Fabel slammed his hand onto the table. ‘God … you’re right! That must have been Klugmann calling in to get instructions. The poor bastard really was in shock that night. He comes across his contact sliced up like butcher meat and he calls his control to find out what to do. They tell him to phone the police but to stay out in the field and under cover. Bastards!’ He turned back to Van Heiden. ‘This is obstruction and suppression of evidence. I want people behind bars for this. Do I have your support?’
Fabel had expected Van Heiden to be put out by being asked such a question in front of the whole team. Instead Van Heiden’s face was drawn tight and hard and determined. ‘Whatever you need, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar, I’ll make sure you get it.’
Fabel nodded his thanks. Whatever else he was, Van Heiden was a straight, honest policeman. Fabel turned to his two lieutenants. ‘Good work, Maria, bloody good work. And you too, Werner … on the phone link.’
‘Speaking of which …’ said Van Heiden picking up the conference-room phone and pressing the button for his secretary. ‘Get me Hauptkommissar Wallenstein at BAO …’
Fabel signalled urgently for his boss to stop. Van Heiden cancelled the call and replaced the receiver.
‘What is it you have in mind, Fabel?’
Fabel slipped Klugmann’s cell phone from the evidence bag. He looked questioningly at Van Heiden who gave a curt and serious nod. Fabel switched on the phone and looked at the last number dialled, then keyed it into the conference room phone. The phone at the other end rang three times. Again there was no voice when it was answered.
‘This is Kriminalhauptkommissar Fabel of the Polizei Hamburg Mordkommission. I want you to listen very, very carefully and pass this information on to whoever is in charge. Your operation is totally compromised. We know about Tina Kramer and your other operative.’ Fabel was careful not to mention Klugmann’s name: he was still out there in the field and if Fabel’s hunch about who was on the other end of the phone was wrong, it could be a lethal mistake. ‘I am sitting with Kriminaldirektor Van Heiden of the Polizei Hamburg and we will be making a full report to the Erste Bürgermeister and to the Bundeskriminalamt.’ Fabel paused again. Still no one spoke but he remained connected. Fabel’s voice now developed a harder, sharper edge. ‘Your operative is in danger and his cover is blown. Whatever you hoped to achieve with this operation is now unachievable. All you are doing now is obstructing a major murder inquiry. If you do not co-operate with our investigation with full transparency, I promise you I will make sure criminal charges are brought against those behind this operation.’
There was an eternity of silence and then a female voice answered.
‘Do you have our operative in custody?’
Fabel looked at those gathered around the table with an expression approaching triumph. ‘No. He’s still at large. We’re looking for him. To whom am I speaking?’
She ignored the question. ‘We have lost contact with our operative. Please let us know if you locate him. On this number. Someone will call you back shortly, Kriminalhauptkommissar.’ The phone went dead. Fabel gave a bitter laugh.
‘I always thought Klugmann was all wrong. I just never thought he’d be wrong in the right way, if you know what I mean.’
‘He’s still in the job, isn’t he?’ asked Werner.
‘Yep. I don’t know for sure for whom, but I’ve got a pretty damned good idea. Anyway, we’ll find out soon enough …’
Nobody spoke. No one seemed to notice how bizarre the situation was: a room full of police officers sitting and standing in silence, the tension almost palpable in the air, and every pair of eyes focused on the missing undercover agent’s cell phone. Several minutes passed. Then the room seemed to fill with the urgent electronic trilling of the phone. Everybody gave a small jump when it rang.
It was Fabel’s turn to remain silent when he picked up the phone and clicked the answer button with his thumb.
‘Hauptkommissar Fabel?’
Fabel instantly recognised the tentative voice at the other end, but he was too pissed off for pleasantries. ‘Be in my office within the hour, Herr Oberst Volker.’
Fabel hung up.
