Timebomb (Paul Richter)

by James Barrington

  Richter walked across to the coffee percolator in one corner, where he poured out two cups and handed them to the other men. Then he made one for himself and slumped down in a chair right at the back of the room. Although he had become involved in the assault, he had really been there just as an observer. It was Schneider who had run the operation, and his team that had implemented it.

  Richter always believed in keeping things simple, so the statement he now prepared filled barely half of the available space on a standard report form. Most of the other sections were not applicable to him, since he wasn’t a member of the Swiss – or indeed any other – police force.

  Fifteen minutes after it was completed and he’d handed it to Schneider, three grim-faced men strode into the room, and the way the Swiss officer immediately stood up to greet them signalled that these were senior officers. Richter spoke fairly fluent Russian, and had a smattering of phrases in French, Spanish and German, but he didn’t need to be a linguist to realize that Schneider was on the receiving end of a comprehensive bollocking – though the Swiss officer was giving back pretty much as good as he was getting. He wasn’t accepting the criticism now being levelled at him and kept snapping back a single phrase in German that Richter finally deciphered as ‘You weren’t there.’

  After five minutes, Richter stood up and walked over to the briefing table. Schneider glanced at him briefly but the other three ignored him completely.

  ‘This isn’t achieving anything,’ Richter said quietly in English.

  His calm voice, speaking in a different language, had the effect of immediately silencing the tirade. One of the senior officers asked Schneider a question, to which he replied in rapid-fire German, presumably explaining Richter’s presence, then he switched to English.

  ‘My senior colleagues believe we mishandled this operation. They reckon we should have been able to arrest the terrorists without it ending in a shooting match.’

  ‘Yes,’ Richter said firmly, ‘and with hindsight we could all win the lottery. I don’t think we ever had a chance of taking them down peacefully, for one very simple reason.’

  ‘The phone call?’

  ‘Exactly Somebody rang that apartment just before we went in and obviously warned the terrorists that we were waiting outside. So when your man here’ – he gestured to the officer sitting a few feet away, still nursing his chest – ‘knocked on the door, they already knew exactly who he was, and that’s why they blasted three rounds right through the door. Somebody knew our plans precisely and he timed his call to the second. I think you might have a mole here, Wilhelm.’

  Schneider immediately shook his head. ‘I can’t believe that. I don’t believe any Swiss police officer – and certainly no member of my team – would get involved with a gang of terrorists.’

  One of the senior officers asked something, and Schneider answered him briefly in German before turning back to Richter.

  ‘But money talks, Wilhelm, and someone made that call,’ Richter argued.

  ‘I know, and we’re checking its origin through Swiss Telecom right now.’

  ‘That might help, at least by a process of elimination. And there’s something else I’d like an answer to. When the landlord – Rolf Hermann, I think you said his name was – did his snooping about in the apartment earlier, he told the local police he’d spotted one Kalashnikov. But I saw four AK47s and six pistols, and we know they had at least one grenade. That’s a serious arsenal, and it presumably wasn’t tucked away in a cupboard somewhere, simply because of the speed with which the terrorists reacted to us. So how come Hermann saw only one weapon?’

  ‘That had occurred to me as well,’ Schneider admitted. ‘I’ve asked the local officers to locate Hermann and fetch him here for further questioning. As his precious apartment now resembles a battleground, I’m slightly surprised he hasn’t turned up already.’

  Another of the senior officers opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment there was a knock on the door, and a junior officer entered. He walked straight across to Schneider and handed him a slip of paper. After a cursory glance, Schneider then passed it to the senior officer closest to him.

  ‘We’ve lost Werner,’ he explained to Richter. ‘The hospital just called to say he died on the operating table. So that’s four of my officers in one day. If there has been a leak here,’ he threatened, his voice heavy with menace, ‘I won’t rest until I’ve uncovered it, but I still think it’s more likely there was a fifth member of the cell we knew nothing about – a man on the outside who witnessed our preparations and made the phone call.’

  Precisely as Wilhelm Schneider resumed his acrimonious discussion with the three senior police officers, a door opened in a rental-apartment complex about a mile away, and a man looked out cautiously.

  He was middle-aged, solidly built and unremarkable in appearance, wearing an overcoat that was perhaps a little too heavy for the prevailing weather, but which served to conceal the fact that he was wearing not one but two shoulder holsters. Under his left arm he had a Heckler & Koch MP5KA4 machine-pistol fitted with a fifteen-round box magazine: this is the variant of the MP5K equipped with a three-round burst trigger group. As it was much bulkier than a semi-automatic pistol, the overcoat was essential to disguise it, while concealed on the other side of his body was his back-up weapon, a Glock 17.

  The name typed in his professionally forged German passport was Helmut Kleber, but this man had actually been born on another continent. He stepped into the corridor pulling a small suitcase on wheels, a leather laptop computer case strapped to the handle, with his left hand. He invariably kept his right arm free and unencumbered, just in case he had to draw one of his weapons. Having glanced round to check that nobody else was visible on the same floor of the building, he closed the door quietly behind him and began heading along the corridor towards the lifts.

