by Peter Beck
Meister played it cool. ‘But this only works if the mobile telephone in question is switched on and it accepts a call. You need a four-second connection to make a triangulation. Otherwise you cannot identify a location.’
‘Four seconds. Understood. As soon as I’m out of the bunker I’ll call from a number Baumgartner won’t decline. Give me ten minutes.’
‘Alright.’
‘As soon as you’ve got him, call me back on my mobile.’
‘Good luck, Winter!’ Meister hung up.
For a second Winter wondered whether the cynical Meister had meant that seriously. Tearing a map of the Bernese Oberland from the wall, he left the geologist’s office and in the corridor bumped into a corpulent man in overalls. His glasses were fogged up, his face red and he panted in horror, ‘He’s dead.’
Stepping back Winter saw that the man had a wet floor cloth in his left hand, while the right was full of blood. Both were dripping onto the lino.
‘Calm down. Who’s dead?’
‘Meierhans.’ The man in overalls helplessly raised his blood-smeared hand.
‘Who?’
‘Meierhans.’
‘Who is Meierhans?’
‘My boss.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He works with the computers.’ The head of technology. ‘When the alarm went off I was just putting away the cleaning trolley.’ As proof he held up his arm with the wet cloth. Tears were streaming down his round cheeks. His chest was heaving up and down briskly. Winter put his arm around the cleaner’s neck in comfort.
‘Keep nice and calm.’ A gentle squeeze of the shoulder. ‘Where is Herr Meierhans?’
‘In the cleaning room.’
‘Would you take me there please?’
The shocked man in white overalls nodded, turned around, walked mechanically down the corridor, turned left, then right. He stopped beside a trolley laden with detergents and a bulky, blue tub full of dirty water and a mop. The man pointed to a door that was standing ajar.
He screwed up his eyes. ‘There.’
Winter carefully opened the door.
A narrow storeroom with stuffed racks. Bright, neon light. Traces of blood on the floor. The cleaner had stepped in the pool of blood that was spreading from the far corner.
Wedged between the last rack, which had been shifted slightly, and the wall stood a man whose white overalls were slashed with red. His head was tilted back onto the rack on a jumbo pack of loo roll, his throat was slit and the blood had run out. In the gape of the man’s bloodied neck Winter could make out the round outlines of the severed carotid artery and windpipe. Baumgartner had attacked Meierhans with a very sharp knife, a cut-throat razor or more likely a scalpel.
His eyes and right hand were missing.
The two-man rule.
Winter turned around, raced down the corridor past the cleaner to the control room, which he remembered from the tour. The door was half open.
The gaunt sergeant was standing behind a technician who was hacking around on a keyboard. The six flat screens of the control console were working. Still. Winter couldn’t help thinking of the control room of an underground rail network. But instead of symbols for tracks and trains, here you saw cables with data flows. Putting a hand on his holster the sergeant said sharply, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’
‘Winter.’ He showed the man his ID. ‘We were just here on a visit.’ He pointed to the consoles. ‘Has anything been manipulated?’
The sergeant stared at Winter and the ID, then said ‘Yes.’ He pointed to two glass plates set in the middle of the console.
Bloody handprints.
A frayed optic nerve on the iris scanner.
‘What has been manipulated?’
The sergeant gave Winter back his ID. ‘We don’t know yet. The sterile areas have not been entered. All systems are functioning. The emergency generators are ready. Data cannot be deleted without the client’s agreement and their code. For the moment it looks as if we’re secure.
‘No. Look here!’ The technician frantically pointed at a screen full of codes. ‘They’ve uploaded a virus.’ He ran his finger along the lines of code. ‘The moment a client logs in the worm changes the time protocols.’ His finger left a sweaty mark on the screen. ‘Which always gives our timestamps priority. Shit!’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing for the moment. But the next time a client logs in, their data will be automatically prioritized here in the bunker. The balancing safeguard has been overridden.’
‘What happens if the data is lost here?’
‘Then we lose all the data. Everywhere.’
