“What does it mean?”
Johnson lifted the bottle to the light, sloshing the contents in front of Maratse’s eyes; there was half a bottle left.
“It means the Constable here is interested. He might even shave that ridiculous beard if the young Petra with those dark almond eyes, chocolate skin, and silky black hair, popped the question, or, you know, just grabbed him one night. I mean, if that’s not worth a drink, I don’t know what is.”
Johnson pressed the bottle to Maratse’s lips as Stefan held his head. Maratse tried to concentrate, to listen to the tiny voice reassuring him that most of the whisky was dribbling down his chin, onto his clothes, but the whisky burned, prevented him from breathing, and Maratse realised once again what he already knew to be true, torture wasn’t about information, it was never about information, it was all about power. The American knew that, and Maratse had the idea that this wasn’t his first time either.
Maratse coughed, ratcheting air into his body as Stefan let go of his head, and he spluttered whisky from his lungs. Johnson tossed the bottle onto the floor and it rolled beneath a table.
“Waste of a good bourbon,” he said, and gripped Maratse’s chin between thick fingers. “What do you think, Constable? Had enough?”
Chapter 20
Petra slammed her palm against the interior panel as the driver swung the heavy assault vehicle around the roundabout and accelerated away from the Siegessaule. Hannah tugged at the straps on Petra’s vest while a member of the German GSG 9 group stuffed ceramic plates into the back of the vest. He lifted a ballistic helmet from the seat and tried to press it onto Petra’s head.
“If I wear that, they will think I’m one of you,” she said, and waved him away.
“You might get shot,” he said.
“I will get shot if I’m wearing that thing.”
Hannah nodded for the man to step away and guided Petra into a spare seat.
Petra took a breath of adrenalin-stoked air, glanced at the men and women of the Bundespolizei’s counter terrorism unit, and forced a smile for Hannah. “I’m okay,” she said.
“I know.” Hannah smiled. “Greenlanders are tough, eh?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Petra said. “I guess so.”
“This one is,” Hannah said. She slapped Petra on the thigh and dug into a satchel on the seat beside her. Hannah handed Petra a thin sheath of papers. “The CVs,” she said. “We printed them off the hard drive.
Petra flicked through the documents, as Hannah sat down beside her.
“Do you know what you are looking for?”
“Not yet.”
Petra lurched into the shoulder of the policeman checking his gear beside her. He smiled and said something about a rookie driver. Petra nodded, braced herself for another turn, and then looked up when Hannah called her name.
“Call for you,” she said, pressing her phone into Petra’s hand. “It’s Lars.”
“Commissioner,” Petra said, as she held the phone to her ear.
“This is the official talk, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I need to hear you say you volunteered for this.”
“I did.”
“Say it.”
“I volunteered, sir.”
“All right. Now I need to know why?”
“They have Maratse.” She waited as the Commissioner sighed.
“I understand,” he said. “What I don’t understand, is what this has to do with the case? I sent you to Germany to find answers, not stir up a storm. You’ve been gone less than twenty-four hours. What’s going on?”
“They want the hard drive. I think they are trying to erase all the evidence.”
“What evidence?”
“The real identities of the Ophelia crew. Once we know who they really are, we’ll be able to confirm what they were really doing in Svartenhuk, and why people had to die for it.”
“Who’s they?”
“I don’t know, but we are heading to the offices of the Berndt Media Group. I think we can assume that he is involved.”
“He hasn’t been picked up by the police?”
“They are looking for him, Sir.” Petra looked at Hannah. She nodded. “What about Berndt’s daughter?” Petra bounced off the shoulder of the man on her left as they drove over a set of asphalt speed bumps.
“Now that’s a topic I haven’t talked about at all today.”
“Sir?”
“I think the First Minister, the German Ambassador, and the Danish Foreign Minister have my number on speed dial, but then I have the General Major for Arctic Command’s number, and he is just as tired of me as I am of them.”
