by Mark Hobson
“Inspector Van Dijk here. Have you finished over there?”
“Van Dijk, I’ve been looking for you, where the hell are you?”
“Over at the science museum, but never mind that. Are there any survivors inside the tower? Sergeant Beumers was in there.”
“I can see the helicopter from here. Is that something to do with you?” demanded Dyatlov.
“Yes! But listen, is Beumers ok? Is he alive?”
There was a slight pause on the line and in the background Pieter could hear shouting, orders been relayed no doubt. Then Dyatlov came back on, his voice more subdued.
“Inspector, you need to get back here now. There’s something you have to see.”
The assault-squad leader was a short and stocky man with a severe buzz cut, who was ex-paramilitary from the Russian armed forces. Pieter knew him vaguely, having worked alongside him during a drugs operation a year or so ago.
Dyatlov met him as he clambered down from the armoured police vehicle that had ferried him back from the docks, then led him over the bridge past the wrecked tram and down towards the tower.
Laid out on the road were three rows of body bags, one set marked with small blue flags and the others with red and black flags.
“Nasty business,” Dyatlov informed him. He pointed at the row marked in blue. “Eight civilians, but that tally might rise as we have some seriously wounded who might not make it. And four police, your two uniformed officers plus one of my men who died when we stormed the place. The one’s in black are the bad guys. Five of those bastards. No prisoners.”
“Make that six,” Pieter told him, and briefly explained what had happened over at the science museum.
Dyatlov said nothing, merely grunted.
“You said four police? There’s only three bodies here?”
“The other’s still inside. I’m sorry Inspector, it’s your man.”
Pieter nodded and whispered, “OK.”
The squad leader led him over to the main entrance, where the door was hanging on its hinges. Before following him inside, Pieter diverted across to the line of body bags marked with their little black flags. Bending down, he lifted one of the sheets, seeing the face below was pock-marked with small burn marks on one cheek, but still clearly recognizable as another young teenager.
Pieter reached below and pulled out the boy’s hand. He saw on one finger a familiar-looking ring, identical to the one back at HQ. He let the hand go, and stepped through the doorway.
Inside there were signs of severe fighting everywhere. The walls were riddled with bullet holes and the floor littered with glass shards and wooden splinters where the windows had blown in. Hundreds, possibly thousands of copper shell casings were scattered underfoot. Over to the right an opening led to a flight of stairs leading down, probably to the boathouse below, and plumes of black smoke billowed upwards. One whole wall was gone where a grenade had exploded, and several firearms were laid about, abandoned or dropped by the gunmen. And in the far corner a spiral staircase disappeared through the ceiling. He heard voices up there, someone laughing, no doubt members of the assault team on a high after the fierce firefight.
And straight ahead, propped up against an empty fireplace, was the body of Daan Beumers, his head covered in a clear plastic bag. What looked like black tape was wrapped around his neck to shut off the life-giving oxygen. The face a sickly blue colour, with his red-veined eyes staring back at Pieter.
He looked away, his eyes filling up with tears.
You bloody fool, mate, Pieter thought to himself.
Dyatlov gave him a moment to compose himself and then indicated the spiral staircase
“There’s another one upstairs on the roof.”
Pieter followed him, their boots clunking on the metal steps. The doorway was built into the sloping side of the slate turret that capped the roof, and they stepped out into bright sunlight. They walked around to the far side.
Here, sprawled upright against the turret as though sunbathing, was a man’s naked corpse. Its ankles were tied together with a plastic cable-tie, and both arms were pulled up above the head and tied individually with lengths of rope to the weather vane atop the turret, giving his posture a Y-shape. Both eyes had been gouged out and the mouth was a wide, bloody hole, with a trail of red gore down his chin. The tongue had been ripped or cut out.
Daubed in blood across the body’s fat stomach was another symbol, different and more intricate than the one found on the alley wall. Some kind of pentagram inside a series of concentric circles, with various strange symbols around the edges, triangles, weird letters with dots inside them or arrows or crosses poking out from them, a crescent moon at the very top
At the corpse’s feet was a briefcase, innocuous amidst the debris of battle up here, which Pieter surveyed as he stepped away and looked out over the wall.
“We’re not sure if this one’s a civilian or one of theirs, so we left him here. He quite obviously died a different way too.”
“Oh, he’s one of theirs,” Pieter replied. He pointed at the briefcase. “I met him earlier, with Daan Beumers. His name is Levi Kohnstaam, a jeweller from The Jordaan. We had him under surveillance. Beumers phoned to tell me he was following him here. But now it looks like he deliberately led him to this place. Led him to his death.”
“And then they killed their own man?”
“And cut his tongue out, which has all kinds of hidden meaning.”
Dyatlov gave another of his little grunts, and said “Well, murder is your speciality. I just kick butt. Life is easier that way.”
Pieter turned and moved around the roof space. The squad leader trailed after him.
As with the room below and the streets outside the rooftop was like a warzone. The walls and turret were blasted everywhere with burn marks and holes, and piles of debris and shell casings carpeted the floor. Opened ammo boxes, some with bullet casings or magazines still inside, lay overturned, alongside grenades and assault rifles and sun-machine guns.
