‘Put the gun away,’ says Rönnau.
Stepanovic breathes in and out again and sticks his gun into his waistband.
Not the holster.
Rönnau looks at him.
‘OK, cowboy.’
He chucks his cigarette away.
‘Give me ten minutes. And don’t budge.’
TRACTOR BEAM
No clue how Faller managed what’s currently happening here, but he simply started talking insistently to Number One, who put the stones, one by one, to the side. Those concrete blocks that he’d walled himself in with, one after another.
First he took two steps to the side, then two steps back, and it was obvious that he’d done so to get away from Faller, but Faller followed him. Just stuck as close to him as he possibly could. Simply keeping on talking. And what can I say, he seems to have cracked him, crick, crack.
The other hostage-takers permitted it, for whatever reason. Maybe because this whole plan here is bespoke, made for Number One. Cos he’s the brains, and if the brains wants to sit at a table and talk, then he does that and the rest shut their traps.
Now they’re sitting at a table in the furthest corner and talking quietly, although Faller’s talking. Number One is listening, sometimes he turns his head away, then he looks at the old man again and says something too. But it all happens as if in slow motion, in an uncanny quiet, who knows, maybe it’s just the state I’m in that’s framing the shot here.
My left hand and the forearm that’s fused to it keep throbbing away. The tablets seem to be working, but they aren’t making anything better.
As if I’ve been switched off.
I’m still only taking in half the situation.
Klatsche on my left, who’s got his hand on my lower back.
Warmth.
Support.
His hand is signalling that he’s with me, no matter how or why, and no matter whether I’ll allow it or not.
End of.
Inceman is on my right, holding my right hand. Firm and clear and steadfast.
Hang in there, his hand signals, come on, you know how to do this.
And then this conversation between Faller and Number One. It’s happening at my back but every time I turn my head to have a look because I absolutely have to know what’s going on there, I know that what’s going on there is important.
Faller’s talking, and he suddenly looks over at me, and Number One looks at me too, and a kind of tractor beam establishes itself between the three of us.
Holy shit.
They’re talking about me.
That wasn’t supposed to happen, lads.
Number One stands up, his chair tips over backward.
‘OK,’ he says, and his voice fills the room, ‘we’ll finish this now, then. If she needs to be out of here so urgently.’
‘That isn’t what I meant,’ says Faller, ‘you could simply let her go, Henning.’
Number One turns to the window and looks down at the port.
‘Henning. Who the hell is Henning.’
BECAUSE HE’S WELL VERSED IN PEOPLE’S SOULS
Stepanovic and Rönnau light each other’s cigarettes so cumbersomely that if anyone happened to be watching them, all their attention would be on the here-please-yes-light-oh-great-thanks kerfuffle and not on the question of whether or not, for example, a fire brigade pass key has just changed hands. The pass key for the service shaft in every hotel in Hamburg, for instance.
Rönnau’s got the key from his mate Johnny, who isn’t just any fireman, he’s someone who’ll owe Rönnau big time till the end of his days because Rönnau once bullshitted him a way out of a very unpleasant situation in a station toilet that could have blown his entire life sky high, and that kind of thing lasts for half an eternity.
As of right now, Stepanovic has the key.
Not because Rönnau owes him anything in turn, but because he, Rönnau, is well versed in people’s souls. Ivo’s soul is in urgent need of something to hold on to, even if it’s only a service shaft up to the twentieth floor. The shaft is to a hulk like Stepanovic as a straw is to a full-grown ladybird, but fine, a straw is a straw.
Of course, none of the police officers present is stupid enough not to have thought of the service shaft when securing this kind of hotel.
But Stepanovic has read his Asterix and that’s just the way it is: gall wins. He marches nonchalantly past the four SWAT team guys who are guarding the entrance to the shaft, situated back round a corner, he flashes his ID, puts on an authorised face and says: ‘Hey, OK you guys, I just need to check on something there a moment.’
Rönnau, meanwhile, is standing on the corner with an eye on both Stepanovic and the SWAT team men, giving discreet smiles and nods and looking just as authorised to the core.
It’s a bit like knock down ginger for grown-ups, with a boy on look-out duty and everything.
The officers in the full rig like it best if they don’t have to move too much, and they’re cold too, ah, it’s sure to be fine, negotiators and their funny jobs and funny ideas, huh.
Stepanovic pulls out the key, uses it, unhooks the hatch to the shaft, activates his inner contortionist and he’s in.
Whoa.
That’s a tight squeeze.
He starts climbing, pulls his way rung by rung up the ladder, and even if his body is heavy and awkward and hasn’t been as supple as it used to be for a long time now, his soul pulls him upward. He gains height much faster than he expected because he’s on his way to her.
Nothing else counts.
Stepanovic knows that this thing is going to blow up in his face tomorrow. But he has fewer fucks to give about that than he’s ever had to give about anything.
THERE’S A DETONATOR IN THE CAKE MIX
‘OK, guys.’
