Forty Hours: A breath-taking thriller

by Kathrin Lange

The man was spattered with blood. His pants, his shirt. Everything was plastered darkly to his gaunt body.

  But that wasn’t what shocked Walter the most about this young man. It was his expression. It looked vacant, panic-stricken and so manic that Walter felt his stomach drop. The pupils looked like giant black holes that wanted to suck him in.

  “Isn’t this …”

  Lukas didn’t need to finish the sentence because Walter recognized the young man. It was the guy the police were scouring the city for.

  It was Alexander Ellwanger.

  Chapter 25

  Ira had worked hard to craft a breakfast from the few items she found in Faris’s cupboards. She had set the table with plates, utensils and cups. A few pieces of toast and an almost empty jar of jelly completed the meal. A bowl of fresh fruit, the only thing Faris refused to do without, stood in the middle of the table.

  Ira now demanded that he sit down as she switched on the coffee maker. As the water began to drip, her gaze fell on a dusty bottle of wine that Faris had left standing on top of his refrigerator.

  “You must be keeping that for a special day.”

  “Actually I’m not.” Faris shook his head. A co-worker had given him that bottle, and when he looked into it, he had realized that it was an expensive wine. That was the only reason he had kept it.

  Ira looked at him quizzically.

  “I don’t drink alcohol,” he said.

  “You …” she broke off as a pale flush spread across her cheeks. “Of course! You’re Muslim.”

  He leaned back. “Right.”

  She threw up her arms angrily. “God, Faris! If I have to drag every word out of you, this breakfast won’t be pleasant for either of us.”

  I didn’t ask you to come here.

  The retort sat on his tongue, but he swallowed it down. He gazed out the window at the sky that was beginning to brighten, and then he thought about the previous night. He was very glad that Ira had been with him. If she hadn’t been, he wasn’t sure what he might have done to himself.

  He forced a weak smile. “Please forgive me. You’re right. I’m Muslim, but that’s not the reason. At least, it’s not the main reason. I was raised Muslim, and my father avoided alcohol for religious reasons. When I was a teenager, I started this practice too, even though his piety always annoyed me.” He propped his arms on the tabletop. “I think I did it more for health and fitness reasons. But over the past few months, I have been glad of this habit.”

  Ira sat down. “Why?”

  The coffee maker gurgled.

  “Because after all that has happened, I probably would’ve become an alcoholic.”

  She nodded sympathetically. “In my faith, wine represents belonging.” She dropped the topic now and pointed at the plates. “This isn’t a grand meal, but I didn’t want to go out shopping and leave you here alone.”

  Faris slowly reached for a piece of toast and began to spread jelly on it. “Why are you doing this?” he asked, making a gesture that incorporated her, him, the food, the kitchen.

  She picked up her knife and twisted it between her fingers as she studied Faris. “Taking care of you?” She glanced at the phone that was sitting next to him on the table, and she looked uncomfortable, as if it weren’t an electronic device but a fat tarantula she was a little frightened of. Faris pushed it slightly aside. She hadn’t said a word about the brutal video.

  He nodded and bit into his toast. His mouth started watering. That was how hungry he was, all of a sudden.

  She shrugged. “Perhaps because I have a feeling that it’s necessary.”

  He chewed. Swallowed. “Your profession,” he remarked curtly.

  She raised an eyebrow in confusion.

  “You’re a pastor,” he explained. “You have to take care of people, save them.”

  “This isn’t the way I usually do it.” A faint flush spread across her cheeks. He knew she was thinking about sleeping with him.

  “I believe you.”

  A weak smile appeared on her face. “You’re the one more used to saving people.”

  A platitude was sitting on his tongue, something like There are different ways to save people, but he kept that to himself. “What’s going on with you?” he heard himself ask.

  She looked astonished. “What’s supposed to be going on with me?”

  “Do you have a family?”

