A fear of dark water jf-6

by Craig Russell

  She took the street plan from her pocket. A booklet: print on paper, not a hand-held satnav device or GPS navigator. She plotted her position from where she had come into the Speicherstadt, across the bridge and along Kibbelsteg, then into Am Sandtorkai. The warehouse was near. If she had calculated it right, it was just a block away and around the corner.

  The warehouses in the Speicherstadt were vast red-brick cathedrals of commerce dating back to the nineteenth century. But now it was all changing. They had extended the original Speicherstadt with a very twenty-first-century version of itself: the vast Kaispeicher A, the Speicherstadt’s most westerly warehouse which had once housed massive stores of tea and tobacco, was being built upwards and outwards and into the shape of a vast sailing ship that dominated the skyline. A building project that had lasted years and was transforming the storehouse into a massive concert hall, hotel, apartments. Like the Speicherstadt before it in the nineteenth century and the Kohlbrandbrucke in the twentieth, the Elbphilharmonie would become the landmark to define Hamburg in the twenty-first century and beyond, as distinctive as the Sydney Opera House, while reminding everyone of the city’s maritime past.

  Even this part of the original Speicherstadt was changing: ad agencies and trendy bar-restaurants were making inroads, mainly to be near the stylish new HafenCity development that extended to the old bonded-warehouse city.

  But the row of buildings outside which Meliha now found herself had remained largely unchanged. Just as there had been for two centuries, the cobbled canalside path was lined with huge storehouses containing imported rugs and textiles from Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan.

  She moved out of the puddle of light cast by the warehouse lamp and checked up and down the cobbled canalside path. No one. No sign of them. But, she knew, that meant nothing. It was their function to follow, to shadow you unseen. To find you without you knowing they were there until the last moment.

  And, of course, they had the kind of technology that you normally only expected the intelligence services of some superpower to have. Maybe they were watching her right now, able to see her in the dark. Maybe she was a bright infrared beacon in the cold dark of the Speicherstadt.

  So close. Meliha ran. Her feet hurt even more with every footfall. She had walked for kilometres to get here. No taxi. No public transport. Nothing that was connected to a computer system or radio network. She had crossed a city without crossing a circuit, without connecting with a technology: even avoiding the few parts of the city that had CCTV, taking circuitous detours to avoid the spots marked in red pencil on her map.

  She stopped suddenly, realising she was at the right block. The signs on the warehouse were in Turkish, English and German. This was the one. There was no alarmed keypad entry, just an old-fashioned brass keyhole in a sturdy, traditional German warehouse door: robust, dense wood, reinforced with brass plates. Reassuringly low-tech: a door that had protected the contents of the warehouse for more than a hundred years. She took the heavy key from her bag and unlocked the door. She slipped through it and into the warehouse’s darkness, with just one last check of the canalway outside.

  Maybe she was going to be all right, after all.

  Meliha took a small wind-up LED torch from her handbag and scanned the warehouse. She was in an entry foyer and a sign listing the tenants told her that what she was looking for — Demeril Importing — was on the third floor. She pushed through the glass-panelled doors and into the main warehouse. Over to one side of the warehouse was a large goods lift, but Meliha decided it was better to take the stairs and make as little noise as possible.

  When she reached the door of Demeril Importing, she took a second key from her bag and let herself in through an ornate Jugendstil door. She shone her torch around the warehouse. Textiles piled high: rugs, carpets, kilims. Rich Turkish designs revealed on the folded edges. Tags revealed names she knew so well: Kayseri, Yesilhisar, Kirsehir, Konya, Dazkiri… Somehow the familiarity of the names gave her comfort. There was a robust, ornate wooden desk and a kilim-upholstered chair near the door; the desk was piled high with paperwork and ledgers, bills and orders impaled on two spikes. Business was done here as it had been done in the last century and the century before that. No computers. No websites. No electronics.