Number One, so the guy whose name is actually Henning Garbarek, even though he clearly won’t admit that, is addressing his team, but he’s standing in front of me on the other side of the counter and looking down at me. I’m more hanging on to my barstool and the bar itself than sitting respectably on or at anything.
Beside me Klatsche and Inceman as guardian angels or some other messed-up thing.
Garbarek mixes himself a gin and tonic with double measures of gin and ice and takes a big gulp. Then he looks at his men, one after another, it’s the classic look around the room.
A classic locker-room-speech look.
‘You know what you’ve got to do.’
The team reacts the way you have to react when you’ve had a thing planned for a very long time, and they must have done or they wouldn’t be standing here anymore. Some nod, some murmur something.
‘Sure, boss.’
That kind of stuff.
Then they gather themselves, one by one they vanish behind the liquor cabinet. The barwoman and the technician follow them. By now, it really is clear to every last person in this room how all this fits together.
I try to look first at Klatsche and then Inceman as a way of knitting myself a kind of insurance policy against right now, but my eyes slip away, the whole moment slips away from me.
My engine’s no longer running.
Something large, heavy, sprawling, has taken possession of me, a cloak of tar that covers me and almost suffocates me.
I find myself thinking about Stepanovic for the first time since we all blundered in here, and I wonder if it would be different if he were here. If he’d be able to pull the tar overcoat away and carry me. If I’d let him carry me.
Perhaps.
Of course, you can never tell.
I feel sick.
The team comes back from behind the shelving. They’re wearing SWAT team uniforms and all the corresponding kit, they’re wearing helmets, they’re wearing heavy boots, equipment and apparatus. And they’re toting even heavier weaponry than just now. They look like a military unit.
I can’t tell which of the uniforms conceal the former hotel staff.
The illusion is broken by th
e rest of the stuff they’ve got on them: smoke bombs, climbing ropes, crowbars and ten large, round items in heavy, bright-red plastic: things that look like they extend and like you could jam them together to make a kind of tunnel.
Only one of them doesn’t have one of those plastic tunnel pieces in his hand, he’s got something else: an ochre-coloured lump that looks at first glance like cake mix. Approximately a handful of cake mix. But then I get it, the way the rest of our cop-like gang has presumably also got it – there’s a gizmo in the cake mix.
I’d bet on the detonator from an old hand grenade.
Garbarek takes a last large swig from his drink and abandons the glass, half full. He grabs the plastic explosive then he takes a few rapid steps over to Hoogsmart, cowering in the corner, pulls him up by the elbows and along behind him to the middle of the long wall of windows.
Hoogsmart is so done in that he probably barely even gets what’s happening, it doesn’t look as if he even grasps that Garbarek is sticking the lump to the window, pressing himself and his hostage to the glass.
In front of the stunning harbour panorama.
Garbarek’s team, meanwhile, are standing in a closed rank at the entrance to the bar. They look at their boss, they also know what’s happening, they planned it together, after all. Maybe some of them, secretly, didn’t believe he’d actually do it, maybe they hoped that in the end he’d pull another brilliant idea out of his hat, and the ones whose delicacy played that trick on them now have a tell-tale glitter in their eyes.
I’d bet on tears.
But hey.
Taking hostages is taking hostages, boys.
The ones who’ve got it together better and have mastered the game of nerves are pointing their weapons at us. And at Faller, who’s still standing at the table where, until a few minutes ago, he was sitting with Garbarek.
‘Listen, Henning.’
He ignores the guns on him and moves cautiously towards the window.
Oh no.
Faller, what the fuck.
Leave it, old man.
Please don’t mess with dynamite and automatic weapons.
Calabretta is clearly thinking the same as me.
‘Faller,’ he says quietly, ‘stop there.’
Faller doesn’t react.
He walks on.
Calabretta again.
‘Faller. No.’
‘Hey,’ I say, ‘over here,’ it’s all I can get out.
Faller looks at me for a split second, I try to catch his eye, to draw him to me, but I can’t reach him.
I breathe out.
Garbarek holds the detonator like he’s pulling a bicycle brake, removes the pin, which falls to the floor with far too loud a sound.
Now the thing’s live.
He pulls his .45 and takes off the safety.
‘Everyone stand back,’ he says.
Then he lets go.
I want to get up from my barstool, I’ve already overcome Klatsche, I can’t feel his hand anymore, but Inceman’s holding me, he seems to pull me to him so that I can’t go anywhere, he’s so clammy, but maybe I am too, and maybe I’m just too weak.
HENNING OR HENK OR WHATEVER
Die.
Huh.
Now?
Yes.
Now.
Come on, Conny, you too.
It’s time to split.
Except that cop.
In the way.
He shouldn’t be.
He shouldn’t.
He’s got.
He’s got to go.
so.
gone.
BOOM
Stepanovic is on the fourteenth floor when he hears the big bang.
It could be anything: an explosion or an explosion or possibly even an explosion.
His heart hammers and he races up the ladder.
