Forty Hours: A breath-taking thriller

by Kathrin Lange

Faris glanced up at Tromsdorff. His lips were now a very thin line, and with his head tilted, he was listening to Hesse’s words which weren’t just coming out of Faris’s phone, but also out of the speaker attached to Ben’s devices. And as Faris looked into Tromsdorff’s eyes, he discovered a steeliness there that he had never seen before.

  “You know where the cross is by now, don’t you?” Hesse asked.

  Faris envisioned the spacious terminal in the old airport and, in a flash, realized why he had felt a sense of impending doom there. Even now, hours later, the thought of it gave him chills. “Tempelhof,” he murmured.

  “Good.” Hesse sounded satisfied. “I want you here in one hour.”

  “Why in an hour?” Faris asked. The drive to the airport would only take him twenty minutes, thirty max.

  Hesse didn’t answer the question. “In one hour,” he repeated. “Or else.”

  Ben shivered. “What does that mean? A duel or what?”

  Faris once again caught Tromsdorff’s eyes. What should I do?

  Tromsdorff looked uncertain.

  “Come alone, Faris.” Hesse’s voice broke through the silence. “And when you get here, enter the airport the same way we did together. If you don’t do as I ask, I’ll set off the next bomb.”

  “What are your plans?” Faris felt a need to sit down, but he struggled against it. He was afraid that if he did that, he would never find the strength to stand up again. He stared at Tromsdorff, pleading silently.

  Let me go! he mouthed silently.

  Tromsdorff still hesitated. Faris could guess what was going on in his mind. It would go against all of the protocols to allow a detective to go by himself into such a situation. If he agreed, it could cost them all their jobs. The entire SURV team would be at risk.

  As would be the lives of hundreds, even thousands, of people.

  Impatience prickled through Faris’s veins. He wished he could rush out of the room and speed off in his car. But he stood there and waited for Tromsdorff’s decision.

  Hesse seemed to notice the hesitation. “I’m weighing up my options for the next bomb. What do you think of the banking district? There aren’t all that many working there today, but a small attack on Deutsche Bank would have some kind of impact on the stock market, don’t you think?” He paused thoughtfully. “Or what about the glow stick that Lilly …”

  “Don’t you dare!” Faris shouted so hoarsely that the words hurt his throat. “If anything happens to her …” he tried to imply a threat, all the while hoping that the officers Tromsdorff had sent had already reached Laura and taken her to safety.

  Hesse simply laughed, then hung up.

  In the meantime, Tromsdorff had made his mind up. Turning around, he marched over to his office and returned a few minutes later with Faris’s gun. He held it out to Faris. “Just in case.”

  Faris stuck the gun into his waistband. He hadn’t thought to put his holster on this morning. With that, he turned to leave.

  “Wait!” Ben threw up his arm to stop Faris. “If you find Ellwanger and that cross, you can just disarm the bombs.”

  “I know, by turning off the monitor.” Faris recalled Ben’s instructions.

  “Yes, but we won’t be able to take out the bombs that the bastard can directly control that way.” Ben let the sentence hang in the air for a moment before he added: “If you come face-to-face with Hesse, shoot him.”

  Faris could feel a black hole open up within him. “We’ll see,” he murmured.

  *

  A few minutes later, he was behind the wheel of the BMW and turning off of Keithstraße onto Kurfürstenstraße when Hesse called back. Ben had activated a phone link so that Faris’s colleagues in the War Room could also talk to Hesse, and he had provided Faris with a headset so that he could keep both hands on the wheel and talk on the phone at the same time. This was critical, because Faris was trembling so much that he could hardly insert the key into the ignition.

  “Explain to me now why you’re doing all this,” he said as struggled to keep from swerving out of his lane. The last thing he needed was to draw the attention of a traffic officer.

  “You know the answer to that already,” Hesse replied. Faris recalled how the reporter’s office had been blown up. That had prevented Hesse’s name from making it onto a list of suspects. “My mother was killed in the …”

  “That’s bullshit!” Faris interrupted him angrily. If he listened closely, he could hear noises from the War Room. “I know you well, don’t forget that!” He controlled himself before continuing. “Your relationship with your mother was anything but close.”

