Her fingers clutched at the glow stick that was hanging from her neck.
Dennis noticed her gaze. He smiled at her and wrapped his hand around hers. His skin was warm and a little rough.
On the stage up front, the one on which the Pope would step a few hours later, a huge gospel choir was singing Taizé songs. They were currently singing in French.
“C’est toi, ma lampe, Seigneur …”
Jenny hummed along to the familiar tune.
But the only thing she could think about was what was going to happen tonight.
*
The officers from the 632 and the GSG 9 had set up a mobile deployment base within a short distance of the airport, and as ordered, Faris checked in with them. There were several discussions about why they shouldn’t allow him to enter the building alone, but Hesse managed to reach Marvin Andersen and to make it clear that he was the one calling these shots. So, as Hesse instructed, Faris entered the terminal on his own, using the same entrance that he and the reporter had used the day before. He immediately found himself back in the gigantic terminal hall. His gun was in his hand. This time, the feeling of impending doom was so palpable that his pistol felt as heavy as lead.
“So nice to see you.” Hesse’s voice echoed through the cavernous space. He was standing at the other end of the hall, on the steps that led up the former main entrance. His hands were hanging loose at his sides, and – Faris could hardly believe his eyes – they were empty. No trace of a gun or of the trigger Faris had expected to see.
Duel, he heard Ben’s words again.
What was going on here?
Faris pointed his pistol at Hesse. The distance between them seemed to stretch into eternity, and then, like a rubber band stretched to its fullest extent and then released, everything snapped back to its appropriate position. It took a moment for Faris to realize that he had suffered a dizzy spell, which had caused that perception.
“I’m here, Niklas,” he said. “Now what?”
“Come with me!” Hesse strode down the steps and turned left to where another staircase led down to the basement level.
Through his scope, Faris watched his former friend cross the hall.
Shoot him!
The demand rang so clearly through his mind that he almost looked around to see if someone was standing behind him. The black hole that he had sensed inside of him earlier grew larger, and Faris tightened his jaw. He wouldn’t look into this abyss! He tried as forcefully as he could to command the cold voice in his head to shut up.
“Your trigger finger is twitching,” Hesse remarked with a smile. “I hope you have yourself under control.”
Faris ignored it. “Where are you taking me, Niklas?” he asked as they descended the lower staircase. “To the basement restrooms?”
Hesse’s smile turned into a wide grin. “I don’t care if you want to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for your fellow officers. But don’t play me for a fool. Yes, the cross is in the old restrooms in the basement, people! You’ll need to use the stairs on the left.”
Faris took one of his hands off the gun and pressed his earpiece more firmly into his ear. “Did you get that, Robert?”
“Loud and clear,” Tromsdorff confirmed.
“Hesse is unarmed,” Faris reported.
The reporter laughed. By now, he had reached the door to the former men’s restroom. With a mocking gesture, he shoved it open and invited Faris to enter. A regular, slow beeping sound could now be heard in the corridor.
The heart monitor.
Faris stepped into the low space, and on the other side of the door, he took a step to the side in order to keep Hesse in sight. For a moment, his gun was pointing at the floor.
The sight of the cross struck him like a whip. The upper beam almost touched the ceiling, and Werner Ellwanger’s feet cleared the dirty floor tiles by only a few centimeters. The pungent smell of blood and other bodily fluids forged an unpleasant and bitter path through Faris’s consciousness. The electrodes on Ellwanger’s chest were practically flush with his pale, waxy skin. Faris could see the cables that ran from them to a receiver attached to Ellwanger’s hip. He assumed that this was the receiver that conveyed the recorded data to the monitor, which would then send the signal for the bombs across the city to …
Faris’s thoughts came to a stumbling halt as he caught sight of Laura. Tied up and gagged, she was lying in a corner. She stared at him fearfully with large blue eyes and looked so forlorn that it almost destroyed him.
“I’m here,” he said to her.
