Blood Eagle

by Craig Russell

  Fabel thought back to the Davidwache interview. Klugmann must have enormous internal resources to draw on. He had sat there and taken Werner’s insults, Fabel’s questioning and absorbed the shock of his partner’s horrific murder. He hadn’t let the mask slip once. Fabel had had his suspicions, but not this. Over by the door, Werner gave voice to the same thoughts.

  ‘Son of a bitch! He has balls, I’ll give you that. Is he safe?’

  ‘We don’t know. We’ve lost contact. You grabbed his secure cell phone, so we can’t reach him on that. And he hasn’t called in to us. We’re very concerned.’

  It was at that point that Maria Klee rapped on the door. Maria’s face had a hard, determined look on it and she gestured for Werner to step out of the office.

  Volker turned back to the Kriminalhauptkommissar. ‘You have to believe me, Fabel, if we had thought there was any connection between Kramer’s death and the operation, I would have come straight to you. In any case, we were only holding out until we located Klugmann.’

  Fabel was about to say something when Werner came back in, his face like stone.

  ‘It doesn’t look like you need to worry about Klugmann any more,’ he said. ‘The Harburg Polizeidirektion have just found a body in a disused swimming pool. And the rough description matches your boy.’

  Monday 16 June, 11.50 a.m. Hamburg-Harburg, Hamburg.

  Fabel, Werner and Maria Klee stood at the chipped edge of a swimming pool that had not seen water in years. Volker had come along, but Fabel had made him wait at the cordon. ‘The fewer people at the crime scene the better … at least until the forensic guys have done their stuff,’ Fabel had explained half-heartedly to Volker. The truth was he was finding it increasingly difficult to stomach Volker’s presence. Volker was part of a half world, the domain of greys and shadows that Yilmaz had described, and Fabel wanted as little as possible to do with him or his world.

  Despite it being nearly noon and despite the absence of all but the occasional shard of glass in the windows that ran the length of one wall, the swimming pool had a gloom to it, as if the grime from the walls and floor had pervaded the air and dulled the light. Now the filth of the swimming pool was accentuated by the stark arc lights that the Tatort forensic team had set up. There were used syringes, condoms, litter and, in one corner, what looked like human excrement. Fabel couldn’t imagine a seedier place to die.

  A six-strong Tatort team, clad in white forensic overalls, were sifting through the filth. Brauner, the head of the team, squatted down beside the body. Klugmann’s hands had been tied behind his back and a sack placed over his head. Brauner had carefully cut away the sacking, which had half stiffened with blood that had caked and dried. He looked up and nodded when he realised Fabel was behind him, standing at the pool edge.

  ‘He was shot while kneeling where you are,’ said Brauner. ‘Execution style and straight through the brain stem. A really professional job. He would have been dead before he hit the bottom. The bullet exited above the mouth.’

  ‘How long has he been dead?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask Möller when he examines the body, but from the temperature, the post-mortem lividity and the easing of rigor, I’d say at least a couple of days. Maybe three.’

  One of the team called out from the corner of the pool. ‘Herr Brauner. Over here!’

  Fabel followed Brauner up to where the forensic technican had called.

  ‘Here …’ The technician pointed to a small metal cylinder that glittered among the dust and debris on the floor. Brauner squatted down on his heels and carefully picked up the object.

  ‘A nine-millimetre cartridge.’ Brauner carefully picked up the casing between latex sheathed thumb and forefinger.

  ‘And lying in clear sight of the shooter,’ said Fabel. ‘A piece of evidence he could easily have denied us just by casting a quick eye around him. An amateurish mistake for such a professional killer to make.’

  Brauner shrugged. ‘Maybe it was dark. Or maybe he thought he was about to be discovered and made a quicker exit than he’d planned.’

  ‘Could be …’ Fabel was far from convinced. He could see from the creases on Brauner’s brow that something was troubling him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘This cartridge is a nine-millimetre all right, but it’s not from a common automatic. What is it you carry? A SIG-Sauer P6?’

  ‘A Walther P99.’

  ‘This wouldn’t fit either. Most nine-mils are based on either the Smith and Wesson or the Walther configurations. I suspect this is a nine-by-nine-by-seventeen. It’s non-standard ammo for a non-standard firearm.’