  She shook her head. Her face reflected a calm professional demeanor toward the topic he had just broached, and he knew that she would now watch him once more with the eyes of a minister. Didn’t Christian pastors like to call their congregational members their little lambs? He didn’t like the idea of her viewing him as a sheep, and he tried to escape this feeling. The memory of the previous night suddenly felt more confusing than it had before.

  “A husband?” He hesitated, considering. “Are you even allowed to have a husband? As a pastor, I mean?”

  She nodded. Suddenly she seemed distant.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured, deciding to jump back to safer terrain. His cheeks also felt suspiciously hot. “Thanks to SURV, I know quite a bit about your faith, but not much about your profession.”

  “What is SURV?” She seemed relieved to change the subject.

  “SURV is the acronym for Special Unit for Religious Violence. It’s a fairly new department, and it falls under the murder commission.

  “You work with terrorist attacks?” The coffee was now brewed. Ira stood up and brought the glass carafe to the table.

  Faris picked it up and poured them both a cup. “No. My colleagues from Department 5 are responsible for those; SURV investigates all sorts of religiously motivated crimes. Honor killings. Threats at abortion clinics, and so on. My colleagues and I specialize in the distinctive characteristics of the world’s major religions. Moral codes and stuff like that.”

  “Then you’re the specialist for Islam.” In the meantime, Ira had made herself a piece of toast and eaten it. She was a quick and efficient eater, a woman who didn’t place much stock in counting calories.

  “Yes,” he replied. “We have specialists for Christian fundamentalists, as well as Islamic and Jewish ones. You have met them already.”

  “Fundamentalism.” She shook her head as if she had trouble understanding how this phenomenon could have come into being. “They’re the ones who value the laws their religion proscribes more than humanity.” She suddenly became thoughtful. “Jesus Christ once said that the laws were made for people, not people for the laws.”

  “Wise words,” Faris said.

  She smiled wanly. “Aren’t they?” With that, she changed the subject. “I read somewhere that most of the religiously motivated murders are done by Muslims.” She said it very matter-of-factly, and Faris was surprised that this didn’t annoy him, especially considering how the statements by Rainer Golzer had had the opposite effect. “Is that true?” she asked.

  “Unfortunately, it is.”

  “That has to be hard for you.”

  “What do you mean?” Faris took a sip of his coffee, studying Ira over the rim of his mug.

  She shrugged. “If it were Christians doing things like that, I think I’d feel guilty somehow.”

  Things like that. Like the burning towers of the World Trade Center. That was what most people meant when they said things like that. But in his case, the past ten months had been filled with visions of the explosion at the Klersch Museum.

  “Why? You wouldn’t be the one who had pressed the button.” As he said this, an unexpected pain shot through him. It wasn’t until it started to subside that Faris realized that he had just uttered Paul’s words.

  Paul!

  Faris struggled to keep from gazing down the black hole that his partner’s death had left within him.

  Ira stared straight ahead as she considered this. She looked serious. She probably took everything she did seriously.

  “No,” she said quietly. “I wouldn’t have. But I would have to question my God if there we
re people who actually thought that he demanded the deaths of thousands of people.”

  The events of the past day raced through Faris’s mind. The bomb in the subway. The bomb at Hesse’s office. The bomb at the summer house. None of them had been set off by an Islamist culprit. Nor had the bomb at the Klersch Museum been.

  Ira seemed to somehow know what he was thinking about. “The explosion that made that …” She pointed at the burn scar on his upper arm.

  “From the Klersch Museum.”

  Ira nodded. “I remember that. The officer that was so seriously hurt during it. That was you.”

  “Yes.” Faris swallowed.

  “This can’t be easy for you.” She didn’t explain exactly what she meant, but he assumed that she was talking about the recent bombings.

  He didn’t say anything, just studied her. “Did you know that the museum bomber wasn’t an Islamist?”

  She picked up her cup and twirled it between her palms. It looked as if she were trying to warm herself up with it. “No. But I have to admit that I didn’t give all that much thought to the culprit’s motives.”

