A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  ‘I don’t know. Fifty, fifty-five metres. Enough to make sure that you’re dead if you slip, so why don’t you come down from the parapet?’

  Niels looked up from the water and out across to the city. ‘You know, it’s a crime that this bridge is closed to pedestrians. You get such a great view from here. But that’s the world we live in. The car is God.’ He paused, as if perturbed. ‘Or at least I think that’s the world we live in. I get confused. Maybe that’s the other place. I had it all straightened out in my head, but now it’s all muddled again about which is which.’

  ‘You’ve got muddled about a lot of things, Niels. You’re tired and confused. Why don’t you come with me and we can talk it all over? Get it all straightened out.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere I don’t want to. And you would take me somewhere I don’t want to go, where I couldn’t see things I want to see or go places I want to go.’

  ‘Niels, why did you kill Daniel Föttinger?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man who burned to death in the Schanzenviertel.’

  ‘Oh, him. I was told to. He was an enemy of Gaia.’

  ‘But he was working on projects, on technology to protect the planet.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Niels said absently and shrugged his shoulders as he continued to take in the view from his vantage point. ‘He did things. Bad things. Things that would look bad for the movement.’

  ‘What kind of things, Niels?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ He turned his attention back to the river below. ‘Do you think that the water is like a mirror? That there is actually an exact copy of our world underneath?’

  ‘No, Niels, I don’t. Who told you to kill Föttinger?’

  ‘The Commander. But he was told by the grey suits, I think. I do think that that’s the truth of it all.’ Niels sounded suddenly animated, as if he had solved some great puzzle. ‘No … it makes sense. All the feelings I have, about all of this not being real. Don’t you see? It isn’t real. The real world is on the other side of the water. It’s us who are under the surface.’ He nodded down towards the river. ‘The real world is down – I mean up – there …’

  ‘Niels, I need you to focus. Who are the grey suits? Who was it who gave your commander the order to kill Föttinger?’

  It was as if Niels had not heard a word Fabel had said. He kept his focus on the distant surface of the water. ‘I didn’t see it before, but now it all makes sense. I always knew that this was just some kind of copy. That I’m just some kind of copy. The real world and the real me is there …’

  Fabel sensed that Niels had tilted forward a little and something lurched in his gut. ‘Niels, listen to me … this is the real world. There’s nothing down there for you except death, trust me. Now, please, will you come with me so we can get this all straightened out?’

  For the first time Niels turned his head to look directly at Fabel.

  ‘No, I think you’re wrong. I don’t blame you, because it is all very convincing, all very well recreated, but I don’t believe this is the real world. I do believe it’s on the other side of the water. I’ll just go and look …’

  With that, Niels Freese took a step forward and disappeared from Fabel’s view.

  The other officers ran to the parapet and leaned over. Fabel remained where he stood. He didn’t want to see Freese’s smashed body floating on the oily dark water of the Elbe. That way, part of him could believe that Freese’s wish had been fulfilled, and he was now in some other reality.

  One that would be more kind to him. One where he could see things the way they really were.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Fabel looked up at the seven a.m. sky. It had been like waiting in for an overdue package to be delivered but here, at last, was a sign that spring had arrived. It was a bright, warm morning and the sky was cloudless.

  ‘Great, isn’t it?’ said Anna.

  ‘Long overdue.’ Fabel fastened the straps of the Kevlar body armour at his sides. ‘We all set?’

  His team nodded: Anna, Werner, Henk, Dirk and Thomas. Nicola Brüggemann was still struggling with the body armour.

  ‘Am I the only person in the Polizei Hamburg with TITS …?’ She shouted the final word in the direction of the MEK team leader who had provided the armour. Then back to Fabel, ‘This shit is clearly designed by men.’ After some more struggling and cursing, she had the armour fastened.

  In addition to Fabel’s team there was a squad of eight MEK special-tactics commandos, Fabian Menke and two other BfV men. A large custody wagon with three uniformed officers was parked behind the cars. They had parked around the corner from the squat, but Fabel knew they would have to move quickly. Even at this time in the morning, news of a police presence in the Schanzenviertel would spread fast.

