‘I see,’ said Fabel, then looked at van Heiden with a confused so why am I here? expression.
‘I’m sure you’re aware that there is almost a tradition of the disaffected of the Free and Hanseatic City expressing their disaffection by setting other citizens’ cars on fire?’ continued Menke.
‘Like the first swallow or the blossom on the trees,’ said Fabel. ‘You know it’s summer in Hamburg when you smell the scent of boiling automobile paint in the air.’ No one got the humour and Fabel moved on. ‘What’s that got to do with the Murder Commission?’
‘Last year there were thirty-four thousand politically motivated crimes in Germany,’ said Menke. ‘A significant proportion of these crimes is made up of arson attacks on cars and business premises in Berlin and Hamburg.’
‘I can quote the figures, Jan,’ said van Heiden. ‘Two hundred cars burned out in Hamburg over the last year. Ten in a single night in Flottbek, a dozen over a one-week period in Harvestehude. And then, of course, there was the attack on the police station in the Schanzenviertel. Unbelievable. One patrol car burned out and a police station in the heart of the city under attack by masked thugs…’ Van Heiden shook his head in genuine disbelief. Fabel knew that no matter how much you tried to explain it to van Heiden, the chief of detectives would never be able to understand how there could be so much anger in Germany’s most prosperous city, his beloved Hamburg.
‘All of these have been down to extreme-left or anarchist groups,’ continued Menke. ‘And that is a worrying trend. The vast majority of the politically motivated crime we investigate at the BfV is skinhead/neo-Nazi. In fact, twice as many offences are committed by the radical right as by the radical left. But there is a shift taking place. We are seeing more and more envy crimes being committed. We have mounting evidence that extreme environmentalist groups are becoming involved.’
‘I don’t think it’s fair to describe these groups as exclusively extreme environmentalists,’ said Muller-Voigt. ‘These people are just as easily described as anarchists or extreme leftists.’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be the first time there’s been a crossover between the two philosophies.’ Fabel kept his tone even and conversational, as if making a general observation. The truth was that everyone in the room knew that Muller-Voigt, a contemporary of Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, had been involved in radical-left politics in the 1980s. And there had been some question marks over how far his involvement with some of the more extreme groups had gone.
‘The point is…’ Menke continued to address Fabel ‘… that our intelligence suggests there are elements who are promoting ever more aggressive levels of direct action.’
‘In short, Jan,’ said van Heiden, ‘it’s only a matter of time before someone gets killed. We believe things may escalate during the GlobalConcern Hamburg summit. Violence and property destruction. We also have reason to believe that we may see delegates at the summit targeted.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ said Fabel. ‘These people are trying to help the environment, aren’t they?’
‘Like I say,’ said Menke, ‘this summit is about the business of environmentalism. Making a green buck, as it were. And there are those who believe that corrupts everything the environmental lobby stands for.’
‘But others,’ interrupted Muller-Voigt, ‘believe that it is a natural evolutionary stage: the belief or value that was once the preserve of the minority becomes the accepted truth of the community at large. But I have to say that I know from personal experience that there are some in any political belief system who love being proselytisers so much that they don’t like it when their message eventually becomes accepted. It deprives them of their feelings of moral superiority; it takes away their exclusivity. There is nothing more bitter than a rebel without a cause.’
‘And,’ said Menke, ‘there is also evidence of a growing consensus between the extreme left, extreme environmentalism and anti-globalisation. And GlobalConcern Hamburg, in many ways, represents everything they hate.’
‘So do we have any definite intelligence that someone in particular is going to be targeted?’ asked Fabel.
‘No one specific, but we are anticipating vigorous protesting and organised street violence. And the word is that there is some kind of showcase one-off action being planned.’
‘And you think that may be an assassination?’
‘It’s possible,’ said Menke. ‘The BfV and the Polizei Hamburg’s anti-terrorism branch are working together on this, but it was suggested that you should be briefed on the situation; that your particular perspective and experience may be useful.’
