They both think of Ilya Nikulin. He was the head of a Russian Mafia organization with various business interests. His specialization was the criminal trade in raw materials. Nikulin bribed leading representatives of Siberian refineries, and with their help siphoned off huge quantities of oil and gas which he sold to countries in crisis, such as South Africa in the days of apartheid. He maintained a global network of bogus companies, which worked as intermediaries, not least in Germany. Later he cold-bloodedly exploited the UN aid programme ‘Oil for Food’ to get Iraqi oil past international sanctions, putting hundreds of millions of dollars in Saddam Hussein’s coffers.
Nikulin had excellent contacts, particularly in the Caucasus. He tapped into the Baku–Novosibirsk pipeline, and had so many politicians in Russia, Georgia and Chechnya in his pocket that for a long time no one dared come near him. He was responsible for countless hit-jobs, but even that didn’t do for him.
‘He was as powerful as the Romanovs,’ Pavlik says. ‘It was only when he put dirty oil on the US market at dumping prices that it all got too much for the Americans. The FBI asked to collaborate with Wiesbaden.’
Demirci nods. ‘But why did they send a fresh young officer from the Berlin LKA to Russia? She was in her mid-twenties. Capable, of course, she’d already distinguished herself. And yet it was a top-level mission by the BKA. Why her?’
‘I asked her once, but she was evasive.’
‘Nikulin killed himself while awaiting trial, didn’t he?’
‘Yes. In Moscow. His friends all turned their backs on him. Presumably they’d just been waiting for a moment of weakness on his part. And Nikulin’s empire collapsed, as big empires always do.’ Pavlik picks up his phone. ‘Just a moment.’ He taps on a stored number. ‘Hi, Richard, Ulf here.’ He laughs. ‘That would be great, maybe next week. Yes, I’d be delighted too. I need information, it would be worth a 1996 Barolo.’ He laughs again. ‘You rogue. Question: in 2005 the FBI hopped into your lap. It was to do with Ilya Nikulin. You paid for Jenny Aaron to go to Moscow. How did that come about?’
Demirci can’t believe her ears.
‘I see. Thank you,’ Pavlik murmurs. ‘We’ll have that bottle of Barolo together. Say hi to Sophie.’ He puts his phone away.
Demirci struggles to control herself. ‘That was Richard Wolf?’
‘I did him a favour once. He would say it was more than that. He’s in his mid-seventies now, but he’s still in great shape. We enjoy a glass of red wine and a Havana from time to time.’
Her thoughts slide away, and Pavlik notices. ‘What is it?’
‘It bothers me sometimes.’
‘What?’
‘The men thing. Chatting over red wine, brandy, cigars. You won’t understand that as a man, and it’s not a dig at you either.’
‘I’m not allowed into ladies’ circles either.’
‘That must be a terrible blow. What does Wolf say?’
‘One of Nikulin’s men had come to Berlin. He brought his girlfriend. The LKA put Aaron on to her. She won her trust, even her friendship. After she went back to Moscow, the woman invited Aaron to see her there. Wiesbaden got wind of it. Of course that was handed to them on a plate. According to Wolf, the Russian domestic secret service was involved as well as the BKA and the FBI. It’s probably a bit much to say that Aaron caught Nikulin. But she must have played an important part in it, otherwise the Department wouldn’t have taken an interest in her.’
‘If that was all there was to it, why didn’t she talk about it?’
‘Aaron is complicated.’
‘Now you’re being evasive.’
‘I could call Wolf again. Or Lissek. Or a few other people. But what would be the point?’
‘Do you think we’re barking up the wrong tree?’
‘It isn’t about the Mafia, or oil or money or politics. It’s just about Aaron and Holm. About something very personal. Forget Nikulin’s business deals.’
Demirci has run out of cigarettes. Pavlik holds a pack out to her. They smoke. Only now does he ask, ‘Why are you here?’