  Moving across the warehouse Meliha continued searching until she found an alcove at the back of the main storage area, filled with less carefully stacked carpets. She chose a lowish pile of carpets right over in the farthest corner of the alcove and lay down on them, switching her torch off. She could rest. She could rest, but not sleep. Sleep would be dangerous. She would be safe here until the morning. Then… well, then she would try to get in touch with Berthold. How she could do so without using a phone or any other electronic medium she had not yet worked out. But she must get to Berthold. Tell him what she knew. But now she could rest, but not sleep.

  She fell asleep.

  It probably had been the quietest of sounds. Maybe it had been the main door, three floors below: an indistinct, dull clunk that had fired into her sleeping brain like a bullet. Whatever the sound had been, she had been asleep and now she was totally, nerve-janglingly awake. For a sliver of a second she wondered if she had slept all night and if what she had heard was the arrival of the warehouse staff; but it was still dark. She lay still on the pile of rugs, only her head raised. She didn’t breathe; straining to hear any further sound. A few seconds passed, stretched intolerably long by the adrenalin surging through her system. Silence. Then she jumped as she heard another sound. Faint and muffled. Voices. Two, three, maybe more. The floor below. Far apart from each other but talking calmly and quietly.

  Meliha couldn’t make out the words, but she knew they would be communicating in English. They always spoke English. Her heart pounded. Of course they didn’t need to speak any louder. They would be enhanced: able to communicate at a distance, to see in the dark, to locate the slightest sound.

  They would be working their way through the floor below. Systematically, methodically. The way they did everything. A single consciousness. A groupmind. An egregore.

  Taking her torch, Meliha shone it into the darkness to search her surroundings for concealment or escape. The LED light was dim, but she dared not wind up the torch again in case they heard the sound.

  There was a storage cupboard further behind her, right at the back of the alcove, barely visible behind a stack of carpets, some lying loose on the floor next to it. If she could get in there, perhaps ease a carpet roll across in front of it, maybe then they wouldn’t see her.

  She slipped off the shoes from her aching feet and eased herself off the stack of rugs. She crossed the rough wooden floor to the storage cupboard. It was much bigger than she had thought and empty except for a stack of sample books in one corner and, leaning against the wall, a metre-and-a-half-long roll of a textile that was too lightweight for carpeting but too heavy for curtains. Easing herself in behind the sample books, Meliha rearranged them to offer meagre concealment. She started to move the textile roll over for additional cover, but it was heavier than she expected and started to slip from her grasp. She made a desperate grab for it and only just stopped it from crashing into the wooden side of the cupboard and alerting her pursuers to her hiding place. Muscle-achingly slowly, she eased the textile roll diagonally across in front of her, like the bar of a gate.

  Shrinking back as far as she could in the store cupboard, Meliha switched off her torch and was immediately plunged into dark. As her eyes became accustomed to this new depth of darkness, she peered through between the top of the sample books and the angle of the leaning textile roll. She could see only a narrow section of alcove and nothing of the main area of the carpet warehouse.

  And she could hear nothing. No movement. No voices.

  It was like a shadow passing.

  Right in front of her. Someone or something passed swiftly and silently across her narrow view of the alcove. Right to left. A dark flutter you could not identify
as a person. She gave a start but instantly contained it, not moving, not breathing. They were there. On her floor. Now she could hear faint sounds of movement. Something spoken quietly in English.

  The shadow crossed again, this time left to right. Closer.

  Meliha didn’t move. She still held her breath, afraid they would hear even that. A tear welled up and ran down her cheek, the agony of waiting for the moment when they would tear away her makeshift camouflage becoming unbearable. More sounds. Then silence. Minutes passed, still nothing. Meliha concentrated so hard on the silence that she gave a small start when it was broken. But this time the sounds were even more muted. And above her. The next floor up.

  She let go her breath, slowly, quietly. They were definitely above her now. They were not as good as they thought. They still had very human fallibilities.