‘Oh? Who suggested that?’ Fabel looked pointedly at van Heiden. He had enough on his plate at the moment and was surprised that his chief hadn’t appreciated the fact.
‘I did.’ It was Muller-Voigt who spoke. He read Fabel’s puzzled expression. ‘That business a few years ago. The Muhlhaus thing. I was very impressed by how you dealt with…’ He struggled for the right word. ‘With things. Very efficient but also very sensitive.’
Fabel nodded his thanks. He noticed that Muller-Voigt, who was normally uniquely composed, seemed less sure of himself.
‘I have already explained to the Senator that you have a rather pressing workload, as you mentioned earlier. We have set up a task group with officers of our own anti-terror unit, the BKA federal crime bureau and agents of the BfV. At the moment we just want you to acquaint yourself with the contents of the file. But we may want to call on your services later.’
There goes my evening, thought Fabel, looking at the thickness of the file.
‘There’s no need to take that with you,’ said Menke. ‘I can email it to you.’
‘Email? Is that safe?’
Menke gave a patronising laugh and earned Fabel’s instant dislike. He indexed the BfV man in a mental file next to Kroeger, the Cybercop. ‘Yes, Chief Commissar, it’s safe. We only use secure servers and systems. Just as the Polizei Hamburg do.’
Fabel shrugged. ‘Well, the State Government’s email system was also meant to be secure. That didn’t stop it from being infected by this Klabautermann Virus. If you don’t mind, I’ll hang on to this hard copy. Means I can read it quicker.’
They spent the next few minutes going over the logistics of the summit. As well as business leaders, GlobalConcern Hamburg was going to be attended by some senior politicians from across the Federal Republic and beyond. Including, of course, Muller-Voigt, who would be chairing the conference. Fabel could see that there was cause for concern, as there would be with any major summit held in the city, but he couldn’t quite understand why his presence was needed. He was an investigator. A murder detective. His job was after-the-fact, not preventative. He was even more puzzled that it had been Muller-Voigt who had requested his involvement. Fabel caught himself involuntarily glancing at his watch. Van Heiden caught him too, but watch-checking was very much part of the Criminal Director’s routine and he didn’t seem irritated.
‘Listen, Jan,’ said van Heiden. ‘I think we’ve got you as much up to speed as you need to be. I don’t want to hold you back — I know you’ve got a lot on your plate.’
‘Thanks,’ said Fabel. He lifted the file and bounced it in his hand, as if assessing its heft. ‘I’ll look this over tonight.’ Fabel rose and shook hands with the three men and took his leave.
‘Actually…’ Muller-Voigt looked at his watch and frowned. ‘I’m afraid I’m already late for another appointment. I think I’ll have to slip away too.’
‘Fine, Herr Senator,’ said van Heiden, also frowning: the idea of someone being late for an appointment was distressing. ‘I hope we haven’t kept you…’
‘No, no… not at all. It’ll be fine. Herr Fabel, could you see me out? I’d like a word, if I may.’
‘Sure…’
Hamburg’s police Presidium was designed as a cylinder, with an atrium in the centre and wings radiating out from it. The design concept had been to mirror a polic
e star. As Fabel and Muller-Voigt walked along the curving hallway to the elevator, the politician made the usual small talk. Fabel was only going down two floors and they got into the lift together. As they did so, Muller-Voigt’s entire demeanour changed. It became agitated. Something that Fabel would never have associated with the Environment Senator.
‘Listen, Fabel. I need to talk to you. Urgently.’
‘What about?’
‘It’s a long story, but it is very very important. I really do need your help.’
‘I don’t understand. You mean professionally?’
‘Yes… no. Perhaps. But it is a matter of life or death. It’s something that, for the moment, I’d like to keep between ourselves. You’ll understand when we talk. Can you come to my house tonight? Around seven-thirty?’
Fabel held up the file. ‘I had planned to do some reading…’
‘This is more important, Fabel.’
They reached the Murder Commission’s floor and the doors opened. Fabel stepped out but placed a restraining hand to prevent the doors closing again.