“Where is Therese?”
“She is approaching Cape Farewell with full sails. The Commander can’t decide if she is talented or suicidal. He suspects both. She’s riding with the storm, and the size of the waves is making it impossible for the crew from either the Ejnar Mikkelsen or the Knud Rasmussen to board her. The helicopters are grounded.”
“So she’s getting away?”
“She’ll either get away or die trying, that seems to be the general opinion. That’s some journal you found.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Personally, I don’t know how much it has to do with the journal. The way she sails, well, I believe the devil drives.” The Commissioner paused to take an incoming call, when he came back he asked to speak to Hannah. Petra handed her the phone and tucked the documents into her vest.
“Yes,” Hannah said. “I’ll look after her.” Hannah smiled. “Yes. I agree.”
Petra frowned as Hannah slipped her phone into her pocket.
“What was that last bit about?”
“He’s very fond of you, thinks you are a very competent police officer. I agreed.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, Sergeant,” Hannah said, as the driver slowed and turned off the siren. “I’m about to send you into the lion’s den.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Oh, I think we do.” The vehicle stopped and Hannah waited for the team to get out before standing up. “It’s not every day we have a shoot out on the streets of Berlin. Make no mistake; we don’t know what’s inside that building, which is why I requested GSG 9, and not just the regular police. These guys are the best.”
“That sounded like a pep talk,” Petra said, as she followed Hannah out of the vehicle and onto the street.
“It was.” Hannah led Petra to an officer standing beside the second van. Petra could only see his eyes. His height, his gear, and the weapon slung across his chest reminded her of Gaba. When she looked at the team members, she realised they all did.
“Great,” she whispered, “I’m channelling my ex-boyfriend.”
“What’s that?” Hannah asked.
“Nothing. I’m ready.”
“Okay.” Hannah introduced Petra to the GSG 9 leader and took a step back.
“You’re Sergeant Jensen?”
“Yes.”
“Right, here’s what you need to know.”
Petra listened as the leader of the counter terrorism team described the layout of the building, the location of the office on the second floor, and a detailed description of the lobby and reception, the position of the elevators, and the stairwells.
Petra nodded when he asked if she understood.
“Good,” he said. “Do you have the package?”
Petra tapped the front pocket of her vest.
“And the wire? Your mic?” he turned to the officer on his right. The man tapped his headphones and gave him the thumbs-up. “Okay.” He took a step back. “This is the back-brief. Tell me what the plan is.”
Petra glanced at Hannah. “I go inside, take the elevator to the second floor, meet with the contact, ask for the location of Constable David Maratse, and give them the hard drive. No negotiations. I won’t try to bargain. I’ll repeat the address,” she said, and pressed her fingers to the microphone hidden beneath her
collar, “then I leave the hard drive on the floor, and go back to the elevator.”
“Good,” the man said. He stepped behind Petra, held her by the shoulders and turned her to look at the position of the sniper teams in the opposite buildings. He tilted her head to see the teams scrambling into position on the roof, and then dipped her head to see the GSG 9 men taking position behind cars, and ballistic shields. “We are deliberately overt,” he said, and let go of Petra. “We want the kidnappers to see us before you go in. If they’ve done this before, they will give you the address once they are clear of the building, but then we’ve got the GPS tracker hidden inside the casing of the hard drive. Hopefully, the sight of so many heavily armed, steely-eyed professional marksmen will put them off doing anything stupid.” The man tugged at the balaclava hiding his mouth. “I’m smiling, Sergeant.”
“Okay.”
“We’ve got your back.”
“I know.”
“Now, will you put on a helmet?”
“No,” she said, and took a breath. “I’m ready.”
Hannah thanked the GSG 9 leader, curled her arm around Petra’s, and guided her to a gap in the police cordon, nodding at the officers as they passed. She stopped three metres beyond the police line.
“He didn’t tell you about the teams already inside the building.”
“Inside?”
