Eternal jf-3

by Craig Russel

  ‘Frank…’ Maria looked at the pale, boyish face. She remembered how she had christened him ‘Harry Potter’ when they had first met. How she had always seen him as a good man. A kind man. ‘You’re ill. You are suffering from delusions. We only live once, Frank. You have got things all… muddled in your head. I understand. I really do. Seeing your parents killed like that. Listen, Frank, I want to help you. I can help you. Just untie me.’

  Grueber smiled. He eased Maria over to a chair and made her sit.

  ‘I know you mean well,’ he said. ‘And I know that when you say you want to help me it’s the truth, not some kind of ploy. But tonight, Maria, the biggest traitor of them all is going to die. He was my closest friend, my deputy in The Risen. He planned the Wiedler kidnap. It was he who pulled the trigger that killed Wiedler. An event he has tried to bury, along with me. He saw me as a hindrance to his political ambitions. Ambitions he continues to follow. But tonight those ambitions, and his life, will come to an end. I can’t let you interfere with what I have to do tonight. Maria. I’m sorry, but I can’t…’

  Grueber took a roll of heavy-duty packing tape and wrapped it around Maria’s torso and the back of the chair. Binding her tight. ‘I really can’t allow you to stop me…’ he said, reaching for the velvet roll-pouch.

  10.30 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg

  Fabel and Werner pulled up outside Grueber’s house. The two silver and blue Polizei Hamburg cars behind them had killed their flashing lights at the corner and parked behind Fabel. Four uniformed officers got out.

  Werner’s cellphone rang as they all gathered on the pavement. After a brief series of one-word answers, Werner hung up and turned to Fabel.

  ‘That was Anna. She and Henk weren’t able to get Maria on her cellphone or on her home number. They’ve checked out her apartment. Nobody home. They’re on their way over here.’ Werner looked up at the substantial bulk of Grueber’s villa. ‘If Maria’s anywhere, she’s in there…’

  ‘Okay.’ Fabel turned to the uniformed officers. ‘Two of you take the back. You two, come with us.’

  The main entrance to Grueber’s house was made of oak and had the shape and substance of a church door. It was clear that it would not yield easily to a ram, so Fabel ordered the uniforms to smash one of the huge rectangular windows. He roughly recalled the layout from his brief stay as Grueber’s guest and guided them round to Grueber’s study.

  ‘When we smash the window, we need to get in and find Maria as fast as we can.’

  At Fabel’s signal, the two uniformed policeman swung the door-ram hard and fast into the centre of the window, shattering the glass and the wooden ribs that held the panes in place. The space it cleared was not enough to allow a man to enter and they swung the ram twice more. Fabel unholstered his service automatic and climbed through the shattered window, clambering over Grueber’s desk and sending the reconstructed head of the girl who was two and a half thousand years old tumbling to the floor. Werner and the two uniforms followed him.

  Ten minutes later they stood in the main hallway, at the foot of the stairs. They had checked every room, every cupboard. Nothing. Fabel even called out Maria’s name into the void of a house that he knew to be empty.

  There was a knock on the front door and Fabel opened it, letting the other two uniformed officers in.

  ‘We’ve checked the gardens and garage. There’s no one there, Herr Chief Commissar.’

  A car pulled up outside and Anna and Henk came running into the hallway.

  ‘Nothing…’ Fabel said grimly. ‘He’s obviously taken her with him.’

  ‘Herr Chief Commissar!’ one of the uniformed officers called from behind the ornate stairway. ‘There’s some kind of door here. It could be a cellar…’

  10.40 p.m.

  Frank Grueber had thrived on knowledge all his life. He had formally studied archaeology and history, but had spent so much of his spare time learning a multitude of disparate skills. His wealthy step-parents had provided him with the means to turn his entire life into one continuous training programme; an endless preparation for his life’s mission. Now, as he stood outside the home of his ultimate target, the sense of convergence was at its strongest. Overwhelming.

  Grueber stood on the driveway to the house, the roll-pouch in one hand, Maria’s service pistol in the other, closing his eyes and taking a long, slow, deep breath. He let every emotion drain from his body. He allowed the great calm to descend on him: the calm that would allow him to act with perfect precision and deadly efficiency.