BOOM
The whump is so violent because somebody’s blown the world sky high. I try to inhale, I stretch out my arms towards the bang, it can still be held back, that’ll work, there’s a second where I’m quite certain of that, but it’s no use, there’s only the heat.
Everything’s burning.
The second bang, somewhat less violent and more contained, bends Calabretta’s face completely out of shape.
The third tremor is silent.
It hits you right there, in the will to keep on breathing once you wake up.
BOOM
If something like that happens, if after almost ten hours during which barely anything has shifted, so if, suddenly, in the early hours of the morning, a piece of speciality glass is blasted out of a façade on the twentieth floor and mingled with the shards falling to the ground are the parts of two human beings and, wham, there are nothing but scraps lying on the road, it’s enough to shake the calm of even the most experienced police officers.
For a good five minutes, the perfectly organised line-up resembles a bunch of headless chickens.
Even Alex Meier runs from end to end, having forgotten what game they’re playing.
Himmelmann is the first to pull himself together, he roars into the earpieces of the ten-strong emergency access SWAT team on the eighteenth floor that they should get in there, and where the bloody hell are the chief negotiators?
EXIT ONE:
THE OCEAN’S ELEVEN VERSION
Lob smoke bombs. At least three.
Better: seven. The only good stairwell is a smoke-screened stairwell.
The bits of tunnel are abandoned in the corridor outside the hotel rooms.
Then crowbar open the doors to the lift, take the crowbars with you, abseil soundlessly down four floors, jemmy open the lift doors on the sixteenth floor, slip out, flit from the lift to the stairs, and zap, through the door.
Then the fake SWAT team heads down through the smoke.
All the while creating an authoritative wave of hectic activity and chitchat, especially at the precise moment a group of colleagues storms upwards, guys, quick, up there, the hostages, hell, it’s mayhem, we’ll help out in the multi-storey carpark next door, it’s possible they’re intending to get out that way, yeah, dammit, maybe they’re intending to bolt through the carpark.
Open the sprinkler-system-room door with the keycards, in you go, shut the doors, done.
It’s a cool trick and almost watertight, but, well: a little old.
Probability of the police still falling for it in 2019: thirty per cent.
EXIT TWO:
THE SEX-GOD VERSION
Drop the tunnel pieces and make tracks. Right behind the drinks cabinet there’s the staff lift shaft. Crowbar the doors, accelerate, abseil at top speed down to the cellar, slide-tackle your way out opposite the laundry room.
Now you just need to get down one more floor via the cellar stairs, into the sprinkler-system room, shut the doors – done.
This trick isn’t new either, but it’s hot and it’s sexy.
But, unfortunately, probability of being shot by SWAT team officers the moment you fly out into the cellar through the crowbarred lift doors: ninety per cent.
EXIT THREE:
THE SHACKLETON VERSION
All the armoured SWAT team uniforms, all the smoke, the mist, the confusion, simply use all that for the coolest ride the criminal world has ever seen: stick the bits of tunnel together, click, clack – yippee, a spiral slide! Get in there, get down there, whoa, wow that’s rattly, into the cellar, kaboom, fly one by one into the wall. Can’t be long getting sorted out now, no time, this way, the sprinkler-system-room, ten seconds’ll do it, then everyone’s in.
The door snaps shut behind the men.
And now they’re gone.
The trick is almost new, it’s only been done once before, when Ernest Shackleton and his men slid down an icy mountain on the island of South Georgia, as their last option for escaping certain death, and the stunt is bold and quick and it’s a blast, but it’s so totally not watertight.
Probability of it working and the slide not splittin
g by the third bend, like it’s kept splitting during their various stairwell training exercises in the last few months: ten per cent.
EXIT FOUR:
THE ARSEHOLE VERSION
Oh.
Well.
What can you say? It’s so charmless.
It’s downright repellent.
The hostage-takers drop everything but their guns and grab the five prettiest hostages, that woman with sepsis is right in the middle there too. Weapons to the hostages’ throats and work their way down floor by floor, past all the forces of law and order.
Nobody would even dare to intervene.
A few SWAT team officers dog the ugly troop at a few metres’ distance, stick hot on their heels, hey boys, come on, let the hostages go, where d’you think you’re going, we’re everywhere here, can’t get further than the cellar anyway, you’re not getting away with this stunt.
But then they do get further than the cellar, none of the incident teams had that on their radar, nobody was expecting a tunnel, maybe that was the crucial error, the one thing they hadn’t thought of, that ends up being chalked up to their account.
Behind the door of the sprinkler-system-room, the hostages are lying exhausted in a corner, and by the time the police finally get through, through the high-security steel door, by the time the negotiators have talked their lips to shreds outside the locked cellar, the bad guys have long since disappeared down the tunnel. Holding a weapon to people’s throats is a tried-and-tested routine, has a very high probability of coming off, and that’s just what’s so shit about it, everyone thinks.
Hotel Cartagena Page 15