A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  Fabel realised what was happening. The bastard was trying to push him off the wharf and into the river.

  He instinctively pushed the footbrake to the floor. A useless exercise, he realised immediately, so he slammed the BMW into reverse and pushed back against the four-by-four. It was an unequal struggle and his tyres squealed and smoked as they spun impotently on the smooth cobbles.

  He had to get out. He had to get out before the car went over the edge. But he was on the wrong side of the car, the water side. He stared wildly at the grille of the Land Rover, which completely filled his rear-view mirror. Filled Fabel’s universe. Fabel had just decided to risk making the jump when he felt suddenly weightless, and realised that his car had gone over the edge.

  There was another impact, this time as the car hit the surface of the water and Fabel was thrown around in the metal confines of his car. Everything went dark and for a moment he thought he had passed out, until he realised, as the passenger cabin of his car filled with cold, oily, dark water, that he was sinking to the bottom of the River Elbe.

  Chapter Thirty

  He had found out her name remarkably easily. Getting around the encryption had not been difficult. It had taken Roman less than half a day to decode and transfer the information.

  Meliha Yazar.

  The woman he had seen in the café had been Meliha Yazar. Roman felt a profound sadness at the idea that such a beautiful woman would now be dead. So would he be, soon.

  He had stopped hating Meliha for leaving the phone for him to find. With that act – which he now felt was not as random as it had first seemed, maybe she had seen him, recognised something in him – she had given him a great gift, for now Roman knew something about himself that he had not known before. He was brave. He had always thought of himself as cowardly, but now he realised that he was not afraid of dying. They would kill him, but before they did he would make sure that the information he had, that she had entrusted to him with that simple act in the café, would be passed on to the policeman Fabel and others. Roman realised that sending the information by email would never work. He recognised the sophistication of their expertise and the scope of their technical resources. He genuinely admired some of their work. Truly creative.

  But they were dangerous. The first thing they would do when they traced Roman would be to wipe out his email traffic and blogging presence. To silence his electronic singing.

  He also knew that he could not simply rely on Fabel, because the chances were he would soon be dead too. Roman and Fabel both represented the outer radiations of a spidering spread of knowledge that had to be contained. A circle that had to be closed.

  But that was in the real world. And Roman existed in more than the real world. He knew the truth and the falsity of their fantasy of a digital otherworld. It existed, but it was not somewhere you could go unless you accepted the total death of the ego. A soulless shadow of reality. He knew. He had spent so much of his young life there.

  He finished decrypting the files. And there it was: he had found the secret about the Pharos Project that they could never allow to be known. They had been mad to think that they could keep something like that hidden from the world. But, there again, the Big Lie was always the most enduring, the easiest to sustain.

  As soon as he had finished transferring the file to the various formats he wanted, Roman went around his apartment, opening the curtains. He struggled with a couple of the half-light windows but managed to get them open and allow some air into the apartment.

  Then he went out.

  It was sunny. The first really sunny day of the year. The Wilhelmsburg street was full of noise after the quiet of his apartment. He thought about the Albanians who lived below him who had not really been noisy; it had been Roman who had been intolerant simply because he had been unable to remove himself that one step further from mankind and the real world. There had, Roman realised, been people just like him throughout history. The medieval monks who chose the austerity of a monastic cell and the virtual reality of religion; the ancient philosophers who hid in caves or barrels and commented on the human condition from which they had disconnected.

  It took him a long time to walk into town. But he had been determined to walk. It meant that every now and then he had to lean against a wall to catch his breath, and he sat down every time the opportunity presented itself on a municipal bench or, on one occasion, even on a lidded waste bin.

  He saw the way others looked at him. But today Roman did not care. Today he had a mission to fulfil, a purpose that was, for once, not all about him. He went to the DeutschePost office first and bought five padded envelopes, dropped a memory stick and a handwritten note into each. He paused for a moment before he let the envelopes slip from his grasp and into the mail chute; in that moment, he thought of Meliha, the woman in the café, the woman behind the truth. He hoped that somehow, somewhere, she would be aware of what he was doing for her.

  After the post office, Roman went to an ATM and withdrew five hundred euros, folded the notes neatly and placed them in a sixth envelope. On the way home he visited two more ATMs, using a different card each time; each time removing five hundred euros. By the time he reached the main door of his apartment building, Roman was wheezing and sweating profusely. He leaned against the wall and looked up at the sky. High above him, the distant glint of a passenger jet left a trail of vapour, like a needle running white thread through blue silk. There is never just one reality, he thought as he watched the jet, wondering what the passengers saw of Wilhelmsburg from that altitude. There are as many realities as there are people on the planet: reality is what lives in each person’s head. When they kill me, he thought, my reality will end, but I will have no sense of it ending. Just as I was not aware before my birth, I will not be aware after my death, so all time only exists as I perceive it. Time began with me and will end with me. I am immortal.