  Her words made Faris strangely sad. “He was Syrian, and had married a German woman,” he explained. “He wanted shared custody of their son, but the authorities had their doubts about him for some reason. They thought he might’ve been in contact with Islamist groups. They decided not to grant him custody, since they thought he might be a terrorist.”

  “Because he looked Middle Eastern,” Ira added. Her eyes were filled with sympathy, but he wasn’t sure for whom it was meant. For the Syrian or for himself. He swallowed.

  “Because he looked Middle Eastern. He was faced with prejudice wherever he turned, and eventually that drove him to do the very thing that people had been thinking he would do all along.”

  He thought about how he had stood there at the museum.

  I’m a Muslim like you, he had said

  And with that, he had added the drop that caused the barrel to overflow. Like the others, he had believed that an Islamist motive was behind this hostage situation. Although he himself was Middle Eastern, although he worked for SURV and experienced on a daily basis how many crimes had religious motives but had absolutely nothing to do with terrorist backgrounds, he had made this fatal mistake.

  And that mistake had driven the hostage-taker to press the button.

  As he thought about this, he rubbed his forehead.

  The topic was too overwhelming for him, so he tried to change it. He glanced up. “You didn’t answer my question. Are you married?”

  She shook her head slowly. “There was someone, once.” Her face hardened so abruptly that Faris was startled.

  “He’s dead,” he guessed, but to his surprise, Ira shook her head again. This time she smiled as she did so.

  “No, he isn’t. My life isn’t as dramatic as yours, I’m afraid. Thomas …” A wistful look flitted across her face as she uttered the name. “He’s a Catholic priest.”

  Faris didn’t understand what that was supposed to mean.

  “Catholic priests aren’t allowed to marry. Thomas and I … we were in a relationship until a few weeks ago. We had to keep it a secret, otherwise he would have lost his job.” She shrugged. “At the end, he chose his job over me.”

  “I understand.” Faris forced a mouthful of coffee down his constricted throat.

  Ira also took a sip. “You look like him.”

  Faris glanced over at his reflection in the windowpane. It was almost light outside, so he couldn’t see himself very clearly. Long, messy hair. Reddened eyes. “I look like your German Catholic priest?”

  “It’s your eyes.” She shivered. This topic seemed to bother her.

  For a few moments, neither of them said anything.

  “Where do you go, when you can’t be alone?” Faris finally asked.

  If the question surprised her, she didn’t let it show. “I have a friend. Jasmin. An Italian. Her father runs a trattoria in Charlottenburg called Da Rossi. When I feel like my ceiling might fall in on me, I go over there, and after that, I usually feel be …”

  Faris’s phone interrupted her sentence, and he quickly reached for it. Ira watched as he grew pale. “The bomber?” she whispered.

  Faris nodded gloomily, then answered.

  He didn’t say anything, just waited.

  “Who is this?” the caller’s distorted voice inquired.

  “Who do you think?” Faris replied through clenched teeth.

  “Faris?” A short hesitation. “You’re alive?”

  The shock was audible, and there was something else mixed in the question. Faris wasn’t sure, but to his ears, it almost sounded like relief. The caller’s next words confirmed his suspicion.

  “How lovely! We can now continue our little dance.”

  It wasn’t just relief. It was delight. Delight that this sadistic little game wasn’t over yet. Fury flooded Faris’s heart, and the numbness that had settled over him since Paul’s death instantly evaporated. “I’m alive!” he hissed. “But my partner went up in that explosion at the summer house, and you know …”

  “Paul Sievers is dead?” For several seconds, the other end of the line was silent.

  And then the stranger hung up.

  *

  Over the course of the night, Dennis and Jenny tried out various clubs, and the last one they visited close to dawn was so full that they only lasted there for fifteen minutes.

  Jenny giggled as they stepped out of the stuffy, ear-splitting atmosphere into the open air. The horizon to the East was already growing lighter, and she felt heady knowing they had stayed out all night.

  The effect of the cocktails that Jenny had drunk earlier was slowly abating, but she still felt carefree and wonderful, and she knew this was the result of being with Dennis. She would never need to drink again if he would just stay with her.