“In the basement, working their way up.”
“They only had an hour.”
Hannah shrugged, and said, “They’re good. They’ve got your back, now it’s up to you to go in there and make the exchange.”
Petra looked up at the large glass windows. The lights were dimmed.
“Do you think he’s in there?”
“David? No, I don’t think so.”
“Neither do I.”
“The truth is, we have no idea what to expect. You probably won’t even recognise the person inside. Hell, it could even be a drone, remotely piloted from one of these buildings,” she said, and waved a finger at the offices overlooking the Berndt Media Group building. “Maybe there’s a pouch on the drone, and..”
“Hannah,” Petra said.
“Yes, sorry,” she said. “I was getting carried away. But, hey, now you have plenty to think about.”
“I liked the other pep talk better,” Petra said, and made a sound that could almost have been interpreted as a laugh. She gripped Hannah’s hand for a second, nodded once, and let go. Petra walked across the street, stepped up onto the pavement, and continued walking to the door.
As soon as she entered the elevator, Petra realised Hannah had been wrong about the contact person being a stranger; she recognised Nele Schneider the moment the young German woman pressed the barrel of a gun into her cheek.
“Going up?” Nele asked, as she pressed the button for the sixth floor, and then ripped Petra’s microphone from her throat. She tossed it into the lobby as the elevator doors hushed to a close.
Nele pushed Petra against the wall of the elevator, shifted the barrel of the gun to Petra’s forehead, and then opened the Velcro pouch at the front of her vest. She tucked the hard drive into the cargo pocket of her trousers and took a step back.
“This is where it gets complicated,” she said.
“It doesn’t have to, Nele.”
“Nele? That’s right, that’s my name.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I forget. It’s not easy playing the victim all the time. It’s far more fun to get physical, if you know what I mean?”
“I’m not sure I do.” Petra worked on her breathing, felt her chest press against the inside of the vest, wondered if it would help to loosen the straps, and then decided that it wouldn’t.
Not one bit.
Nele glanced at the elevator’s progress, grabbed Petra by the hair, and pressed the gun to the side of her head. When the elevator doors opened, Nele kicked Petra’s legs, dropping the Sergeant to her knees, and then ducked behind her. She made Petra shuffle into the corridor, turning her like a shield with a twist of her hair, first to the left, then right. Satisfied, Nele told Petra to get up, and then shoved her forwards, through the open office, and into a more luxurious workspace with a door, and a large side window facing the street. The rear wall of the office separated the Berndt building with the adjoining offices of an insurance company. Nele flicked off the lights and pushed Petra into the corner.
“Snipers,” she said. “I know their game.”
“Who are you?” Petra asked, as Nele relaxed her grip on her hair.
“That’s not important.”
“Where’s Maratse?”
Nele laughed, and said, “That’s even less important.”
“You have what you want. You can at least tell me where he is.”
“He’s safe,” Nele said, “for the moment.”
Petra crumpled to her knees as Nele let go. She watched as the young German woman opened a black backpack tucked beneath a desk. She pulled out a remote with two large safety switches. Nele grinned and mouthed the word boom at Petra.
So this is how it feels, Petra thought, as she imagined Maratse being tortured by the Chinaman. This is how it feels when someone holds your life in their hands, and has every intention of ending it. Total control, total power.
“You’re thinking too much,” Nele said. “Stop it. It bothers me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m working on getting out of here. Your friends are good,” she said, with a nod to the street. “I should know, I trained with them once or twice.”
“You’re a soldier?”
Nele laughed. “I might have been, if he hadn’t found me.”
“Who?”
“You’ll see,” she said, with a nod to the whiteboard covering the adjoining wall. Petra watched as Nele crawled to the wall, tugged a set of wires from behind the whiteboard, and attached them to the remote in her hand. She crawled back to Petra, and then toppled a desk in front of them.
“You’re going to blow us up?”