  He remembered one evening at the police academy when he and Hesse had eaten supper together and chatted about their families. And he still hadn’t forgotten the day when Hesse admitted to him that his mother had given him away when he was five years old. Because she “simply wasn’t in the mood to keep me around” as Hesse had put it. Faris had extrapolated from this declaration that she could no longer handle the raising of her son, and he had been taken away from her because of that. But he hadn’t contradicted Hesse, because he knew how important rage could be, to keep oneself from coming apart at the seams over a particular situation. Because of her, Hesse had spent his childhood in an orphanage. Thus, there was no reason at all for him to have reacted violently to her death at the museum.

  “You know me?” Hesse hissed. Although the voice distorter was turned off, his voice now sounded even stranger than before. Full of madness. And hate. “You think you know me? Whatever made you think that? You might have known the Niklas who went to the police academy with you.”

  Faris switched on his turn signal and turned right onto Potsdamer Straße. Hesse’s burst of anger intensified the feeling that he was talking to a total stranger. He drove underneath a bridge.

  “Did you know that I didn’t work in Wiesbaden long?”

  “No. You never wanted …”

  “Just let him talk, Faris,” Tromsdorff urged over the phone link, and Faris could guess what his supervisor wanted to achieve from this.

  As long as he’s talking, he’s not pressing the trigger.

  Hesse chuckled in amusement, since he had also heard Tromsdorff’s voice.

  And he resumed his story. “I spent a couple of months at the academy, and then they asked me if I might be interested in working as an instructor for police officers in Afghanistan.”

  “And you agreed.” Faris came to a stop at a red light. A flashy, dark blue Mercedes was sitting in front of him. A sticker announcing No brats on board was stuck to the back window.

  “I did,” Hesse confirmed. “I went to Afghanistan, to the Balch Province, and I helped to train the students there.” He took a deep breath that sounded like a sigh. He was then silent for a while.

  The noises from the War Room grew louder than before. Faris’s co-workers were talking among themselves about something, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  In the meantime, he had driven down Potsdamer Straße. Hesse still hadn’t said anything by the time he turned onto Hauptstraße, so he asked cautiously: “And?”

  Hesse sighed again. “After I had been there for a few months, I met a woman.”

  A premonition sent a shudder through Faris, like a cool draft. “The picture on your desk.” He recalled the young, dark-haired woman with the golden star earrings in the photo he had seen in Hesse’s office.

  “Faridah,” Hesse said softly. “That was her name.”

  “A lovely name.” Faris struggled with a sudden flash of sympathy. He suspected that something bad had happened to Faridah. He had to force himself to focus on the fact that Hesse’s fingers were on the trigger.

  “She is dead.” The three words sounded like a sob.

  Faris could feel the edge of the abyss they were standing next to. “What happened?” he asked carefully.

  “I fell in love with her. And she felt the same for me.” For a long moment, the only sound on the phone was Hesse’s heavy
breathing. “That cost her her life.”

  As Faris drove past the Old Schöneberger Cemetery and the two churches that stood right next to each other there, he listened to the reporter’s belabored breathing.

  “They condemned her for that,” he finally said slowly.

  Another long pause followed this.

  “And then stoned her.”

  Over his headset, Faris heard Shannon swear under her breath.

  Although he was in traffic and shouldn’t have done it, Faris closed his eyes. It took a long beep from another car to jolt him back to reality. His eyes flew open, and he swerved back into his lane. A sports car sped past him angrily, and he saw the driver shouting at him.

  “She was married,” he said quietly. He didn’t need to ask. He just knew.

  Hesse made a noise that sounded like a whimper. “I was forced to watch.” He was now talking quietly too. Very quietly. And yet the words seared themselves into Faris’s brain. “They made me watch, Faris! I watched the stones fly, every single one of them. Do you know what sound a stone makes when it hits a skull? Do you know what it feels like to hope that the next rock will be the one that finally kills someone because you can’t take it anymore?”