  It was difficult for her to tell how long had passed: her fear stretching every second immeasurably. But Meliha guessed it had been at least an hour since they had finished checking the floor above. No sounds of searching, no quiet, calm, measured voices in English. She peered into the gloom. Nothing. Carefully, slowly, making sure not to touch anything, she turned her wrist but, as it lacked a luminous dial, she still could not see the time on her watch. Her legs began to cramp but she didn’t move them. The pain grew and grew, the fibres of her muscles knotting in spasm. But she ignored it. She concentrated once more on driving out her fear.

  ‘ Benim kucuk cesur kaplanim.’ She focused on remembering her father’s voice as he had said it. The gentle tone; the pride. ‘ Benim kucuk cesur kaplanim.’

  She waited for another hour. Meliha perceived a faint brightening of the light out in the warehouse. A hint of morning. She had not heard anything more.

  They had failed. Or perhaps they had not known but merely suspected that she had been in the building. There were other places they perhaps knew about and were searching there. She decided that, from now on, she must not go anywhere she had been before. But she had to keep moving. Their failure had presented an opportunity for her to open up the distance between her and them. She could get out of the city, out of the country. If she acted now.

  Meliha eased the textile roll back as gently as she could, making no sound. Edging herself out from behind the sample books, she paused and searched all she could see of the storeroom before taking tentative steps out of the alcove.

  There were four of them waiting for her. They were standing, motionless, in the centre of the main floor of the warehouse. Four dark shapes, shadows. Genderless, ageless. They were silhouetted against the vague milky bloom of the large warehouse window. Two of them had something bulky around their eyes. Night-vision goggles. None made a move as Meliha appeared; no hint of reaction. They had been standing there for two hours, waiting for her to come out of her hiding place. It was more efficient, quieter that way.

  They were what Meliha knew had been pursuing her. They were what she feared most.

  Consolidators.

  The Consolidator closest to Meliha slowly raised its dark arm as if pointing at her. There was a popping sound and she felt a sharp pain in her chest.

  As she fell backwards onto the same stack of carpets on which she had slept, she thought she heard her father’s voice call to her.

  ‘ Benim kucuk cesur kaplanim.’

  Chapter Three

  The Night of the Storm

  There was no storm.

  All there was, was a vast expanse of open, dark sea. No land, no ships; no one there to witness the storm’s night-time birth. But there was syzygy: the perfect alignment of sun, moon and Earth, with the moon at its closest to the Earth, and the yearning sea heaved and arched its back under the moon’s compelling pull.

  Above the sea the air was cool. Dry. And higher above it was a colossal mass of even colder air that had been born somewhere in the north and far to the east, and had drifted south-west, over the Baltic Shield. And as it had done so, it had climbed higher into the troposphere. Its Siberian chill had become even colder with altitude. And now, superchilled and super-elevated, it slid silently and disdainfully over the Atlantic.

  But it would not be allowed to pass.

  Something moved low across the arching back of the sea; something equally as colossal as the cold above it. This mass of air had been born in the tropics and carried warmth and moisture with it. And just as her counterpart above was colder than normal, she was three full degrees warmer than the usual drift.

  Warm air rises, cold air sinks: a simple fact of physics, of meteorology.

  The storm was born. It sucked the warm, moist air upward in a violent convective mesocyclonic vortex, the torn air reaching speeds of 180 kilometres an hour. A waterspout formed, joining sea to sky. Condensing water vapour from the warm air fizzed and crackled with electricity and clouds bulked and boiled and fumed. A vast supercell stormcloud, like a titanic anvil, formed above the Atlantic, turning the night darker.

  Filled with millions of tonnes of water, it rotated slowly, malevolently, and began to shoulder its way towards the land.

  Chapter Four

  Kreysig recognised the fluttering in his chest as a rush of adrenalin and felt guilty about it. This was a catastrophe: buildings had been damaged, people had been injured, perhaps some had even lost their lives. Kreysig’s home city had been assaulted; violently, relentlessly, without mercy.

