The red countdown number had dropped to seventeen hours now.
On the once white surface of the case wall, dozens of photos were now taped up. Photos of the completely destroyed subway station, of computer fragments from Hesse’s abode, of the charred summer house. Photos of the victims who had been identified so far. Faris recognized the face of a famous Berlin actress who had been on the subway. And he saw pictures of several teenagers whose IDs had been photographed. The elderly nun with the pale eyes was also among the dead. Her body looked strangely undamaged, almost as if, even in death, God had held his hands over her. Faris studied the old woman’s slender, pale face for a few moments before letting his eyes continue to wander. At the sight of a blackened corpse, his stomach lurched. Paul! his mind screamed, and it took a second glance for him to read the name that stood above the photo. Bobby. He realized that this was the homeless man. The spot where a photo of Paul should have hung was empty. The vacant area in the otherwise cluttered wall struck Faris as a reflection of his own mental space.
Gitta was the first to notice him.
“Faris!” She was on her feet and in his arms before he could even take a breath. “Oh, Faris!” She clung to him, though only for a brief moment. She then pushed him away from her and examined him. Tears ran in broad rivers down her cheeks, before dripping from her jaw and onto the floor.
“Gitta.” Even this single word had difficulty leaving his throat. His t-shirt was wet where her cheek had pressed.
Gitta’s outburst had alerted the others that he was there. Shannon interrupted her reading of Werner Ellwanger’s books and looked up. She stood up at the same moment as Marc, but unlike the latter, who just stood helplessly at his desk looking as if he wished he were miles away, she walked over to Faris. She shyly held out her hand. “So sorry, dear,” she said huskily. Although her head was lowered, Faris could still tell that her eyelids were red. She never cried around her colleagues, and on one other occasion when she couldn’t help it, she had disappeared into the women’s restroom.
When she turned around and went back to her desk, her movements were jerky.
Marc still hadn’t moved. He gulped, then sat back down. Faris let him. There wasn’t anything to say.
As Faris stepped into the room, Ben had been on the phone, listening hard to whatever the other person had been saying. He now leaned over his computer screen. “Thanks,” he said. “That helps us a lot.” He then hung up without saying goodbye, stood up, and strode over to Faris.
Like Shannon, he couldn’t look right at Faris. “I … shit! What is there to say?” He lifted his head. His eyes swept quickly across Faris’s face, and Faris wished he knew what he had seen there. It must have been alarming, since Ben took a quick step back in response. “My condolences,” he exclaimed before beating a retreat.
Faris looked around. Paul’s desk chair was the only unoccupied chair in the War Room, and something inside him rebelled against the thought of using it. So he crossed his arms and leaned against the case table. It was very obvious that Paul’s death had changed something in this room. A grim energy now emanated from the people that he knew so well. It washed over Faris like a heat wave, engulfing him. Emotional radioactivity, he thought. It felt as if everything in here would vanish in an extraordinarily blinding flash of light.
“Let’s concentrate on catching this pig,” he said.
He could almost physically feel the others’ relief. With grim, silent faces, they all returned to their work.
“Where’s Tromsdorff?” Faris asked.
“He had to appear in front of the Senator of the Interior,” Marc explained. “Along with Geiger and the other departmental chiefs.”
Faris nodded before turning toward the case wall.
A mind map of sorts was dedicated to the summer house explosion. All the details that were known had been written down inside hurriedly drawn circles. For a while, Faris couldn’t take his eyes off of it, but then he turned to some words that Paul had jotted down the day before. The handwriting was jaunty, so typically Paul, that for a minute, Faris couldn’t move. Images and memories swept through his mind.
“Hey.” Someone touched his shoulder, and he yanked himself out of the past. Gitta was standing next to him. She had traded her colorful garments for ones in a subdued dark blue. Faris surmised that this was probably the most somber color she had in her closet.
He automatically glanced down at his black t-shirt.
“Everything alright?” Gitta asked softly.
Nothing’s alright!
Faris held back this reply. “Yeah.” He was about to add something when Ben uttered a satisfied “There you go!” at his desk.
All eyes turned toward him. “What have you got?” Shannon asked.
He pointed at his monitor. “This is the schematic we found on Alexander’s computer. I think it might be a diagram of the heart monitor that’s attached to Ellwanger. We don’t see much of it on the video. I was able to zoom in on one clip and print it.” He held up a color printout that had been lying next to his keyboard. It was fairly blurry, but a company logo was still recognizable on it. MedicCare, Faris read.
“MedicCare has its headquarters in Eastern Europe,” Ben continued. “To be more exact, in Ukraine. They’re an hour ahead of us, and this morning, I reached someone who works there. I spoke to one of the developers.” He looked down the line of his co-workers. “Did you know that almost all of them there speak German?” When nobody replied, he cleared his throat. “Anyway, I sent them the diagram, and they have just responded. It is actually an original schematic from one of their devices.” He fell silent and grinned widely.
“And?” Faris wasn’t quite clear about what they were supposed to do with this information. He could tell from the others’ puzzled faces that they felt the same as he did.
