IN THE DARK
Andreas Pflüger
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
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About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
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About In The Dark
Jenny Aaron was a government assassin, part of an elite unit tracking Germany’s most dangerous criminals. She was one of the best, until a disastrous mission ended with her abandoning a wounded colleague and losing her sight forever.
Now, five years later, she has learnt to navigate a darkened world, but is haunted by her betrayal. When she is called back to the force to trace a ruthless serial killer, she seizes the opportunity to solve the case and restore her honour.
Strong-willed, fearless – but vulnerable too – Jenny Aaron is a character to stand side by side with Clarice Starling and Lisbeth Salander.
Contents
Welcome Page
About In The Dark
Dedication
Epigraph
A note on German police and politics
The Sagrada Familia
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Echolocation
Afterword
About Andreas Pflüger
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
For Anne. Always
If there is still time in the end,
I don’t want to ask myself
why I must die
I want to know
why I have lived
A note on German police and politics
The Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA, is the German Federal Criminal Police Office, the federal investigative police agency directly subordinate to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, and based in Wiesbaden in the west of the country, with a second large base in Berlin. The agency coordinates cooperation between the federation and state police forces, and focuses on cases of international organized crime and those involving terrorism and national security.
The Landeskriminalamt, or LKA, is the State Criminal Police Office, the independent law enforcement agency in most German states, analyzing police intelligence from home and abroad and investigating serious crimes such as drug trafficking and terrorist offences.
The Conference of State Ministers and Senators of the Interior – Ständige Konferenz der Innenminister und Senatoren der Länder, also known as the Innenministerkonferenz – is a regular conference on law enforcement issues of the Interior Ministers of the various German states. In some states, including Berlin, these Ministers are called Senators, hence the rather unwieldy name.
The Sagrada Familia
Nothing calms her down as much as cleaning her gun. Anyone else would have to check the cartridge chamber to be sure that it’s empty. Not her. She knows the exact weight of the magazine that’s sliding into her hand, right to the last gram. She knows that there is no ammunition in the barrel of the Browning Hi Power, just as she knows that her eyes are green. And sometimes black.
In four seconds she has depressed the magazine release, moved the slide and lifted the barrel and recoil spring assembly free of the frame. High-class Belgian workmanship.
How often she has been grateful for that.
She first killed at twenty-two, when a drug dealer wanted to take her life and forgot that it takes two to tango.
A year later, when the ransom money was being handed over, she was prepared for the moment when the bag of newspaper cuttings was opened, but not for the 2-inch revolver that the little boy’s kidnapper had in a leg holster. For the next few months she had to sleep with the lights on.
He wasn’t the last.
There were others, too, and she will remember all of them for ever.
The hitman sent by Ilya Ivanovich Nikulin with a special hello found her in Moscow. He played cat and mouse with her in the underground car park of the Hotel Aralsk until she was the cat and he the mouse and she could hear him squeaking. She wasn’t bothered about the bullet he took to the belly. But even today she still finds herself being stared at by the young hotel clerk who took a ricochet from her Browning right in the middle of the heart, she sees the eyes of the woman whose hand she held until it was all over.
She carefully brushes the barrel and the breech with gun oil over the basin of the luxurious bathroom, and reflects that there was one occasion when she didn’t clean her pistol.
Naples. The alleyway near the Basilica of Santa Chiara, where the capo of the Mazzarella clan was waiting, the one with whom they had negotiated the fake purchase of ten million counterfeit Euros. When he had spat the word ‘puttana’, revealing that she’d been unmasked, the quickness of her reactions had been of no use.
She pulled the trigger, but the shot didn’t go off.
The previous day, she and Niko had had to fly back to Berlin for a few hours. The Secretary of State for the Interior had demanded to be informed in person about how things were going; a human tortoise who would never understand the difference between an action memo and a .357 Magnum. After that she had let off some steam in the shooting simulator, three hundred and fifty cartridges, had hurried to get to the airport, back to Naples, to the meeting with the capo where a combination of condensation, combustion gases and powder residues jammed the Browning.
That will always be a lesson for her.
The barrel of his Luger rested on the bridge of her nose. She was surprised to realise that she wasn’t scared. She just thought that the gap in the capo’s teeth, which he was wolfishly revealing, would be the last thing she ever saw.
But instead he fell at her feet without a sound.
Niko.
A shot to the head with a Colt from a hundred metres.
You can’t learn something like that.
She scrubs all the parts of the gun with a children’s toothbrush, taking care not to leave any scratches, and sees with satisfaction that the oil is turning deep black; only then is it right. She pushes the toothbrush into the barrel and cleans it from the inside. She’s aware of how much she likes touching the steel, indestructible and at the same time soft and warm.