  At this point in the early morning, the air was considerably cooler, and Jenny was happy about that. She nestled close to Dennis and acted as if she were freezing.

  “Are you cold?” He gazed into her eyes.

  “A little,” she lied. The truth was that his gaze made her feel more hot than cold.

  He took off his jacket, draped it around her shoulders, and pulled her tighter against him. Just as she had wanted him to. She tried to hide a satisfied grin.

  “Where should we go now?” she asked.

  He didn’t reply but steered her toward one of the city’s numerous parks. He came to a stop in front of a bench that was secluded by a row of tall bushes.

  “Let’s just sit here,” he suggested. Was she mistaken or did his voice suddenly sound a little rawer?

  Her heart pounded like crazy.

  They sat down, and Jenny let Dennis pull her against his chest. He smelled of fairly pricey aftershave. She had noticed earlier, but now it was making her dizzy.

  “Mmmm!” She inhaled his scent appreciatively and closed her eyes. “You smell so good!”

  He chuckled softly before leaning down and kissing her.

  She felt like she was in seventh heaven.

  Something hard now pushed painfully into Jenny’s thigh. For one sweet breathless moment, she thought it was Dennis’s erection, but she then realized that it was one of the two glow sticks that she had taken off her neck in one of the clubs and stuck into her jeans pocket. With an embarrassed laugh, she readjusted it.

  “What is that?” Dennis studied her quizzically.

  “Nothing. Just this!” She fished the two glow sticks out of her pocket. One of them actually was much heavier than the other, she thought incidentally, feeling a little uneasy at this discovery. But this was totally irrelevant at the moment. She held the glow sticks under Dennis’s nose.

  “They were poking me.” She giggled as overconfidence sparkled like champagne in her veins. “And I thought you were just so happy to see me!” she exclaimed, quoting something she had heard in some stupid TV show.

  Startled by her lewdness,
Dennis just looked at her. He then started laughing. “Maybe I am,” he teased. He took the glow sticks away from her. He ran one of them along her jawline, then down her neck to the neckline of her blouse.

  She trembled. Everything inside of her felt as soft as wax, and when Dennis set the glow sticks aside and finally began to slide his hands underneath her clothes, she closed her eyes and savored the moment.

  Chapter 26

  The conversation with the caller had mobilized Faris’s reserves. He was suddenly back in fighting mode, and the desire to stop the bastard flamed up inside him with a new intensity. He felt a tingling in his veins that he hadn’t experienced in hours, and he knew that his adrenaline was back in full force.

  “I have to go,” he told Ira.

  She was still sitting at the kitchen table. Her left fingers were resting lightly on the edge of her mug, and her eyes wandered searchingly across his face.

  “Yes,” she finally said. “I think you’re better now.”

  He listened to his inner voices. It was possible that this strength was coming from one last flash of rebellion before his ultimate collapse, but he was determined to use it to finally bring this matter to an end. He would catch the bomber if it was the last thing he did!

  Ira seemed to catch sight of something in his eyes that bothered her, and she shivered. She quickly dropped her eyes to her hand. “Go!” she declared. “I’ll figure out my way home.”

  He paused, sensing that he should say something about last night. But he didn’t have any idea what that something should be. The embarrassment he felt at the thought of Ira’s bare skin under his hands made him dizzy.

  “Thanks,” he mumbled.

  She smiled a melancholy smile. “Glad to be of assistance.”

  *

  He drove his own car to Keithstraße, and shortly before seven o’clock, he stepped into the War Room. He paused briefly at the door and soaked up the scene. Almost all of his co-workers were there already: Gitta, Ben, Marc, and Shannon. Marc and Gitta were wearing different clothes from yesterday, which slightly soothed Faris’s guilty conscience. At least they had made it home as well. On the other hand, Shannon was still wearing the same outfit as the day before, and Ben didn’t look as if he had changed his clothes either, although this was harder to guess. He always wore the same beige shirts and pants.