“I’m going to blow that up,” she said, and pointed at the wall. “That’s our way out.”
“You’re taking me with you?”
“Sure,” Nele said, “I need insurance.” She furrowed her brow and said, “Of course, premiums are high, and I can’t promise to keep up the payments. Do you understand?”
“You’ll shoot me.”
“Shoot you? Hell no, Eskimo, I’ll kill you.”
Petra ignored the pressure in her bladder, and took a chance. “Like you killed the crew of the Ophelia?” Nele whipped her head around and stared at Petra. “You stabbed them to death, didn’t you?”
“You can’t prove that.”
“I don’t need to, if you tell me.” It was Petra’s turn to shrug. “You’re going to kill me, you said so.”
“I did,” Nele frowned. “But why do I get the feeling you are playing me?”
“Because I want you to save Maratse. I don’t care about me.”
“The old guy with the funny beard?”
“Yes,” Petra said. She felt the corners of her mouth twitch, and she amazed herself with a smile. “He means a lot to me.”
“There’s a shortage of men in Greenland?”
“Not exactly?”
“Then why?”
“You wouldn’t understand. I love him.”
Nele stared at her, and then turned the remote in her hand. Petra continued.
“You didn’t love Henrik.”
“What?”
“You wouldn’t have stabbed him if you did.”
“Henrik had to go.”
“Because he found out about Arbroath Mining?” Petra waited as Nele shuffled closer. When Nele was close enough that Petra could smell the sweat beneath her shirt, she said, “But you didn’t need to kill Antje, unless…”
“Unless what?” Nele said, her top lip twisted, a cruel slant.
“You did love Henrik. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“I was told someone had to die. That was my role on th
e expedition. Not ski guide or mountaineer. That’s what I was hired for, but my job was to kill. To make a mess.”
“Who hired you? Berndt?”
“You won’t get that from me.”
“But Antje?”
“Henrik tried to stop me. He woke up too soon.” Nele shook her head. “I only put half the drug in my drink. I think he took that one. I had to put more in his ear, couldn’t cope with his screams.”
Petra heard something click outside the door. She kept talking.
“What about Dieter?”
“Hah, fall guy, the patsy. Idiot.” Nele laughed. “He made it easy. Wouldn’t go back to the yacht. Something about not trusting himself around the captain.”
“So you left him on the mountain?”
“Hardly. We were on the path to that cabin the Greenlanders like to keep so secret, like it’s a shrine. He said he knew where it was. All I had to do was push him to disobey orders, turn him against Henrik.”
“So you could kill them and pin the murder on Dieter?”
“It was a good plan. Guilty lover, confused with exposure. He was supposed to die on the mountain.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No,” Nele said, as she clicked the remote.
The blast from the shape charge behind the whiteboard filled the room with a cloud of grey plaster, as the whiteboard shattered the window opposite the wall, and revealed a hole into the adjoining office. Nele scrambled over the desk, and disappeared through the cloud. Petra scrabbled on the floor, shuffling bits of debris through her fingers as she picked herself up, and staggered after Nele.
The second explosion was louder and brighter than the first, but without the physical shock of the blast. Petra tumbled to her knees as the GSG 9 team crashed through the office, green lasers lancing through the plaster cloud as they moved through over the rubble, the stocks of their submachine guns pressed to their shoulders, the barrels and lasers sweeping left and right in sync with their eyes.
One man knelt beside Petra as the rest of the team moved forwards. He wiped dust from her eyes with rough brushes of his thumb, turned her head to check her ears for blood, to see if her eardrums had been perforated in the explosion, and told her to stay put. He pressed his fingers to the microphone around his throat and then gagged as Nele crawled out from from beneath a desk, and slid a knife into the base of the man’s skull. He toppled forwards on top of Petra, as Nele tugged the pistol from her waistband and aimed it at the rearguard of the GSG 9 team. She loosed off two shots before she was shot in the back, by team two moving in from the rear.
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