It had taken Fabel only twenty minutes to wind up the briefing in the conference room, allocating investigative and follow-up tasks to his team. Fabel waited in his office. He put his phone on voice mail and told Werner and Maria he needed a few minutes to gather himself before Volker arrived. He needed to muster the windblown thoughts, facts and theories that had been scattered by the impact on the case of the second victim’s revealed identity. He gazed out of his window and looked out across Winterhuder Stadtpark and the city beyond. But he didn’t take anything in. Fabel’s mind was in the darklands: that grey half world Yilmaz had described, where the space occupied by law enforcers lies somewhere between the legal and the expedient and is shadowed and clouded.
It is not easy to be German. You carry the excess baggage of recent history while other Europeans travel comparatively light. Ten centuries of culture and achievement had been eclipsed by twelve years in the mid-twentieth century, twelve years in which the most exceptional evil had become the commonplace. Those twelve years had defined for the world what it was to be German; they had defined for most Germans what it was to be German. Now, they were not trusted. And they could never again trust themselves.
For each German, this distrust had its own focus, an aspect of German life that had a discordant, unsettling resonance. For some, it was geographical: northern Germans mistrusting southerners for their fascistic parochialism; or West Germans, the
Wessis
, mistrusting the
Ossis
, the East Germans, fearing that Nazism had been cryogenically preserved in the deep freeze of Communism and was now beginning to thaw out. For others it was generational: the protestors of 1968 and ’69 who rebelled against the war generation and traditional German conservativeness; the new generation who addressed each other with
Du
instead of
Sie
, de-formalising and liberalising the German language itself.
For Fabel, the focus of his mistrust was the hidden machinery of the state: the deep, internal organs of a new democracy that had been transplanted from a dying dictatorship. And right at the centre of that focus, in the spotlight of Fabel’s distrust, was the BND.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst had been set up in 1956. It was part of the machinery of the Cold War, the counter to the East German Stasi, or Staatssicherheitsdienst. The first director of the BND had been General Gehlen. The truth was that the BND had been operating since the end of the Second World War as the Organisation Gehlen. Gehlen had been a general in the Abwehr, the Nazi intelligence service, which had planted spies in the United Kingdom, the United States and around the world. The Abwehr had also operated as a counter-espionage unit, tracking down resistance agents and allied spies in occupied Europe. In its duties it had displayed a slightly smaller appetite for torture than the Gestapo or the SS. After the war, the Americans faced a new threat, Soviet Communism, and found themselves naked of any meaningful east-facing intelligence network. But they knew people who had such a network: the Germans. So the ‘South German Economic Development Agency’ was set up in Pullach, near Munich, and Gehlen was put in charge and told by the Allies he could have access to any personnel he needed.
Gehlen toured the internment camps and liberated dozens of SS men to join the new intelligence network. And he did so with the full cooperation and consent of the Allies. Now was not the time, apparently, to get sentimental over a few million Jews.
The Organisation Gehlen, and the BND that succeeded it, had been far from successful. The East German Stasi had infiltrated the organisation from the earliest days and there had been a number of spectacular and very public failures. After the reunification of Germany, the BND found itself without its original
raison d’être
, and started to seek a new role. The fight against terrorism, in which it had been engaged since the late 1960s, became a more central function. But now there were emergent Rechtsradikale neo-Nazi groups as well as the established left-wing brands like the Rote-Armee-Fraktion to contend with. In the mid-nineties it had been decided that the BND should become involved in the fight against organised crime, something that Fabel and other career policemen had viewed with profound scepticism. Fabel was aware that the evil machineries of state that the Nazis had emplaced cast long and dark shadows. And for Fabel, the BND lay half hidden in those shadows. Fabel did not trust the BND. Volker was BND.
A few clouds scudded across an otherwise bright sky. Fabel’s gaze through the window and across the city remained unfixed, as if he were looking beyond the visible. From Volker to Klugmann. From the BND to GSG
9
.