‘The Federal Aviation Office reacted to the photograph of the third man. Armin Bosch, a former professional soldier. He has a helicopter licence and one for single-engine planes, both from the Federal Defence Forces. I talked to his former commander; he’s now in charge of the government air fleet in Tegel. I had to do something to keep from going mad.’
‘So?’
‘Bosch was on combat duty in Afghanistan, he got a special bravery medal. Two years ago he was deployed in the Horn of Africa. His helicopter was stationed on a frigate. He was shot down over the sea by Somali pirates. Three of his comrades died. Bosch was the sole survivor, with severe burns all over his body. You were right about his short-term memory. He hasn’t been able to concentrate since the crash.’
Demirci follows her thoughts, and Pavlik follows his.
‘Bosch couldn’t get by on his small pension, and threatened his former superiors,’ she says. ‘He said he was going to come and get what was owed to him. His wife left him. She took their son with her and moved to her sister’s.’
Pavlik’s neck muscles tense again.
‘The Federal Police sent people to the house. They found the bodies of Bosch’s sister-in-law, his wife and his child in the apartment. They’d been there for at least a week. A triple murder.’
28
The remains of the covering still hang from the globes of the satellite antennas, flapping in the wind. Niko Kvist leaves the ruins of the US army base on the Teufelsberg behind him. Below him the city lies in a whirl of snow and light. The voices from Department headquarters are still ringing in his ears. They are carried by the bug that he stuck behind a monitor before Demirci took his service weapon away from him. They are searching, chatting, chucking theories back and forth. They know nothing. It drives him crazy.
He tried to cling on to an idea as he drove aimlessly around. In vain. He tried to control his breath while snow drifted above him. In vain. He tried to call her Aaron and not Jenny, as if that would help take him away from her. He yearned to stand on a mountain and be able to think clearly.
But now he is standing on that ridiculous pile of rubble and knows that it was all in vain.
On his fifth birthday his mother went away and left him alone with his father. His father took him to Finland, where he ran a video equipment store in a small town. His father was lonely, but none of the women that Niko saw coming out of the bathroom in the morning was up to much. His father started drinking, and when Niko was eleven there was a note in the kitchen and his father had left as well.
He came to Hamburg to live with an aunt. She told him that his mother had died a year before in Canada. She had been living there with a man that her sister had never met. He stayed with his aunt for seven years. When he packed his things at the age of eighteen, she was as much of a stranger to him as she had been on the first day. He never saw her again.
He joined the police because he wanted to belong to something. After five years he was asked if he wanted to join GSG 9, the counter-terrorism unit. Jenny’s father didn’t give him preferential treatment, but Niko knew that he expected more from him than he did from anyone else. He didn’t take part in a single operation over the next five years because there were none. Just training.
One winter he and four comrades were sent to Kabul, where they were to protect the German embassy. It was a fortress, and outside it a life was worth less than a bag of millet. When they drove through the city in their armoured cars, they saw men who had been collecting leaves in the fields to sell as fuel. They saw women with no shoes in the snow, they saw three-legged donkeys.
Once they got a flat tyre in some godforsaken part of the country. One of them changed the wheel, the others stood around him in a semicircle with their fingers on the triggers of their submachine guns. A dog trotted across the road with a human foot in its mouth.
Two of the comrades couldn’t bear it and asked to be transferred. Ot
hers came. They asked no questions, just as Niko had asked no questions, because after a day in Kabul you knew everything. In the evening they played cards.
In the markets people were scared and flinched from them. But children begged for the chocolate that they always carried in their pockets because children’s laughter was some consolation. One of the children in the marketplace in Yahya Khail didn’t want any chocolate. The child exploded, taking three of Niko’s comrades to their deaths. All that remained of the bomber was a red shadow on the wall. Niko only survived because he had stopped to watch a puppeteer telling a fairytale about a prince and a beautiful princess who was guarded by an ogre.
