‘It doesn’t make sense unless I’m being sent in all packaged up as a present for Vitrenko. Maybe I’m the target and Vitrenko’s the one with his finger on the trigger.’
‘Then don’t go.’ Sasha frowned. The cold had pinched his cheeks and nose red.
‘I have to. I don’t think it’s likely that it’s a set-up. But it’s possible. Anyway, I’m acting out of pure self-interest. There have only been three people who have got close to nailing Vitrenko. Me and two German police officers. We’re three loose ends that Vitrenko will eventually tie up. He’s nothing if not neat. But that’s also his one weakness. Despite all his efficiency, if it’s a target that’s important to him then Vitrenko likes to be close for the kill. Really close. He’s like a cat who plays with his prey before killing them. And
that
is the only time he’s exposed. Anyway, did you do a check on the three names I gave you?’
‘I did. But again I don’t get it. You hand-picked those three because you know them personally. If you trust them, why get me to check them out?’
‘Because I thought I knew Peotr Samolyuk.’ Buslenko referred to the commander of the assault team who’d been there when they’d missed Vitrenko in Kiev. ‘I would have trusted him. It would seem that every man has his price.’
‘Well, I did check them out.’
‘And no one knows you’ve been through their records?’
‘If you want to know who’s been accessing the Ministry’s records,’ Sasha shivered despite the layers of thick clothing, ‘I’m the one you come to. Don’t worry, I’ve hidden all my tracks. Anyway, all three are clean, as are the three I picked out. No one served with Vitrenko or under an officer who served with Vitrenko and I can find no hint of any other connection.’
‘And have you found me the other three?’
‘I have.’ The cold chilled the brief satisfied smile from Sasha’s face. ‘I’m rather proud of my contributions. All three meet your criteria exactly. I’ve included one woman. Someone you already know … Captain Olga Sarapenko of the Kiev City Militia’s Organised Crime Division.’
Buslenko was surprised at Sasha’s choice. He thought back to Ukrainian Beauty and how well she had handled herself in the Celestia operation. ‘You reckon she’s up to it?’
‘She understands Vitrenko, Molokov and their operations. She’s one of the best organised-crime specialists we’ve got. She’s clean and I believe you’ve seen how handy she can be in a tough situation. Like I say, it’s a good, solid team.’
‘The only thing that concerns me is that we’ve pulled them together from such a wide range of units,’ said Buslenko. ‘Wouldn’t have it been better
to pick exclusively from Sokil?’ Buslenko himself was a member of the Sokil – Falcon – Spetsnaz unit. That made him, technically, more of a policeman than a soldier. The Falcons were an elite police Spetsnaz under the direct command of the Interior Ministry’s Organised Crime Directorate. The rest of his team were drawn from other Interior Ministry Spetsnaz units: Titan, Skorpion, Snow Leopard and even one Berkut, the Golden Eagles, in which Vitrenko himself had served. There were also two members from outside the Interior Ministry: they belonged to the SBU Secret Service’s Alpha Spetsnaz.
‘I wanted to put together the best team for the job. Each one of these people has special expertise. The thing that worries me is that maybe Vitrenko has a better team.’ Sasha stood up and stamped his feet on the compressed snow. He handed Buslenko a document folder that he had tucked inside his overcoat. ‘The details are there. Look after yourself, Taras.’
Buslenko watched as Sasha made his way back towards Chervona Plosha, his dark frame hunched as he walked.
‘You too,’ said Buslenko, when Sasha was too far away to hear.
Fabel’s mother was delighted to see her son. She embraced him warmly at the door and steered him into the parlour, taking his raincoat from him first. Fabel’s mother was British, a Scotswoman, and he smiled as he heard her richly accented German, influenced as much by local Frisian as by her native English. It was an odd combination, and Fabel had
grown up continually aware of another dimension to his identity. She left him by the tiled
Kamin
to warm up while she went to make tea. Fabel had seldom drunk coffee while at home. East Frisians are the world’s heaviest consumers of tea, leaving the English and the Irish in their tannin-hued wake.