  When he had recovered enough, he entered his apartment building and started the slow, painful climb up the stairs. His breathing was even more laboured by the time he reached the door of the apartment beneath his. When the Albanian opened the door and recognised Roman, his face darkened with dull anger; then he seemed to notice the state Roman was in and the anger was replaced by concern.

  ‘Are you all right? You no look so good …’

  ‘Jetmir …’ Roman spat the words out between rheumy wheezes. ‘That’s your name, isn’t it … Jetmir?’

  The Albanian nodded and moved out to help Roman. Roman nearly laughed: Jetmir was a small, wiry, dark man whom Roman reckoned would be crushed to death if he fell on him.

  ‘You come in. You not well man. I get doctor, maybe.’

  ‘No doctor, Jetmir. I’m sorry. I’m the one who kept calling the police. You knew that anyway, but I’m telling you now, it was me and I’m sorry.’ He pushed the envelope containing the fifteen hundred euros into the Albanian’s hands. ‘Take it. I want you to have it. I know you don’t have a lot of money.’

  The Albanian stared at the cash. ‘Why?’ he asked. But he made no attempt to return it.

  ‘Because I’ve been a bad neighbour. And because I want you to do something for me. It’s payment in advance.’ Roman paused. A pain started to shoot across his chest and down his right arm. He grabbed the Albanian’s shirt front and pulled him close. With his other hand he shoved a second envelope against his chest. ‘This is for the police,’ he said. ‘It’s very important that they get this. There are bad men coming, Jetmir. They’re coming for me.’

  ‘Then I get police now …’

  ‘No!’ Roman shouted and tightened his grip on the small Albanian. ‘No. That could be dangerous for you and your family. Listen, if anything happens to me, you’ve got to give that envelope to the police. But only to a policeman called Fabel. Jan Fabel. His name’s on the front. Have you got that? Don’t give it to anyone else.’

  The Albanian nodded vigorously. ‘You wait here, I get you some water.’

  It took a full fifteen minut
es for the pain to ease and for Roman, sipping slowly at the water, to get something of his breath back. While they sat together on the stairs, Roman and the Albanian talked. They chatted about the most inconsequential things, about Jetmir’s home in Albania, about his children and how they sounded just like Germans. But throughout the whole conversation the earnest expression of concern never left the Albanian’s face. Roman remembered how the Albanian had tried to talk to him when the family first moved in, how they had made an effort to befriend him. He felt bad when he thought about that. They were people, after all; not just a noise, an annoyance, on the periphery of Roman’s existence.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Roman, slowly and painfully easing himself up from the stairs. ‘I’ll be fine. Just don’t forget your promise.’

  ‘I won’t forget. We is good neighbours now. You are my fqinj. We look after each other.’

  The Albanian helped Roman up the rest of the stairs to his front door.

  ‘I’ll be fine now. Thanks for your help, Jetmir.’ Roman unlocked his door, smiled and waited until he heard the Albanian shut his own door one floor down. Only then did Roman step into his apartment.

  Roman looked around. It really was a nice place, if only he had kept it tidier. He regretted that now. There was a lot he regretted now. He stood leaning against the door, still struggling with his breathing.

  There were three of them in the flat. None of them spoke. They all wore identical grey suits and had Bluetooth earpieces jammed into their ears as if fused there. One was sitting at Roman’s computers, another held Meliha’s cellphone in his hand. The third stood directly in front of Roman, staring at him with nothing in his face.

  Roman had known they would be there. Before he had left to carry out his chores he had reassembled Meliha’s phone, including the tracer, and had left it switched on. A beacon. A digital lighthouse. They were big on that kind of metaphor, he thought.

  He started to laugh at the absurdity of it all just as the Consolidator closest to him stepped forward, slipped the large plastic bag he had in his gloved hands over Roman’s head and pulled the drawstring tight.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Fabel knew that it would be panic that would kill him. He forced the thought to the front of his mind. He had been winded by the first impact and his lungs were still depleted of oxygen; a primal instinct screamed within him to open his mouth and breathe: to suck in the filthy river water; to fill his lungs with something, anything.

  The natural buoyancy of his body was pushing him up against the fabric roof of the car as it sank and he knew he was being dragged deeper into the Elbe. The wharf had originally been intended as a shipping berth, meaning the water was deep enough to accommodate a large ship’s draught. Deep and dark.

  Now Fabel could see nothing. This was the car he had owned for ten years but suddenly its interior was totally alien to him. A strange and toxic environment. One window, he knew, was open and offered a quick exit. The other was intact. A simple choice: one direction or the other. He pushed himself toward what he thought was the right side of the car. No steering wheel. He found the edge of the passenger window and pushed himself through. He was out of the car. And rising. His lungs screamed and a searing pain he had never felt before sliced through his chest. He could now see the surface above him but it did not seem to get any nearer. The light above started to dim, the water around him growing darker again. He felt renewed panic when he realised he was going to black out. He was going to lose consciousness and he would never regain it. His arms and legs became leaden and he knew he was sinking again.

  All fear left him and he let his held breath go in an explosion of bubbles.