“I described our little problem to the technicians there,” Ben continued. He seemed a little annoyed at having to provide an explanation. “They studied the diagram and told me how the culprit will make the bombs go off. It’s a ton of technical jargon, which I’ll spare you, but there’s one important thing. The MedicCare team is certain that all we have to do is shut off the monitor, to prevent him from sending the detonation impulse.” He looked around triumphantly.
“Nice,” Shannon grunted drily. “All we have to do now is find it.”
Ben ducked his head, but then shrugged indifferently. “That’s your job,” he grumbled. He retreated to his computer and buried himself once more in his data and programs. As usual, whenever he felt like he had done good work that the others didn’t respect enough, he acted as though he had been insulted.
Before any of them could say anything, Gitta’s office phone rang. She hurried to her desk.
“Are you serious?” she exclaimed immediately. “That’s amazing!” As she hung up, an expression of grim satisfaction flashed across her face. “That was Tromsdorff.” She pressed her hands flatly against each other and tapped her lips with her pointer fingers. “It looks like some officers in the Kreuzberg area have picked up a young man who might be Alexander. They’re bringing him over here.”
*
As they waited for the suspect to be delivered, Faris used the time to read through the newest file entries in the DigA A. He still couldn’t bring himself to sit at Paul’s desk, so he had asked Marc if he could have his old spot back. Marc nodded without saying a word. Taking his black cup with him, he set off to brew a fresh pot of coffee.
The list of entries for their case had by now grown to a practically unmanageable scale. Faris knew that the DigA A was powered by algorithms that structured and organized the bulk of information and then searched for connections that the investigators might have missed. He couldn’t recall, however, that SURV had ever solved a case as a result of these algorithms. Nor did he ever inquire if other departments had similar experiences. He wanted to remain convinced that human reason protected Berlin from villains, not some series of zeroes and ones on a compute
r somewhere.
He opened several memos at random, skimmed them, and then closed them because they didn’t help him any. As he stared at the long list of entries, trying to determine the best way to handle the data, a new entry appeared at the bottom of the list, bearing a current timestamp. When Faris clicked on it, he saw that the file contained the transcript from the interview with a Norbert Langner, the husband of one of the Klersch Museum victims. The man had alibis that covered all four bombings, so he wasn’t a suspect.
Following a hunch, Faris opened the list of museum victims. He skimmed the names until he found the woman in question. At the time of her death, Nina Langner had been twenty-seven years old. The lines swam in front of Faris’s eyes for a moment. He blinked and continued to read down the list.
Langner, Nina.
Mayer, Hiltrud.
Mechow, Ludmilla.
There were no files on Ludmilla Mechow. With a quick check, Faris determined that the interviews with her relatives were the only ones missing from the system.
Suddenly, Tromsdorff’s voice interrupted Faris’s thoughts.
“… and take him to the interrogation room!”
Faris now noticed that someone must have left the War Room, because the door was standing wide open. He could see a section of the corridor and the landing at the top of the stairs, as well as the group of men about to reach it. Tromsdorff was ahead, followed by two officers in uniform who were leading a young man with shaggy black hair whose hands were cuffed in front of him. As they walked past the door to the conference room, the prisoner lifted his head. His chin-length hair slipped to the side, and his narrow, pale face emerged.
“Good Lord!” Gitta gasped, as her eyes flew to the photo from Ira’s album hanging on the case wall.
A cold stone settled into Faris’s chest.
The man was Alexander Ellwanger.
And it was startling how young he looked.
*
Faris asked Tromsdorff if he could be the first to interview Alexander. Tromsdorff was reluctant to agree, since Faris was still officially suspended, but Dr. Geiger wasn’t in the office yet and they needed fast results. So Tromsdorff finally agreed, though with a visibly heavy heart.
Before he joined Alexander, Faris removed several photos from the case wall and placed them in a folder. At the door to the interrogation room, he paused to steel himself for what was coming, and it took several seconds before he had the strength to enter the room.
The air in the small, bare room was cool and smelled a little stale. There was no furniture in the room except for a table with a mounted microphone and two plain plastic chairs.
Alexander was sitting on one of the chairs. Someone had removed his handcuffs. He sat there like a pile of misery, his head lowered, and his hands folded as if in prayer. A strong stench emanated from him, one that Faris knew all too well. Sweat and blood. Alexander’s clothes were covered with dried blood splatter. His black hoodie was stuck to his skin, and his ribs were visible through the fabric.
Faris glanced at the one-way mirror to his right. He knew that his fellow officers were in the adjacent room. One of them was ready to rush in to take over the interview as soon as anything unforeseen happened or Faris reached a dead end.
Earlier, Paul had been the one who did that …
Faris was instantly overcome by a gnawing, forlorn feeling. The awareness that he couldn’t fall back on his partner’s support, that he never would be able to do that again, was gut-wrenching. He took a deep breath, and then strode over to the table and deposited his folder on it. Faris ignored the recorder positioned between himself and the young man. “Alexander Ellwanger?” he asked.
Alexander didn’t react immediately. Faris could hear him mumble inarticulately, and he assumed that the boy was praying. After two or three minutes that Faris let pass without interruption, Alexander raised his head. “Yes.” His voice was hoarse.