  Zanshin.

  10.40 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg

  The small locked door was made of the same heavy oak as the entrance and would not yield to the kicks of the police officers. It was only after several hard slams with the door-ram that it eventually gave way.

  ‘Maria!’ Fabel called as he struggled through the door and into the cellar.

  ‘Over here!’

  Fabel followed her voice, running through the vast cellar. He found her bound to the chair, close to the plastic-curtained area.

  ‘Grueber…’ she said. ‘It’s Frank. He’s mad. He thinks he’s Red Franz Muhlhaus reincarnated – I think he really may be Muhlhaus’s son.’

  ‘He is,’ said Fabel, untying Maria’s hands and struggling with the parcel tape. He jerked his head questioningly towards the enclosed plastic-screened area.

  ‘Cornelius Tamm,’ she said. Fabel used a penknife to cut the tape. Maria stood up. ‘Trust me, Jan. It’s not pleasant. But you have to leave that for now… He’s going after his last victim.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bertholdt Muller-Voigt. Frank said he was going after the most senior member of the group after Muhlhaus. He also said that he was a politician. Look over there. That box. Muhlhaus buried it and told Frank where to find it after his death. It has all the names.’

  Fabel opened the box. There were several notebooks, a diary, a small plastic bag, a photograph and a ledger. They were all bound in brown leather that had tarnished with being buried in the damp earth. Fabel examined the photograph. A family snap: Muhlhaus, a woman with long, bone-coloured hair whom Fabel assumed was Michaela Schwenn, and a boy of about nine, clearly Grueber. But it was the woman who captured Fabel’s attention.

  ‘Shit, Maria,’ said Fabel, handing the photograph to her. ‘Michaela Schwenn – she could be you… the similarity is amazing…’

  Maria stared at the image. Fabel went through the rest of the box’s contents. He lifted out the plastic bag and saw that it contained a thick lock of hair. Red hair. Grueber had placed one hair at each scene, and when the forensic team had missed the hair in Hauser’s bathroom the first time round, Grueber had moved it to where it could be found. Fabel flicked through each of the notebooks, scanning the information as quickly as he could to try to find the information he needed. Then he found it.

  ‘Let’s go!’ He started towards the cellar door, ordering two uniformed officers to stay and preserve the scene. ‘You’ve got the wrong politician, Maria – and I think I know where he’s taking him.’

  For a moment, Maria continued to stare at the image of a woman who looked just like her. Then she dropped the photograph back into the box and followed Fabel out of the cellar.

  16.

  Twenty-Eight Days After the First Murder: Thursday, 15 September 2005.

  12.15 a.m.: Nordenham Railway Station, 145 Kilometres West of Hamburg

  Fabel had left his car abandoned, skewed at an angle and with the headlights still full on. He and Werner had come round the south end of the station building. Following Fabel’s orders, Anna, Maria and Henk drove round to the north end. To Fabel’s intense annoyance, the Nordenham uniformed units had announced their arrival from kilometres away, with lights and sirens blazing in the cool night. Three units came around the back and sides of the building, while three more skidded to a halt on the far side of the railway tracks, their headlights trained on the platform and station building.

  After the sirens, after
the running, after the shouted orders, it suddenly became very quiet. Fabel now stood on the station platform and became very aware of his rapid breathing: he could hear it in the sudden silence; he could see it bloom as grey clouds in the still, thin, chill air. Fabel was filled with a deep sense of unease. There seemed an inevitability, a surreal familiarity in the fact that this group of people should come together in this place at this time. A feeling of destiny fulfilled.

  But it was another group of people who had cast the mould for this destiny. It had all been so cleverly organised. No one would look too closely for deeper meaning in the death of a murderer and terrorist. With the demise of Franz Muhlhaus, it would be seen that the head, the brain and the heart of The Risen had been excised. His death meant the death of the organisation. The deal that Paul Scheibe had brokered anonymously with the security services had been that no further inquiries would be made about The Risen. And, of course, there had been a guarantee that The Risen would simply disappear.

  The lights of the Nordenham police cars, ranged along the far side of the tracks, illuminated the figures on the platform like players on a stage, their exaggerated shadows cast giant on the facade of the railway station.