Niko barely knew two of the dead men, even though they had shared a room. The third had liked ice-hockey, which was why they called him Puck, and he had been his friend.
Niko had seen the child who wore the belt of explosives with a man hours before. He never told anyone. But from then on he went to the market alone every day. On the tenth day the man came. Niko followed him and stabbed him to death in an alley. He was spotted. It turned out that the Afghani was a CIA informer. He had had nothing to do with the suicide bombing, and had in fact warned the Americans about it.
Niko was sent back to Germany. Jenny’s father was waiting at the airport. Niko was handed a plastic bag: they had cleared his locker. Jenny’s father would say nothing about Yahya Khail. But Niko heard him say something that he would never forget. He knew that from now on he was dead to Jenny’s father.
Niko fell ill. He stopped eating and sleeping and pulled the telephone cable out of the wall. One morning Pavlik was standing outside the door of his apartment in Bonn. They had known each other since a GSG 9 training course with the Department. That was years ago, but Pavlik had never lost contact with him. He had always been a wood-fire stove on which everyone warmed themselves.
Without knowing anything about what happened in Yahyahel, Pavlik had sensed that Niko needed him. He took some leave, looked after him and saved him. He never asked what had happened in Kabul.
After a week he no longer needed the sleeping tablets; he made breakfast and breathed. Pavlik said he had talked to his boss and there was an opening for him in the Department. They got drunk, and it was decided.
The Department became his family. They were like brothers, that was what he had missed at GSG 9. For the first time he felt at home.
He met André, and André became his brother as well.
The brother he would kill.
And then there was Jenny.
She had arrived a year before him. When she walked, the air vibrated for ten metres around her. When she fought, it was terrifying. When she breathed, he listened.
She was Jörg Aaron’s daughter.
He wooed her, but she didn’t let him get his hopes up. It was three years before they first went on duty together in Naples. Niko saved her life, and she thanked him by cooking him dinner. They met a few times after that although she never gave him anything more than her intelligence, her laughter, her charm.
A year later they came out of a cinema. He bought her a bag of hot chestnuts, and Jenny kissed him. She took him home to the apartment that she shared with a strange cat who gave him evil looks. That night and many others she thought Niko was sleeping, but he was wide awake.
They didn’t tell anyone in the Department apart from Pavlik. He told Niko he would break every bone in his body if he ever hurt Jenny.
In Marrakech they made love from dawn till dusk. But Niko was unhappy. Everything about Jenny was perfect. And still it didn’t work. She told him about Boenisch and Runge and the basement. He held her in his arms.
And still it didn’t work.
Niko didn’t know what was wrong. Perhaps her father, whom he had disappointed and who now stood between them.
No. Of course I know. We couldn’t be together. One of us would have stood by the grave of the other and hated themselves. That was why I decided not to love her.
He wanted to call it a day in Barcelona, in the little restaurant on the Parc Güell, where he had booked the table. But that was before they drove to the harbour and he died in that warehouse while she sped down that tunnel where she died as well.
For five years he was afraid to see her again. For five years he told himself she had never meant anything to him. But yesterday morning he stood in the terminal and looked at her for an eternity as she waited for him. Then he knew that he loved her, and had loved her for all those years. It hurt so much that he needed a second eternity to find the strength to speak to her.
He hears Fricke calling Pavlik. ‘We’ve got the airfield.’
‘Where?’
‘In Finow, up in Brandenburg. Bosch chartered a Cessna for 4:30 and paid in cash. Fake papers. But they recognized him from the photograph.’
‘Did the plane leave?’
‘No. He called at a quarter to four. He said something had come up, and postponed the flight till tomorrow. The time is left open, the charter is valid for two days.’
‘Destination?’
‘Supposedly Vilnius.’
‘How many people?’
Fricke lets a moment pass and then says: ‘Three.’
Niko feels his shattered ribs. His face is numb. The snowflakes make way for crusted blood. He has the taste of copper on his tongue.