  Faris could hear the trembling in Hesse’s voice, followed by a cough.

  The reporter suddenly sounded cool and composed again. The transformation was so abrupt that it filled Faris with horror.

  “I left Afghanistan after that and returned to Berlin. Believe me, it took me quite a while to work through all that.”

  Faris had to stop at another light. A small group of conference-goers walked down the crosswalk. Demonstrators holding printed devil posters were standing on the other side of the street. The light switched to green, and Faris accelerated. At this point, he was glad that Hesse had given him an hour to reach the airport. The traffic was awful.

  “And you established hotnewzz,” Faris said. “You had started writing already back in your teens whenever something was bothering you.”

  “Sometimes I can’t go to sleep at night, because I can’t get those pictures out of my head. And then I write stuff. It helps.”

  Faris had always envied Hesse for this. He didn’t have any effective mechanism for getting rid of the often-horrifying images that his job left him with. He hesitated.

  “Or you build bombs and blow them up.”

  Hesse ignored him. “I had just gotten about halfway back up on my feet, when what do you think happened?” He didn’t give Faris a chance to respond but provided the answer himself. “That bastard in the museum blew up my mother.”

  “The catalyst,” Faris heard Shannon say in the War Room, and he felt a twinge at this because it had always been Paul who had said those words in the past. All at once, every bit of sympathy he felt for Hesse vanished. This man on the other end of the line – he was no longer his friend. He wasn’t some pathetic victim, but the asshole who had his partner’s death on his conscience!

  “Despite the fact my mother gave me away like an old hat when I was five,” Hesse continued, “I kept in touch with her. And when she died, I took care of her estate. It was from some of the papers she left behind that I learned who my biological father was. My mom spent her whole life refusing to tell me who he was. And you know what else she failed to tell me? That I had a half-brother.”

  “Alexander.”

  “Alexander.” Hesse chuckled softly, and Faris couldn’t deny the impression that he was slowly drifting into insanity. “But you know what? We can chat about all this later. Where are you now?”

  Faris looked through the windshield. “I’m at the Stadtring, right at the underpass.”

  “Wh …” The line crackled as Faris drove through the short tunnel. For a moment, the connection was quite bad. “... tell you!”

  Faris considered his next move. “What happens if I don’t come alone?”

  “If you don’t, your sweetheart dies!” The threat had a derisive edge and sounded completely insane.

  Faris’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel, and his foot pressed harder on the gas pedal. “Which sweetheart?” he asked carefully, although he felt like he already knew the answer.

  “Don’t act so naive!” Hesse snarled.

  Faris gulped in horror. “Laura?” The word hurt his throat.

  “Wait a sec.” More crackling in the line. “Say hello to Faris, my dear!”

  There was a snap, then a voice said: “Faris?”

  “Laura!” He could hardly breathe.

  “He overpowered me,” she murmured. She sounded sleepy. “You have to …”

  He didn’t hear the rest because Hesse was back on the line now. “That makes everything a little more interesting, doesn’t it?” The connection was poor. “In any case, it shows that you had better do what I say!”

  Hot fury shot through Faris’s veins, and he was glad of it, because it made him feel stronger. Nonetheless, he needed to keep a clear head. He knew that Tromsdorff and the others were listening. Tromsdorff would do everything he could to help him bring Hesse in. But as long as the bastard had his fingers on the trigger, there wasn’t much they could do.

  Except obey the orders they were given.

  “What do you want from me?” Faris asked through dry lips. “What do you hope to achieve with this little game?”

  Hesse didn’t answer.

  “Why don’t you just blow up the stadium and be done with it?”

  “The stadium? Oh, right. That’s going to be the crowning glory of my little play. My crown of thorns, so to speak.” The journalist chuckled again. “The entire world will begin to understand, then.”

  “Understand what? That their gods weren’t able to protect them from you?”