  Emerging a few minutes later at the rear of the building, he now made his way unhurriedly across the car park towards a hired Ford saloon over on the far side. He used the remote control to open the boot, but glanced around carefully before lifting the suitcase into it, because that would need both hands. The area was deserted, and moments later he strapped himself in, started the engine and turned the car towards the road heading for the French border.

  He had a long drive ahead of him, and knew he wouldn’t reach his objective for a couple of days, but that would still leave time enough.

  Early that same evening, Richter was on his way out of the hotel to find a restaurant for dinner – he was planning to leave for Spain the next morning – when his mobile rang.

  ‘We’ve another puzzle,’ Schneider announced, when he answered it. ‘Can you get back here?’

  A few minutes later Richter re-entered the police station and was directed straight through to the briefing room. Sitting at the table, reading through a sheaf of papers, Schneider looked up as he entered. He waved his hand to the seat opposite and waited until Richter sat down, then slid an A4-size photograph across the table towards him. It showed an elderly man – about seventy years old – wearing spectacles and scowling at the camera.

  ‘And this is?’ Richter asked, looking up.

  ‘Rolf Hermann, the owner of that apartment block.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Hermann is seventy-three years old, not in the best of health, and currently in a very aggressive mood. He arrived here at the station late this afternoon in a wheelchair pushed by his daughter and was extremely displeased about what had happened to his property. He warned us that he would be seeking substantial compensation for the damage caused and for future loss of rental earnings. Quite apart from the repairs and redecoration now necessary, not everyone, as he pointed out, would want to live in a flat where eight men had been recently killed in a serious shoot-out.’

  ‘Will he get anything?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. That’s not my department.’

  ‘And your point is?’

  ‘My point is that the first Rolf Her
mann knew about the assault we mounted today was when he saw his own property appear as the lead feature on this afternoon’s television news. Unfortunately, that was shortly before we phoned him, which might explain his somewhat hostile attitude. He hadn’t previously contacted the police about the person who had leased his apartment – he always uses a rental agency – and had absolutely no idea what we were talking about when we began to question him about his tenants.’

  ‘He’s a doppelgänger?’

  ‘Exactly. We’ve no idea of the identity of the man who contacted the local police about these terrorists, but we do know he certainly wasn’t Rolf Hermann.’

  Chapter Four

  Tuesday

  Onex commune, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland

  The ringing of his mobile woke Richter at just after four thirty.

  ‘Richter,’ he said groggily.

  ‘What the bloody hell happened yesterday?’

  ‘Simpson?’ Richter was astounded. His boss was not known as an early bird. He preferred, he often said, to wait until the streets were properly aired before he ventured onto them. And as four thirty in Switzerland equated to three thirty in London, Richter was even more amazed.

  ‘You were supposed to be liaising with the gnomes in Geneva, not staging your own version of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. What’s the latest score, anyway? Four terrorists and three policemen dead?’

  ‘Four cops, actually. The wounded officer died in hospital yesterday.’

  ‘Four police officers,’ Simpson echoed. ‘And, just to remind you, we don’t have any mediums on the staff, so dead terrorists are no fucking good to us. Why the hell did you get involved?’

  ‘You weren’t there, Simpson,’ Richter explained, unconsciously echoing Wilhelm Schneider’s remark to his superiors of the previous evening. ‘These guys were definitely not prepared to surrender. It was either them or us.’

  ‘And how come you ended up shooting two of them? You weren’t even supposed to be armed, and you were there strictly as an observer.’

  ‘I wasn’t carrying and I didn’t plan any of it, but four policemen were taken out by a grenade, and if I hadn’t grabbed a gun and stepped in when I did, the result might have been even worse. And anyway I only shot one and a half terrorists.’

  ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

  ‘I hit the last bad guy with a round from a shotgun, but a Swiss police officer got him at the same time, so we’re claiming half each.’

  ‘Don’t be flippant, Richter. I was called in here at two fifteen this morning, and I’ve had the Six duty officer bending my ear about you for the last half-hour. The Swiss authorities are extremely unhappy about what happened and they’ve communicated their feelings to Vauxhall Cross. Geneva is looking for someone to blame and, according to Six, the wheels in FedPol are considering issuing a warrant for your arrest – for either murder or manslaughter.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘It may be, but that’s the way it’s panning out. My guess is that they’ll jump one way or the other sometime today, so my advice is you get dressed, forget about breakfast and get the hell out of Switzerland as soon as you can. I don’t want the hassle of trying to spring you from some continental slammer, because there’s too much else going on right now.’

  ‘And what if the Swiss then ask the French to arrest me? I can’t hope to outrun all of the European police forces, you know.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll make the appropriate noises to the FCO as soon as there’s some chance of raising anyone there who possesses a brain, and then get them to liaise with Paris. If you do happen to get picked up in France, make sure you notify me about where and when. Oh, by the way, your leave is cancelled. Get yourself back here as soon as you can.’

