A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  ‘Are you okay?’ Menke asked as the two men shook hands.

  ‘I’m fine. Just a bit shaken up after my last trip to the waterfront.’

  ‘Oh God, yes,’ said Menke. ‘I should have thought. A pretty insensitive venue. Sorry. Do you want to go somewhere else?’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’

  Menke led the way along the quayside. From here Fabel could see the arc of Hamburg on the far shore, from the Köhlbrandbrücke bridge to the Speicherstadt and HafenCity. This side of the Elbe, the south shore, was the working heart of the city. Huge cranes behind them arranged freight containers in piled-high rows, like children’s building blocks.

  ‘Before we start,’ said Menke, ‘do you have a cellphone with you?’

  ‘Of course. But it’s switched off and I left it in the car.’

  ‘I see,’ said Menke. ‘You clearly recognise what we’re dealing with here.’

  ‘We’re dealing with an idea,’ said Fabel. ‘Not a reality. I know that these people have massive technological resources and skills at their disposal, but I still think they’re not as omniscient as their PR makes out.’

  ‘No?’ said Menke. ‘I work in the business of watching others, Fabel. And I have technology at my disposal that you couldn’t begin to imagine. I can sit outside someone’s home and see what they’re seeing on their computer monitor. I’m not talking about hacking into their WiFi or anything like that. They don’t have to be connected to a hub or a network at all. We even have keystroke analysis where we can tell what’s being typed into a computer without breaking into the hard drive … all done purely externally. Or take where we’re standing now … there are at least five national intelligence agencies who have access to satellite technology so sophisticated that they could have a good stab at deciphering what we’re saying to each other right now. You’ve read the material I sent you on the Pharos Project?’ he asked when they reached the pier’s end.

  ‘I have, yes. And the more I’ve read, the more I’m convinced the Pharos Project is connected to the death of Berthold Müller-Voigt and the disappearance of Meliha Yazar. I am also pretty certain they are directly or indirectly behind the murder of Daniel Föttinger, and I think I know why. I wanted to talk to you because I think you can help me put the pieces together with the Föttinger case.’

  ‘I’ll do anything I can, Herr Fabel.’

  Fabel gave an appreciative nod. ‘We fished a body out of the river and I believe he’s the motorcycle rider involved in the attack on Föttinger. He’s the guy I sent you a note about: Harald Jaburg.’

  ‘I know,’ said Menke. ‘You’re right that Föttinger’s death was arranged indirectly.’ He paused, looking out over the water for a moment before turning back to Fabel. ‘Do you know anything about quantum physics – superposition, unified string theory, holographic principle, that kind of thing?’

  ‘In a word, no.’

  ‘Quantum theory is throwing up ideas that would make your head hurt. And every cult, street-corner messiah, New Age guru and nut-job is giving these theories a spin to try to give their loopy philosophies some kind of credibility. And they’re using them to snare the more vulnerable in our society.’ Menke took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered one to Fabel, who shook his head. ‘Harald Jaburg is indeed a person of interest for the Bureau. As soon as the name went into the system I was alerted. He’s red-flagged: a known member of the Guardians of Gaia, an extreme environmental group.’

  ‘One of the extreme environmental groups you didn’t want to go into details about with Müller-Voigt?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘Exactly. This job has made me paranoid. The Guardians of Gaia believe in direct action against any individual, group or organisation they believe is endangering the environment. So far it’s been more protests and minor vandalism.’

  ‘Setting cars on fire?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘Among other things. Our intelligence is that they’re becoming more and more militant.’

  ‘There’s nothing more militant than four bullets in the head,’ said Fabel.

  Menke shook his head emphatically. ‘No, that doesn’t seem right. As far as we’re aware, they haven’t yet injured anyone they see as the enemy, far less carried out internal executions. This is a weird one, all right. You mentioned in your message that Jaburg had a distinctive tattoo. The green gamma on the chest is their symbol for Gaia.’