  Hesse made a puzzled sound, then fell silent for a moment. “You saw the video I sent to N24, right?”

  “Of course. Just tell me, what do you hope to achieve with all this?”

  “I’m going to play it on the big screen right before the bombs explode. Someone’s always filming stuff when a disaster like that happens. And this video will land on the internet. My question to the world will be out there in huge letters, Faris. Why are your gods letting this happen? Right after that, the explosion that will pulverize the stadium. People will finally start telling their gods to go to hell! Excuse the pun.”

  A frantic mumbling broke out in the War Room.

  Faris blinked. His head ached, and whenever he blinked, he saw dark red dots zoom around him. “It’s still …” he glanced at the clock, “... eleven hours until the Pope’s Mass. What’s going to happen until then, Niklas?”

  Hesse didn’t reply. Instead he said, “Do you know what’s going on in the stadium right now? A Taizé service. They’re singing, Faris. I’m afraid I might need to rework my schedule a little. I’ve been planning to use the papal Mass for my fiery finale, but God has other plans.” He giggled. “I would guess that the stands are about two-thirds full. Do you know how many people that is? Just think!”

  Faris wanted to respond, but wasn’t fast enough.

  Hesse had hung up.

  “That’s insane!” Shannon said, now closer to the microphone so that Faris could hear her clearly. Deep inside, Faris felt regret. Regret that the Niklas Hesse he had once known no longer existed. He tried to imagine what had happened in Afghanistan. To be made to watch the stoning of a woman that you loved … He had a hard time imagining what that must be like. Laura’s face suddenly flashed through his mind. She was in the hands of this mad man. He had to focus if he wanted to save her.

  “He’s crazy,” he mumbled. “Totally crazy.”

  “He’s definitely showing signs of being delusional,” Tromsdorff agreed. “He thinks he’s on a mission.”

  And Marc added: “He really thinks he can make the human race give up their religions, doesn’t he?”

  “People have tried for centuries to answer the question of theodicy,” Shannon said. “No catastrophe – whether caused by humans or by natu
re – has ever compelled them to fundamentally question or give up their faith.”

  For a moment, they were all silent, in shock.

  Agitated beeping from behind Faris reminded him that he needed to concentrate on the road. He now realized that he had been driving slower and slower, and now he accelerated again. The driver who had almost plowed into his bumper shot him the middle finger as he passed him. Faris decided against making an apologetic gesture. “You heard that he has Laura, right?”

  Tromsdorff’s voice was flat. “We did. I informed Andersen. The GSG 9 has been on standby for hours already. He is deploying them as we speak. Where are you?”

  Faris could guess at the actual meaning behind those words.

  Don’t go in alone.

  He gritted his teeth. He had just exited the city freeway and was turning right onto Tempelhofer Damm. An older woman merged into his lane, right in front of his bumper. He had to slam on the brakes to keep from hitting her, and in his thoughts, he shot the most scathing profanity he could think of in her direction. Out loud he said: “Almost there. Hesse isn’t stupid. He’s set up cameras or something like that all over the place. The officers won’t stand a chance of storming the airport before he pushes the trigger.”

  “Still!” Tromsdorff didn’t say anything for several seconds. “We’ll only survive this as a team, Faris! Did you hear me? As a team!”

  Faris was silent.

  “Notify them before you go in,” Tromsdorff ordered.

  *

  The mood in the Olympic Stadium was amazing, and Jenny felt equally amazing. She was here, at this conference, at the side of the coolest guy she had ever known.

  She shot a sideways look at Dennis.

  After last night – this morning, she corrected herself, since it had been almost dawn – when he had kissed her to the point of sheer unconsciousness on the park bench, he had pulled back from her. Breathing heavily, he had gasped: “Not here. Not like this!”

  At first, Jenny had been disappointed, but then she realized that he was right.

  Tonight! Today would finally be the day. Dennis had booked a hotel room. Her body was filled with a tingling sensation as she thought about having sex for the first time with him.