Pieter stood there and looked at it, shaking his head in amazement.
“Where the hell did they get this stuff from? There’s enough firepower here to equip a small army.”
“My guess is that it probably came from Slovakia. That’s the main route for gun smugglers these days. This kind of gear is legal over there, all you need to do is walk into a gun shop with some ID, and you can buy whatever you want. Ex-army assault rifles, C10’s or C15’s, anti-personnel mines, even rocket launches. It’s all surplus stock from the days of the Cold War. Then all they’d need to do is smuggle it back across the border into Holland. Which is pretty simple these days with open borders everywhere. Yep, if you’ve got the money and the motivation, it’s not difficult at all my friend.”
“Yeah but these guys, from my limited amount of experience, they were well trained. Getting the stuff is one thing, but knowing how to use it is another, surely?”
“True, they certainly knew what they were doing. But there are training camps all over the place. A few in the Balkans, in Scandinavia even.”
This made Pieter look up. “In Finland?”
“Sure, why?”
“Just a bit of info we received with possible links to an old far-right group based there.”
“Well there are thousands of places up there where they could set up a training outfit, real remote places off grid. Yeah, it would be an ideal location.”
Pieter nodded.
“I could ask around if you like? I’m still in touch with some of my buddies from my days in the military. A lot of them went into private security, executive protection for dodgy politicians in the Middle East or the rich and famous in the west. It’s big business these days. They might have heard of something, the odd rumour perhaps.”
“Yeah I’d appreciate that. Some of them are still out there remember?” He nodded at the corpse tied to the roof turret.
Dyatlov followed his gaze. His mouth turned up like there was a bad smell. “As for tha
t crap, the fucking witchy signs and occult nonsense, it’s all mumbo jumbo to me.”
CHAPTER 13
FEVER DREAMS
The rest of the afternoon and evening went by in a blur. A city-wide sweep for the escaped fugitives sprang into immediate action. The speedboat could potentially be on the far side of Amsterdam within ten minutes once it was on the main canal network. After 60 minutes it was decided to extend the search into a nation-wide manhunt, and check all border access points, and police forces across Europe were put on maximum alert.
A fierce debate began immediately within Dutch law enforcement agencies as to whether to treat this as a terrorist or domestic incident. Opinion was divided, for although on the surface it had all of the hallmarks of a terrorist attack like the Paris atrocities, the occult nature of the murder of Levi Kohnstaam led others to wonder if they were dealing with some kind of crazy cult. The symbols found on the alley wall suggested the latter.
Predictably the world’s media descended on Amsterdam, with news crews from as far away as Japan and Australia clambering for exclusive updates. The media liaison department was swamped with queries, and Pieter himself had to fend off questions thrown at him by Dutch reporters gathering close to the crime scenes. It soon became a media frenzy, and photographers taking pictures from high vantage points in the surrounding buildings, using telephoto lenses, were able to capture images of Kohnstaam’s body up on the roof. These pictures hit the internet within minutes, showing not just the jeweller’s corpse but also the pentagram sign daubed in his own blood.
Over at the science museum the helicopter had located and retrieved the body of the youth, and his corpse, along with all of the others, was transferred to a temporary morgue. Then news had reached Pieter of another incident. There was a fire reported in Jordaan near to Rozengracht Bridge, a bakery and office premises above were engulfed in flames, and fire crews were at the scene. Eyewitnesses were talking of a malfunctioning oven in the small bakery, but Pieter suspected otherwise. It was just too much of a coincidence.
Rumours and speculation were rife all across town. The full might of the Dutch National Police Force was swinging into action.
The questions on everybody’s lips were: Just who was responsible for the series of barbaric crimes and attacks? Where had they gone to ground? And when would they strike again?
One thing was clear: Whoever they were, they had announced themselves to the world in a spectacular fashion.
◆◆◆
It was after midnight by the time Pieter made it back home. Lotte had left a note for him on the kitchen unit. He read her message:
Wake me when you get in. Lotte xx
It was too late to disturb her, and besides he was exhausted. Instead he quietly opened the bedroom door and looked at her sleeping form. They had gone back to their original sleeping arrangements after the first night, she in the big bedroom, and he in the smaller one. Seeing her helped to ease the worries racing around in his mind, if only temporarily. But they could talk in the morning, and so he gently closed the door again.
Passing through to the living room he briefly switched on the TV. It was still tuned to a 24hr news channel, and Pieter sat on the couch to see the latest developments, but the reporting mostly consisted of shaky footage captured on mobile phones by members of the public.
He watched for a while, reliving the intense firefight which the media had already christened THE BATTLE OF WEEPING TOWER. But very soon he felt his eyelids drooping, and so he put the TV on standby, kicked off his shoes and, too tired to even head to his bedroom, he lay back on the couch and was asleep within seconds.
Once again he dreamt.
As before, his dream was in monochrome, and all jerky like an old silent movie.
Stepping from bright sunlight into a dark world. With walls on either side, hemming him in tighter and tighter, he moved along the twisting passageway, deeper and deeper into the bowels of the rank underworld of the city.