  ‘The Greek goddess of the Earth?’

  ‘In name, yes. But their interpretation is more in the sense of the Gaia Hypothesis, formulated way back in the seventies. Back then it was considered weird and New Age-y, but now mainstream science is buying into it. It’s the belief that the Earth’s biosphere, of which we are part, is actually a single, integrated, living system. An organism in its own right.’

  ‘Sounds harmless enough,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Yes, well, the Guardians of Gaia has a distinctly paramilitary structure. They believe that “Gaia” is dying and that mankind is the infection that’s killing her. So I’m sure you understand our interest in the group. They see themselves as soldiers. Soldiers engaged in a war against the forces of globalisation and industrialisation. And in some ways against mankind itself.’

  Fabel thought back to the pale, skinny corpse of a young man lying on a mortuary trolley. ‘I think someone may have just fired the first shot.’

  ‘Harald Jaburg was the most minor of minor players in the Guardians. A gofer. And definitely not an assassin type.’

  ‘A getaway rider?’

  ‘Entirely possible. Our intel tells us that Jaburg worked on several occasions with one Niels Freese, an entirely different kettle of fish. I know even more about Herr Freese than I do about Jaburg.’

  ‘In what way different?’

  ‘Freese is the one with the skewed perception of the world. He’s unpredictable, violent. History of severe mental disorders.’

  ‘Unlikely to have planned and executed the Schanzenviertel attack, then?’

  ‘I’m not saying that. Not by a long chalk. Freese is disabled, officially. Brain damage at birth, but that doesn’t seem to have blunted his intelligence. And he can function normally in many ways, but he does have all kinds of other problems, mainly neurological, and some that have made him outright delusional on occasion. But he’s smart enough, all right. He is, however, highly susceptible to manipulation, to suggestion. His mental state means he could be convinced of almost anything, if it’s articulated right and gels with his odd perception of the world.’

  ‘What is his problem?’ asked Fabel. ‘I mean specifically?’

  ‘It’s tragic, really. He really does experience reality differently from the rest of us: he suffers from almost constant promnesia, a highly disconcerting condition which is like having permanent déjà vu. And he has frequent episodes of what the quacks call reduplicative paramnesia. When he’s in that state, the poor bastard thinks someone’s abducted him from the real world and built a perfect but counterfeit copy around him.’

  ‘I’ll ask my partner about it. She’s a quack, by the way.’

  ‘Is she?’ Menke looked only remotely embarrassed. ‘Ah, well, no doubt she can tell you more about the condition than I can. In any case, his condition has made Freese someone who can be influenced by feeding his paranoid beliefs. Not controlled, but influenced. The nature of his condition makes him easy meat for all kinds of mumbo-jumbo about quantum realities and environmental singularities.’

  ‘The kind of thing the Guardians of Gaia spout?’

  ‘And the Pharos Project.’

  ‘There’s a connection?’

  ‘Not that we can prove,’ said Menke. He paused as the two men watched a freighter, stacked impossibly high with containers, drift silently by. ‘But there has been a suggestion that the Guardians of Gaia are actually just a directly controlled arm of the Pharos Project.’

  ‘But surely their philosophies are totally different.’

  Menke handed Fabel a sheet of paper with a handwritten
note on it.

  ‘This is the last known address we have for Niels Freese. The second name is one that no one knows outside the BfV … except now you know. That is the name of the man we now believe to be the Hamburg commander of the Guardians of Gaia. If Freese carried out the attack that killed Föttinger – and it’s a big “if” – then that is the name of the man who ordered it.’

  ‘Jens Markull …’ Fabel read the name out loud. ‘Why the big secret about his name?’

  ‘He is … he was one of ours. You implied we must have infiltrators, undercover people working for us. Well, we do. He was one of them.’

  ‘He’s a BfV officer?’