He was practically a child. His facial features looked soft, and a soft down covered his upper lip and chin. The blood spattered across his body had reached his face. He had tried to scrub it off, but not thoroughly enough. Residue remained on his cheekbone and beside his left nostril. The undersides of his fingernails were black.
Faris kept his eyes fixed on Alexander’s hands as he pulled his chair out from the table and sat down.
“You got yourself pretty dirty,” he started.
The young man studied his hands as if they didn’t belong to him. “That’s blood,” he whispered almost inaudibly.
Faris waited a moment to see if he wanted to say anything else, but he didn’t. “Your father’s blood?” Faris asked.
Alexander nodded.
Faris looked up in surprise as he stifled a rush of excitement. Was it really going to be this easy to get a confession? “Did you … crucify your father, Mr. Ellwanger?” he asked gently.
“Mr. Ellwanger is my father. Please call me Alexander. Everyone else does.”
“Fine. Alexander. Did you crucify your father?” This time the question made him less uncomfortable.
Alexander pressed his palms together. It looked as if he had to hold onto himself. After a small eternity, he looked up. “Yes.”
“Where is he?”
But Alexander just shook his head and pressed his lips together.
Faris leaned forward slightly. “You’d rather not tell me?”
Alexander shook his head again.
“Why not?
“Because I’m not allowed to.”
The neon bulb on the ceiling buzzed softly. In Faris’s ears, the noise turned into a faint beeping. “Who has forbidden you to?”
“My father.”
Faris inhaled through his teeth. “What did you say?”
Alexander looked skyward. In his eyes shimmered with something that looked like madness.
“Your father forbade you to tell anyone where you set up his cross.” Faris expressed this as a statement.
Alexander nodded.
“You’re talking about your heavenly father – about God, right?”
“No.”
“Why did your father forbid it, Alexander?”
Alexander didn’t know the answer to this, or he was reluctant to give it. He simply lowered his head. His black hair fell in front of his eyes and strengthened Faris’s impression of having a stubborn teenager in front of him.
“Why did your father forbid it?” he repeated.
“Because Christ hasn’t appeared to him yet.”
Faris leaned back. “You’re going to have to explain that to me.”
And to his amazement, Alexander actually did start to talk. He talked about spiritual experiences, about the forgiveness of sins through washing with blood, from the boundless fear of eternal damnation. And he talked about encountering God in Jesus Christ and about rising in the suffering of Christ.
Faris didn’t understand a single word he said.
He shot a quick glance at the mirror and wished that he could see his colleagues. Hopefully, Shannon had some idea of what to do with all this babbling.
He then turned back to the young man who sat slumped over on his chair. A profound horror penetrated his chest. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you nailed your father to a cross so that he could have some kind of spiritual experience?”
Alexander nodded.
“But what do the bombs mean, then?” The question came sharp and hard.
Alexander’s head snapped up in astonishment. “What bombs?” His face was frankly astounded.
“The bombs you set off yesterday, Alexander!”
The young man instantly looked as if he wanted to jump up and run away. His hands began to tremble, as did his chin. He didn’t look as cool and clever as the caller had seemed all along, and more than that, he didn’t look anything like a bomber. Faris found himself staring at Alexander’s hoodie. It looked like the top worn by the man in the video. Faris took this as proof that Alexander’s claims were true. He had nailed his father to th
e cross, and he was filmed while doing it. But the caller – their mysterious second culprit – was still unknown.
“I don’t know anything about any bombs,” Alexander murmured, wrenching Faris out of his thoughts.
“Who helped you do this?” Faris countered.
Alexander understood that he was talking about the crucifixion, not about the bombs. “I … nobody …” The lie was written across his face. Someone had helped him, and he knew who it was.
Faris hesitated. He considered what his next steps should be and decided to increase the pressure on Alexander. He would continue to act as if he thought the young man was the bomber. Normally, suspects were more willing to name their accomplices if they knew the consequences of what they had done.
With a jerk, Faris jumped to his feet. “Do you think I’m an idiot? You crucified your father, as you have admitted yourself. You attached electrodes to him that are linked to a bomb at the Olympic Stadium. You blew up the subway at the Bismarckstraße station, my friend’s office, and your father’s summer house …”
As he said these last words, he ran out of air. He saw Paul’s blackened face and braced himself against the table to keep from staggering.
Alexander tried to pull away from him as far as possible. “I didn’t do those things,” he whispered, tears pooling in his eyes.
Faris reached for the file holding the photos. He pulled them out, one after the other, and slammed them down in front of Alexander. Pictures of the old nun, the blackened corpse of the homeless man, the ruins of the summer house. Faris’s heart was pounding.
“Look at what your bombs did!” he said to Alexander, tapping the picture of the nun. “This was a nun, Alexander. Your bomb killed her as she was heading to a service of worship. Do you want to know her name? Her name was Sister Xaveria.” He had read her name up on the case wall and had memorized it. “What do you think? Was this woman looking forward to seeing the Pope this evening? And she was traveling with children. Children, Alexander!”
Forty Hours: A breath-taking thriller Page 26