‘If this is official business…’
‘Humour me, Fabel. I really need to talk to you. There’s no one else… Can you make it or not?’
Fabel looked at the Environment Senator for a moment. ‘I’ll be there.’ He let the doors close. As he walked along the corridor towards his office, the expression on Muller-Voigt’s face haunted him. He had never seen the politician ruffled before. Even on the occasion when Fabel had interviewed him as a potential murder suspect.
What bothered him was that Muller-Voigt hadn’t looked ruffled: he had looked downright scared.
Chapter Eleven
Niels Freese waited under a tree at the corner of the street, looking across at the cafe. He stood with a black sports holdall in one hand, his grip tight around its handle. He was dressed in a baggy dark combat jacket and jeans, with a black woollen hat perched on the top of his narrow, long head. The hat was actually a rolled-up ski mask, ready to be pulled down over his thin features when the moment came.
And the moment was coming.
He made a quick check that Harald was still in position, the engine of the stolen motorcycle ticking over. Then he closed his hand around the loaded automatic in his pocket and turned his attention back to the approaching Mercedes.
Niels Freese was twenty-eight and as angry as it was possible for a young man to be. Anger wasn’t really a big enough word, a broad enough concept, to describe what he felt as he stood there, waiting for the luxury car to park. He was a sighted man in a land of the blind. The wilfully blind. But there again, all his life, Niels had had a different way of seeing.
It was Niels’s anger and frustration that the Guardians of Gaia had been able to harness and give form and function. He was a walking — or limping — example of what Man’s arrogant abuse of the environment had done. The doctors had tried to tell him different, but he knew — he just knew — that it had been the chemicals in that factory where his mother had worked that had caused the problems with his birth; that had left him brain-damaged.
It was not that he was a simpleton: the damage had been neurological and had caused a slight palsy that had left him with his slight limp. But it was the other symptoms that had caused the problems. All of his life, he’d had difficulty processing information and reacting to his environment with immediacy. It had given him subtle ‘developmental problems’, as the doctors had described them. There was the deja vu. Everyone experienced deja vu sometimes but Niels experienced it every day of his life, sometimes as many as twenty times in one day. It was as if his wiring had all become entangled and short-circuited daily; at one stage his deja vu had blossomed into full-blown reduplicative paramnesia. As a young teenager, Niels had experienced depersonalisation episodes in which he had believed that he did not really exist. He also had experienced delusions that he was no longer living in his real home but in an exact replica of it, and that the replica was actually millions of light years distant from reality. He had been taken away for a while and treated in Hamburg-Eilbek Hospital’s psychiatric department. He had been treated with lithium and then with immunoglobulin and corticosteroids. The delusions faded without entirely disappearing, but Niels learned to cope with them. The deja vu remained as severe.
Niels’s mental illness had separated him from the others in his school and he had ended up friendless and isolated. Or almost friendless: there had been Roman, the fat boy who had also been a loner and had seemed weird even to Niels. They had not really liked each other, but there was some kind of recognised commonality.
It was after school, working for the forestry department, that Niels had become obsessive about the environment. He started to see his different way of perceiving the world around him not as a disability but as a gift. It was then that he realised that he, and perhaps only he, could see what was really happening to the world.
Niels looked up for a moment through the bare branches above him and at the sky beyond. The leaves had been late in coming out on all the city’s trees that year, but this specimen was not yet even showing signs of budding. It didn’t stand a chance here, thought Niels, its roots hemmed in by asphalt, its foliage strangled by fumes. The sky he looked at through the lattice of naked branches seemed to match exactly what Niels was feeling inside: an emotion even he would find almost impossible to describe. There was hatred and anger, and, greater than either, there was a colossal sense of frustration: frustration that others were oblivious to that which was so painfully, urgently obvious to Niels. But most of all, at the core of the emotion that burned inside him, was a raw grief: a mourning for a death he could foretell but seemed powerless to prevent. But if it was an emotion that was impossible to describe, it was possible to articulate. And he was seconds away from that articulation.