  Fabel drew his service automatic as he ran towards them.

  ‘I would stop there, if I were you.’ Frank Grueber called across to Fabel. The blade in his hand glittered cold and keen in the night. Grueber had forced the man before him to his knees. ‘Do you think that I care if I die here, Fabel? I am eternal. There is no such thing as death. There is only forgetting… forgetting who you were before.’

  Fabel’s mind raced through the thousand possible ways this could all end. Whatever his next words were, whatever action he now took, would have consequences; would set in train a sequence of events. And an all too conceivable consequence would be the death of more than one person.

  His head ached with the weight of it. The night air that made grey ghosts of his breath felt meagre and sterile in his mouth, as if in coming together to this moment they had reached a great altitude. It seemed as if the air was too thin to carry any sound other than the desperate half-sobbed breathing of the kneeling man. Fabel glanced across at his officers who stood, white-faced in the harsh light, taking aim in the hard, locked-muscle stance of those who stand on the edge of the decision to kill. It was Maria he noticed most: her face bloodless, her eyes glittering ice-blue, the bone and sinew of her hands straining against the taut skin as she gripped her SIG-Sauer automatic.

  Fabel made a movement of his head, hoping that his team would interpret it as a signal to hold back.

  He stared hard at the man who stood in the centre of the harsh cast light. Fabel and his team had struggled for months to put a name, an identity, to the killer they had hunted. He had turned out to be a man of many names: the name he had given himself in his perverted sense of crusade was ‘Red Franz’, while the media, in their enthusiastic determination to spread fear and anxiety as far as possible, had christened him the ‘Hamburg Hairdresser’. But now Fabel knew his real name. Frank Grueber.

  Grueber stood staring back at the headlights with eyes that seemed to shine with an even brighter, even starker, even colder gleam. He held the kneeling man by his hair, angling his head back so that the throat lay exposed and white. Above the throat, above the terror-contorted face, the flesh of the kneeling man’s forehead had been sliced across in a straight line the full width of his brow, just below the hairline, and the wound gaped slightly as Grueber yanked the man’s head back by the hair. A pulse of blood cascaded down the kneeling man’s face and he let out a high, animal yelp.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Fabel.’ The kneeling man’s voice was tight and shrill with terror. ‘Help me… Please… Help me, Fabel…’

  Fabel ignored the pleading and kept his gaze locked like a searchlight on Grueber. He held his hand out into empty air, as if halting traffic. ‘Easy… take it easy. I’m not playing along with any of this. No one here is. We’re not going to act out the parts you want us to play. Tonight, history is not going to repeat itself.’

  Grueber gave a bitter laugh. The hand that held the knife twitched and again the blade flashed bright and stark.

  ‘Do you honestly think that I am going to walk away? This bastard

  …’ He yanked again on the hair and the kneeling man yelped again through a curtain of his own blood. ‘This bastard betrayed me and all that we stood for. He thought that my death would buy him a new life. Just like the others did.’

  ‘This is pure fantasy…’ said Fabel. ‘That was not your death.’

  ‘Oh no? Then how is it that you started to doubt what you believe while you searched for me? There is no such thing as death; there’s only remembrance. The only difference between me and anyone else is that I have been allowed to remember, like looking through a hall of windows. I remember everything.’ He paused, the brief silence broken only by the distant sound of a late-night car passing through the town of Nordenham, behind the station and a universe away. ‘Of course history will repeat itself. That’s what history does. It repeated me… You’re so proud that you studied history in your youth. But did you ever truly understand it? We’re all just variations on the same theme – all of us. What was before will be again. He who was before shall be again. Over and over. History is all about beginnings. History is made, not unmade.’

  ‘Then make it your own history,’ said Fabel. ‘Change things. Give it up, man. Tonight history won’t repeat itself. Tonight no one dies.’

  Grueber smiled. A smile that was as scalpel-bright and hard and cold as the knife in his hand. ‘Really? Then we must see, Herr Chief Commissar.’ The blade flashed upwards to the kneeling man’s throat.

  There was a scream. And the sound of gunfire.