  ‘Any idea what?’

  ‘Not at this stage. We’ll be able to narrow it down to a few makes, but it’ll take time.’

  Möller, the pathologist, arrived. Fabel nodded an acknowledgement.

  ‘He’s been dead a couple of days,’ Fabel told Möller as he made his way to the door out of the pool. He smiled at Möller’s indignation and made his way out into the fresh air. Volker was half leaning, half sitting on the wing of one of the green and white Schutzpolizei cars.

  ‘Is it Klugmann?’

  ‘Looks like. But we’ll have to wait until Möller turns him over and we can see his face.’

  A silent minute passed before Werner and Maria emerged, followed by the body, sheathed in a black body bag and on a wheeled trolley between two pathology technicians.

  ‘It’s Klugmann all right,’ said Werner, grimly.

  Volker stepped forward and stopped the technicians with a gesture of his hand. He sniffed a lungful of air as if preparing himself and then nodded curtly towards the body bag. One of the technicians pulled on a long tab; the zipper peeled open with a resonant rasp to expose the empurpled face of Hans Klugmann. Much of what had been between his teeth and his nose had been blasted into the crater of an exit wound. Volker made a face and nodded again to the technician who re-zipped Klugmann into his vinyl cocoon. He turned to Fabel; the dark eyes glittered with something between pain and anger.

  ‘He was a brave man. And a good and honest policeman. You can understand that, Fabel.’ Volker paused and watched the body being loaded into the mortuary wagon. ‘I recruited him myself, Fabel. I sent him on this operation and I didn’t insist he came in when the girl was killed. It’s my fault he’s dead.’

  ‘I rather think it is,’ said Fabel, without a hint of maliciousness.

  Monday 16 June, 2.00 p.m. Altona, Hamburg.

  Sonja Brun’s pretty face had the sore, inflamed look that only comes with an hour of constant crying. Even now, although the effort had dulled the pain in her red-rimmed eyes, she somehow found the energy to rack her body with intermittent, deep sobs. Fabel had made it clear to a furious Volker that this was now a Mordkommission case and he would treat any intervention by Volker as obstruction. Volker had no choice but to take it on the chin, and had accepted the scrap of being allowed to tag along when Fabel and Werner interviewed Sonja. He had winced when Fabel had revealed to Sonja that Klugmann had been working as an undercover federal agent. She had not been able to accept it and Fabel saw her eyes working through every moment, every word she had shared with Klugmann.

  ‘But he said we were going to get married … that we would get out of Hamburg and start over somewhere else, once he had this big deal done … was that all a lie?’ Her eyes searched Fabel’s pleadingly.

  ‘No, Sonja. I honestly don’t believe it was. He cared about you. I’m sure he did …’

  They questioned Sonja about the Ukrainians, the big deal Klugmann had talked about, when he had gone out, who she had seen him with. Fabel tried to keep the pace slow and easy, allowing her a moment between each answer. No, she had never seen ‘Vadim’. No, Klugmann had never mentioned him. Yes, he would often go out late when he was off work to meet with people about his ‘big deal’.

  They got nowhere. Sonja started to sob again, apologising for not being able to help. Fabel suggested they leave it there and crossed the living area to the kitche
n and made a cup of green tea from a pack he found on the counter top. He placed the cup in Sonja’s hands.

  ‘Just one more question, Sonja. Did Hans own a video camera?’

  Sonja frowned above the red-rimmed eyes and shook her head.

  ‘Did he ever bring one home? Or did you ever see a tape cartridge from a video camera?’

  Again a puzzled look, a shrug and a shake of the head.

  They left Sonja alone in the apartment she had shared with a man she thought she had known, but who had really been a Bulle living a lie with her as a stage prop. There was no one to sit with her: no relatives, no friends. She was just a pretty girl left on an empty stage. A girl who just a couple of days before had swung her shopping bags as she strolled back to her flat and her lover, her head filled with dreams of a new life in a new place. Now she would no doubt sink back into the life of prostitution and porno films. Fabel had no idea if Klugmann had really loved Sonja or had ever intended to marry her, but he knew that he had cared enough to seek to liberate her from a degrading way of life.

  As he closed the apartment door behind him, Fabel made a silent promise to a dead policeman.

