by Marko Kloos
“I have several colleagues in the area, and they would not like it if you tried to hurt me,” the stranger said.
“I won’t pick a fight if you don’t,” Khan replied. “Again—who the fuck is we?”
“We are with BDBF,” the visitor said. “Bundesamt für Besondere Fähigkeiten. The federal office for special abilities. What you at home call S.C.A.R.E.”
* * *
“I just flew in from Kassel, and boy, are my arms tired,” Khan said with a chuckle. The man in front of him either didn’t get the joke or wasn’t in a jovial mood, because he merely cocked his head quizzically.
“My name is Fledermaus,” he said. “And five thousand meters above us, my colleague Überschall is keeping an eye on things from above. Rest assured that he can be here very quickly.”
“Fledermaus,” Khan repeated. “And Überschall. Sounds like the title for a sitcom.”
“I am not familiar with that word.”
“Never mind. They said you’d come. Are you here to ask me questions about my client’s kidnapping, too?”
“You claim there was an enhanced individual involved. So far, the only such person confirmed to be involved was you. That is why the Berlin police asked us to assist.”
“There was someone else,” Khan said. “Three nats—regular people. And one wild card. Big, strong guy, looked like a tree. Bark for skin and everything. He held me off while the nats grabbed my client.”
“Looked like a tree,” Fledermaus repeated.
“Yes, a tree. Rock-hard skin. And strong as shit. He threw me over a whole row of parked cars. Couldn’t make a scratch in him, not even with these.”
He held out his tiger hand and extended his claws, three inches of curved black keratin knives glistening in the moonlight, then retracted them again so Fledermaus wouldn’t feel threatened.
“If that is true, it would be very interesting,” Fledermaus said.
“So you know the guy?”
“I have heard of him, yes. That is our main task at BDBF. To keep our eyes on people such as him. And you. But the man you speak of, he is not known to be in Germany.”
“Well, unless I got beaten up by his twin brother, I’d say you’re wrong. Who is he?”
“We do not know where he comes from. Some sources say he is from Ukraine. We know he works as hired muscle for many groups. Sometimes for the Chechens or the Serbians, but mostly for the Georgian mafia. They call him Mukha. The Georgian word for ‘oak.’”
“Georgian mob. Super,” Khan said. Back home in Chicago, the Georgians were not to be fucked with. They were not as numerous as the Russians or the long-established Polish mafia, but they had a reputation for stomach-churning violence.
“You think the Georgians took your client?”
“I’m not sure. They were Eastern European, though. I’ve been around that kind long enough.”
“I do not think I have to warn you about these people, then,” Fledermaus said. “They have no respect for the local authorities, and they are very violent. If you go after them, the police may not be able to protect you.”
“The police sure weren’t any help in that parking garage,” Khan said. He hesitated, then decided to throw caution to the wind. Time was running short, and he couldn’t shop around for allies. “Do you know anything about a local place called the Flakturm? Big, ugly concrete tower in the Tiergarten park.”
Fledermaus cocked his head a little. His ears were large and pointy, with tufts of coarse black hair sprouting from the tips.
“I know of it, yes. A relic of the war. They had three of them in the city. I think this one is the only one left. Apparently it was too large to blow up. The walls are very thick.”
“They say there’s a museum in this one now. And a nightclub. Know anything about that?”
Fledermaus shook his head.
“I’m afraid not. I am not from Berlin, and I do not frequent nightclubs. The noise, you see.” He flashed an awkward-looking smile. “But I do know that the criminal element often uses legal places such as this to cleanse the money from their other activities. The Italians use restaurants. The Arab clans have their tobacco lounges. And the Russians and Georgians—“
“Bars and clubs and gambling,” Khan finished. “Same as back home.”
“BDBF can only intervene in law enforcement matters if we are asked to do so by the local authorities,” Fledermaus said. “I cannot help you with whatever it is you are planning to do. You are in our area of responsibility. If you commit any offenses, we will not need a request from the police to deal with you.”