  ‘Any movement?’ Fabel asked the team leader. There had been a single unmarked surveillance unit outside the squat since Niels Freese had taken a dive off the Köhlbrandbrücke the afternoon before. Fabel had managed to keep the story away from the press, despite the heavy police presence on the bridge and it being closed to traffic. There was an unofficial arrangement with the press that suicides from the Köhlbrandbrücke should be played down, in case it became an even more popular suicide spot.

  ‘Nothing much. A woman arrived about half an hour ago and let herself in. Odd thing – she was smartly dressed, not the usual type you would associate with a mob like this.’

  ‘Has she come out yet?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘No, she’s still in there.’

  ‘We’re all clear on what we’re doing?’ asked Fabel. More nods.

  ‘We shouldn’t have too much trouble,’ said Menke. ‘So far the Guardians have been all talk. We’ve no reason to believe they have weapons but, given their increased militancy of late, it’s best to be safe.’

  Fabel nodded. ‘Right,’ he said, addressing the whole team. ‘When we go in, we arrest anyone we come across. Prone them, cuff them, search them, and then it’s a pass-the-parcel chain out to the custody guys. You’ve all seen the photograph of Jens Markull. He’s our main target. He is the link between Niels Freese and whoever ordered the murder of Daniel Föttinger. Nicola, I want you to take Thomas and Dirk and go round the back of the house with a couple of the MEK boys. The rest of us will go in the front door. Anna, you stay with the custody guys.’

  ‘You’re kidding me?’

  ‘I am not kidding anyone, Commissar Wolff. I’ve given you your post.’

  ‘Jan, I’m not going to get shot again. I’m definitely not going to get shot here. The worst thing these bozos are going to do is chuck lentils at us.’

  ‘Anna, humour me.’

  ‘Okay.’ She made a resigned face.

  ‘Remember, I want everyone out as fast as possible,’ Fabel spoke again to the whole team, repeating what he had said at the briefing. ‘It’s not so much them I’m interested in as any evidence we can seize. Since Freese took a high dive, we need to get evidence to tie the Guardians and the Pharos Project to Föttinger’s murder. Don’t give anyone a chance to delete data or destroy paperwork. And remember that Jens Markull gets priority.’

  Menke had told Fabel that the house would normally have someone on lookout, so they decided not to approach on foot. Instead, on Fabel’s radioed signal, the cars drove around the corner and pulled up directly outside the building. The custody van followed seconds later, giving the officers enough time to leap from the cars and race to the door, led by the MEK men. Two carried a door ram and the heavy wooden door yielded with surprising ease.

  Fabel followed the black-uniformed commandos into the house, yelling ‘Polizei Hamburg.’ He heard a splintering smash from the rear of the house and knew that the other team had gained entry. There were four grubby rooms on the ground floor. No lookout, just three men and one woman who had been sleeping on scattered mattresses, rudely awakened, hauled to their feet and handcuffed. They looked unwashed, underfed and overwhelmed by the sudden violence of the raid.
Fabel swiftly took in the faces: all too young to be Jens Markull.

  ‘Where’s Markull?’ he barked at the girl, who responded by spitting at him.

  There was a sound from upstairs.

  ‘Henk, you come with me. You too,’ Fabel called to one of the MEK men. They took the stairs three at a time. Four more rooms upstairs. Fabel nodded to Henk and he and the MEK commando kicked open the door closest to the landing. Nothing. Another sound.

  ‘Here!’ shouted Fabel and kicked open the second door.

  It took him less than a second to take in the room, but for that sliver of time his brain could not process it all. This room did not look like it belonged to the rest of the house. It was spotlessly clean and contained banks of expensive-looking computer hardware that filled the room with a quiet hum. The windows had been completely boarded up but the room was brightly lit. Fabel recognised Jens Markull instantly. He sat behind a large desk, staring directly at Fabel, but it was clear that the activist was incapable of seeing anyone. The side of his skull was smashed in, his dark curly hair matted with deep red blood and brain matter. He looked like he had been killed and then sat back up in his chair.