Fabel had Klugmann’s adulterated personnel file on his desk. He turned from the window and looked again at the photograph. Klugmann’s position within the investigation had shifted. The face in the file was the same face, but now Fabel saw it anew, read the features differently. He was pretty certain that Klugmann was an agent of GSG9, which, technically, kept his status as a policeman. GSG9 – Grenzschutzgruppe Neun – was officially part of the Federal German Border Police, but its agents had nothing to do with checking passports or looking under fruit trucks for asylum seekers. GSG9 was, ironically, born out of Germany’s mistrust of itself.
The decision to hold the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich had been a turning point in German history. The mental image that came from putting together the concepts of Germany and the Olympian tradition would no longer begin and end with swastikas billowing above the 1936 Games in Berlin.
It was still dark at four-thirty in the morning of 5 September 1972. A small group, dressed like athletes and carrying sports bags, made their way silently through the Olympic village in Munich. Their destination was 31 Connollystrasse. The Israeli team’s quarters. Sixteen hours later, the tarmac of Fürstenfeldbruck military airbase, fifteen miles west of the Olympic village, was scattered with the twisted metal of an exploded helicopter, the bodies of five dead Black September terrorists, one policeman and nine Israeli hostages. Two other Israeli athletes had been murdered in the village earlier in the day.
With the atrocities of the SS so vivid in the national memory, Germany had denied itself, under law, the right to create an elite military counter-terrorist unit, such as the British SAS or the American Delta Force. The result of Germany’s lack of preparedness had been a disastrous, extemporised rescue attempt by untrained marksmen. The result had also been seventeen dead under the unblinking gaze of the world’s media. Within six months GSG9 was in business, masterminded and led by Ulrich Wegener, a forty-three-year-old officer from a patrician, East German family. Wegener had been a thorn in the side of the East German authorities and was imprisoned by the East German Stasi for two years for pro-democracy and pro-reunification campaigning. After his release, Wegener had escaped to the West and had joined the West German security services.
The premise of the new unit was simple: no member of the armed forces could serve in GSG9, only policemen. Instead of being part of the Bundeswehr army, GSG9 was a 350-strong unit within the Federal Border Police. In 1977, Wegener was to become the hero of GSG9’s most successful operation. The unit, supported by two British SAS ‘special observers’, stormed a hijacked Lufthansa Boeing 707 in Mogadishu after terrorists, demanding the release of Baader-Meinhof members held in Germany, murdered the captain. Wegener himself led the assault and shot dead one of the terrorists. It was GSG9’s shining hour.
Then the gleam tarnished. In June 1993, GSG9 tried to arrest Wolfgang Grams, a member of the Rote-Armee-Fraktion in a rail station in Bad Kleinen in eastern Germany. The operation was botched and Grams killed one policeman and wounded another. The official report, borne out by forensic evidence, stated that Grams then shot himself. Civilian witnesses, however, claimed that they saw the GSG9 operatives hold Grams down and shoot him in the head at point-blank range.
The ensuing scandal resulted in careers lost at cabinet level. And GSG9 sank back into the shadows.
Fabel was no fan of GSG9. Or of the Mobile and Sonder Einsatz Kommando units, styled on American SWAT teams, that had sprung up in almost all of Germany’s police forces. The line between policeman and soldier was becoming ever less distinct and it went against every instinct Fabel had. Fabel’s view on these paramilitary units won him no friends on the upper levels of the Präsidium, particularly when he pointed to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as an example. The Mounties had set up a unit similar to GSG9. They had called it SERT – the Special Emergency Response Team – and it was a highly efficient counter-terrorist unit. And it had disbanded. The Canadian officers within SERT could not reconcile the imperative to kill imposed by counter-terrorist operations with their natural instincts as police officers to preserve and protect life. Those, Fabel had always thought, were the kind of cops he’d like to serve with.
He focused on Klugmann’s face in the service photograph. It was a leaner face than the one that had been opposite him in the whitewashed interview room in the Davidwache station. It was a taut face, the skin pegged tightly to the heavy skull by guy-rope muscles and ligaments. It was the kind of face that told you that the unseen body to which it belonged was powerful and fit. The photograph wasn’t that old; Klugmann must have worked at making himself look that little bit run down for his undercover role.