“That guy who looks like a tree. Mukha. You must have a file on him. Any idea if he has any weaknesses? Unofficially speaking, I mean. Since you know for sure he’s not even in the country right now.”
Fledermaus considered Khan’s question for a moment. “Officially, I cannot help you, as I said.” He smiled again in his awkward way. His teeth were very bright in the darkness. “Unofficially, I can point out that he is very much like a tree. You cannot take down a tree with claws and fists. But there are other ways.”
Fledermaus shuffled to the edge of the roof and put a hand on the railing. In the light coming from the square and the Brandenburg Gate beyond, Khan saw that he was wearing some sort of high-tech ballistic armor, cut out low on the sides to make space for his enormous wings. He swung himself over the rail and looked back at Khan. “Just ask yourself, Herr Khan. If you were a tree, what would be your worst fear in life?”
Fledermaus nodded a curt goodbye and jumped off the roof. Khan walked over to the railing to watch the German joker-ace glide over the Pariser Platz and soar through the space between the central columns of the Brandenburg Gate before disappearing in the darkness of the park beyond.
“Squirrel shit,” Khan said into the silence.
* * *
The Flakturm was a foreign presence in the calm tranquility of the Tiergarten. Somehow, even the peaceful trees and meadows that surrounded it didn’t mellow its massiveness or the complete lack of aesthetic concern evident in its architecture. As Khan walked toward it, he felt something like existential dread at the sight of the thing. Near the top of the tower, four round gun platforms jutted out at the corners like the leaves of a giant concrete clover leaf. It was a structure built for war, and it looked out of place here in this park in the middle of a modern, cosmopolitan city. Khan walked around it twice at a distance to get an idea of the layout, and it struck him that nobody had ever tried to pretty up that ugly block of concrete, as if they knew all these years that no coat of paint or architectural surgery could make it look inviting.
Whenever he wanted to get into a place without an invitation, Khan would scale the fire escapes and get in from the roof, or pop open a window on the way. But this place had no windows, no fire escapes, and the roof was more than a hundred feet above ground, atop sheer concrete sides without handholds or other features. There were thin concrete beams jutting out of the walls near the gun platforms, but even those were much too high for him to reach. The Flakturm truly was a fortress by design, with only one obvious way in and out. Khan watched from a distance as late-night revelers arrived and walked into the entrance vestibule, and others left and noisily made their way to the distant parking lot at the edge of the Tiergarten. Every time the front door opened, he heard a smattering of thumping electronic music. He spent half an hour looking for alternative entry points before deciding to throw plan B out the window. On the eastern horizon, the colors of the sky had started to shift from black to dark blue and purple. The best time to bust into a place was this exact time of the night, when everyone was tired and winding down, and reflexes and reaction times were at their worst.
I hope you’re really in there, kid, Khan thought as he cut across the lawn and briskly walked toward the entrance vestibule.
The entrance was a set of double doors, one each on the inner and outer edges of the exterior wall. He pushed open the outer door and walked inside, past a group of club-goers on the way
out. The wall of the Flakturm was at least ten feet thick, and when he walked through the second set of doors and into the foyer, the temperature dropped by a dozen degrees. He pulled out his phone to confirm a hunch and saw that his reception had dropped to nothing. No radio signal would make it through that much concrete, which was why Natalie’s watch had dropped off the map as soon as they had brought her inside.
As Eli had learned online, it was a multiuse building now. The interior looked far more welcoming than the outside. The foyer was two floors high and looked like a boutique computer store, all white wood and tasteful accent lighting. There was a broad staircase leading up to what looked like an art installation, and down to a pair of glass doors that had a pair of broad-shouldered guys standing in front of it. Beyond the glass doors, Khan saw the reflections of flashing strobes and neon lights. On the right side of the foyer, there was a bar that had throngs of people standing in it, chatting and swilling drinks. A few of the patrons looked over at him, and some nudged their friends to draw their attention to him, but the stares were curious, not concerned. Berliners seemed used to seeing weird and unusual things.