‘I don’t understand. Isn’t the data secured in the other locations too?’
‘Yes. But those data will be automatically deleted. It’s like the hard disk on your PC being overwritten by completely blank documents.’
The sergeant cursed. ‘Do something!’
At that moment a warning lamp flashed.
The technician rolled over to an adjacent screen.
‘The air-conditioning! It’s also interfered with the programme for controlling the air-conditioning.’ He typed hectically and brought up a diagram of the ventilation system. The bars in the chart were all in the green, none of the values too high or low. The technician breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back. ‘All seems to be okay. It just opened the ventilation valves. The air supply is working perfectly. The oxygen level is right. We’re breathing fresh, unfiltered mountain air. So long as we don’t have a cow crapping into the ventilation pipes we’ll be fine.’
‘What would that do?’
‘No idea.’
‘Close the ventilation valves again and restore the programme’s default settings,’ the sergeant barked.
‘I can’t. It can only be authorized by…’ The technician’s eyes glided over to the blood-smeared glass surfaces. The three men exchanged glances and then looked around. Prudently Baumgartner hadn’t left the hacked-off hands and gouged-out eyes lying around.
The sergeant growled in annoyance and asked, ‘Are they going to gas us?’ The technician looked more closely at the code. ‘We do have the gas masks,’ he said to his own relief.
‘Explosive gas, perhaps. The servers wouldn’t survive a fire or explosion in here,’ the sergeant ruminated.
Another diagram appeared on the screen. ‘The fire suppression system is functioning at any rate.’
‘All the same we’re going to evacuate. Quick march!’
They hurried back to the visitors’ lounge where the staff had assembled. About thirty men were standing around, putting on gas masks. They were talking to each other in muffled voices. An eerie atmosphere. The heads covered in grey-green rubber and with glass eyes turned to the newcomers. ‘Listen up, everyone,’ the sergeant bellowed and began his assessment of the situation.
As he made his way over to Dirk and Fatima, someone handed Winter a gas mask. Dirk lifted his rubber nose and asked, his face already dripping with sweat, ‘What the hell is going on here?’
‘I’ll tell you later. We’ve got to get out as soon as we can. Let’s go.’
Fatima, Dirk and Winter slipped out of the room, passed the unguarded security door and hurried along the by now familiar tunnel into the fresh air.
The sun was high in the sky.
Without a tour guide Dirk, the bankers and their guests had become restless, and half of them had already taken their seats on the coach. Von Tobler was standing in the middle of the forecourt, trying his best to entertain his guests. When he saw Dirk he waved him over impatiently.
Winter called out, ‘Dirk, get these people away from here!’
He took out Känzig’s mobile as well as his own and called Baumgartner. Hopefully Meister was ready. It rang four times. The ringing tone cut out. No connection. Was Baumgartner still inside the mountain?
‘Shit!’
Winter looked around, then at his watch. Still a good two and a half hours be
fore the stock markets of the Western world were all open. Where could Baumgartner be? What was he planning? Explosive gas?
Känzig’s phone rang. Winter stared at the screen. Baumgartner’s number. Clearing his throat, Winter pressed the button with the little green phone icon. Disguising his voice, making it extra deep and putting on a Bernese Oberland accent, he said, ‘Hello, who is that?’
‘Did you just call me?’ No name, but Baumgartner’s voice for sure.
‘It’s Bettschen here. Good afternoon. I found a mobile phone here on a bench. I rang the first number on it and wanted to know if you could help me…’
‘Sorry.’ Click.
More than four seconds. That should be enough for Meister to pinpoint the location. Winter closed his eyes and ran through the conversation again in his head. Background noises? None. Had Baumgartner recognized his voice? It had been a pretty good attempt to imitate the dialect, and he hadn’t detected any indication that Baumgartner had recognized him. But Baumgartner was ice cold. His own mobile rang. Meister.
‘Winter?’
‘Did you get him?’
‘Yes.’ Meister relayed the coordinates.