  ‘No. Markull is simply someone whose principles were for sale. But it looks like something’s happened to make him shut up shop. We were getting really good intelligence from him, then it dried up. The last thing we heard was that he had met with some people from the Pharos Project. Then suddenly he’s promoted to Commander of the Hamburg division of the Guardians of Gaia and doesn’t seem to want to talk to us any more.’

  Fabel put the note into his pocket and the two men started walking back to their cars.

  ‘There’s one thing I’d like to ask you about Niels Freese,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘These neurological problems he has. Do they include a limp?’

  Menke stopped and turned to Fabel, a look of surprise on his face. ‘Yes. As a matter of fact he does have a limp. The result of mild palsy caused by the oxygen deprivation at birth.’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Heiner Goetz was a burly man just on the right side of sixty. He had thinning grey hair brushed back from a broad heavy forehead and large wiry eyebrows. A pair of wire-framed reading glasses had permanent residence on his heavy nose, balanced almost at the tip. Fabel always felt the glasses were a deliberate affectation: something to mitigate the fact that Goetz looked as if he worked on a building site. But Heiner Goetz was no bricklayer; he was the Chief State Prosecutor for Hamburg.

  He sat and stared out of the window of his office on Georg-Fock-Wall as Fabel ran through, for the third time that day, his suspicions about the Pharos Project and its role in the disappearance and probable murder of Meliha Kebir, as well as the killings of Berthold Müller-Voigt, Daniel Föttinger and Harald Jaburg.

  Fabel did his best, but knew that he had no hard evidence on which to base his claims. Securing any kind of warrant was a distant hope. He looked at his watch and glanced across at Werner Meyer whom he’d brought along with him. They had been talking it through for the best part of the morning and Fabel wanted to get back to the Presidium. After his conversation with Menke the previous day, Fabel had initiated a major manhunt for Niels Freese.

  Goetz did not turn from the window when Fabel had finished speaking and gave no indication that he had heard what the Chief Commissar had said. Fabel remained patiently quiet: he had dealt with Goetz on countless occasions before and knew that the Chief State Prosecutor always took his time to think things through. Either that, or he enjoyed making police officers desperate to close in on a suspect sweat.

  ‘So all of these deaths have been sanctioned to keep a secret?’

  ‘That’s what I believe.’

  ‘But you have no substantiating evidence?’

  ‘None, Herr Goetz. We need the warrants to seize computers and compel testimony. It’s the only way we’re going to get to the bottom of this.’

  ‘Herr Fabel, you have been a police officer long enough to know that if I granted warrants on this kind of speculation, and the execution of said warrants yielded nothing material, then you and I would both be looking for another line of work before long. Now, if you had asked for surveillance warrants – wiretaps, email interception, that kind of thing, through which we could gradually harvest more convincing evidence – then I would have given that more credence.’

  ‘But don’t you see, Herr Goetz,’ said Fabel, trying to keep the frustration out of his tone, ‘such measures are futile against an opponent who is infinitely better resourced in terms of technology than we are. There is no form of electronic surveillance that they would not immediately spot and counter.’

  Another silence as Goetz continued to stare out of the window.

  ‘All this internet business,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s a whole new environment for crime and we don’t have the laws or even the basic understanding to combat it. About six months ago there was a case put up to me, not by your commission but by one of the child protection agencies. This girl – fifteen, if I remember right – threw herself under an S-Bahn train. She’d been a victim of so-called cyber bullying. She couldn’t get away from it. It was relentless – vicious, vile stuff sent constantly to her computer, to her phone … it was a real campaign to destroy the spirit of a human being and it was facilitated by all of this technology that’s supposed to make our lives better. She felt she couldn’t escape it so she threw herself in front of a train. Fifteen. A life over before it had properly begun. I really wanted to go after the girls who had driven her to it, but the laws aren’t there. The understanding isn’t there. That poor girl, driven to that …’

  Turning suddenly from the window, he leaned forward onto his desk, the heavy shoulders hunching.