Hesse laughed loudly. “Yes, your knight in shining armor is here. Did you know, Laura Darling, that in German, Faris means knight. That’s true, isn’t it? How about we see if he is a white or a black knight.”
As he was talking, Faris glanced over at the heart monitor, which was standing a little to the side. The screen attached to the front of it indicated a regular sine curve. A strong spotlight and a camera on a tripod were positioned right next to the entry door. The spotlight illuminated every centimeter of the entire scene. In its light, the blood on Ellwanger’s white body stood out garish and bright.
Faris turned his attention back to Laura. Her silky hairy was tousled, her face was pale. He could see several dark red spots on her neck that looked like bruises. What had the bastard done to her?
“I’m here now,” he said to Hesse. “Let her go!”
“Why would I do that?” Loathing and madness flashed across the reporter’s face. “No, Faris,” he added slowly. “Laura will die, and you will watch, just as I had to watch Faridah’s death.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Faris saw Laura start to frantically shake her head.
I won’t let that happen! he thought as forcefully as he could, hoping that she would be able to see the determination in his body language. He didn’t understand what he and Laura had to do with Faridah’s death, but he was convinced that he had passed the point of being able to argue rationally with Hesse. Delusional, he could hear Shannon saying. In Hesse’s reality, Faris was guilty of everything that had happened, and there was nothing he could do to change that.
“What happened to you?” he murmured. “Why do you hate me so much?”
Something crackled in Faris’s earpiece. The reception down here was bad. He pointed his gun at Hesse’s abdomen. “And what makes you so sure that I won’t just shoot you right here and now?”
The chasm within Faris was now wide and bottomless.
Hesse shrugged. “Probably the fact that you aren’t sure if I have an ace up my sleeve.”
That was true. Hesse’s demeanor projected confidence and self-assuredness. It was likely that everything playing itself out here was part of his plan.
But what was the plan? What did Hesse plan to do?
Faris racked his brain, but he simply couldn’t connect the dots.
Impending doom …
He struggled against the overwhelming urge to close his eyes. He longed for peace and quiet. For sleep.
“You know that my superiors consider me a ticking time bomb,” he said softly. “What makes you so sure that I won’t just give it a gamble?”
Hesse took a step back. Uncertainty suddenly flared in his eyes, and Faris was surprised at himself. This wasn’t the first time that someone had been able to see in his eyes the black abyss lurking inside him.
Without taking his eyes from Hesse, Faris moved backwards, closer to the heart monitor. Under other circumstances, the constant beeping would have had a calming effect on him. But right now, the regular, quiet rhythm pierced him.
Chapter 30
“Something’s not right here.” Ben Schneider was tapping the top of his pen rhythmically against his teeth as he gazed at the heart monitor on Alexander’s computer. In the background, he could hear the dueling words flying between Faris and Hesse. Ben’s stomach felt uneasy.
They were missing something. But what?
The situation seemed so utterly unreal. Hesse’s actions were c
ompletely illogical. Could that be explained away by his madness?
Why didn’t the reporter have a gun to use against Faris? Why had they found the diagram for the heart monitor on Alexander Ellwanger’s computer? As things looked right now, Alexander was a victim – so how had the diagram gotten onto his computer? It was this last question that was the primary cause of Ben’s stomachache.
As he considered this, his eyes moved restlessly across the screen. The Wi-Fi indicator in the upper right corner was gray. The computer was offline, just as it was supposed to be. Ben himself had disconnected the machine from the internet, as soon as Marc Sommer had handed it to him. Ben clicked aimlessly through the various windows on the desktop. And suddenly he found himself staring at the diagram’s creation date.
“Shit!” he exclaimed. His stomachache intensified tenfold.
He once again glanced at the Wi-Fi indicator. With flying fingers, Ben now opened one of the utility programs and inputted a command order.
His eyes widened as he caught sight of an IP address that appeared where the word inactive should have been. He suddenly leaped to his feet so quickly that his chair rolled backward and slammed against the wall.
