The Fourth Figure

by Aspe, Pieter; Doyle, Brian;

  “Jesus, you almost caused a miscarriage,” said Hannelore, feigning annoyance.

  Van In threw his arms around her and kissed her behind the ear. It melted her.

  “But I’m happy you’re here.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Excellent. What about you?”

  Van In gasped for breath. His lungs were threatening to tear, and his heart was pounding like crazy. “Is this it?”

  Hannelore dropped her hospital gown. “Take one last look,” she said with an impish grin.

  Venex made his way into the hospital lobby, its marble walls reflecting his shadow. No one noticed him among the dozens of visitors that streamed in and out of the place day and night. His face was half covered by a scarf, but he didn’t take the elevator. That was too much of a risk. He turned left into the stairwell next to the elevator door. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

  Venex took a deep breath and started his climb to the eighth floor. All was not lost. If he could silence Jonathan, then Richard, no one else would dare betray him.

  The two officers bundled Frederik Masyn into their SSV and took him to the police station, leaving Guido behind with the documents found in the floor safe. He sat down and removed the papers from the plastic folder. The words Last Will and Testament had been typed on top of the first page. I, the undersigned, Frederik Masyn, hereby … A list of legal statements followed, together with a detailed inventory of the property and possessions of his parents. All this I leave to … Guido cursed, threw the will on the floor, raced into the corridor, and grabbed the phone.

  The corridor on the eighth floor was empty. Venex followed the room numbers and stopped at 834. He carefully pushed open the door and slipped inside. Jonathan was lying on his back. His eyes were closed, and his breathing was calm. A drip full of clear fluid was suspended from a metal stand at his side, a thin tube leading downward to a plastic flow regulator. The tube ended in a tiny butterfly needle attached to Jonathan’s lower arm. Venex fished the flat box from his inside pocket and flipped it open. It contained a syringe without a needle and was filled with a yellowish fluid. He loosened his scarf, took the syringe from the box, and attached it to the plastic regulator.

  Dr. D’Hondt had just finished a five-hour operation and was enjoying a cup of tea in his office. He expected the patient to make a full recovery, and in spite of his many years in the surgery business, he still felt good about it. On an impulse, he punched in the number of the eighth floor and asked the nurse on duty if the boy who had almost succumbed to the overdose had regained consciousness. If so, he would like to pay a visit.

  “One moment, Doctor?”

  The duty nurse put down the receiver. She had five minutes to go before the end of her shift, but that didn’t interest the doctors, did it? She rattled down the corridor in her hospital clogs.

  Venex heard the nurse’s footsteps approaching quickly. He let go of the syringe and wrapped his scarf around his face. Just as he was about to hide behind the bed the door flew open. The nurse looked around the room and was aware in an instant that something wasn’t right. Then she spotted the syringe attached to the regulator.

  “What’s going on here?” The nurse lunged toward Venex.

  He was quick to react. He rushed to meet her and punched her hard in the stomach. But she was a robust woman and wasn’t easily alarmed. She grabbed his scarf, pulled it from his face, and kicked him in the shins with all her might. Venex growled from the pain and staggered momentarily, but still managed to push the nurse out of his way and limp outside into the corridor.

  The duty nurse stood there, bewildered, with the scarf in her hand. But only for a split second. She phoned reception and raised the alarm.

  Hannelore was lying on her side. Her contractions had subsided, and Van In was massaging her back, following the rhythm of her breathing. “I’m thirsty,” she said suddenly.

  “Do you want me to get you something? There’s a vending machine in the corridor.”

  Hannelore nodded.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  The vending machine was located in the stairwell. Van In popped a twenty-franc coin in the slot and pressed the button marked Coke. The can clattered down to the dispenser unit. He crouched. Suddenly he spotted a man stumbling down the stairs.

  “Geens. What are you doing here?”

  When the crime-scene technician heard his name and recognized Van In, he froze on the spot, wheezing, gasping for breath. A siren screamed in the distance.

  “Something wrong?” Van In asked. The laboratory analyst stared at him like a mad scientist who’d just had a eureka moment.

  “Hannelore’s in labor,” Van In said when Geens didn’t answer his question. “I’m about to become a father.”

  “There he is,” someone shouted.

  Two burly nurses stormed down the stairs. Geens looked left and right like a cornered animal. His right hand disappeared into his inside pocket, and in a fraction of a second he was holding Van In at gunpoint. “This is going to cost you, Commissioner.”

  At that moment, Van In realized that Raf Geens and Venex were one and the same.

  17

  “If I were you I’d put down the gun, Raf. The place is going to be crawling with police any minute.”

  Van In did his best to stay calm. He might as well have offered ice cream to a gang of football hooligans if they promised to behave themselves after the match. Geens had nothing to lose, and it was written all over him. His eyes were rolling in their sockets, and a string of foaming saliva was dangling from the corner of his half-open mouth.

  “You probably think I’m crazy, Commissioner,” said the lab analyst, laughing insanely to underline his point.

  “No, actually, I don’t,” said Van In. “I know you’re an intelligent man and that you’ll make the right decision in the end.”

