Timebomb (Paul Richter)

by James Barrington

  ‘There it is.’ Morschel pointed to a Peugeot saloon parked about fifty yards away.

  ‘Are you going to call him first?’ Hagen asked, ‘or just go straight up to his room?’

  ‘We’ll ring his mobile and ask him to come down,’ Morshel replied. ‘We definitely don’t want any of the hotel staff seeing our faces. You call him. Tell him there’s a problem. In fact, tell him my car has broken down and that he’ll have to help shift the plastic out of it before it goes to a garage. Tell him that we need him right now in Rochester and we’ll meet him on one of the main roads close to the junction with the M2, say.’

  ‘OK.’ Hagen pulled out his mobile phone.

  ‘Helmut, we’ve got a problem,’ he said, as soon as his call was answered. ‘The Mercedes has broken down out on the road. You know what’s inside it, so before we can let any garage people near it, we have to empty it. The only place we can put that stuff is inside another car – yours, to be exact. Can you get over to Rochester right away?’

  Hagen listened for a few seconds, then snapped the phone closed. ‘He’s on his way down,’ he said.

  Up in his hotel room, which he’d only reached a few minutes earlier after leaving the Sutton Road police station, Kleber looked thoughtfully at the telephone. Hagen might just be telling the truth. Mechanical problems could occur in any car, and if Morschel’s Merc did need garage attention they’d obviously have to shift all the Semtex before letting some grubby-fingered mechanic loose on it. On the other hand . . .

  Kleber picked up his mobile again, pulled a card from his pocket and dialled Richter’s number.

  M25 motorway

  When it rang, Richter was proceeding at a steady, and entirely legal, sixty-five clockwise around the M25. He picked up the mobile, recognized the number and immediately pulled over to the hard shoulder. He switched on his hazard flashers before answering the call.

  ‘Richter.’

  ‘Kleber. I don’t know if it’s significant, but I’ve just had a call from Ernst Hagen, who’s Morschel’s number two. He claims the Mercedes has broken down somewhere on the road and they need to shift the Semtex into my car. They want me to drive over to Rochester right now.’

  ‘And will you?’

  ‘I don’t have a lot of choice. If I don’t go, Morschel will realize something’s wrong, and anyway Hagen could well be telling the truth. We still have no idea what they’ve got planned, so clearly I do need to keep in with them.’

  ‘Your decision,’ Richter said. ‘Are you armed?’

  Always – except, of course, when I’m sitting in one of your police stations.’

  ‘OK, tell me exactly where you’re heading in Rochester and I’ll get over there myself. But I’m not carrying, so if this does turn into a shooting match, I’m gone.’

  Two minutes later, Richter punched the details he had been given into the satnav and started the Jaguar’s engine. He swung back out onto the motorway, took the next exit and pushed the big car as hard as it could go.

  Maidstone, Kent

  Morschel and Hagen were standing behind a Renault people carrier, parked just a few yards from Kleber’s Peugeot, and both were carefully watching the hotel entrance.

  ‘Here he comes now,’ Hagen murmured.

  Both men ducked out of sight, relying primarily on their hearing to track Kleber’s progress across the crowded car park. When they guessed he was quite near the Peugeot, Hagen eased his head around the front of the Espace, at the same time pulling a cosh from his pocket.

  Though he was walking quickly, Kleber was obviously cautious, his glance flicking from side to side. His most vulnerable moment would be as he opened the door to get into the car and that, predictably enough, was when Hagen struck. He covered the few feet between the parked Renault and the Peugeot in under a second, and before Kleber had time to do more than turn his head towards the sound of the approaching footsteps, Hagen smashed the cosh down on the side of his head. Morschel watched with quiet satisfaction as the big man grunted just once, then tumbled senseless to the ground. Hagen replaced the cosh in his pocket and looked round. There was nobody else in the car park, and nobody driving past on the nearby road. It was now the work of just a few moments to pick up the unconscious man and dump him in the boot of the Peugeot.

  Before Hagen closed the lid, Morschel reached down and, with some difficulty, removed the two weapons Kleber was carrying, also his mobile and his wallet. He lashed the unconscious man’s wrists and ankles together with plastic cable ties, so as to completely immobilize him, and tied a rudimentary gag around his mouth.