“Faris!” he shouted. “Faris, can you hear me? Do NOT turn off the monitor under any circumstances! Did you hear me?” He glanced over at his fellow officers’ shocked faces, but he didn’t pay the slightest attention to their puzzled looks. “The bombs will explode as soon as you turn off the monitor!”
*
A loud crackling in his earpiece caused a dull pain to spread through Faris’s head. The connection down here was almost completely nonexistent. He only heard fragments of what the others were saying from the War Room.
“Fa … me … turn off …”
With the hand with which he had just been reaching for the monitor switch, he reached for his ear. “Ben? Is that you?” He shot a sideways glance at Hesse who was now back to being calm and relaxed. “Ben? What did you say? I didn’t get it.” Unsettled, Faris once again reached for the switch.
Laura’s gaze rested on him like a great weight. He forced himself to not be distracted from what he needed to do.
Focus!
Had Ben wanted to tell him something; or had that simply been part of the conversation that his colleagues were having back on Keithstraße? He had no idea. Ben’s voice had sounded excited, but that could have been caused by the problems with the connection. The beeping of the monitor had become even, nerve-frazzling background noise.
Faris glanced up at Ellwanger, whose face resembled that of a man who had already been dead for a long time. The streaks of blood that ran down his cheeks, chin and neck looked like gaping wounds in the garish glare of the spotlight. As Faris argued with himself about what to do next, Ellwanger suddenly opened his eyes.
Faris flinched.
Ellwanger’s eyes were bleary. His lips moved without making a sound. Then a long, drawn-out sound issued from his mouth. Half groan, half word.
“Looor…?”
Faris clenched his teeth. It was obvious that the man was in anguish. He had to finally make up his mind! He looked over at Hesse irresolutely, and slowly stretched his hand out toward the switch for a third time.
*
Jenny leaned against Dennis’s chest and swayed with the rhythm of the music. The glow stick she had given him hung from a rainbow-patterned strap around his neck. She was holding her own glow stick and swinging it back and forth, despite the fact it wasn’t glowing yet. Some of the other worshippers had already lit theirs, but Jenny wanted to wait until tonight.
She closed her eyes and imagined how beautiful it would look when thousands of people lit their glow sticks and held them into the night sky. It would be a sign, a sign of ecumenicism and mutual understanding.
But after that … After the Pope had come out on stage and held the first truly ecumenical Mass, she would go with Dennis to the hotel and …
She shook off her heated thoughts and held back a grin.
Pia, who was standing next to her, studied Jenny. The two girls winked at each other conspiratorially.
“Hey!” Dennis said suddenly with a jerk.
Jenny pulled out of his arms. “What is it?”
He pointed at the large screen behind the gospel choir. Until just now, bright geometric shapes had been flickering there in time with the music, but now they had disappeared, and a film had started to play.
Images of the papal visit in 2011 flashed into view.
“What’s going on?” Jenny heard Pia murmur.
*
Alexander
Alexander looked at his hands.
The hands that had nailed his father to a cross.
He shook his head in utter disbelief.
The angel was gone. He hadn’t come along to this bare room, and Alexander felt so extraordinarily lonely that he gave a hiccupping sob.
Had he done the right thing or not? The two men who had interviewed him – the dark-haired one with the burning look in his eyes, and the prim and proper officer in the polo shirt – they had seemed horrified by what he had done.
Something stirred in him, and he thought about how his father had preached over and over again about how he needed to fight against the devil in his own body.
Icy horror washed over him. What if he had lost that battle a long time ago?
He whimpered.
What if the angel hadn’t been an angel at all, but a demon? An emissary from Satan?
This thought came to him all of a sudden, and it was so horrible that Alexander slowly pushed himself upright. His eyes flashed around the sparse room.
And then he noticed the pipe hanging from the ceiling.
*
Faris felt like an insect skewered under a microscope. Laura stared at him, panic-stricken, as Hesse smiled at him gently. And Ellwanger gazed down at him through clouded eyes.