  Saartje spotted Van In at the end of the corridor. Who was he talking to? “Hey, Pieter. Any chance of that Coke?”

  She was standing in the doorway to Hannelore’s room and was invisible to Geens. Why didn’t Van In respond? Hannelore’s contractions were increasing in frequency, and she was dying for something to drink. Geens noticed the desperation in Van In’s eyes. He moved a little closer until he could look down the corridor.

  “Pretty,” he said when Saartje came into view. “So that’s where the lady wife is hiding.”

  Geens gestured with his revolver that Van In should lead the way.

  “My wife’s about to have a baby, Raf. Let’s settle matters here. You’ve got me, haven’t you?”

  Geens stood still, and Van In heaved a sigh of relief. Suddenly Geens stretched out his arm, pressing his revolver against Van In’s head.

  “Actually, I don’t need you, Commissioner.”

  Van In understood what Geens was getting at. As hostages, Hannelore and Saartje were worth a thousand times more than him.

  “Wise up, Raf. If you shoot me, there isn’t a judge in the country who’ll grant you mitigating circumstances.”

  “Of course none of them would spare me. Don’t forget I work for the judiciary. I know how judges reach their verdicts nowadays.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “Help me!” he shouted, saliva spattering everywhere. His finger curled around the trigger. A couple of millimeters and the gun would go off.

  “Win back their respect,” said Van In, fishing for words to penetrate the man’s hysteria. He pinched his eyes shut and thought of the baby he would never cherish. Why was Geens waiting? This was taking forever.

  “So you want to restore my honor.”

  Van In opened his eyes. Geens’s finger relaxed.

  “I wonder if that little wife of yours will think the same.”

  Beekman was having lunch in a small Italian restaurant on Saint Amand Square. He’d chosen marinated artich
oke hearts and scampi fritti, both dishes he loved. The prosecutor had been a regular for more than twenty years, and he wasn’t the only satisfied customer if the number of cover charges was anything to go by. The restaurant was wall to wall every day. One of the waiters—a balding Italian in a red waistcoat, crisp white shirt, and matching tie—served him an amaretto on the house. Beekman gave the man a generous tip, to which he responded with a warm “Grazie.”

  Beekman’s beeper went off just as he was raising the glass to his lips. Now that everyone had cell phones, no one paid the least attention to beepers anymore. Beekman switched it off, pushed the table forward, wormed his way out from behind it, and navigated his way between the diners to the bar telephone.

  “Beekman here.”

  He stood behind the bar and did his best not to get in the way of the hardworking waiters. His face tightened as the conversation proceeded. He spluttered a couple of orders, but the noise in the restaurant forced him to shout.

  “Send a car immediately,” he roared. “And inform the Diane Group.”

  The hustle and bustle around him suddenly stopped as eighty pairs of eyes turned to look at him.

  Beekman registered the surprise in their faces and whispered, “I’ll wait for you outside.”

  Guido was in the hospital lobby, where a provisional command post had been set up. In less than fifteen minutes, he had managed to muster no fewer than forty officers, and they had hermetically sealed the hospital from the outside world. All he could do was wait until the experts arrived. Sirens wailed in the distance, and from the communication crackling through from his walkie-talkie, he figured Prosecutor Beekman was on his way.

  Hannelore was gasping and panting when Van In and Geens entered the room. All the color drained from Saartje’s face at the sight of them. She worked her way to the right side of the bed and rested her hand on Hannelore’s shoulder.

  “It won’t be long now,” she said. “Your contractions are every five minutes.”

  Van In turned in desperation to Geens. “Let me call a doctor, Raf. Please!”

  “You promised you would save my honor, Commissioner. Babies don’t need any help. What if they send a cop in disguise with a teargas grenade?” Geens laughed, smug and superior. “You can call reception, Commissioner. Tell them they have half an hour to clear this part of the hospital. I want you to make sure they follow the correct procedures. If there’s still a single living soul in this part of the building in half an hour, your wife is dead. Understood?”

  Van In nodded and did what Geens asked. His heart pounded so hard against his lungs that it hurt, and the tension in his head made him dizzy. When the federal officer who had been manning the lines at reception since the start of the crisis asked for more information, Van In shouted at him to obey his orders and hung up.

  The maternity unit took up the entire wing of the hospital. The evacuation took exactly twenty-two minutes. Most of the patients were able to make their way to safety without assistance, while officers with semiautomatics kept an eye on things from the end of the corridor. Van In made sure they kept their distance and then explored the other rooms to make sure no one had been left behind or snuck in unnoticed.

  “I know what they’re up to out there,” said Geens, glancing furtively at his watch. Van In collapsed into a chair, breathless and panting.

  “At this very moment, a Diane Group platoon is getting ready to move out. If they use a helicopter, they’ll be here in less than thirty minutes. The federal boys will close off the area, and marksmen will keep a close eye on any potential escape routes.”

  He turned to the window and closed the curtains. “They’ll install infrared cameras, mount laser-guided telescopes on their rifles, abseil from the roof on climbers’ ropes, shoot out the windows and toss in stun grenades, send phony negotiators who’ll make me all sorts of tempting suggestions, install directional microphones. If they have to, they’ll hire a dwarf and send him in via the air-conditioning.”