  Then he picked up the set of car keys that had fallen from Kleber’s hand.

  ‘Here.’ He handed them to Hagen. ‘You drive his car and follow us.’

  Morschel hurried out of the car park, climbed into the Mercedes and pulled away from the kerb, Hagen following a few yards behind in the Peugeot. Within seconds, both cars had vanished from sight.

  North Downs, Kent

  None of them had any very clear idea where they were, but that didn’t matter. They’d left the Mercedes in a public car park outside Sittingbourne, and then Hagen had driven the Peugeot along a series of increasingly narrow country lanes and eventually taken a winding track that led up into the hills lying south of the town. From their present location they could see the lights of vehicles driving along the M2 motorway but as far as they could tell there were no houses nearby.

  And that was exactly what Morschel and bin Salalah wanted.

  Hagen drove the Peugeot off the track, stopping it at the edge of a small wood, where there was a large area of flattened earth, and switched off the engine. He guessed the site was probably used by courting couples, or maybe it was where hunters left their vehicles before going after pigeons or rabbits in the woodland.

  ‘This will do,’ Morschel announced.

  ‘Are you certain we need to do this?’ Hagen asked, his face troubled.

  It was bin Salalah who replied. ‘No, but it’s the only way to make absolutely sure, and we have to be absolutely sure. So open the boot and get him out.’

  Kleber was still unconscious, but showing the first signs of recovery. Hagen was a big man and hoisted him across his shoulders without much difficulty.

  ‘Where do you want him?’ he asked.

  ‘Over here.’ Morschel opened the rear door of the Peugeot and pulled out a couple of plastic carrier bags, one of which clattered slightly as he moved it. He led the way to the trees at the very edge of the wood, took a torch from his pocket and shone the beam up at the overhanging branches.

  ‘That one,’ he decided, focusing the torch beam on a substantial oak with a thick branch projecting almost at a right angle from the trunk, about ten feet above the ground. He opened one of the carrier bags, took out a length of rope and tossed one end of it over the branch.

  ‘Strip him first,’ Morschel ordered.

  Hagen carried the unconscious Kleber across the clearing and dumped him under the projecting branch, removed his clothes and then busied himself tying the end of the rope firmly around his wrists. Once he was happy with the knots, he nodded to Morschel, and together they began hauling on the other end of the rope. In a couple of minutes, Kleber was swinging gently, suspended by his wrists.

  But if Kleber was who Morschel now suspected he might be, they would be wise to immobilize his feet as well. The German shone the torch around again till he spotted a large broken branch lying on the ground a few feet away. Together, the pair dragged it over, and Hagen tied another piece of rope to Kleber’s ankles and its other end around the middle of the branch. Even Houdini, Morschel thought, looking at their handiwork, would have found getting out of that a challenge.

  ‘Now what?’ Hagen asked.

  ‘Take off his gag,’ Morschel replied, directing the beam of the torch at Kleber’s face.

  Once Hagen had removed it, Morschel switched off the torch and leant back against a tree trunk. ‘Now we wait till he wakes up,’ he said. ‘Then
we’ll see if Ahmed can persuade our friend to answer a few simple questions.’

  Ten minutes later, they heard groaning sounds as Kleber slowly regained consciousness, but Morschel left it another five minutes before he spoke. It was very dark there in the wood, and he deliberately kept the torch switched off to further disorient his captive.

  ‘Helmut?’ he began quietly.

  ‘What? Morschel? Is that you? What the fuck’s going on here? Cut me down, you bastard.’

  ‘Not yet, Helmut.’ Morschel kept his tone low and reasonable. ‘First I think we need to have a little talk.’

  The German settled himself more comfortably and paused a few seconds before continuing. ‘We have a bit of a problem, Helmut, and I believe you can help me solve it. If you recall, you approached me a few months ago with a rather ambitious plan. You had the money and the military sources, and I had the contacts, and to begin with everything seemed to be working out well. But in the last week certain things have gone badly wrong.’