The beeping of the monitor briefly accelerated, but then sank back down to its old rhythm. Hesse took a step closer, and Faris raised his gun in his direction in order to send him back to his spot. At that moment, he detected triumph in the reporter’s eyes.
“You bastard!” he exclaimed. “You want me to turn off the monitor, don’t you? The bombs will go off when I do that!” He stepped away from the machine.
Ellwanger groaned. This time he formed an actual word out of his anguished sounds: “Lord?”
Faris wrapped both hands around his gun. “Is that true?” he yelled at Hesse, who smiled grimly.
“Yes.”
All of a sudden, the last puzzle pieces fell into the right slots. “You planned all of this!” Faris wheezed. “That’s why you’re playing these games with me! You wanted to keep your hands clean! You wanted to use me to trigger the last bombs.”
You didn’t push the trigger. He heard Paul’s words echo through his mind. Shit, he almost had, this time! He had been so close to stepping into Hesse’s twisted plan.
“Why?” he bellowed. To his right, Laura tried to sit up.
Without breaking his smile, Hesse shrugged. “Let’s call it my version of divine judgement. If I succeed at getting you to do it, then my cause is just. Something like that.”
Faris’s stomach did a somersault. He shook his head. “All of this is so personal, Niklas,” he said quietly.
“Personal? Oh! True. Know what, when I think about it, I resent you for having SURV. All of you and your fucking self-righteousness, which makes you think that you’re some kind of experts on religious matters! You and her.” He stared down at Laura. “Look at her! She still loves you, did you know that? And that just isn’t fair! Faridah …” He fell silent, taking a breath that sounded like a sob.
Faris couldn’t believe it. “You resent me for …”
“You have a team, friends, a family! You always land on your feet, regardless of what happens to you!” He seemed to really believe that! Faris almost started laughing. Hesse stretched his hands out to him. They were trembling. “I thought you�
��d be the perfect candidate for all this.” His smile turned diabolical. “Maybe I just wanted to punish you for the fact that you have my mother’s blood on your hands! You do, you know.”
You have my mother’s blood on your hands.
Faris felt his knees go weak. He felt an irrepressible urge to pull the trigger, and he was aware that the darkness inside of him would swallow him up if he gave in to this desire.
He took a deep breath. By this point, Laura had managed to get up onto her knees. Bent forward, she was kneeling diagonally beside the cross. It looked as if she was praying. Faris tightened his grip on the gun. He used the barrel to point at the door. “Upstairs!” he ordered.
Hesse just looked at him in bewilderment.
“Upstairs!” Faris now bellowed. Every single nerve in his body was vibrating tautly.
The journalist obeyed him without a word. They climbed the stairs, one after the other, and when they reached the halfway point, the crackling in Faris’s earpiece finally stopped. He took his left hand off the gun and pressed it farther into his ear. “Ben?”
“Faris! Thank God! Under no circumstance should you …”
“Thank God?” Faris interrupted.
“Listen, under no circumstance should you turn off the monitor!” Ben said sharply. “Do you hear me? Do not turn off the monitor.”
“It’s okay, Ben. I didn’t touch the monitor. What’s up with it?”
Ben’s words tumbled over each other as he now explained. “I had a funny feeling the whole time. I kept wondering why the diagram was on Alexander’s computer. After all, he obviously wasn’t involved with the planning of the bomb attacks. And do you know why the diagram was there? Because Hesse put it there, Faris! I thought I had disconnected the laptop from the internet when Marc brought it to me. But the bastard had built himself a back door. The file creation date revealed that the diagram wasn’t installed on the hard drive until after we had already secured the laptop. He wanted …”
“Thanks, Ben,” Faris cut him off. “You can fill me in on the rest of it later, okay?”
“Faris,” Tromsdorff now joined the conversation. “Where is Hesse?”
Forty Hours: A breath-taking thriller Page 30