  Van In nodded, still hoping that Geens would realize how pointless his actions were.

  “But they’ll never do any of that if they know that the hostage taker is in a room with a pregnant woman who’s just about ready to give birth. The public would never forgive them.”

  Hannelore was lying on her back with her knees pulled up, leaning on her elbows, her head tossed back. She groaned as a vicious contraction cut through her belly like a red-hot knife. Geens grabbed a chair, sat down next to her on the left side of the bed, and pointed his revolver at her belly.

  Van In stiffened. He started to take shallow breaths, just like Hannelore, in an effort to suppress the feeling that his guts were about to explode. Geens was right. With Hannelore here, no one would give orders to storm the room. There were two possibilities: wait until Geens made a mistake and try to overpower him, or convince him to hand himself over. In both instances, it was essential that Van In kept his cool.

  Suddenly the phone rang. Saartje swallowed a squeal.

  “Answer it, Commissioner,” said Geens.

  Van In walked over to the nightstand and Saartje stepped out of the way to let him pass.

  “And repeat every word you hear out loud.”

  Van In immediately recognized Guido’s voice. “He wants to know if Hannelore’s okay.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Sergeant Versavel.”

  “Tell him if anyone dares to attempt any further contact, I’ll shoot all three of you on the spot.”

  Van In repeated what Geens had said and hung up.

  “He also asked about your demands.”

  “Demands. What should I demand? Money? A helicopter? A pardon?” Geens shook his head. “I thought you were smarter than that, Commissioner. First they play for time, then they make all kinds of weird promises, and in the end they shoot you dead as if you were a dog. I explained that already.”

  Geens was getting upset, his voice agitated and unstable, his finger ever tighter on the trigger.

  “Sorry, Raf,” said Van In. “That’s not what I meant.”

  Hannelore’s body arched in response to a paralyzing shooting pain. She shuddered, started to pant, threw back her head, then collapsed to the bed in exhaustion. Her fingernails clawed the sheets. Van In didn’t want to think what was going through her head. Giving birth in circumstances like this was unimaginable. Saartje was frozen to the spot. After Geens had threatened to kill them all, she hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “It would be a shame if we were robbed of your talents, Raf.”

  Van In had thought long and hard about what he had just said and he realized the risk he was taking. Geens raised an eyebrow. His trigger finger relaxed.

  “Take the Andries case. It was a perfect murder, and all the so-called experts were at a complete loss. Then you came along.”

  Geens smirked. “You’d like to know if I killed her, wouldn’t you.”

  Van In shrugged his shoulders, taking advantage of Geens’s brief inattention to slide his left foot forward by half an inch.

  “I have to admit I’m curious,” said Van In with a smile. “The experts were scientists just like you, weren’t they?” Van In won another half inch.

  “That’s true, Commissioner.”

  Saartje started to breathe again, and Hannelore carefully licked her dried and cracked lips.

  The hospital lobby was wall-to-wall blue. Visitors had been evacuated together with unnecessary staff. In spite of efforts to clear the hospital grounds, a couple of hundred spectators had assembled at a safe distance, hoping to catch a glimpse of what was going on.

  Guido listened in on the crisis meeting going on in an adjacent room. A young captain from the Diane Group was trying to convince Beekman, the governor, De Kee, and a number of other officials that his men could take care of things in no more than two minutes. His plan was simplicity itself. His men had infrare
d viewers attached to their helmets that allowed them to operate in the dark. They could make their way to within a few feet of the room in which the hostage taker was holed up. All it would take was a brief power outage, a couple of seconds, no more. In the ensuing confusion …

  The captain vigorously defended his plan, but no one present was prepared to give him a green light. The baby was a sore point. If anything happened to it, the public would demand their heads.

  “Let’s just say I managed to convince Jasper to continue his relationship with Trui in another world.”

  “A better world,” said Van In.

  Geens nodded. “I’m happy you share my vision, Commissioner.”

  Van In moved his left foot.

  “You were their father, after all,” he said. “You knew what was good for them.”

  Hannelore struggled with an oncoming contraction. Suddenly she felt her thighs moisten. Something in her lower belly had snapped.

  Geens shook his head, his pistol still pointing at Hannelore’s belly. “You think you can distract me with your flattery. Can’t you see for yourself how transparent your strategy is? Creeping forward inch by inch, waiting patiently until my attention wanes for a second.”

  Van In withdrew his foot. The situation was hopeless.

  “I had them all in my power, Commissioner. Jasper, Jonathan, Richard, Frederik … In the end, they all did what I desired of them.”

  Van In looked at Hannelore. Plump beads of sweat appeared on her forehead. He could see the terror in her eyes. She also knew that Geens wasn’t likely to hand himself over. The man wanted respect. He’d dreamed all his professional life that people would praise him, shower him with the adulation his work deserved. Geens dreamed of immortality and a place in the history books. He wanted to be remembered.

  “But Trui threw a wrench in the works,” said Van In, feigning confidence.