  Fabel turned in the direction of the shot in time to see Maria fire again. Her first shot had hit Grueber in the thigh and he had buckled. Her second caught his shoulder and he lost his grip on the kneeling man. Werner rushed forward, grabbed Grueber’s captive and pulled him clear.

  Maria moved forward, keeping her gun trained on Grueber, who had now sunk to his knees. Her face was streaked with tears.

  ‘No, Frank,’ she said. ‘Tonight no one dies. I’m not going to let you do that. Drop the knife. There’s no one left to hurt.’

  Grueber looked at the retreating figures of Werner and the man Grueber had intended to kill. The final sacrifice. He looked up at Maria and smiled. A sad little-boy smile. Then he took a long, deep breath. There was a flashing bright arc as he swung the blade up with both hands and brought it back down with all his strength into his own chest.

  ‘Frank!’ Maria screamed and ran forward.

  Grueber’s head sank slowly forward and down. As he died, he spoke a single word into the night.

  ‘Traitors…’

  1.40 a.m.: Wesermarsch-Klinik Hospital, Nordenham

  When Fabel and Werner entered the hospital room on the third floor of the Wesermarsch-Klinik, Criminal Director Horst van Heiden was already there, standing at the bedside of Hamburg’s head of government, First Mayor Hans Schreiber. The nurse at the desk had informed Fabel that Schreiber had been given a mild sedative but was otherwise alert.

  Schreiber’s forehead was covered by a heavy surgical dressing, but Fabel could see that the ridge of his browline had swollen and discoloured in protest at the violence done to his scalp. The rest of his face had a puffed-up appearance and Fabel would hardly have recognised him. Schreiber turned in Fabel’s direction but clearly did not have the strength to ease himself up into a sitting position. He smiled weakly.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here, Fabel,’ said the First Mayor. ‘I owe you my thanks.’ He paused and corrected himself. ‘I owe you my life. If you hadn’t got there when you did. If Frau Klee had not fired when she did

  …’ He left the thought hanging, to emphasise the unspeakable alternative.

  Fabel nodded. ‘I was just doing my job.’

  Schreiber indicated his bandage
d head. ‘I’m told that I will need plastic surgery. There’s quite a bit of nerve damage, too.’ Two uniformed officers entered. Fabel ordered them to take their position outside the room.

  ‘No one is to enter other than the medical professionals directly involved in Herr Schreiber’s care,’ Fabel said to the two officers as they left.

  ‘My wife will be here later,’ said Schreiber.

  ‘No one,’ repeated Fabel.

  ‘Surely that isn’t necessary, Herr Fabel,’ protested Schreiber. ‘The danger is past. Grueber is dead and he was clearly acting alone under his own insane agenda.’

  ‘So why did he pick you?’ asked Fabel. ‘Every other victim was directly connected to Red Franz Muhlhaus and The Risen. Why did he single you out?’

  ‘God knows.’ Schreiber’s swollen face was incapable of expression but his tone was one of irritation. Fabel half-expected van Heiden to protest at his questioning of the First Mayor, but the Criminal Director remained silent. ‘Listen, Fabel,’ continued Schreiber. ‘I am in too much pain and too exhausted and distressed to psychoanalyse a lunatic who just tried to kill me or to speculate about his motives. He was mad. He also styled himself as a terrorist. I am the head of the Hamburg city and state government. Go and work it out for yourself. After all, that’s what I pay you to do.’

  ‘Oh, I have, Herr First Mayor.’ Fabel turned to Werner and held out his hand. Werner handed him a clear plastic evidence wallet. Inside was a thick notebook, its leather binding stained with damp and age. ‘Red Franz Muhlhaus knew that his time was over. He knew that the authorities would track him down. He was, however, determined that he would not be taken alive. He also had very grave doubts about the loyalty of his followers. Particularly his deputy, whom the journalist Ingrid Fischmann identified as Bertholdt Muller-Voigt. It was also Muhlhaus’s deputy who had been the driver of the van that abducted the industrialist, Wiedler, eight years previously. Whereas the rest of the group had disappeared into the undergrowth after the Wiedler kidnapping, Red Franz and the Dutchman, Piet van Hoogstraat, were the only members identifiable by the authorities and were forced to continue to live fugitive lives, funded by their fellow former gang members.’