  And there was a woman in the centre of the room. Fabel recognised her instantly too. She was wearing exactly the same grey business-style suit that she had on the night when she had approached him down at the docks and given her identity as a woman already dead and waiting to be found.

  ‘Stay exactly where you are!’ Fabel aimed his SIG-Sauer at the woman but there was no hint of alarm or aggression or fear in her expression. She simply stood still in the centre of the room, staring at Fabel with eyes that were almost as dead as Markull’s. She had something in her hand. Not a gun. Something smaller. Like a TV remote control.

  Fabel was aware of the MEK officer at his shoulder. Then, suddenly, the commando grabbed the collar of Fabel’s Kevlar vest and tugged him violently out of the door frame and back onto the landing. Fabel was about to protest when he heard the MEK officer scream ‘Bomb!’ at Henk Hermann and anyone else who could hear.

  The three police officers had only got halfway down the stairs when the device detonated. Fabel felt simultaneously that someone had stabbed him in his left ear with something hot and sharp and that the world had disappeared from beneath his feet.

  Fabel, Henk and the MEK officer plunged together with the shattered staircase into the ground floor. Suddenly Fabel was aware that Werner was leaning over him, then Anna. It felt as if someone was blowing a high-pitched whistle in his ear and he had had the wind knocked out of him. Apart from that he and the other two seemed to be in one piece.

  ‘Thanks for that,’ he said to the young MEK officer when they had both been helped to their feet.

  ‘We had better get out of here,’ the MEK man said. ‘There could be other devices and we’ll need the bomb squad here. We have to get everyone out.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Fabel. But he knew there would be no other bomb in the squat. The one upstairs had only been big enough to do the job it had been intended for: to destroy all the computer equipment and any data stored on it.

  As he made his way outside, Fabel could not get the face of the young woman who had detonated the device out of his head. She had not come there to die.

  ‘I take back my lentils crack,’ said Anna, once they were a safe distance away from the building. Black smoke billowed from the upper floor. Fabel guessed there must have been an incendiary element to the bomb. ‘You sure you’re okay?’

  ‘I’ll get checked out.’

  ‘God, Jan,’ said Anna. ‘A suicide bomber. These people are as bad as radical Islamists.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be a suicide bombing, Anna. It was the same woman who approached me down at the docks. She wasn’t meant to die. She was there to shut Markull up, permanently … and to destroy evidence. Get out and detonate the bomb from a distance.’ Fabel tentatively pressed his fingers to his ear, then checked his fingertips. No blood. His eardrum was intact.

  ‘You should have seen the computer hardware in that room,’ he said. ‘A shit-heel outfit like the Guardians of Gaia couldn’t stretch to that. Markull had someone behind him and that someone was severing their partnership. I reckon she smashed his head in, then propped him up to make his injuries look consistent with a bomb blast. It was all supposed to look like the increasingly militant Guardians of Gaia had decided to go into the bomb-making business and that Markull had been clumsy when assembling a device.’

  Fabel stared at the burning building for a moment.

  ‘Get the team reassembled.’ His voice was hard. Determined. ‘We can’t let this hold us up.’

  ‘We’re going ahead as planned?’ asked Werner.

  ‘Yes. We hit the Pharos now.’

  Fabel knew that they would be spotted well in advance. There were only two ways to approach the Pharos: the river and the shoreside road. Both offered no cover and the approaching police would be spotted from half a kilometre away. This was a raid where speed was everything; each second would mean more data lost, and that meant less evidence to bring before a court.

  He had briefed and rebriefed the teams. But five valuable hours had passed since the botched storming of the Guardians’ squat and Fabel was afraid that the Pharos People would now be expecting a police raid. His own people were backed up by MEK officers of both the Polizei Hamburg and the Polizei Niedersachsen. The Harbour Police were leading the water-based assault. Fabel had no reason to believe the police would be resisted, and he had no evidence that the so-called Consolidators who took care of security would be armed but, as he had pointed out at the briefing, recent history was full of cults resorting to murder-suicide. He did not want this operation to turn into a German Waco.

