Blood Eagle

by Craig Russell

  ‘Werner, you and Hauptkommissar Sülberg go around to the back and see if there’s a way in there. Paul, you and I will take the main door. Maria, you take a position out to the side, with a view of that side window, in case anyone makes a break for it that way.’ He looked at Sülberg before addressing the Cuxhaven officers. Sülberg nodded his consent. ‘You two cover the other side of the barn. Just make sure, if anything comes out, that it’s not one of us before you start shooting. And you two –’ Fabel indicated the remaining SchuPos – ‘take up positions on either side of Oberkommissarin Klee. The WSP have the route back to the boat covered.’

  A silver-edged, untidy clump of cloud drifted lazily in front of the moon and the shadows around the barns and on the surrounding fields seemed to stretch and soak out into the night, like black ink on an already darkened blotter.

  ‘Okay,’ said Fabel, ‘let’s go.’

  The night seemed to empty itself of all other noise, making Fabel painfully aware of the sounds of their breathing and the crunch of their feet as they scuttled in a half crouch towards the parked BMWs. Fabel drew his Walther from his holster and snapped back the carriage to place a round in the firing chamber. Paul, Werner and Sülberg followed suit. Fabel nodded to Sülberg and he and Werner headed off around the side of the barn that had no window. Fabel gave them thirty seconds that seemed like an eternity, then nodded to Paul.

  They were on their feet and across to the barn in seconds. Paul and Fabel positioned themselves, weapons readied, on either side of the door.

  Fabel applied the slightest of pressure on the heavy door. It gave way. Of course they hadn’t locked it. They felt secure in their seclusion.

  Now was a time for cool professionalism, but they had Anna in there and Fabel felt anger and hatred hot in his blood. Paul’s jaw was set hard, the sinuous muscles in his face like cables beneath his skin. A vein pulsed visibly in his neck. He turned to Fabel and his eyes burned with a dark fury. Fabel made a face that silently asked, You okay? Paul nodded in a way that did not reassure his boss. Fabel lifted his radio to his lips and whispered one word.

  ‘Go!’

  Paul slammed the door wide with the sole of his boot and Fabel burst through first. He took in four figures. There was a makeshift altar arrangement constructed out of an old oak table and Anna lay on top of it. She had a bathrobe flung around her and was unrestrained except for the bonds the drugs had wrapped around her will to move. MacSwain was half bent over her, his hands reaching out to her. He stared blankly at Fabel and Paul and then snapped his head around as Werner and Sülberg burst in through the other doorway. Fabel and Paul spread out, ensuring their line of fire wasn’t directed at the two policemen opposite.

  Fabel registered the other two figures. One of the men had the look of trapped, violent energy in his short, squat, powerful frame: Fabel recognised him from the surveillance images as Solovey, one of Vitrenko’s lieutenants. The other figure was taller, dressed in a long black overcoat. And, even at a distance, his eyes burned an almost luminous green in the dim light.

  Vitrenko.

  Something gleamed in Vitrenko’s right hand: a broad-bladed knife. Its blade was the thickness of a sword, but short and double edged, sweeping to a sharp tip. Fabel had no doubt that he was looking at the murder weapon.

  Fabel heard his own voice high and tight. ‘Police! Place your hands on top of your heads and get down onto your knees.’ The three men didn’t move. MacSwain from shock and indecision. The other two, Fabel guessed, as some kind of strategy. Paul Lindemann obviously shared the thought.

  ‘Pull anything and I’ll blow your fucking heads off. I mean it.’ Paul’s voice had the same spring-loaded tension in it that Fabel had heard in his own. And he had no doubt that Paul meant exactly what he said.

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ said Vasyl Vitrenko, the green eyes locking with Paul’s.

  It happened so fast that Fabel barely registered it. Solovey dropped as if a trapdoor had opened beneath him, his hand disappearing underneath his black leather jacket as he fell. There was the loud crack of a pistol and Fabel heard a sound like a slap beside him. In that instant, and without turning his head to see, Fabel knew that Paul was dead. Vitrenko made a swift move sideways, seemed to bounce on the balls of his feet, and dived at the window. Fabel fired at the floor where Solovey had dropped. The air fumed with the smell of cordite and filled with a deafening chorus of shots as Werner and Sülberg opened fire as well. MacSwain threw himself into a corner, where he curled up in a foetal pose.

  Fabel turned to where Paul had fallen. He lay staring blankly up at the ceiling, the fury swept from his face by death. His broad, pale forehead was punctured dead centre by the entry wound made by Solovey’s bullet.