  Monday 16 June, 10.50 p.m. Pöseldorf, Hamburg.

  It was nearly eleven by the time Fabel got home. He had re-gathered the team to go through everything that had happened. They now knew that ‘Monique’ was Tina Kramer, a BAO operative. Klugmann was dead. Volker claimed no connection between his investigation and the ritualistic murder of Tina Kramer. MacSwain was now officially under surveillance. Fabel had negotiated with Van Heiden and agreed on a team of six, which had to include two team leaders from the Mordkommission. Van Heiden didn’t like hunches. More specifically he didn’t like committing a Polizei Hamburg budget on a hunch, but he let Fabel have his way. Fabel had put Paul and Anna in charge of the surveillance, knowing that they needed a display of confidence from Fabel after they had lost Klugmann only for him to turn up dead.

  They had also gone over Angelika Blüm’s murder again. Brauner, the forensic team leader, had reported back that no physical evidence had been found on Blüm’s laptop. According to Technical Section, whoever had wiped the files from the computer’s hard drive had done so thoroughly, probably using an external device to do so. It was the work of an expert with sophisticated kit at his disposal. Möller’s preliminary autopsy report confirmed his initial observations. Maria Klee had produced something new but, she admitted, pretty tangential. She had placed an exhibition programme on the table. It was for an exhibition of works, in Bremen, by Marlies Menzel. It was not so much that the name was familiar to Fabel as that it stabbed into the memory centre of his brain. Marlies Menzel had only recently been released from Stuttgart-Stammheim Prison. She was a former member of Svensson’s Radikale Aktionsgruppe and had taken part in the robbery in which Fabel had been wounded. The day he put two bullets into the face of a seventeen-year-old girl.

  The exhibition was called Germany Crucified. Fabel had felt a fluttering in his chest as he looked at the photographic plates of the paintings. Each canvas was comprised of vivid splashes and smears of blood red, black and an orangey yellow: the colours of the German flag. Each canvas was slightly different, but all used the same colours and all displayed an indistinct figure, crucified and screaming. Fabel understood instantly why Maria had brought the programme to his attention: there was something vaguely but disturbingly reminiscent of the Blood Eagle murder scenes. He had nodded to Maria and had suggested they pay Frau Menzel a visit.

  After the meeting, Fabel had spoken to Kolski and Buchholz at LKA7 Organised Crime and had told them about the BND operation and about Klugmann’s execution at the swimming pool. Fabel had watched them both as he spoke: their anger seemed genuine, but not as deep as he would have expected; perhaps when you’re in the business of dealing with organised crime, you become inured to deceit. At any rate, Fabel had no reason to doubt that Buchholz, just as Volker had claimed, had known nothing about the operation.

  Fabel had been dog tired when he got home. He poured himself a glass of wine and slumped into the leather sofa without putting on his living-room lights. Through the picture windows of his apartment the city’s lights glittered on the mirror of the Alster. He tried not to think about Angelika Blüm’s voice on the phone, about her ripped-apart body, about Klugmann lying in the filth of a disused swimming pool, about a drugged girl staggering into the path of a truck. But the images danced randomly inside his head like bees trapped in a jar. He sipped the white wine and found it acid in his mouth. He placed the glass on the side table and resolved to make the gargantuan effort that would be involved in getting into bed. Before he got off the sofa the lead in his eyelids succumbed to gravity and Fabel drifted into a deep sleep.

  He woke up with a start at one-thirty a.m. from a dream in which he’d been forced to watch the snuff movie he had seen as part of an earlier murder investigation. This time it was Sonja Brun’s face that had blackened and twisted in terror and instead of PVC bondage masks the men in the video wore masks of one-eyed Odin. Fabel stripped and went to bed, but found that his exhaustion was unable to drag his racing mind to a halt. After an hour of tossing and turning in his bed he rose and dressed again. He grabbed his car keys and went out into the night.

  Fabel stopped by the Präsidium to pick up Blüm’s apartment keys. He didn’t know what he expected to find there, but he felt the need to be surrounded by her things, to walk through what had been her life. At the very least it was as good a place as any to think.