  Something closed over his mouth and pinched his nose shut. A hand. There was someone in the water with him. Another arm looped under his armpit and around his chest. Fabel instinctively fought against the hand bruisingly clamped over his nose and mouth: the logic that it was preventing him breathing in the filthy dock water lost in primal panic.

  He knew they must be rising, but the water became even darker. Black. He no longer felt his limbs, the chill of the water, the hammering in his chest.

  Fabel found himself sitting again in his father’s study in Norddeich. It was dark and the study was illuminated by only one desk light. Somewhere outside the window, on the other side of the dyke, there was the sound of a storm. As Fabel listened to the wind and the rain he noticed that Paul Lindemann was sitting opposite him, the bullet wound in the centre of his forehead crusted with a circle of long-dried black-red blood.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ Fabel asked.

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It happened. It was my time.’

  ‘It’s my time now. Is this real?’

  ‘It’s not your time,’ said Paul and smiled. ‘I don’t know if this is real. Do you remember that case you investigated, the one where the murderer thought he was made up, that everything, including himself, was all part of a fairy tale?’

  ‘I remember him.’

  ‘Maybe he was right after all. Maybe there is no such thing as reality.’ Paul paused. ‘Did you see the books?’

  ‘What books?’

  ‘The books she kept beside her bed.’

  ‘Yes, I saw them.’

  ‘Are they with you now? Do you have them in the water?’

  ‘I’m not in the water. I’m here.’

  ‘You’re in the water, Jan. Do you have the books with you?’

  ‘No. Anna took them. In a bag.’

  ‘Remember the books.’ Paul frowned, creasing the punctured skin around the bullet wound. ‘Don’t forget about the books.’

  Fabel wanted to answer Paul but found himself becoming sleepy. The room went dark and the sound of the storm faded.

  Something seared through him; penetrated every millimetre of his being. There was a great roar, like the crashing of waves but too fast, one after the other. The pain surged with each roar and Fabel realised it was his own breathing. There was something still clamped over his nose and mouth and he grabbed at it. A hand caught him by the wrist.

  ‘Take it easy.’ A female voice mixed authority and reassurance. ‘It’s just an oxygen mask.’

  He tried to get up but more hands gently restrained him.

  ‘It’s Anna, Chef. You’re going to be okay. You’re in an ambulance. We’re taking you to the hospital.’

  Fabel’s vision cleared and he saw Anna and a female paramedic leaning over him. Full consciousness returned like an electric shock.

  ‘Did you get them?’ He tried to sit upright but again was restrained. Pain throbbed nauseatingly in his head. ‘They pushed me into the water. They tried to kill me.’ He saw there was someone else in the ambulance. A figure sitting on the bench seat next to Anna; hair wet-black and plastered to his brow, a blanket wrapped around hunched shoulders.

  ‘This is Herr Flemming, Jan,’ said Anna. ‘It was Herr Flemming who pulled you out of the water. He saw your car go in and he jumped in to save you.’

  Fabel remembered the hand over his nose and mouth, the arm looped around him, pulling him upwards.

  ‘You saved my life?’

  Flemming shrugged underneath the blanket. ‘Right place, right time.’

  ‘It was more than that. You risked your life to come in for me.’

  ‘Jan …’ Fabel thought he sensed something tentative in Anna’s tone. ‘Herr Flemming works for Seamark International.’

  ‘But I thought …’

  ‘You were right, Herr Fabel,’ said Flemming. ‘We were following you. But we’re on the same side, so to speak. But rest now. They’re taking me to the hospital, too. We can talk later.’

  ‘Was it you who phoned me last night? Are you Klabautermann?’

  Flemming laughed. ‘Maybe I was the Klabautermann today, but no, I didn’t phone you.’

  Fabel lay back on the gurney. The oxygen eased his breathing. He cl
osed his eyes and tried to fight back the nausea that washed over him in great, welling waves. The ambulance started to move, jolting over some obstacle as it got under way. Fabel tore off the oxygen mask and twisted sideways, vomiting over the edge of the gurney. The paramedic held him while he finished retching, before asking him if he felt better and easing him back into a lying position. As he lay there, feeling the pressure of the paramedic’s fingertips on his wrist as she checked his pulse, Fabel felt a dull surprise as his eyelids closed. He was going to sleep.

  Susanne arrived at the hospital in St Georg about half an hour after Fabel had been admitted. She looked shaken and Fabel found himself worrying more about her than himself as she sat at his bedside. She stayed there while he was reexamined on the hour. The frown on her face refused to dissipate, no matter how often he reassured her that he was all right, or the doctors told her that there was nothing to be concerned about.

  ‘I didn’t take in much water,’ he said. ‘That guy Flemming made sure of that. He got me out really quickly, Susanne. I’m fine, honest.’ He placed his hand on her cheek and smiled. She placed her hand over his.

  ‘They tried to kill you, Jan,’ she said incredulously. ‘These maniacs actually believe they can get away with trying to kill a senior Hamburg police officer.’