Fabel had spent so little time in this room during the last twenty-five years, but he could still close his eyes and picture everything exactly where it was: the sofa and chairs were new, but they were in exactly the same positions as their predecessors; the reproduction of
The Nightwatch
by Rembrandt; the bookcase that was too big for the room and was crammed with books and magazines; the small writing table that his mother still used for all her correspondence, having let the world of e-mails and electronic communication pass her by. As well as its contents, the very fabric of the house was still so familiar to Fabel. The thick walls and heavy wooden doors and window frames always seemed to embrace him. He had a strange relationship with Norddeich: he came back to it only to visit his mother, and he felt no real affinity with the place. Yet this was the only world he had known as a child. It had formed him. Defined him. He had left East Friesland in stages: first studying at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, then at the Universität Hamburg.
When she came back into the parlour with a tray set out with the tea things, he shared the thought with his mother. ‘I never thought I’d end up being a policeman. I mean when I was growing up here.’
She looked surprised and a little confused.
‘It’s funny that now, at my age, I’m giving it up and going to work for someone who grew up right here in Norddeich.’
‘That’s not strictly true,’ said his mother. She poured some tea, added milk and dropped a
Kluntje
into the cup before handing it to Fabel, despite the fact that he hadn’t taken sugar in his tea for nearly thirty years. ‘You were always such a serious little boy. You always wanted to look after everybody. Even Lex. Goodness knows he got into so many scrapes and it was always you who got him out of them.’
Fabel smiled. His brother’s name was short for ‘Alexander’. Fabel himself only narrowly missed being called ‘Iain’, his Scottish mother finally compromising with his German father and calling him ‘Jan’, which had been ‘close enough’. Lex was the older of the two, but Fabel had always been the wiser, more mature one. Back then, Lex’s carefree attitude to life had annoyed the young Fabel. Now he envied it.
‘And that painting …’ His mother pointed to
The Nightwatch
. ‘When you were tiny you used to stare at that for hours. You asked me about the men in it, and I explained that they were patrolling the streets at night to protect people from criminals. I remember you said, “That’s what I’m going to be when I grow up. I want to protect people.” So you’re wrong. You did think about being a policeman when you were young.’ She laughed.
Fabel stared at the picture. He had no recollection of expressing any interest in the painting, or in the occupation of the people featured within it. It had become just an unnoticed, taken-for-granted element in his childhood environment.
‘It’s all wrong, anyway,’ he said and sipped his tea without stirring it, letting the sugar dissolve and settle on the bottom of the cup. ‘It’s not even a night scene. It was the varnish that made it too dark.
And they’re nothing to do with a nightwatch. They’re civil militiamen under the command of an aristocrat. It was just that the original painting had been stored next to another titled
de Nachtwacht
and the titles were confused.’
Margaret Fabel shook her head, smiling reproachfully. ‘Sometimes, Jan, knowledge isn’t the answer to everything. That painting is what you think it is when you look at it. Not what its history makes it. That was another thing about you. You always had to know things. Find things out. You becoming a policeman isn’t really the great mystery you think it is.’
Fabel looked again at the painting. Not night, day. Not police, an armed militia. A few days ago he would have said that it had more to do with Breidenbach, the young MEK trooper, than with Fabel. But Breidenbach had died defining what it meant to be a policeman: placing himself in harm’s way to protect the ordinary citizen. They changed the subject and talked about Fabel’s brother Lex for a while, and how his restaurant on the island of Sylt was doing its best business for years. Then Fabel’s mother asked about Susanne.
‘She’s fine,’ said Fabel.
‘Is everything all right between you two?’
‘Why shouldn’t it be?’
‘I don’t know …’ She frowned. Fabel noticed the deepening creases in her brow. Age had crept up on his mother without him noticing. ‘It’s just that you don’t talk about Susanne so much these days. I do hope everything is all right. She’s a lovely person, Jan. You’re lucky to have found her.’
Fabel put his cup down. ‘Do you remember that case I was involved with last year? The one that took such a terrible toll on Maria Klee?’
Margaret Fabel nodded.
‘There was a terrorist connection to the case. I got involved in investigating anarchist and radical groups that had kind of faded into the background. Raking up the past, I suppose you’d call it.’