  But as he stood there, surrounded by tumult and clamour, Lars Kreysig felt a thrill. This was what he had been made for.

  The night was filled with the roar of heavy equipment and machines, of mobile generators, the piercing, insistent bleeping of reversing fire trucks and the relentless churning of the water pumps: man-made thunder competing against Nature’s tempest of wind and rain. Everything was glossed wet and sparkled under the arc lamps and the red, blue and orange flashing lights of the firetrucks, emergency vehicles and heavy caterpillar-tracked bulldozers. The worst of the storm had passed, and the ebb had begun, but a contemptuous Nature still wind-tugged at Kreysig’s yellow protective suit and angrily drummed pellets of rain on his hard hat.

  Like the neck of some improbable nocturnal dinosaur, the massive arm of a Liebherr LTM 1130-5.2 lattice-boom truck swung overhead, heavy cable and chains swinging and clashing. A team of firemen fastened the chains around a tangle of wood and metal that had been swept up onto the wide expanse of flooded ground beside the Fischmarkt. The lattice boom hoisted the debris up and clear of the flood area, lowering it onto the back of a flatbed. A second, smaller crane lowered a section of armoured evacuation pipe into place and the same fire team rushed forward and snapped shut the camlock couplings to connect it to the rest of the pipe. As soon as the connection was made, Kreysig shouted into his radio and another two pumps came on line.

  And still Kreysig felt the thrill of battle. This was Man against Nature. And he was the man.

  Kreysig had known well in advance that the storm had been coming. It had wrought devastation across France and England; the North German Climate Bureau and the German Weather Service had tracked its progress. They had also tracked another cluster forming in the North Sea, one hundred and eighty kilometres south-west of Jutland. It was like two armies gathering before attacking at once, combining their strengths before the onslaught on the Netherlands, Denmark and Northern Germany. Kreysig had seen Hamburg devastated by flood before. The 1953 flood had been before he was born, and he had been a baby when the ’62 storm had hit and killed more than three hundred and left sixty thousand homeless in the city; but he remembered ’76 and had been a senior fire and rescue officer in 2007. Each time the water had hit higher, but each time Hamburg had been that little bit readier, that little bit more protected.

  And this time, before the flood hit, millions of euros’ worth of flood barriers had paid for themselves in a single deployment: blocking and channelling the storm surge. But some flooding was inevitable, and they had known where to be ready, where the battle lines would be drawn, including here, at the Fischmarkt, where S
t Pauli met the city centre.

  Tramberger, Kreysig’s deputy, came across to him and leaned his weather-beaten face in close, shouting to be heard above the combined clamour of storm and machine.

  ‘That’s all the electric submersibles and all the diesels on line. We’ve got an ebb and the water level is dropping. We’re down to plus three metres.’

  Kreysig grinned and slapped his deputy on the shoulder. They were winning. He looked around at the teams he had deployed; all were still working full tilt: hard, muscle-tearing work against a far stronger opponent, but no one showed any sign of the fatigue that must, by now, be adding lead to every movement. It was a good team. A bloody good team. He had put it together himself, picking the best from the Hamburg Fire Service, from the Hamburg Harbour Police, from the Hamburg City and State Engineering Department.

  He checked in with his other crews, further to the west on Klopstockstrasse and Konigstrasse. Same news. He checked his watch: it was nearly five a.m. They had been fighting the flood for twelve hours. Looking up at the still-dark sky, Kreysig saw the heavy clouds scud malevolently over the city. It was like watching a fleet of bombers pass overhead, laden with potential destruction. But these clouds, he knew, would wreak havoc elsewhere. Hamburg’s turn was over. For now.

  It was then that he noticed one of the teams had stopped working. The firemen stood in a circle looking down at something on the newly exposed tarmac of Elbestrasse. The team leader looked across to Kreysig and Tramberger and beckoned, urgently, for them to come over.

  Something, Kreysig could tell, was wrong.

  Part One