That was what it was like when her father first took her to the old quarry as a twelve-year-old girl. He taught her how to shoot, telling her everything that a policeman can pass on to his daughter.
She got her first gun on her eighteenth birthday. A Starfire 9 mm pistol, used but well-looked-after, which weighed only four hundred grams and fit her hand perfectly. She loved that pistol, a real little jewel.
She rubs the steel with a Kleenex and sniffs at it.
Enjoys the smell. Nutty. Sweet. Clean.
Four seconds to put the Browning back together.
The loud click with which the breech slips back in is the best beta blocker.
But not today.
*
In February 1912 in Paris Marc Chagall painted The Dream Dancers; two lovers, entwined on a dizzyingly high tightrope stretched between the towers of Notre Dame. Chagall liked the painting so much that he kept it. When he returned to Russia just before the outbreak of the First World War he gave it to his muse and later wife, Bella.
In the early 1920s they took it to Berlin, where it hung in their bedroom and delighted Bella. But when Chagall confessed to her that he had had an affair, she sold The Dream Dancers to a Jewish gallery-owner to punish her husband.
Four years after seizing power, the Nazis confiscated all the works of Chagall that they could get hold of and mocked them as degenerate in the House of Art in Munich. After the exhibition the works were supposed to have been sold on in Lucerne. But the night watchman at the museum, lonely after the early death of his wife, had fallen in love with The Dream Dancers and gazed at them in the silence of his long nights. He was not a brave man. But the idea of not being able to look at the picture any more was so unbearable to him that he made it disappear before it was transported away and successfully pretended he knew nothing about it. He hid the painting in his attic until the end of the war. After that it hung in his sitting room opposite a heavy wooden sideboard.
When he died at a very old age his children had the painting valued. Of course they were unable to keep The Dream Dancers. It went to the rich daughter of the gallery-owner who had bought it from Bella Chagall. She knew that the painting had meant more to her grandfather than any other, and wanted to honour his memory; so she gave it to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin on permanent loan.
There it was stolen. Cut from its frame in broad daylight. Cold-blooded. With surgical precision. Without a trace.
Two years: nothing. Early in November Niko was given a tip-off by an informer: a man called Egger had the Chagall. It took Niko three weeks to make contact in Bruges.
His cover story: investment banker, mad about art.
Egger wanted three million pounds sterling. In Barcelona.
That’s why they’re here. Two secret intermediaries with a bag full of money.
Aaron’s cover story: the expert, there to pass her opinion on the painting.
Niko gets to his feet. He puts his arm around Aaron and tenderly strokes her cheek. He smells good. They have been together for a year. No one in the Department must know, or they would be forbidden to work together. They’re good at keeping secrets. But they have so little time to themselves. Three times that year Niko has been on assignments that didn’t allow him to go back to Berlin. And Aaron twice. Warsaw, Helsinki. During their fortnight’s leave in Marrakech they barely left the little riad on the Djemaa El Fna. They were dream dancers in the blistering heat of the days and the cold of the nights. The wind from the Atlas Mountains blew icily down the alleyways. It was an irrelevance to them, like food and drink.
After Naples, Barcelona is only their second mission together. But in Naples they were still creeping around one another like two cats sharing a bowl of milk. She now knows: there’s a difference between sleeping with the man you love when you’re on holiday and sleeping with him just before a mission. Why is she so tense? She doesn’t get it. Barcelona is routine, she’s carried out far more difficult missions. And yet last night she couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t help shaking, while beside her Niko breathed like a child.
In her solitude she tried to find the number to match the shaking.
She has assigned a number between one and ten to every emotion. One for pleasure; two means gratitude; four is perfect control; five says contempt; six, compassion; seven, not being able to wait for something; eight means pride; nine means almost being happy. Ten is adrenalin.
She tries never to think about three.
It’s time.
She puts the Browning in the room-safe along with Niko’s Colt. Where they’re going they can’t take guns.
*
The lift door closes. Three floors down. Aaron shifts her weight from one side to the other and back again, cranes her neck, pushes her shoulder blades together, moves them in a circle, rotates her arms, spreads her toes in her ballet pumps, limbers up to increase the elasticity of her movements.
Without noticing, she touches the scar on her left collarbone. Not her only one. But the important one.
Niko says: ‘I know a great restaurant at Parc Güell. How about we leave it for a day and celebrate tomorrow?’
‘Another time.’ She doesn’t want to stay here a moment longer than she has to.