‘But what has this to do with Susanne?’
‘I was sent a file. Background information more than anything. One of the photographs was of a guy called Christian Wohlmut. It was taken about nineteen-ninety, when German domestic terrorism was on its last legs. Wohlmut wanted to breathe new life into it. He sent parcel and letter bombs to US interests in Germany. Amateur stuff and most were intercepted or failed to go off. But one was professional enough to maim a young secretarial worker in an American oil company’s office in Munich. That’s where Wohlmut was based. Munich. And that’s where Susanne studied.’
‘It’s a big city, Jan,’ said his mother. But her frown indicated that she was already ahead of him.
‘There was a girl in the photograph with Wohlmut. It was blurred and she was only ever described as “unknown female”.’
‘Susanne?’ Fabel’s mother put her cup back in the saucer. ‘No! You can’t believe that Susanne could ever have been involved with terrorism?’
Fabel shrugged and took another sip of tea. He had forgotten the sugar at the bottom and got a mouthful of nauseous sweetness. ‘I don’t know what her involvement with Wohlmut was. But I do know she’s very defensive, almost secretive, about her student days. And there was some guy in her past who she says was manipulative and domineering. It was I who suggested we should move in together … Susanne was wary at first because of some bad experience she’d had.’
‘And you think it was this terrorist, Wohlmut?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So what if it was? What does that matter now? If she didn’t actually do anything wrong – I mean, break the law?’
‘But that’s exactly it,
Mutti
… I’ll never know for sure that she wasn’t actively involved.’
‘You’re not seriously thinking about confronting her with this?’
‘She knows something’s wrong. She keeps on at me to find out what it is. Things aren’t so good between us and she knows I’m stalling over moving in together.’
‘Susanne works with the police, Jan. If her political views in the past were so radical, I don’t see her doing that.’
‘People change,
Mutti
.’
‘Then accept her for who she is now Jan. Unless …’
‘Unless what?’
‘Unless you are simply using this as an excuse for you to get out of the relationship.’
‘It’s not that. It’s just that I’ve got to know. I have to know what the truth is.’
‘Like I said, Jan,’ his mother smiled at him in the same way she had when he had been ‘such a serious little boy’ and she had sought to reassure him about something, ‘knowledge isn’t always the answer to everything.’
The British had bombed Cologne to a pile of rubble. So much so that there had been a serious suggestion at the end of the war that the city
shouldn’t be rebuilt. Just moved. But the cathedral had remained standing to remind everyone that this was Germany’s oldest city and deserved a new life. So they had rebuilt Cologne. Unfortunately, whole chunks of the city were brought back to an artificial and sterile form of life. Chorweiler was a perfect example of the kind of place architects and city planners at dinner parties would boast about creating, but would never themselves contemplate living in.
When Maria thought about Slavko and his countrymen, she couldn’t believe that they thought that Chorweiler, with its towering clumps of multi-storey apartment blocks, was really the end of the rainbow. Chorweiler lay to the far north of the city and Maria reckoned that Viktor would start his Saturday pick-up run here and work his way back toward the city centre. She was pretty sure she had worked out which of the high-rises contained Slavko’s flat and she parked the Saxo some distance down the street from the block and sat with the engine switched off.
Contrary to its depiction in American movies, surveillance from a car was not always the best way of keeping tabs on someone’s movements. Most of the time people would walk by a car and not notice anyone sitting in it, but once they did they would notice
every
time they passed. Maria was dressed in her grungy clothes and she had slumped slightly in the driver’s seat so that her head did not project above the headrest. Her main disadvantage was that she had no photograph of her surveillance target. She didn’t even have much of a description of Viktor from Slavko to go on. At about eleven-thirty an Audi pulled up and a big-built man of about forty went into the apartment building. Maria noted down the time and the make, model and licence
number of the car. She had brought a small digital camera with a half-decent zoom, and she took a photograph of the man as he went into the building, then again as he came out with a younger man. Maria could tell that this was not her man and she didn’t follow the Audi when he drove off. She settled back down. The clothes she had bought were too big for her, but they were warm and comfortable. More importantly, the body she hated became lost in their bagginess.