  It was a quarter past three when he pulled up outside the apartment block. Fabel parked just about where the girl from the apartment had said her male companion had pulled up. The lights of the lobby still burned brightly and anyone approaching the glass doors would be clearly illuminated. But, at this distance, any description would have had to be as general as the girl had given. A tall, well-dressed, blond man with broad shoulders. But was he the killer?

  Fabel took the elevator to the third floor. He stood for a moment before opening the door to the apartment. He stared as if he could see through the wood of the door and into the darkness of the apartment. He found himself remembering the last time he had unlocked this door and opened up a gate to hell and how yet another image of grotesque death had been branded into the matter of his brain. He shook such thoughts free from his head and turned the key. Having switched on the hall’s downlighters, he made his way towards Blüm’s office. Again he found himself unconsciously bracing before switching on the lights. Once more the sudden illumination revealed an unexpected scene; not one of horror this time, but one of surprise. Blüm’s office had been very professionally ransacked. Drawers had been carefully removed from the desk and cabinets and books and files from the shelves that lined the wall; the furniture had been turned over so the undersides could be checked. The room could not be described as being in chaos; it was far too systematic for that. And Fabel knew that Brauner’s team had not left it in this state. Someone else had been here.

  The thought sparked only for a millisecond before a sudden feeling ruffled the hairs on Fabel’s neck. Someone else was there.

  Fabel became a statue. He listened to the stillness of the apartment with such intensity that it amplified the surge of blood in his ears and the sound of metal sliding against the stiff leather of his holster as he drew his Walther. He had his back to the office door and felt exposed. Turning swiftly and silently, he slipped back into the hall. Silence. He stood unmoving for half a minute, straining to hear any sounds from the other rooms. Still nothing. The tension eased, but only slightly, from his body and he moved silently along the corridor. Back against the wall, gun raised in his right hand, he pushed the door of the bedroom as wide open as it would go. He swung round into the frame and scanned the room along his gun sight. He took one hand from his gun and fumbled for the light switch. The room was empty. Fabel gave a small laugh: he was being an idiot. He led the gun hang by his side and turned back into the corridor.

  The
first thought Fabel registered was surprise. How had the man moved so silently and quickly? He must have been in the main living room, waiting to strike. Fabel’s gun arm shot up but he looked down in disbelief as it stopped dead in mid-arc. His attacker had a solid, unyielding grip and Fabel felt as if the bones of his wrist were being crushed into splinters. The pressure seemed to force his hand into an open palm and his Walther clattered onto the wooden flooring. The man was close now and Fabel tried to swing his other fist upwards, but his attacker fastened his free hand around Fabel’s throat. In the adrenalin-slowed time of the attack, Fabel realised that his airway was not blocked, but that his assailant was applying intense pressure to his neck, just below the angle of his jaw. Fabel tried to call out but found himself mute. As the world around him started to cloud into blackness, all Fabel could do was wonder if this was what it was to die, and gaze, fearful and helpless, into the cold, glittering green eyes of the man he had seen outside the Tina Kramer murder scene.

  Tuesday 17 June, 5.20 a.m. Uhlenhorst, Hamburg.

  The first thing Fabel became aware of was pain: a pain that exceeded all definition of a headache, that surpassed any hangover: a buzz-saw that seared through his skull. Then the sound of birds, heralding the breaking day with their chorus. Fabel lifted his head slightly and was rewarded with a cold dagger of pain that sliced through him. He let his head fall back again. He had no idea where he was or how he had got there or even what day of the week it was. It took almost a minute for his full consciousness to boot up. The Slavic guy. He sat bolt upright and was shocked with another, even greater jolt, this time with an accompanying surge of vertigo and nausea. He lunged over the side of the bed and vomited. The surging ache in his head did not abate, but he embraced it. Pain meant he was alive. He flopped back onto the bed and fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone. It was gone. So was the gun from his holster. He eased himself up slowly so that he could look around the room. He was on Angelika Blüm’s bed. The Slav must have put him there. The pain in Fabel’s head wrapped a shroud around every thought. In the pale grey light he could see that his cell phone, his handgun and his wallet were carefully laid out on the dresser. It took him another five minutes to ease himself off the bed and stagger over to the dresser. He dragged his cell phone across the maple dresser top and stabbed the preset number for the Präsidium.