He walked down the steps to the club. The two bouncers looked like they were unsure how to deal with him. One of them fidgeted with his lapels while the other put a hand under the jacket of his dark suit and tried to look casual about it.
“You can try to draw whatever the fuck that is,” Khan said when he had reached the door. “Or you can let me in there without losing a hand.”
The second bouncer removed his hand from his waistline and held it up in a placating gesture. Khan saw that he had been reaching for a pepper spray dispenser on his belt. The first bouncer opened the door for him.
“Just looking for someone,” Khan said. “I won’t be long.”
Even at this hour, the club was packed. Dozens of people were gyrating to thumping electronic music, and dozens more were watching from the edge of the floor or hanging out in the seating groups tucked into alcoves along the periphery of the room. The air smelled like weed, spilled booze, and sweat, and the room was radiating warmth, the collective body heat of all the late-night revelers dancing and drinking and groping each other in the corners. It was everything he hated about nightclubs, turned up to maximum intensity. As Khan skirted the edge of the dance floor and walked deeper into the bowels of the club, a smoke machine hissed and spewed a stream of thick fog onto the dance floor. The cloud temporarily displaced all the awful smells of the place, and it cut visibility in the vicinity of the dance floor to three feet or less. He went to the left until he found the row of seating alcoves on that side of the room, and started to map out the periphery of the place. There had to be other exits.
It took him five minutes to find all the doors in the room. Most of them were fire exits that led to dirty concrete stairwells where people were making out or smoking joints. One was behind the bar, and Khan could see people going in and out every few seconds, carrying armfuls of glasses and empty bottles. There was only one door that was locked, secured with a keypad. He concluded that if they were hiding anything in this place, it was behind that door.
Khan looked around to see if anyone was paying attention, but saw nothing except for club patrons lost in their own worlds. If the bouncers had called for backup, it hadn’t found him yet. He waited until the fog machine blasted another thick cloud of water vapor onto the dance floor. Then he turned toward the door and wrapped his tiger hand around the knob.
The door was reinforced with steel liners, but Khan could max out the weight plates on the gym machines with just his feline arm, and he strained only for a moment before he wrenched the lock out of the frame with a dull crack. The handle came off in his hand, and he dropped it onto the ground and kicked it aside. Beyond the door, there was a long, dimly lit hallway that had more doors leading off to the left and right. He counted them: four left, four right. Then he stepped into the hallway on light feet and closed the access door behind him.
The first door to the right was a janitorial closet, shelves of cleaning materials and a bunch of mops and buckets. The first door to the left was an office, a desk with a computer screen and a filthy-looking keyboard, an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, and shelves with stuffed binders and untidy stacks of papers. Khan moved on to the second set of doors. Natalie wore a particular perfume, something that smelled like waving a freshly cut lilac over a warm blueberry pie, and he hoped that the whiffs of it he caught in the stale air of the hallway were not just his wishful imagination. He reached for the handle of the second door to the right and yanked it open.
Inside, three men sat around a table littered with ashtrays and bottles. There was a TV set in a corner of the room that was showing a news report. The air was thick with the smell of old cigarette smoke and body odor. One of the men turned around to see who was standing in the door, and his eyes widened. Then he muttered a curse, which got the attention of the other two.
“Shit,” Khan said.
For just a moment, the space between them practically hummed with the anticipation of the impending violence. It was that split second before a fight Khan knew all too well, the moment that felt like everyone was holding their breath before committing to action. There was no way to talk these men down, and if he hesitated, he’d give them an edge. He flicked out his claws just as the first guy grabbed a bottle off the table and threw it at him. Khan jerked his head to the side, and the bottle sailed past him and smashed against the wall of the hallway behind him.
