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 Fottinger. 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 Fottinger’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 Bruggemann 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, Badorf, 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.
‘You know, this is very interesting reading,’ he said conversationally. ‘Did you know that Daniel Fottinger studied philosophy at Hamburg University?’
‘No, Herr Fabel. I did not.’
‘Really? I would have thought you and he would have discussed such things. After all, the Pharos Project trades heavily on the philosophy of mind, wouldn’t you say?’
Wiegand said nothing, instead keeping Fabel locked in a cold, contemptuous glare.
‘He didn’t do too well with his studies,’ continued Fabel. ‘From what we’ve been able to find out, he had a tendency to become too fixed on one particular aspect of philosophy. Obsessive, almost. He lacked intellectual discipline, apparently. Not enough rigour. His dissertations were considered to be too narrow and ill-researched. Take this one: it was supposed to be a general exploration of Plato’s Theory of Forms, but it turns into a very, very discursive piece on Platonic Simulation.’ Fabel flicked further through the document. ‘But where it really gets interesting is when he gets into a discussion about qualia. Now, I’m no philosopher, but qualia seem to me the sensory experiences we have of the world, how we perceive our environment.’
‘Does tedium fall under that description, Herr Fabel?’ said Wiegand wearily. ‘I really do hope that you intend to make some kind of point.’
‘Well, let me put it this way. Daniel Fottinger’s personality, I feel, is revealed through these notes. Philosophy is, after all, all about making sense of the individual’s experience of the world. Fottinger was interested in a very specific concept related to qualia: the concept of the “philosophical zombie”. That is the idea held in some fields of philosophy that there is only a minority of people in the world who are real; that some people — most people, in fact — don’t really exist at all in the real sense of the word. They react to stimuli the way you would expect them to — they express feelings of sorrow, pain, anger, love… but they don’t really feel these things, because they have no real sentience.’
‘Point?’ asked Wiegand’s lawyer.
‘Simply that it’s interesting that these notes suggest that Daniel Fottinger was obsessed with the concept. Now, I’ve spoken to a lot of people about Herr Fottinger, and I’ve gained a bit of an insight into his personality. And I have to say it’s not a very pleasant personality. I believe that, as a young student, he was obsessed with these ideas because they fitted pretty much with his experience of the world.’
‘Which was?’ asked Wiegand.
‘That people didn’t really matter. Daniel Fottinger was a person completely devoid of empathy. He simply could not imagine that others had any kind of consciousness in the same way that he did.’ Fabel closed over the file. ‘Daniel Fottinger was, quite simply, a sociopath.’
‘And what does this have to do with my client?’ asked Harmsen.
‘Let me get to that. Sociopathy, as a personality disorder, is much more common than one would think. A mildly sociopathic personality is probably something of an advantage in the corporate world; the “ruthless businessman” is very often someone who is supremely egocentric and blind to the feelings of others. Daniel Fottinger was certainly such a businessman, as was his father before him, from what I can see. Daniel must not have seemed the ideal candidate for you to recruit into the Project, but you already had his independently wealthy wife and you needed Fottinger’s business to work in harmony with the Korn-Pharos Corporation. I don’t know, but it was probably your intention that, when you had him brainwashed sufficiently, Fottinger Environmental Technologies would become absorbed into the Korn empire.’
‘I still don’t see-’ began Wiegand’s lawyer.
‘Your brainwashing techniques started to work on Fottinger, mainly because the concept of a virtual world peopled with self-aware programs appealed to his already skewed ideas. But he was a bit of a thorn in the side, wasn’t he, Herr Wiegand? My guess is that his behaviour became i
ncreasingly erratic. I would also guess that you perhaps started to encounter problems with how he interacted with the female members of your little group.’ Fabel paused. ‘So how does that have anything to do with you, Herr Wiegand? I’ll tell you. A young environmental activist and web-journalist calling herself Meliha Yazar infiltrated your organisation. Somehow she gained access to the deepest levels of the Project. She discovered something big. Something so big that it could bring the Project down. And because she gained that knowledge, you had her killed. Then, because you thought she had passed that information on to her lover, Berthold Muller-Voigt, you had him killed too. You even arranged for me to be shoved off a pier and into the Elbe because you thought I was getting close to the truth, which I was.’
‘Are you going to enlighten us?’ asked Wiegand. Fabel could see the billionaire did not feel threatened. He knew that accusations were one thing; having the evidence to back them up was another. His counsel remained quiet.
‘First of all, let’s talk about the death of Daniel Fottinger. You arranged that, too. Your Consolidators actually run the Guardians of Gaia and you used poor, confused Niels Freese to kill Fottinger.’
‘And why,’ asked Harmsen, ‘would my client do that?’
‘Because of the big secret that Meliha Yazar discovered, the knowledge that Herr Wiegand here has tried so hard to wipe off the face of the planet.’
‘And what is this “big secret”?’ asked Harmsen.
‘That Daniel Fottinger was the Network Killer.’
There was a pause. Nothing to read on Wiegand’s face. Less certainty on Harmsen’s.
Fabel turned to Wiegand again. ‘As Fottinger got more and more drawn into your wacky ideas — ideas that actually made sense of his experience, just as they did with Niels Freese — he became more and more out of control. He spent up to six hours a night logged into Virtual Dimension, leading a substitute life that spilled out into the real world. He arranged to meet these women online, then raped and strangled them, dumping their bodies in the waterways around the city. You found out about it but couldn’t get to him before he got to his last victim. In fact, I suspect you didn’t find out about it until you caught Meliha Yazar. Am I right?’
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