He turned his attention back to the Mercedes convertible. New, maybe only weeks old. Shiny. It pulled up and parked across the street. The man who got out of the car looked exactly like the kind of person you would expect to see parking an expensive status-symbol car outside a self-consciously trendy, artificially alternative cafe in the Schanzenviertel: he was in his mid-thirties, tieless and dressed in a designer suit that fitted with the car yet would look out of place in a traditional boardroom. He was all dot-com, right-on, designery, sunrise-businessy. Ten years ago he would have had a ponytail.
Niels despised these people even more than he hated the old guard. At least the old guard did not try to hide what they were. The old guard made it clear that they were about making money and keeping it from everyone else; they were visibly exclusive and conspicuously fuck-the-planet arrogant. These bastards — bastards like trendy Merc-Man — were much worse. They had exactly the same obsession with money and status, but they dressed it all up in a right-on, socially committed, environmentally friendly guise. They were fucking the planet just like the others, but they were doing it surreptitiously. Hypocritically.
Niels did not know the man who had parked the Mercedes. The Commander had not told Niels his victim’s name nor anything about him, but Niels hated him. Hated him with every fibre of his being. And soon he would get to vent that hatred: soon, Merc-Man would come to understand that every decision, every choice you made had consequences, no matter how ignorant you were of them.
Niels watched as a woman pulled up behind the convertible in an equally new, boxy, ugly Alfa-Romeo Giulietta. Everything about her, her look, her clothes, her hair, told Niels that she was a female equivalent of Merc-Man. She greeted the Mercedes driver with a kiss and a laugh and they both went into the cafe together.
This was it. The next phase. Until now, the group had restricted itself to torching cars like this at night. But it was almost a tradition for the cars of the rich to be sporadically targeted in the Schanzenviertel and it was never clear which group was responsible. Often it was down to individuals simply protesting about the gentrification of the Schanzenviertel and the erosion of its edgy, individualistic character. But tha
t was not what Niels was about, what the group was about. They were the Guardians of Gaia. Protectors of the Earth. Soldiers in a war to defend the air, the sea, the soil.
He looked up again towards the end of the street where Harald waited, ready with the motorbike they had stolen the night before. That too would be torched. Afterwards. Harald, on the Commander’s orders, knew nothing about the automatic in Niels’s pocket, nor that this daylight arson attack was, in fact, an execution.
Niels put the holdall on the ground and unzipped it. He didn’t take anything out; he was just getting it ready. He picked it up again and walked purposefully across the street. As he approached the Mercedes, he stayed on the road side of it, pulling a hammer with a spiked head from his combat jacket with his free hand. As he passed the car, he heard the angry buzz of the motorcycle engine as Harald gunned it up the street behind him. Niels smashed the driver’s window with the hammer and the car’s alarm exploded into an urgent whine. Pushing the holdall through the window, he walked on, repocketing the hammer. Once he was a few metres clear of the car he turned to see Harald, his face hidden by his helmet, pull up alongside the Mercedes and toss in the lighted Molotov cocktail before accelerating away and screeching to a halt alongside Niels.
‘Get on!’ Harald shouted at Niels and held out an arm.
The couple were now out on the street, having rushed from the cafe on hearing the Mercedes’s alarm. Niels could see the flames inside the car increase in intensity, but it was still just the Molotov cocktail that burned: the five litres of plastic-bagged accelerant hadn’t ignited yet.
‘Get on! ’ Harald shouted even more urgently. But Niels was hypnotised by the flames licking at the inside of the windshield. The fabric of the soft-top now burned and flapped. Merc-Man and his girlfriend were now out at the car, but were too focused on what was happening to the Mercedes to look in Niels’s direction. Merc-Man looked distraught and tugged at his hair, doing a little dance of decision/indecision, towards the car and back from it. He hadn’t a clue what to do. Niels guessed that there was something he wanted to rescue from inside the car.
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