The smell was appalling, making him retch. A stench like vomit and piss and animal shit. When he reached out to touch the walls he found them all sticky and slimy, and his fingertips came away smeared with something like thick mucus.
On he went, drawn inwards.
The passage was part of a huge and corrupt living thing, the walls becoming narrower but pulsing and sucking. From somewhere ahead came a dull and rhythmic thud, faint but growing louder with each step he took. A heartbeat.
Turning his head to the left and right, he saw windows that lined the walls, with the girl’s faces and bodies pressed against the glass. Beckoning him inside, their lithe body’s dancing seductively.
Just ahead the passageway entered a curved brick tunnel, and beyond the darkness was infinite, stretching away to nothing.
He hesitated.
Hearing a shuffling noise, bare feet scraping and sliding across the ancient cobbles underfoot.
From out of the pitch darkness emerged a naked woman, with dark hair and smoky eyes and pouted lips entrancing him with their beauty. He knew this was Mila, the girl from Estonia, and she smiled as though she recognized him too.
Unable to prevent himself, his gaze shifted downwards, over her breasts, and lower across her stomach. Yet there was no stomach, just a gaping wound, glistening like raw meat, parts of her ribs and spine showing through. From her butchered belly slithered coils of her intestines, and she held them out as though offering them to him.
From behind her stumbled a naked man. He was twitching and jitterbugging, his eyeballs bulging and their pupils shrunk to tiny pinpricks, like a person tripping on drugs. Between his legs was a bloody hole where he’d been castrated.
After him came his father, hunched over on spindly legs, a twisted and stooped old man with a wasted face. His bare skin was starting to corrupt to a sickly grey and green colour, and parts of his flesh had been eaten away, nibbled by tiny creatures. In his wake he left damp footprints on the ground.
Finally the fat jeweller, his huge and bloated body rippling and trembling, with his arms outstretched as he groped around like a blind man, for his eyes had been gouged out. He tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was a quiet mewling noise.
They came out of the shadows, their hands reaching forward to grab him, their cold, dead fingers probing his face and mouth and eyes.
Pulling him back into the dank tunnel.
Pieter awoke with a loud yell, twisting and thrashing and pushing the hands away.
He sat bolt upright and looked around at his surroundings, and then remembered falling asleep on the couch. The living room light was still on, and the wall clock told him it was the very early hours of the morning.
Slowly his heartbeat came back to normal and he sat forward and rubbed at his face, his eyes blinking away the residual images of the dream.
He heard the door opening behind him and he turned to see Lotte standing there with a concerned frown on her face. She moved towards the couch and placed her hand gently on his back.
“I heard you shouting.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled sleepily.
“Bad dream?”
“You could say that.”
She gave his shoulder a comforting squeeze and came around to the front. “Budge up.”
Pieter shifted across and she squashed in next to him, the hem of her nightie rising over her thighs. She pressed against him and hugged him tightly.
“It’s been a long day for you.”
“The longest of my life,” he corrected with the faintest of smiles. “A tough few days in fact.”
“I waited up. I didn’t want to text you, thought you’d be swamped with work, but you should have woke me when you got back.” She took a hold of his hand and splayed her fingers between his, squeezing them affectionately. “But never mind.”
Pieter wrapped his other arm around her and held her tightly, and his body gave a huge shiver as the tension came out. Then he stretched his legs out, the last dregs from the bad dream slowly eva
porating from memory.
“I heard about everything on my way over, and then spent most of the evening watching the news. Was kinda hoping to catch a glimpse of you, maybe the big hero being interviewed, having your fifteen minutes.”
“Well it wasn’t quite like that. To be honest, everything is such a whirl that my head’s still spinning. I think I mostly acted on instinct…and training.”
Lotte looked up at him earnestly, her big eyes roving over his face, and that worried frown back on her brow. “Tell me what happened.”
Pieter told her everything. From his and Daan Beumers meeting with Levi Kohnstaam earlier in the day, the phone call from Beumers telling him about tailing their suspect to Schreierstoren Tower, his panicked drive over and hoping to catch his colleague before he did anything rash. The fierce gun battle that had developed, followed by him chasing one of the gunmen, and the youth’s shocking leap to his death. Then later seeing his dead friend. He explained a little about the massive manhunt currently underway, how the whole country was on high alert. He finished by telling her that the investigation was massively complex and there was no end in sight just yet.
Lotte listened attentively, without asking any questions, happy to let him talk and get things out of his system. When he was done, she prodded him in the stomach.
“You know, you can’t do everything yourself. You should let some of the others shoulder some of the responsibility. You already have enough on your plate with your father, they’ll understand if you wanted to step back. You’re going to suffer from burn out if you are not careful.”
“But it’s my case. I want to see this through to the end. Get the bastards responsible.”
“Okay,” she replied quietly. A hush descended for a moment, a nice lull that felt good. Then she whispered: “I want to help you.”
Pieter looked at her upturned face, an unspoken question on his lips.
“I can do something, to help with the strain you’re under.”
Then she placed her hand over the front of his trousers and gently squeezed him.