  He paused and waited.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Kleber’s voice was harsh and strained.

  ‘Not the most original response,’ Morschel said, and picked up the torch, ‘but I haven’t asked you anything yet. This little question-and-answer session will proceed much more satisfactorily if you remember to speak only when I ask you something.’

  He switched on the torch and aimed it directly into Kleber’s face, effectively blinding their captive. ‘Ahmed,’ he called.

  Out of sight of the bound man, bin Salalah – now wearing latex gloves and a one-piece set of overalls – picked up a length of heavy-duty electric flex and swung it with all his strength at Kleber. The crack as the flex bit deeply into the flesh of the bound man’s back was drowned immediately by his howl of pain.

  Morschel switched off the torch. ‘That, Helmut, was just a taster. Now, as I was saying, some things have gone badly wrong this week. First, despite taking every precaution to avoid detection, my colleagues in Onex were wiped out by a surprise raid by the Swiss cops. That could have just been unfortunate, like some other resident seeing something suspicious, but when almost exactly the same thing then happened in Stuttgart. . . Well, I’ve never believed much in coincidence – do you?’

  Kleber said nothing.

  ‘You can speak now, Helmut,’ Morschel said. ‘In fact, you’d be wise to.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with those raids,’ Kleber gasped. ‘I knew nothing about them until afterwards. You have to believe me.’

  ‘Actually,’ Morschel said, ‘I don’t have to believe you. And in fact I don’t believe you. You see, ever since that incident in Germany, I’ve been thinking hard about what happened. And the only common links between Onex and Stuttgart were you and me. We two were liaising with both cells simultaneously, and I certainly know I didn’t tell anyone else about them. You were the one to choose the targets. And in Onex you even rented their apartment. Now to me,’ Morschel continued in the same conversational tone, ‘that means the only one who could have betrayed both cells to the authorities was you. What I don’t know for sure is whether you were just incredibly careless, or whether betrayal was your plan all along. And that, my friend, is what we’re here to find out.’

  Morschel again shone the torch into Kleber’s face, and again the flex cracked across his back – once, twice, three times. Then the torch went out, and the only sounds in the all-enveloping darkness were the loud moans of pain.

  ‘Now that the preliminaries are over,’ Morschel growled, ‘let’s see if we can get some honest answers. We’ll start with a really simple question. Who the fuck are you? What’s your real name?’

  Forty minutes later, Morschel, bin Salalah and Hagen headed back to the Peugeot. Hagen was carrying a bulging black rubbish bag containing the overalls, now heavily bloodstained, the latex gloves, a bundle of tools and a small plastic carrier bag, securely knotted. He opened the boot, put the bag inside, then climbed into the back seat. Morschel slid behind the steering wheel, bin Salalah beside him, started the engine and eased the car back onto the track.

  ‘We’ll dump all that stuff when we’re well clear of the area,’ Morschel decided.

  ‘What about this car, though?’ Hagen asked.

  ‘We’ll swap it with the Mercedes once we get to Sittingbourne, and this one can stay there in the car park. We’ll wipe it clean and walk away.’

  ‘Somebody’s bound to notice it eventually.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. We got what we wanted, and there’s nothing to link us to him. The treacherous fucking bastard – it’s a shame we didn’t have more time. I’d have liked to make him really suffer.’

  ‘Oh, he suffered,’ bin Salalah murmured. ‘There’s a limit to what pain a human body can tolerate before it simply shuts down, and Kleber reached that stage at least three times tonight. Anything more would probably have been pointless.’

  There was silence in the car before Hagen asked the obvious question. ‘Do we still go ahead?’

  Morschel nodded as he turned off the track and onto a tarmac road, heading in more or less the direction they wanted to go.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘because he didn’t know enough yet to betray this operation. We can still see it through exactly as we’d planned. That’s the best possible way to avenge our comrades in Stuttgart and Onex. And,’ he added with a slight smile, ‘to strike a blow at London that will take the British decades to recover from.’