‘Send two SETs straight away.’ Pavlik chooses the men. Fricke is one of them.
‘Demirci wants me to stay at HQ.’
‘I’ll talk to her. Have Mertsch tell the Federal Police to get moving. We need all available drones with infrared cameras up there. But no helicopters. Just a second—’ Niko hears murmuring, Pavlik speaking to someone. ‘Tell the technical department that operation headquarters is moving to Finow. Get your arse in gear, we’ll see you there. I want the Mauser and the Light Fifty.’
‘OK.’
‘Where’s Kvist?’
‘At the old American listening station. He’s looking at the landscape. Maybe he wants to write a poem about it. He doesn’t know anything, believe me.’
‘Don’t lose him.’
He is standing on the Teufelsberg. Snow falls on him and turns to blood on his tongue. She talked to him and he was amazed. She yelled at him and he was amazed. She danced with him and he was amazed. He has been dead for ages.
29
Under her coat Demirci’s blouse clings wetly to her back. It isn’t because Pavlik is dashing northwards at full speed along the Berlin city freeway. Not because of the twenty centimetres between their car and the truck that he finally forces to the side. Not because he is tapping the number that Fricke just gave him into his phone as he does so.
‘Three,’ they said.
Behind that number is the urge to chain-smoke and the certainty that there is no seat on the plane for Jenny Aaron.
A phone is picked up at the other end. ‘Germer speaking.’
‘One of my colleagues called you. Who’s doing the paperwork for the flight to Vilnius tomorrow?’
‘I am.’
‘Are you at the airfield?’
‘Yes.’
‘When do you shut?’
‘In half an hour, at eight.’
‘Is there anyone there apart from you?’
‘Two colleagues who are staying a bit longer, till nine.’
‘Where do you live?’
The man gives him the address.
‘Go home now, but don’t hurry, take it easy. I’ll see you there. Tell the other two to knock off now. Everything has to look perfectly normal.’
‘What’s all this ab—’
‘Later.’ Pavlik cuts him off and ends the call.
‘Why would he have postponed the flight?’ Demirci asks as they shoot past a slow car, touching its wing mirror and leaving an extended beep on the horn far behind them.
‘There are a thousand possibilities.’
‘But you’re banking on one.’
‘Aaron somehow scuppered his plans.’
‘Holm
didn’t sound concerned on the phone.’
‘If he was, we wouldn’t notice.’
‘Why do you want to have Fricke there with you, of all people?’
‘It’s going to be a long night, the men are nervous. He always has a joke at the ready. Fricke does the others good, don’t underestimate him. And when things get going, he’s deadly serious.’
They’ve reached the northern edge of the city. The passing lane is free now, and the dark freeway is up ahead of them. At two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour the central reservation looks like a burst of rapid-fire tracer bullets.
‘I’m thinking about Kvist. Don’t you think his behaviour is curious?’
Pavlik says nothing.
‘If you were in his place, what would you do?’
‘Stick a .45 in my mouth and pull the trigger.’
‘I mean it.’
‘So do I.’
‘Please.’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘You’ve got underworld contacts, you’d talk to informers, you’d ask about Holm or his accomplices, as our people are doing as well. You’d call one of your buddies at bomb disposal to find out what we know and so on.’
‘He may have done that already. We’re only listening in on his car, we’re not tapping his phone.’
‘Wrong.’
Pavlik’s head suddenly turns towards her. ‘Without authorization?’
‘Since when have you been such a stickler?’
‘What happened to the woman who used to sleep with legal clauses sewn into her bed sheets?’
‘Every now and again the sheets need changing.’
The car feels cold.
Change down, accelerate, change up.
‘I’ve known Kvist for four weeks,’ she says. ‘When he went on that mission against the Romanians he charged straight into the flames. Looking at his files, you might think he’d done it deliberately. Quite honestly I even thought about having him transferred.’
In the Dark Page 32
