‘Why?’ Maria found the word from somewhere.
‘Why? Why did I do this? Because he betrayed me. They all did. They did a deal with the fascist authorities and sold me. My life. Piet van Hoogstraat was the only other person the police knew about, so they sent him to identify me. But it was Paul Scheibe who negotiated it all, from a safe distance. The others went along with it. Even Cornelius. My friend.’ He turned to Maria. There was the hint of tears in his eyes. ‘I died, Maria. I died.’ He rested a hand on his chest. ‘I can still feel where the bullets hit me. I saw you die, and then I died, kneeling on that railway platform.’
‘What are you talking about? What do you mean, you died? Who do you think you are, Frank?’
Grueber straightened his back. ‘I am Red Franz. I am eternal. I have lived for nearly two thousand years. And probably before that, but I cannot yet remember. I was a warrior who gave up his life as a sacrifice for his people, for the Earth to renew. Twice. Once over a millennium and a half ago, the second time as Red Franz Mühlhaus.’
‘Red Franz Mühlhaus?’ said Maria incredulously. ‘Without even getting into the whole reincarnation thing, your arithmetic is all wrong. You were born long before Mühlhaus died.’
‘You don’t understand.’ He smiled patronisingly. ‘I was the father
and
the son. My lifetimes overlapped. I saw my own death from two perspectives. I am my own father.’
‘Oh. I see. I’m sorry, Frank.’ Maria understood it all now. ‘Red Franz Mühlhaus was your father?’
‘We were always on the run. Always. We had to dye our hair. Black.’ Grueber ran a hand through his thick, too-dark hair. ‘Everyone would notice our red hair otherwise. And then we were betrayed. My mother and father were both murdered by GSG Nine troops. A sacrifice organised by those traitors. I watched my father die. I heard him say “traitors”. I was taken away after that. The Gruebers adopted me. They had no children. They couldn’t have them. But they brought me up as if the first ten years of my life hadn’t happened. As if I was their own and always had been. After a while, even I started to feel like all that had happened before had just been a bad dream. I found I couldn’t remember things. It was like all that life was being wiped out. Erased.’
‘What happened, Frank? What happened to change you?’
‘I was at university, studying archaeology. I visited
the Landesmuseum in Hanover. It was there that I saw him. Red Franz. He was lying in a display case, his face rotted almost to nothing, but with that glorious mane of red hair still intact. I just knew, in that instant, that I was looking at the remains of a body that I had once occupied. I realised that we can look upon ourselves as we once were. As we lived before. It was then that it all came back to me. I remembered my father telling me that he had hidden a box in an old archaeological site. He had told me that if anything ever happened to him, I was to find the box and I would know the truth.’
Grueber let the thick plastic sheeting fall to veil the horror of Cornelius Tamm’s flayed body. He walked over to one of the cabinets ranged along the cellar wall. When he turned his back, Maria struggled furiously to free her hands from the rope bonds. But they were too well tied. Grueber took a rusted metal box from the cabinet.
‘My father’s secret diary and details of his group. I remembered where he’d said it was hidden. Exactly. I went and dug it up and it told me the whole story. And it gave me the names of all the traitors.’ Grueber paused. ‘But it was more than my memory of my childhood that returned that day as I looked down on Red Franz. It was my
whole
memory. My memory of all that went before this life. I knew that the body I looked at had once been mine. That I had inhabited it more than one and a half thousand years ago. I also knew that I had inhabited my father’s body. That the father and the son were one. The same.’
‘Frank …’ Maria looked at the pale, boyish face. She remembered how she had christened him ‘Harry Potter’ when they had first met. How she had always seen him as a good man. A kind man. ‘You’re ill.
You are suffering from delusions. We only live once, Frank. You have got things all …
muddled
in your head. I understand. I really do. Seeing your parents killed like that. Listen, Frank, I want to help you. I
can
help you. Just untie me.’
Grueber smiled. He eased Maria over to a chair and made her sit.