  Rochester, Kent

  Richter had been waiting futilely in the Jaguar for over an hour, watching the location where Kleber was supposed to meet Morschel. He’d even called the mobile number Kleber had given him, as soon as he’d checked the road and seen no sign of a broken-down Mercedes. That had convinced him Kleber was walking into a trap, but then, as on his subsequent four attempts, the phone system reported the mobile as unavailable, presumably switched off.

  There was nothing Richter could do except hope Kleber had sufficient wits about him to avoid whatever nasty little plan Hans Morschel had hatched. But with the evidence now available to him, that looked like a fairly forlorn hope.

  Chapter Eleven

  Saturday

  North Downs, Kent

  ‘So who discovered the body?’ Dick Clark was staring with a kind of horrified fascination at the small woodland clearing in front of him.

  After receiving the call at home – where he’d actually still been asleep and technically off duty – he had picked up DI Mason on his way out towards Sittingbourne. They’d arrived about a quarter of an hour after the pathologist and the SOCOs, and by now there were some twenty people milling around at the edge of the woodland.

  Like every crime scene the detective sergeant had ever been summoned to, it had a somewhat surreal appearance, made even more so by the poor light. The day was dull and overcast, and the tall trees surrounding the clearing ensured that it was perpetually gloomy. The purposeful movements of the pathologist and white-suited officers were illuminated by portable floodlights and given grim emphasis by the pulsating blue and red lights of the roof bars on the patrol cars and intermittent flashes from still cameras wielded by SOCOs as they recorded every detail that was visible. This crime scene, he knew, would stay embedded in his memory for a long time.

  The naked body of a strongly built man was suspended by a rope from the bough of an oak tree, his feet lashed to a weighty branch on the ground below, which was quite literally covered in blood. The pathologist had already confirmed that the man was dead, and the main task of the SOCOs now was to find whatever evidence they could before they cut the body down and had to trample all over the crime scene to do so.

  ‘The farmer who owns this wood found him,’ a police constable informed Clark. ‘He was driving up here in his jeep – that vehicle over there,’ he added, pointing to a dirty green short-wheelbase Land Rover standing at one side of the lane. ‘He was intending to shoot a few wood pigeons, so he parked and walked over here. Once he got to t
he edge of the wood, he saw this.’

  ‘Nice, first thing in the morning,’ Mason remarked.

  ‘Yes,’ the uniformed constable agreed. ‘He lost his breakfast a few seconds later.’

  A lean, cadaverous figure wearing a white one-piece disposable suit approached them. The Ghoul was looking even more corpse-like than ever, his grey features having little more colour than what he was wearing.

  ‘Good morning, doc,’ Mason said, his voice determinedly cheerful.

  ‘Is it?’ The Ghoul responded.

  ‘Any idea of the cause of death?’ Clark asked. ‘And maybe the time as well?’

  ‘He died in the early hours of this morning. Based on the body itself and ambient temperature, probably not before midnight, and I doubt if it was any later than three. As for the cause of death, take your pick. He was badly beaten with some kind of a whip, but he looks as if he was a strong man, so I doubt that was enough to kill him. Then somebody started using a blowtorch on him. There are burn marks all over his body, especially around the groin, and both his eyes have been burnt out. He’s severely bruised almost everywhere, which suggests an attack with fists or maybe clubs. But that lot probably still didn’t kill him, so then he was disembowelled and just left hanging there to die slowly.’

  The Ghoul turned back to look again at the body, then swung round to face Mason and Clark. ‘This attack was medieval in its sheer ferocity, inspector. I’ve been a police pathologist for almost all my career and I’ve never seen anything like this before. Whoever did this is little better than an animal.’

  As the pathologist turned to go, Mason stopped him. ‘This isn’t a question I normally ask, doc, but what’s your off-the-record opinion about this killing? I mean, does it look like a gangland execution, something like that?’

  For a second time, The Ghoul gazed back at the clearing and the horrendous object suspended there. Then he shook his head. ‘A gang execution? I doubt it. Why would they bother torturing their victim? A bullet in the back of the head is much more likely. No, this looks to me like an interrogation. They started by simply beating him, and I presume that didn’t work so they moved on to more sophisticated methods. And it was definitely planned. This was no off-the-cuff job. Whoever did this came up here with all the equipment they needed.’