‘Wait a sec.’ Clamping the phone between his ear and shoulder, Winter kneeled down and spread out the geologist’s map on the gravel. He ran his finger along and down the latitude and longitude lines. ‘He’s right on the dam.’
Winter looked up the narrow valley. What had Fatima said?
In his head, he pictured a dry riverbed in the desert, and a torrent suddenly roaring through it. The dam wasn’t far away and behind it lay huge volumes of water.
There was a terrible predictability to this horrifying thought. Winter felt sick.
‘What’s he doing up there?’ Meister asked from what sounded like far away.
‘Baumgartner’s going to blow up the dam. If I can’t stop him the valley’s soon going to be overrun by a tsunami.’
A ‘shit’ escaped from Meister’s mouth. ‘I’ll organize the evacuation.’
‘Hugentobler is somewhere here. He’s the financial group’s head of security.’
‘I know him. But why is Baumgartner doing this?’
‘He’s opened Secer’s ventilation valves and overridden the controls. The bunker housing the servers will be flooded and all the data destroyed. We have two and a half hours. Then the American stock market opens and by then he wants the market ready to plunge into freefall.’
‘A catastrophe.’ Meister said, with rapid understanding.
AUGUST 7 – 12:56
Winter looked around. The forecourt was emptying. Von Tobler shook hands, clearly intent on keeping up the façade that everything was as it should be. He was excellent at that sort of thing. Dirk was standing beside the coach, which would be setting off shortly, to judge by the driver letting the engine warm up. Hugentobler was nowhere to be seen.
Fatima was beside him. ‘Come on!’ Winter said, grabbing her hand.
They ran through the forest to the clearing where von Tobler’s helicopter was waiting. The sliding doors of the bright-red Alouette III were open. On the back benches sat two Arabs in conversation. The pilot was reading the Blick. Winter yanked open the cockpit door.
He had Fatima speak to them in Arabic before they made any signs of moving; Winter had factored in that her language skills might come in useful.
‘I’m the bank’s head of security,’ Winter said meanwhile to the pilot. ‘We have an emergency. You have to fly us up to the dam immediately.’
The pilot lowered his tabloid, looked at Winter calmly and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’
He was around forty years of age, with weather-beaten skin and a peaceful demeanour. Although greying at the temples, his Lech Wałęsa moustache was still black. He didn’t look as if he would be easily fazed. The man probably flew rescue operations for injured mountain climbers.
Whipping out his ID, Winter said in a low voice, ‘Two men have been killed in the bunker. We’ve just located the murderer up by the reservoir. He’s going to blow up the dam. You need to fly us up there immediately.’
The pilot put on his helmet, switched a few levers and the rotors began turning. He radioed the control tower. ‘Panther 2 here. Housi, there’s an emergency. I’m flying quickly up to the dam. Out.’
The rotors reached takeoff speed. Fatima and Winter climbed in and the helicopter rose into the sky. The Arabs’ no-longer-quite-so-white robes wafted in the clearing.
Winter checked the .45 SIG, the .22 Mosquito down by his right calf and the flick knife in his right trouser pocket.
He turned to Fatima. Their faces were only a hand-width apart. ‘Listen to me. You were right earlier. Baumgartner is trying to flood Secer. He’s overridden the air-conditioning and opened the ventilation channels so the water can get in. Now he’s up by the dam. I don’t know how he plans to do it, but if it ruptures it will look like an accident.
‘By Allah the almighty!’
‘And this morning Känzig admitted that he gave Anne the bomb. He got it from Baumgartner.’
‘Who is this Baumgartner?’
‘He works for the chairman of the financial group. He told Känzig that the whisky was a present from the chairman.’
‘So what now?’
‘I’m going to stop him.’
‘How?’
‘Somehow.’ He could see the fear in Fatima’s eyes. ‘I’ll improvise. We haven’t got a second to lose.’ Still almost two and a half hours.
‘Be careful!’ Fatima said, stroking Winter’s knee. It was the first time they’d touched like this other than when they were alone.