In the foyer a boy is sitting beside his mother. He has an ancient face, eyes like stones with sea salt drying on them. He is reading a comic. Daredevil, Blind Justice. Aaron feels the boy’s eyes on her back. She looks around. His mother has got to her feet and is trying to drag him to the lift, but he doesn’t move, stays where he is and stares at Aaron.
*
The colleague from the special unit of the Mossos d’Esquadra who is playing the role of her chauffeur holds open the door of the Daimler. Jordi. The other two, Ruben and Josue, are playing bodyguards and follow in a second limousine.
These boys are her life insurance.
Jordi drives fast. Massive rectangles of reinforced concrete thrown up in the 1970s. Aaron likes all things geometrical.
Barcelona is breathing the last of its light. The sky is a fakir walking on glowing coals of cloud.
A ten plus. The adrenalin crashes like a tide against the ventricles of her heart. She knows four kinds. The adrenalin immediately before contact: what awaits me, a handshake or a bullet? The adrenalin in the danger of death. The adrenalin of injury. The adrenalin when you think about a mistake you made.
You always have to reckon with the possibility of a mistake.
Niko says: ‘Look.’
Aaron knows she will see the Sagrada Familia, on the right, Gaudí’s temple of madness, triumph of faith, ruin of Catholicism, monument to the greatest victory and the most brutal failure, breathtaking, glorious and at the same time the disturbing absence of any order, boundless and frightening.
She turns her head and looks out of the window.
But there’s nothing there. Nothing at all.
The cathedral has been engulfed in a black hole, an abyss whose mass is so huge that the light pours in, a maw that extends like the universe, sucking in Jordi, Niko and Aaron as if they were asteroids on the edge of a galaxy.
Panicking, Aaron tries to feel for Niko, but her hand is alien, cut off from her body, and refuses to obey.
She closes her eyes and opens them again.
They are at the junction with the Carrer de Mallorca. Street lights flicker on. Taxi drivers laugh by their rank. Lovers meet outside a cinema. A dog tugs on a leash. A child cries.
Aaron whispers: ‘Give me a number between one and ten.’
Niko’s face is startled, teasing.
‘Please.’
‘Three.’
*
They are a group of three, already waiting outside the warehouse in the harbour. A black Audi. Aaron sees immediately that it has been customized.
Egger is tall, gaunt; lean, even though he must be about forty-five, Aaron guesses. Budapest shoes. His suit is made to measure. He has a white camellia flower in his buttonhole. The hand he holds out to her is manicured and cool and smooth. He has the ease of a man who reads Dostoyevsky in the original Russian. But his strong neck muscles tense like steel cables, even when he tilts his head only slightly and says in a soft, sonorous voice to Aaron: ‘I would even have waited two minutes for you.’
He’s arrogant. Presumably because he rarely meets people whose intelligence is a match for his. Aaron doesn’t doubt that he knows the precise value of The Dream Dancers. Not just the price he has negotiated. No, its real value, th
e truth and clear-sightedness and depth that allowed Chagall to paint the picture in just one day, the power that Aaron herself felt when she looked at a mere reproduction.
How beautiful the original must be. Suddenly she wonders why Egger doesn’t want to keep it, why he wants to sell it on.
He makes no attempt to introduce the woman and the man who are with him, and who must be ten years younger than he is. The woman is attractive and confident. She reveals a remarkable sense of balance when she totters around the Audi on six-inch stilettos. If she was holding a water glass, full to the brim, she wouldn’t spill a drop.
The younger man has eyes like black plastic tokens, flat and lifeless. If it weren’t for the cigarette-stub dangling from the corner of his mouth it would look as if he had no lips. His nose has been broken, then straightened. There is a birthmark on the back of his right hand.
But the similarity with Egger is unmistakable.
Brothers. Strange.
They both wear holsters, Egger can’t hide his even with his double-breasted Savile Row suit. Aaron bets that Token-Eyes’ Glock 33 is his pride and joy. Egger probably doesn’t need such a thing. He isn’t the kind of person to show off his firearms. And he has style: a gun with a plastic grip wouldn’t suit him. More like a Remington 1911 or a Beretta Target.
The holsters are empty, Aaron can tell at a glance.
A confidence-building measure.
Niko asks: ‘Where’s the painting?’
‘Where’s the money?’
In response to Niko’s nod Jordi opens the big bag on the passenger seat of the Daimler. In Berlin they had talked about using fake notes. But they would only go into action once the picture had been handed over, and since they couldn’t expect Egger to bring it to their rendezvous, they had opted for clean, used banknotes.
Egger looks at them with an expression bordering on mockery. He lifts one cheekbone by a millimetre: a kind of smile. ‘Just you, the women and me. Your men stay here with him.’ The brother. ‘See him as security.’
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