There was no grace to the fight. The room was only ten feet square and had a table and a bunch of chairs in it, and there was no way for anyone to execute any fancy maneuvers. It was like an attempted assassination in a phone booth. Two of the men pulled knives and the third swung his fist at Khan, and only his reflexes kept him from getting shanked on the spot. He recoiled from one knife and slashed at the hand holding it, then drove his fist into the face of the second knife’s wielder. The bare-handed one of the group was the only one to connect with Khan. His fist cracked into Khan’s eyebrow on the human side of his face, and Khan saw a burst of stars exploding in his field of view. He roared, and in the confines of the room, the sound was so loud that it made the ashtrays on the table bounce and clatter.
* * *
One of the knives was on the floor now, but the other was still seeking in play, its owner slashing with quick and practiced moves. Khan jerked away from the edge of the blade and bodychecked the bare-handed fighter into the TV shelf in the process, and the man went down along with the screen as the shelving collapsed. The knife made another arc and stabbed into Khan’s shoulder blade, then skidded off the bone to carve open a few inches of his tiger fur. Khan lashed out and raked all five claws across the remaining knife wielder’s face and neck. He leapt back, bounced off the doorframe behind him, and collapsed in the hallway with a wet gurgling sound. The smell of blood was suddenly thick in the air.
The guy who had held the other knife was doubled over and shouting incoherently. Khan saw that his swipe at the knife hand had taken the hand off at the wrist. He picked the man up and hurled him against the concrete wall, then did it again. After the second impact against the rough concrete, his opponent crumpled to the floor and stopped his pained shouting. Maybe ten seconds had passed since Khan had turned the door handle, but he was panting for breath, and his heart was pounding like he had just run a hundred-yard dash. Blood was running down from a gash in his right eyebrow and clouding his vision, and he used the sleeve of his sport coat to wipe it out of his eye.
The man in the hallway was a mess. Khan had opened him up along the whole length of his collarbone. The puddle of blood spreading out from him was already pooling from one side of the hallway to the other. Khan wondered about the depth of the shit he was likely to find himself in over killing someone on foreign soil, even in self-defense. But he’d have to be around for them to charge him, and that was a shaky proposition at the moment. All it took was another room of mobsters,
but ones who were packing guns instead of blades. He had come here to find Natalie, though, so Khan steeled himself and went back to opening doors.
Two of the remaining rooms were stockrooms, haphazardly loaded from floor to ceiling with boxes and crates of supplies, and thankfully devoid of armed men. Khan went to the end of the hallway, where the last two locked rooms waited. He hadn’t smelled the scent of Natalie’s perfume again, and for a moment, a sort of deep, dark fear gripped his mind as he convinced himself that he’d find nothing, and he would be stamping license plates in a German prison for absolutely nothing in the end.
Then his heart skipped two beats when he saw that the last door on the right had a security keypad next to the handle, just like the entry door had.
He grabbed the door handle, wrenched it down, and threw himself against the door with all the force he could muster. It popped out of the frame, spraying bits of the lock, and swung inward with the grinding sound of steel against concrete as the bottom edge of the door, now crooked in its hinges, dragged across the floor and left a chalky white scrape mark.
* * *
Natalie was lying on her side on a field cot on the far side of the room. There was a little table and a folding chair, and a chemical toilet in one corner. She didn’t wear a gag like a kidnapping victim in a movie. They had tied her wrists and ankles to the frame of the cot with several loops of commercial plastic ties. She had her back to him, but turned her head at the sound of the door busting open. He could tell that she couldn’t turn far enough to make out who had just entered the room.
“Motherfuckers,” Khan growled. He peeked into the hallway to make sure he wasn’t about to get jumped by reinforcements. Then he rushed over to Natalie’s cot.
“Are you okay, kid?”
He saw recognition in her eyes, and she murmured something, but it was slurred gibberish. Her eyes were glazed over and she looked like she was having a hard time focusing. He cursed again. They hadn’t bothered with a gag because they had sedated the shit out of her to keep her quiet.