  Menke was there with his whole Pharos Project investigation team and Fabel had even roped in Kroeger and other officers from Cybercrime. It would be up to them to retrieve as much data as quickly as possible. Fabel knew that the Pharos Project would no doubt have some kind of self-destruct software for exactly this kind of situation.

  Fabel, Werner and Brüggemann went on the lead Harbour Police boat. It was a fast rigid-hulled inflatable craft that tore through the river, lifting its nose out of the water and bouncing over any hint of a wave. The small flotilla stayed tight in to the shore to delay being spotted for as long as possible.

  ‘You all right, Jan?’ Werner shouted over the whine of the engine. Fabel sat crouched over, his jaw set rigid, clutching the sides of his seat tight.

  ‘I’m fine. Just not good on water.’

  The Pharos was even more impressive from the water. The boat arced out a little into the river and swept between two of the twelve support pillars and under the projecting floor where Fabel knew Peter Wiegand had his office.

  There was a jetty set centrally under the cover of the building. Two grey-suited Consolidators watched the approach of the police boats. One of them was talking – but not to his companion – and Fabel guessed that their arrival was being announced to the main building.

  As they reached the jetty, Fabel received a radio message from Anna that her team was through the main gate and heading for the principal entrance.

  The MEK officers secured the jetty, spinning the Consolidators around against the wall and checking them for weapons. Nothing.

  ‘That doesn’t mean the others aren’t armed,’ said Fabel. ‘Take no chances.’

  A police raid has a contained violence, a force that is intended to dominate and establish control. For the innocent bystander caught up in it, and for most criminals, it is a traumatic experience; yet, as Fabel marched through the building, forcibly subduing any Consolidator they came across in the process, the cult members they encountered watched the police advance room by room with an absolute passivity. There was no panic. What concerned Fabel more was that there was no sign of anyone hunched over a monitor, desperately trying to delete data.

  Peter Wiegand was waiting for them, as he had the last time they had spoken, in
his office. He sat behind his vast desk with a studied serenity. His chief of security, Bädorf, stood beside him, hands folded, like a butler waiting for instructions.

  ‘I take it you would like to have that chat you mentioned the last time you were here, Herr Fabel,’ said Wiegand, with a small polite smile that suggested he found Fabel slightly tedious. ‘The one at your office …’

  Peter Wiegand somehow managed to convey a sense of authority, that he was a master of his environment, even though that environment was now one of the interrogation rooms in the Hamburg police Presidium. He sat composed as always, and neat. Wiegand’s neatness extended far beyond his tailoring. The beard was immaculately trimmed, his shaven head burnished. He was a shortish heavyset man, yet there was a compactness about him and a physical efficiency in the way he moved.

  Sitting next to Wiegand was an attractive woman in her early forties. She had butter-coloured hair combed back into a French pleat and she was wearing a business suit that certainly had not a single synthetic thread in it and probably, thought Fabel, cost more than he earned in a month. Fabel had recognised her right away: Amelie Harmsen was not the kind of legal representative he was used to coming up against. She was one of the Hanseatic City’s most high-profile lawyers, known more for winning punitive damages for her celebrity clients than fighting criminal cases. Harmsen was certainly not an indoctrinated member of the Pharos Project. She was here representing Wiegand the billionaire, not Wiegand the cult leader.

  ‘I want to know how long you intend to detain my client, Principal Chief Commissar,’ she asked. ‘And if you have something of which you wish to accuse Herr Wiegand, then I would like to hear it. Now.’

  ‘As would I, Herr Fabel,’added Wiegand, with the same hint of bored disinterest.

  Fabel smiled politely. Werner handed Fabel a folder, which he placed squarely on the table before him. He started leafing through the file’s pages.