  Werner and Sülberg rushed forward. Sülberg kicked the prone Solovey, who lay face down on the dirt-covered floor; he eased his foot under the Ukrainian’s shoulder and took a couple of heaves before flipping him over. He was clearly dead. Werner was already over to where Anna lay. He ran his hands swiftly and firmly over her body, his eyes searching frantically for any signs of blood. He looked up at Fabel, then briefly down at Paul.

  ‘She’s okay, Jan. She’s not been hit.’

  Fabel snatched the radio from his inside coat pocket. The aerial snagged on his jacket and he wrestled with it in a pointless fury that ripped the lining. Once it was free he pressed the transmit button.

  ‘Maria … Vitrenko is making a run for it. He’s jumped from the west window and is heading your way.’

  ‘I see him! I see him!’ The shrillness of Maria’s voice was accentuated by the radio’s static hiss.

  ‘Maria, watch out for yourself. I’m on my way. All units assist Oberkommissarin Klee.’

  He released the radio button and walked swiftly across to MacSwain, who still cowered in the corner. There was a deadly decisiveness in Fabel’s movements. When he reached MacSwain he snapped his arm out rigid, jabbing the muzzle of his Walther into the flesh of MacSwain’s cheek. MacSwain whimpered and squeezed his eyes tight shut, waiting for Fabel’s shot to blast his face and his life to nothing.

  ‘You fuck …’ said Fabel in a slow, quiet voice. He looked across at Werner and Sülberg, both of whom said nothing. Fabel looked down on MacSwain. He eased and then re-tightened his grip on his pistol, his face twisted in a sneer. In a single second, a dozen images sped through his mind. Michaela Palmer’s scared, hunted look. Four innocent women, ripped apart, prepared for death the same way. Paul Lindemann’s dead eyes. But this was the apprentice, not the master. MacSwain’s was a sick mind manipulated by a greater, even more twisted intellect. It had been Vitrenko who had killed the Ukrainian girl and the old man. His own father. Not work to be given out to an apprentice. A signature piece. Fabel snapped his gun away from MacSwain’s head.

  ‘Watch him!’ he snapped at Sülberg, who nodded grimly and moved over to MacSwain. ‘Werner, you look after Anna.’

  ‘What about Vitrenko?’

  ‘I’ll deal with him,’ Fabel said and sprinted towards the door.

  Fabel burst out into the night. He stopped and scanned the low, wide fields. He snatched his radio to his mouth.

  ‘Maria?’

  Silence.

  ‘Maria? Answer me.’ Still no reply.

  Sülberg, back in the barn, must have heard. His voice came on the radio asking each of the four Cuxhaven units if they had seen either Vitrenko or Oberkommissarin Klee. Three responded negatively. The fourth, like Maria, did not respond. Fabel narrowed his eyes and scoured the night for any movement against the green-black fringes of trees and scrub at the far end of the fields. He saw something. Indistinct, not even identifiable as a person. He burst into a sprint in its direction.

  ‘He’s heading towards the water! Away from the boat!’ Fabel screamed into his radio between breaths. ‘I’m going to lose him in the trees!’

  Fabel’s lungs began to sear. His heart hammered in his chest.

  He found the Cuxhaven SchuPo first. The police
man lay on his side, his SIG pistol still in his hand, caressed by the long grass in the depression made by his own falling, dying body. The posture of the dead uniformed policeman reminded Fabel of the mummified bodies of ancient sacrificial victims that archaeologists would occasionally reclaim from the peaty earth of this part of Germany. From just below the ear, sweeping across his throat immediately beneath the jawline, a wide, sweeping gash sparkled in the dim moonlight and blood glistened black on the grass. Silence and death had come to the young SchuPo simultaneously, and he had been robbed of his right to cry out as his life left him.

  ‘Maria!’ Fabel bellowed into the darkness. Silence. Then something like a sigh. Fabel turned sixty degrees to his right. Maria lay, about ten metres away, half hidden in the grass. Fabel ran across to her and dropped to his knees beside her. She lay on her back, her face towards the dark sky, in a posture that looked almost relaxed, as if she had sought solitude to gaze up at the moon and stars. She moved her eyes to look at Fabel without turning her head. Her lips were drawn tight and she was breathing through her mouth in short, shallow breaths. The hilt of the broad ceremonial knife jutted hideously from her abdomen, just below the sternum. The entire blade had been driven into her body, deliberately missing the heart and an instant kill, but causing enough internal damage to throw Maria’s survival into a perilous balance.

  Fabel leaned over her and placed a hand gently on either side of her face, bringing his face kissing-close to hers.