Just above the treetops, the helicopter hurtled up the valley, angled forwards. Side valleys and a few farms flashed past. They gained altitude and headed straight for the dam.
Winter peered through the windscreen and stared at the slightly curved concrete wall. It rapidly grew bigger.
He scanned the huge edifice for explosives, but all he could see was a maintenance platform, similar to the lifts used by window-cleaners on skyscrapers. In some places water dripped down. Water and microorganisms were eating into the concrete and would finally defeat it in a few million years. Man was far more effective. He could blow up the dam in just a few minutes.
How high would the wall of water rushing down the valley be? One hundred metres? Two hundred? It would hit the bunker at full force and flood the ventilation pipes. Mudslides would come crashing down, tearing apart the data cables. Buildings and homes in the valley below would be annihilated. Many lives would be lost.
The pilot turned around halfway. ‘Where would you like to be put down?’ They flew along the crest of the dam. Not a soul was to be seen.
‘Down there. While you hover,’ Winter replied, pointing to a small car park at the edge of the dam.
‘Roger.’ The flight had only taken a couple of minutes and the landing was pure routine.
‘Thanks.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘And then take the lady straight back,’ Winter said.
‘Where should I send the taxi bill?’ the pilot asked. Even – especially so – in a crisis, money could not be forgotten.
‘To the bank.’ It wouldn’t break the budget for the annual conference. Assuming the bank was still solvent, that is.
The pilot slowed down for landing, curved round to the left and slowly approached the car park. Winter pushed open the side door and prepared to jump out. On the other side of the helicopter someone got out of a green Land Rover.
When the pilot saw that the man in black was holding a pistol and aiming at his head he immediately jerked the helicopter around.
The bullet entered via a small window on the underside of the helicopter and exited the cockpit through one of the curved ceiling windows. Apart from the additional ventilation holes there was no damage.
Surprised by the sudden lurching of the helicopter Winter slipped and skidded out. His fingers tried to dig into the lightly ribbed rubber mat on the fl
oor of the helicopter. Without success.
Wanting to help, Fatima bent over. But the safety belt held her back. She was jammed.
Slipping further, Winter made a desperate grab for the sliding door, but only grasped at air and fell completely from the twisting helicopter, which was once more above the chasm of the valley. Before Winter’s eyes, a three-hundred-metre deep, dark-green hole opened up.
Fatima’s cry of horror was drowned out by the noise.
‘What the hell was that?’ the pilot asked.
‘Winter fell out of the helicopter!’ Fatima screamed.
‘What?’
‘Winter is gone!’
‘Where is…?’
With one hand Winter was gripping onto the runner. He was dangling in mid-air. With his other he tried to reach the metal bar, but the helicopter was racing upwards in a wide arc. Gravity and acceleration were working against each other.
Swinging back and forth, he used the momentum to grab the bar with his free hand. The sharp blades cut into his hands, but he felt marginally safer. The gaping, green hole was gone. They were flying above the water. With a pull-up he heaved himself up and to the side, and hooked his leg over the runner.
The pilot stabilized the helicopter out of firing range. Then he noticed Winter’s leg through the floor panel. ‘He’s hanging onto the runner.’
‘What?’
‘He’s still there.’ The pilot pointed down.
Fatima bent carefully through the open door and could see only Winter’s hands, one foot and his fruitless attempts to clamber onto the runner. Her hair was blowing all over the place and blocking her view.
‘Land! Fly to the other side of the dam.’
‘I can’t.’
Fatima turned her head. On the other side the dam abutted the rock face. No space anywhere. Far too steep for a helicopter.
‘Can you land directly on the dam?’
‘Too dangerous.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the cables and the wind.’
‘Try. Please. There’s no time to lose.’
‘Okay, I’ll see if I can do it.’ Slowly, and with finesse, the pilot manoeuvred the helicopter back to the dam wall. Right above the edge, a strong downwind was blowing. Fatima bent over again.