‘I know you mean well,’ he said. ‘And I know that when you say you want to help me it’s the truth, not some kind of ploy. But tonight, Maria, the biggest traitor of them all is going to die. He was my closest friend, my deputy in The Risen. He planned the Wiedler kidnap. It was he who pulled the trigger that killed Wiedler. An event he has tried to bury, along with me. He saw me as a hindrance to his political ambitions. Ambitions he continues to follow. But tonight those ambitions, and his life, will come to an end. I can’t let you interfere with what I have to do tonight. Maria. I’m sorry, but I can’t …’
Grueber took a roll of heavy-duty packing tape and wrapped it around Maria’s torso and the back of the chair. Binding her tight. ‘I really can’t allow you to stop me …’ he said, reaching for the velvet roll-pouch.
Fabel and Werner pulled up outside Grueber’s house. The two silver and blue Polizei Hamburg cars behind them had killed their flashing lights at the corner and parked behind Fabel. Four uniformed officers got out.
Werner’s cellphone rang as they all gathered on the pavement. After a brief series of one-word answers, Werner hung up and turned to Fabel.
‘That was Anna. She and Henk weren’t able to get Maria on her cellphone or on her home number. They’ve checked out her apartment. Nobody home. They’re on their way over here.’ Werner looked up at the substantial bulk of Grueber’s villa. ‘If Maria’s anywhere, she’s in there …’
‘Okay.’ Fabel turned to the uniformed officers. ‘Two of you take the back. You two, come with us.’
The main entrance to Grueber’s house was made of oak and had the shape and substance of a church door. It was clear that it would not yield easily to a ram, so Fabel ordered the uniforms to smash one of the huge rectangular windows. He roughly recalled the layout from his brief stay as Grueber’s guest and guided them round to Grueber’s study.
‘When we smash the window, we need to get in and find Maria as fast as we can.’
At Fabel’s signal, the two uniformed policeman swung the door-ram hard and fast into the centre of the window, shattering the glass and the wooden ribs that held the panes in place. The space it cleared was not enough to allow a man to enter and they swung the ram twice more. Fabel unholstered his service automatic and climbed through the shattered window, clambering over Grueber’s desk and sending the reconstructed head of the girl who was two and a half thousand years old tumbling to the floor. Werner and the two uniforms followed him.
Ten minutes later they stood in the main hallway, at the foot of the stairs. They had checked every room, every cupboard. Nothing. Fabel even called out Maria’s name into the void of a house that he knew to be empty.
There was a knock on the front door and Fabel opened it, letting the other two uniformed officers in.
‘We’ve checked the gardens and garage. There’s no one there, Herr Chief Commissar.’
A car pulled up outside and Anna and Henk came running into the hallway.
‘Nothing …’ Fabel said grimly. ‘He’s obviously taken her with him.’
‘Herr Chief Commissar!’ one of the uniformed officers called from behind the ornate stairway. ‘There’s some kind of door here. It could be a cellar …’
Frank Grueber had thrived on knowledge all his life. He had formally studied archaeology and history, but had spent so much of his spare time learning a multitude of disparate skills. His wealthy step-parents had provided him with the means to turn his entire life into one continuous training programme; an endless preparation for his life’s mission. Now, as he stood outside the home of his ultimate target, the sense of convergence was at its strongest. Overwhelming.
Grueber stood on the driveway to the house, the roll-pouch in one hand, Maria’s service pistol in the other, closing his eyes and taking a long, slow, deep breath. He let every emotion drain from his body. He allowed the great calm to descend on him: the calm that would allow him to act with perfect precision and deadly efficiency.
Zanshin
.
The small locked door was made of the same heavy oak as the entrance and would not yield to the kicks
of the police officers. It was only after several hard slams with the door-ram that it eventually gave way.
‘Maria!’ Fabel called as he struggled through the door and into the cellar.
‘Over here!’
Fabel followed her voice, running through the vast cellar. He found her bound to the chair, close to the plastic-curtained area.
‘Grueber …’ she said. ‘It’s Frank. He’s mad. He thinks he’s Red Franz Mühlhaus reincarnated – I think he really may be Mühlhaus’s son.’
‘He is,’ said Fabel, untying Maria’s hands and struggling with the parcel tape. He jerked his head questioningly towards the enclosed plastic-screened area.
‘Cornelius Tamm,’ she said. Fabel used a penknife to cut the tape. Maria stood up. ‘Trust me, Jan. It’s not pleasant. But you have to leave that for now … He’s going after his last victim.’