  ‘We’ve got four dead victims – and from what you’ve told me, these people have the arrogance to believe that they can go on killing whoever they feel is in their way, including a Hamburg State Senator, and attempting to murder a senior Hamburg police officer. If there’s one thing that really gets me fired up, gentlemen, it’s when someone thinks they’re beyond the reach of the law.’ Goetz slammed his open hands down on the desktop. ‘I’ll grant your warrants. Search, seizure and arrest. I’ll try to get them ready for this evening, but there’s a jurisdictional crossover because of the location of the Pharos or whatever they call this cult commune. I need to speak to the Lower Saxony Prosecutor’s office.’

  Fabel stood up, beaming. ‘Thank you, Herr Prosecutor …’

  ‘When do we execute the warrants?’ asked Werner once they were back in the pool car Fabel had been given.

  ‘Tomorrow morning. When we get back I need you to do the liaison with the Polizei Niedersachsen.’

  ‘No problem.’

  Fabel took his cellphone from his pocket and rang Susanne at her office in the Institute for Legal Medicine.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked. ‘You were a bit shaken up this morning.’

  ‘Can you blame me? Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine, like I told you. Still a bit shaken up too, but I’ve got a job to do. Have you finished going through the psych assessment and history I got on Niels Freese?’

  ‘Yes. It’s an interesting one, I’ll give you that. According to his records, Freese suffered brain damage at birth that’s left him prone to Delusional Misidentification Syndrome.’

  ‘In layman’s terms?’

  ‘We all suffer from a mild form of it every time we experience déjà vu. Just as we experience the delusion of having experienced something before, patients with full-blown DMS have more florid and specific delusions.’

  ‘What kind of delusions?’

  ‘Take your pick. Fregoli’s Delusion makes you think that everyone around you is actually the same person in disguise … if you’ve got Capgras Delusion you believe your family members or friends have been replaced by identical impostors … and if you’ve got Cotard’s Delusion you don’t believe you’re even alive. What Freese seems to have is Reduplicative Paramnesia. The poor bastard thinks he’s been transported to an exact copy of the world.’

  ‘Well, I have to say, that makes him sound pretty mad to me.’

  ‘The sad thing is that these delusions are never the result of a mental illness. The root always lies in neurological damage: a brain injury, stroke, Alzheimer’s or something like that. Poor Freese has had this since birth. His reality is one that’s almost impossible for us to imagine, Jan. Just think of it: almost continuous déjà vu, const
ant feelings of deep significance provoked by the most ordinary object, person or event. And then the long periods of short-circuited memories and the belief that everything around you is a fake, a conspiracy. All the trappings of paranoia without the schizophrenia. Niels Freese is a sane man who lives in an insane reality.’

  ‘But he’s a killer; and from what you’re saying, these people are not dangerous …’

  ‘Anyone who’s delusional is dangerous. There are instances of people suffering from Capgras Delusion slicing open their spouse to look for the mechanical workings or the robotic circuitry inside. People with Cotard’s Delusion frequently kill themselves or others, believing it doesn’t matter because no one is alive anyway. If you want my professional opinion, Jan, then I suggest you find Freese quick. Before he harms himself or others.’

  ‘I need to find him quick, all right,’ said Fabel. ‘Freese is the key to reality as far as I’m concerned. He ties everything together.’

  After he hung up from his call to Susanne, Fabel dialled Anna’s number.

  ‘Did you get the information I asked for?’

  ‘Yep, Chef. Tim Flemming is exactly who he claims to be and his background is what he said. No disciplinary or other problems, either while in the Kiel harbour police or as a naval frogman. But something interesting did come up. His younger sister became involved with an extreme religious group that later became a focus for the attention of the BfV. Flemming apparently removed her from this group against her will and held her at a secret address in Denmark, where he worked with established deprogrammers to undo the brainwashing. It worked, so no charges were ever brought.’