows, then Pavlik. They hurry along the colonnades of the Bikinihaus. People jump out of their way, a little dog flies past on a lead. The front spoiler of the BMW hits a billboard and sends it flying through the shattered glass of a shop window. Pavlik sees the woman with the buggy at the last minute. He puts his foot down firmly on the brake and just touches the buggy, which seesaws for a second. The woman’s eyes are the size of frisbees. She is pulled away by a grimacing, shouting, tooth-baring man, and hangs on to the buggy for dear life. The three-piece convoy thunders past the traffic jam, shoots back into the road at Hardenbergplatz and carries on unimpeded.

  Pavlik wonders if he should tell the others that Aaron is in Holm’s power. It will cause a shock. But if Holm comes out of the coach with her, the men need to be prepared or it’s going to catch them off guard.

  While he belts along at almost a hundred, through the gap in the traffic torn by the sirens of the Fords, he lends a matter-of-fact note to his voice. ‘We’ve got a new situation. A hostage has been killed. And one hostage is new. Aaron.’

  Rogge checks his Luger. Sascha grins.

  ‘Roger SET 1.’

  ‘Roger SET 2.’

  They reach the monumental 17 Junistrasse, which crosses the Tiergarten park all the way to the Brandenburg Gate. The stretch they are driving along is the only part with buildings beside it: on either side the Technical University. Pavlik sees the bus in the car park on the left. The windows have been covered over with newspaper. Ten patrol cars keep their distance. The last passers-by have been taken to safety by the riot police. Pavlik starts the stopwatch on his wrist. ‘SET 1 to me. SET 2 in position,’ he mutters into the microphone.

  The first Ford sheers off. He crosses the street and stops thirty metres from the coach. Pavlik overtakes the second car and turns, with the car in his wake, into the side-street that runs parallel with Prachtstrasse. ‘SET 2 to HQ.’

  ‘HQ here.’

  ‘Put me through to police headquarters.’ There is a click as the connection is established. ‘Get the girl out of there. And all the vehicles. Close off 17 Junistrasse from Ernst Reuter Strasse to Charlottenburger Tor right now. Have the university evacuated by the rear exits. If twenty kilos of C4 goes up, I don’t want anyone apart from my people anywhere around.’

  And not them either.

  Pavlik stops in a driveway beside the sixties building that houses the Faculty of Transport and Systems Planning. He jumps out of the car. At a glance he registers that the helicopter is moving away. The patrol cars swarm out to paralyze one of Berlin’s main transport axes. The other SET takes up position in the car park. They use cars as cover. Pavlik knows that there’s a hatch opening on the side of the Ford facing away from him, and Fricke is adjusting the precision rifle
that he controls with a joystick inside the vehicle.

  He takes time to look back into the BMW. Sascha looks out at him. It’s only now that Pavlik puts on his balaclava, provocatively slowly.

  He runs over to the men in his SET, ties a long plastic strip to the branch of a tree and sticks a sensor into the trunk. Reaches into his pocket. Each of them is carrying a hundredweight of kit as they hurry into the building.

  A siren wails; through the loudspeakers people are told to make their way to the rear exits as quickly as possible. The men have to work their way through a throng of students and staff who are dashing down the steps past them.

  Pavlik runs ahead and charges up to the second floor so quickly that the others can hardly keep up. It puts more of a strain on the fifty-year-old than they can imagine.

  Every step he takes he’s with Aaron. He’s bringing her home for the first time and he knows, from the moment she and Sandra smile at each other, that they will be friends for ever. He introduces her to the twins, and from then on they want her to come every evening. He has the Basque’s garrotte around his neck in Paris, and she kills the man with the side of her sunglasses. He is sitting with her and Marlowe on the sofa, and they’re playing at trying to outstare each other. He is in hospital in Barcelona, and he stays awake all night, afraid to close his eyes.

  Pavlik pulls open the door to an empty lecture theatre. Two men extend the telescopic stands and stretch out a black tarpaulin between them as a background to hide the five snipers from Holm; one man installs the video camera whose images will be transmitted to the operations centre of the Department. A second camera is outside, on the roof of the Ford.

  The routine that they’re playing out with great concentration helps Pavlik to get his breath back. They cut circles with a forty-centimetre diameter in the window panes. He opens the gun-case and takes out the rifle. Pavlik likes to be mobile, so for targets up to three hundred metres he’s got used to working with the Mauser, which is ancient but lighter. He likes the familiar feel of the antiquated wooden stock on his chin; he and the rifle are one. ‘I bet you’ve got a name for it,’ Aaron once teased him, ‘Jacqueline? Lucy? Mandy?’

  The thing about the name is true. But he keeps it to himself.