  ‘Right,’ Richter said and ended the call. Just ten minutes later he was walking across the car park towards his Westfield, overnight bag in his hand, his room key left at the deserted reception desk in an envelope with a bundle of euro notes to cover the hotel bill.

  Richard Simpson’s assurance that the Swiss authorities hadn’t yet decided whether or not to charge him was one thing. But if Richter had been employed by FedPol, and there was any possibility of an arrest warrant being issued, he would have soon placed a watch on the borders. Or at least on the border crossings immediately south of Geneva, so he wasn’t going to take that route.

  Before driving out of the hotel car park, he pulled out a road book of Europe and spent a few minutes working out what looked like a better option. Then he programmed his Navman, fired up the engine on the Westfield – though regretting for the first time that his car wasn’t just a little less conspicuous – and headed north-east out of Onex.

  He had gone less than a quarter of a mile when he noticed two sets of headlights in his mirror, which were then switched off as the vehicles came to a stop. He pulled in to the side of the road to check what was happening, fishing a pair of compact binoculars out of his bag. Two police cars had parked outside the hotel and, even as he watched, four men climbed out of them and approached the main building.

  They would now have to rouse the receptionist to gain entrance, but Richter guessed that within ten minutes they’d be inside the room he himself had just vacated. He slipped the binoculars back inside his overnight bag, put the Westfield into first gear and drove away.

  Minutes later, as he approached the outskirts of Geneva, he saw flashing lights in his mirror. It could have been a routine patrol, or it could be the local plods responding to an emergency call from some respectable citizen. Or it could be something else.

  Richter decided not to wait around to find out. He dropped two gears, swung the Westfield into a right-hand turn down a side street and floored the accelerator pedal.

  Stuttgart, Germany

  The relays of watchers had done what they could to establish what might be happening inside the vacant shop and storerooms, but the results of the surveillance effort placed on the building following the observations by Fritz Stiebling had been disappointing, to say the least. Getting any useful result was proving difficult, as the terraced building on the left of their target premises was deserted, which meant they couldn’t use it for fear of alerting the suspects. They set up powerful cameras, and parabolic microphones linked to laptop computers, in whatever vantage points they could access on the opposite side of the road, but these were proving of limited use because few of the people under observation ever spoke outside the building, and they seemed to come and go fairly infrequently.

  The primary concern for the police was the bank next door. The manager had already been visited by two senior officers who had explained their concern that the occupants of the adjacent building might be planning to tunnel into his vault. That, the bank official had insisted, would be almost impossible, because it was lined with steel plate and fitted with sensors that would instantly detect any attempted intrusion. But he was happy enough to let the police install additional microphones on the party wall abutting that of the other building. These were linked to another laptop computer and to a wireless router, while a further laptop housed in a building across the street was set up to access the wifi network and to burn the ‘take’ onto audio CDs.

  That exercise had produced results, but they were confusing. Noises that could have been interpreted as tunnelling work had been detected but, in the opinion of the team monitoring the system, they originated nowhere near the wall of the bank. That didn’t make much sense, but it was sufficiently interesting for the inspector in charge to keep the surveillance in place for the moment, despite the misgivings of his superior officer. But the operation, the chief inspector also warned, had a finite life. If they got nothing positive from the surveillance after another forty-eight hours, he was going to pull the plug on it.

  But that was before he was called in during the early hours of that morning to listen to the last recording from one of the two parabolic microphones aimed at the target building. The conversation it had picked up la
te the previous evening, between two of the suspects, lasted for less than ten seconds but what one of them said was enough for the chief inspector to instantly alert not only his superior but also contact the BGS – the Bundesgrenzschutz or Federal Border Police.

  Switzerland

  Richter knew that outrunning a single police car was comparatively easy if the escaping driver knew the area, was competent behind the wheel and was in a car at least as powerful as the pursuing vehicle. Outrunning a police force, on the other hand, was almost impossible if the pursuit was conducted properly. The police could divert traffic, close roads, set up road blocks, deploy stop sticks or spikes, use multiple vehicles on the ground and get helicopters into the air, and against that kind of organization no solo driver could hope to evade capture for very long. Richter knew his Westfield could out-turn and out-accelerate any car the Swiss could send after him, but he’d never visited the country before and certainly didn’t know the terrain or the local roads. He would have to rely on his Navman to keep him from driving down any dead ends and just hope he could get out of Switzerland before a comprehensive pursuit could be organized.

  The only possible edge Richter had was that, if he could avoid the single pursuing car, there would be no way they could know which route he might plan to take out of the country since the Swiss border can be crossed in literally dozens of places. The problem was that every crossing, even on the most minor roads, has a customs post located either directly on the border itself or on one of the roads leading to it, and he presumed that FedPol could initiate some kind of general alert procedure with just a couple of phone calls. He doubted if every minor customs post would be manned twenty-four hours a day, but his worry was that they might instead have barriers across the road, to prevent vehicles from driving through.

  He kept checking his mirrors and already, less than a minute after he’d cleared the side street and got onto an eastbound road leading towards Annemasse, the flashing lights reappeared behind him. A couple of hundred yards behind, true, but far too close for comfort, so now it was time for evasive action.