  ‘I don’t want to die, Jan …’ she said in a little girl’s voice. ‘Please don’t let me die.’

  ‘You’re not going to die, Maria,’ Fabel’s voice held gentleness and determination in equal measure. ‘Look at me. Listen to me. Think this through. Vitrenko could have killed you if he had wanted to. But he didn’t. He didn’t because he wanted me here, tending to you, instead of coming after him. You’re not one of his victims, Maria. You’re a diversion. A delaying tactic.’ He could feel her small breaths on his face. ‘You’re not going to die.’ But he was not at all sure he was telling the truth. Maria smiled and a small rivulet of dark blood escaped from the corner of her lips.

  A voice from beyond the universe that was Fabel and Maria and the small circle of dark grass. A radio voice. Werner.

  ‘Anna’s okay, Chef. Repeat … Anna is okay … Have you got Vitrenko? Over.’

  Fabel hit the transmission button. He heard his own voice, dead and flat, reporting the murder of the Cuxhaven policeman and that he had a seriously wounded officer in need of immediate airlift by Medicopter.

  ‘Help will be here soon, Maria. You’re going to be fine. I promise. We’ve got MacSwain.’

  Maria smiled weakly. Her breath was becoming more laboured.

  Fabel raised his eyes. He thought he could see a tall figure at the extreme far corner of the field. Vitrenko, heading into the woods. As he ran, Vitrenko’s raincoat flapped behind him, like dark wings. Fabel leapt to his feet, drew his pistol and fired, knowing that Vitrenko was out of range. Out of reach. As the magazine emptied, and Fabel heard the repeated, impotent clicking of the firing pin on an empty chamber, he again recalled the words from the e-mail. The words that MacSwain had written, but that Vitrenko had dictated.

  You can stop me, but you will never catch me.

  THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have a lot to be grateful for. And there’s a lot of people to whom I am grateful: Wendy, my wife, for all her comments and edits on the first draft and for her unwavering support and belief in Jan Fabel; my children, Jonathan and Sophie, for their patience while I devoted so much time to this book; and my mother, an avid and expert crime thriller reader, who provided comments on the manuscript.

  I wholeheartedly thank my agent, Carole Blake, for her enthusiasm, energy, commitment and hard work, as well as Oli Munson and David Eddy of Blake Friedmann Literary Agency. I would also thank Paul Sidey, my editor and a true literary gent, whose suggestions have made this a better book; Tiffany Stansfield, his assistant editor; and Neville Gomes, my copy-editor, for his painstaking attention to detail. I would like to thank Mark McCallum and Ron Beard, as well as everyone else in Random House marketing and sales departments, for their enthusiastic support.

  I have to single out Dr Bernd Rullkötter, my German translator, who has gone above and beyond the call of duty in helping make this as authentic and accurate a book as possible in English as well as in German (even if this has involved telling me where to stick my Umlaut). I also owe thanks to Dr Anja Lowit, for her time and her comments on the original draft.

  In my opinion, the Polizei Hamburg is one of the world’s finest police services. I have also found it to be one of the most open and accessible. I have sought to remain, as far as possible, within the real operational and organizational structures and procedures of the Polizei Hamburg, but this is, after all, a work of fiction, so any licence taken or errors made are entirely mine. I would, however, like to make special mention of Erste Polizeihauptkommissarin Ulrike Sweden of the Polizeipressestelle, for all of the information, help and contacts she supplied. I would also like to offer my gratitude to Dirk Brandenburg and Birte Hell, both of the Hamburg murder squad, for devoting so much of their valuable time to me. Special thanks go to Peter Baustian of the Davidwache police station and to Robert Golz, from the control and operation room division of the Polizeipräsidium. Boris Manzella, Andre Schönhardt and Rene Schönhardt, all serving officers in the Polizei Hamburg uniform branch, offered invaluable opinions on the first draft of Blood Eagle.

  I am enormously grateful to Katrin Frahm for all of her help in making me sound less stupid when I speak German. I would like to thank Dagmar Förtsch, of GLS Language Services (and Honorary Consul of the Federal Republic of Germany in Glasgow) as well as Duncan McInnes.

  Special thanks also to my editors and publishers around the world for their faith and commitment.

  And, of course, if this book has a hero, it’s a city, not a person … Vielen Dank, Hamburg!

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Glossary

  Epigraph

  Part One: Wednesday 4 June and Thursday 5 June

  Part Two: Friday 13 June to Tuesday 17 June

  Part Three: Thursday 19 June to Sunday 22 June

  Thanks and Acknowledgements