‘Who?’
‘Bertholdt Müller-Voigt. Frank said he was going after the most senior member of the group after Mühlhaus. He also said that he was a politician. Look over there. That box. Mühlhaus buried it and told Frank where to find it after his death. It has all the names.’
Fabel opened the box. There were several notebooks, a diary, a small plastic bag, a photograph and a ledger. They were all bound in brown leather that had tarnished with being buried in the damp earth. Fabel examined the photograph. A family snap: Mühlhaus, a woman with long, bone-coloured hair whom Fabel assumed was Michaela Schwenn, and a boy of about nine, clearly Grueber. But it was the woman who captured Fabel’s attention.
‘Shit, Maria,’ said Fabel, handing the photograph to her. ‘Michaela Schwenn – she could be you … the similarity is amazing …’
Maria stared at the image. Fabel went through the rest of the box’s contents. He lifted out the plastic bag and saw that it contained a thick lock of hair. Red hair. Grueber had placed one hair at each scene, and when the forensic team had missed the hair in Hauser’s bathroom the first time round, Grueber had moved it to where it could be found. Fabel flicked through each of the notebooks, scanning the information as quickly as he could to try to find the information he needed. Then he found it.
‘Let’s go!’ He started towards the cellar door, ordering two uniformed officers to stay and preserve the scene. ‘You’ve got the wrong politician, Maria – and I think I know where he’s taking him.’
For a moment, Maria continued to stare at the image of a woman who looked just like her. Then she dropped the photograph back into the box and followed Fabel out of the cellar.
Fabel had left his car abandoned, skewed at an angle and with the headlights still full on. He and Werner had come round the south end of the station building. Following Fabel’s orders, Anna, Maria and Henk drove round to the north end. To Fabel’s intense annoyance, the Nordenham uniformed units had announced their arrival from kilometres away, with lights and sirens blazing in the cool night. Three units came around the back and sides of the building, while three more skidded to a halt on the far side of the railway tracks, their headlights trained on the platform and station building.
After the sirens, after the running, after the shouted orders, it suddenly became very quiet. Fabel now stood on the station platform and became very aware of his rapid breathing: he could hear it in the sudden silence; he could see it bloom as grey clouds in the still, thin, chill air. Fabel was filled with a deep sense of unease. There seemed an inevitability, a surreal familiarity in the fact that this group of people should come together in this place at this time. A feeling of destiny fulfilled.
But it was another group of people who had cast the mould for this destiny. It had all been so cleverly organised. No one would look too closely for deeper meaning in the death of a murderer and terrorist. With the demise of Franz Mühlhaus, it would be seen that the head, the brain and the heart of The Risen had been excised. His death meant the death of the organisation. The deal that Paul Scheibe had brokered anonymously with the security services had been that no further inquiries would be made about The Risen. And, of course, there had been a guarantee that The Risen would simply disappear.
The lights of the Nordenham police cars, ranged along the far side of the tracks, illuminated the figures on the platform like players on a stage, their exaggerated shadows cast giant on the façade of the railway station.
Fabel drew his service automatic as he ran towards them.
‘I would stop there, if I were you.’ Frank Grueber called across to Fabel. The blade in his hand glittered cold and keen in the night. Grueber had forced the man before him to his knees. ‘Do you think that I care if I die here, Fabel? I am eternal. There is no such thing as death. There is only forgetting … forgetting who you were before.’
Fabel’s mind raced through the thousand possible ways this could all end. Whatever his next words were, whatever action he now took, would have consequences; would set in train a sequence of events. And an all too conceivable consequence would be the death of more than one person.
His head ached with the weight of it. The night air that made grey ghosts of his breath felt meagre
and sterile in his mouth, as if in coming together to this moment they had reached a great altitude. It seemed as if the air was too thin to carry any sound other than the desperate half-sobbed breathing of the kneeling man. Fabel glanced across at his officers who stood, white-faced in the harsh light, taking aim in the hard, locked-muscle stance of those who stand on the edge of the decision to kill. It was Maria he noticed most: her face bloodless, her eyes glittering ice-blue, the bone and sinew of her hands straining against the taut skin as she gripped her SIG-Sauer automatic.