Faris listened deep inside himself. The queasy feeling wasn’t gone yet. “He’s here with me. Right in front of my muzzle.” The situation still felt as strangely unsettled as it had before, and Tromsdorff seemed to be entertaining the same thoughts. He didn’t say anything.
“Ben.” Faris ran his tongue across his lips. “How am I supposed to disarm the damned thing?”
His colleague didn’t reply immediately. “Shit, I don’t know, but the bomb squad is on its way to you.”
*
In less than five minutes, the restrooms were swarming with police officers. While Hesse was arrested and Werner Ellwanger received attention, two experts from the bomb squad began their investigation of the heart monitor, in order to prevent the fatal trigger impulse that would set off the glow stick explosions across the city. One of the uniformed officers wanted to assist Laura, but Faris insisted on taking care of her himself.
“Everything’s okay now,” he said as he walked over to her. “I’m here.”
She stood in front of him, swaying slightly. Her hands were still bound, and with the gag in her mouth and her huge eyes, the panic on her face felt like a punch.
The first thing he did was remove the gag.
“Thank you,” she gasped as he loosened the ties around her wrists. Her knees then gave way, and she would have fallen if Faris hadn’t caught her. For a moment, he held her as tightly as he could without hurting her. She rested her head against his chest and inhaled deeply before exhaling with a muffled groan. Just fleetingly, he indulged in the illusion that everything between them could be fixed and that they would find a way back to each other through their shared experience. But with a forceful jerk, Laura pulled away from him, and the look she shot him vaporized any hopes he might have had. He instantly knew that what had just happened would become yet another obstacle between them. He could already see the subtle accusation lurking in her eyes.
None of this would have happened if you weren’t a police officer!
He braced himself against the pain that would inevitably follow this awareness.
“I’ll get someone who can take care of you,” he promised softly. He took a step back and motioned for the uniformed officer from earlier. As his colleague knelt down before Laura and untied the rope around her ankles, Faris returned to the airport’s terminal building.
Since he had last been in here, someone had opened a large gate. Several emergency vehicles and two ambulances were standing there. They looked miniscule in this huge hall.
Faris watched as the officer led Laura out of the basement and over to one of the ambulances. The paramedic, a man wearing the bright-red gear of the fire department, reached for her arm and guided her over to a luggage carousel in the center of the space. He gently nudged her to sit down.
“She was probably sedated,” Faris said. And in his mind, he added: Take good care of her.
Laura persistently avoided his eyes. She kept her head lowered, and her hair covered her face. Slowly, step by step, he retreated as he struggled against the overwhelming emptiness he felt inside. In order to escape it, he concentrated on the throbbing uneasiness at the back of his mind. It hadn’t abated at all, and he couldn’t figure out why that was. Dozens of unanswered questions were gnawing at him.
He reached for his earpiece, but there were so many loud, excited voices coming from the War Room that he suspected he wouldn’t be able to get anyone’s attention. So he took out the earpiece and stuck it into his pocket before pulling out his phone and calling Gitta.
“It’s me,” he announced as soon as she picked up.
“Faris.” She almost sounded intoxicated. Elated, happy. Euphoric even. “You did it, hot shot! I could …”
Faris interrupted her. “Later, Gitta! Then you can kiss and cuddle me all you want. But right now I need you to go tell Alexander that we saved his father.”
“Are you sure that he’ll be happy about that?” Gitta suddenly sounded somber and skeptical.
“No clue, but he should know, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Faris heard the rapid click of her heels on the linoleum flooring outside of the War Room. “I’m on my way.”
*
Right before Gitta unlocked the door to the interview room, she heard a strange gurgling sound.
With fingers flying, she fumbled for the key and stuck it in the lock. Her hands were trembling, and it took her a couple of tries to insert it correctly. However, she finally succeeded and turned the key. She hastily pushed open the door, and as it swung open, she caught sight of two legs dangling in the air.
“Oh, God!” Gitta whispered in horror.
*
After he sent Gitta off to inform Alexander Ellwanger, Faris hung up. He didn’t know what he should do next. Laura had been taken off in an ambulance without glancing his way even once. Faris suddenly felt exhausted, completely and eternally exhausted. He decided to head down to the restrooms where the bomb squad was still at work examining the complicated wiring on the heart monitor.
Werner Ellwanger was still nailed to the cross, but someone had laid it on the floor, which meant that he wasn’t in as much pain as before. Faris knew that a cardiac monitor would sound an alarm if even one of the electrodes was detached. They wouldn’t be able to disconnect Ellwanger from the electrodes until the experts had managed to deactivate the transmission pulse.
“Why aren’t you taking him off the cross?” Faris asked the paramedic. The nails that had been driven through Ellwanger’s flesh looked huge. The sight of them alone turned Faris’s stomach.
“We’re having a hard time gauging how stable he is,” was the explanation he got. The paramedic, a short, gaunt man with protruding ears pointed at the curve on the monitor. “That looks remarkably good considering how much time he has been hanging on the cross, but we don’t want to run any risks. If we pull out the nails and he goes into shock, then that won’t help anyone.”
No one except Niklas Hesse, Faris thought grimly. In this condition, the shock could instantly kill Ellwanger, and Hesse would achieve his goal after all.
Since he didn’t have anything better to do at the moment, Faris stepped closer to the camera that was still standing close to the door. He removed it from the tripod and flipped open the hinged viewscreen. A video file was open on it, and Faris hit play. It was some kind of interview. An interview with Alexander who, a picture of misery – blood-smeared and half-mad with fear –, was talking with someone he kept calling angel. A quiet voice off-screen provided answers to his questions, and Faris grew cold as he recognized Hesse’s voice.
He heard Alexander moan: “Are you an angel?”
And Hesse laughed softly. “Maybe. An emissary.”
“An emissary from God?” Alexander whispered. “What should I do now?”
And Hesse commanded: “Tell me about him. Tell me everything!”
Alexander’s face winced in sheer horror.
“You monster,” Faris murmured. He forwarded the video and came to a spot in which Alexander was babbling on and on about a flowerbed in the allotment garden. He cut off the camera. He no longer felt sick to his stomach. He was long past that.
With long strides, he marched back up to the terminal hall, where a couple of officers had taken Niklas Hesse into one of the former airline offices and were now guarding him with guns out. Faris angrily slammed the camera against the reporter’s chest.
“Why this, on top of everything else?” he barked. “Why did you make Alexander jump through all your hoops?”
Hesse just laughed. He was sitting in a rickety plastic chair, and the camera had fallen into his lap. “I think you should take a closer look at the flower beds in Daddy’s little garden.”
“What will we find there?” Stars danced behind Faris’s eyelids whenever he blinked.
“Didn’t you watch the whole video?” With his cuffed hands, Hesse reached for the camera and held it out to Faris.
He accepted it. “Tell m
e!”
Hesse ignored the demand, but didn’t shift his gaze from Faris’s eyes. “Who’s the monster here?” Hesse asked, now speaking quite softly. “Justice, Faris. That’s what this is about.” With a shrug, he continued: “We didn’t finish our conversation earlier.”
Faris didn’t feel the least need to do that, but he nonetheless exclaimed: “Talk!”
“I learned that Werner Ellwanger was my father from my mother’s papers. I visited him.” He chuckled, but this time it sounded sad. Resigned. “I honestly thought I was finally getting a family. That was just a few months after Faridah had died in that miserable barrage of stones.” He took a breath, trembling. “Two days after my mother had been bombed out of existence by that religious fanatic.”
Faris decided not to bring up the fact that the museum attacker had detonated his bomb for reasons other than religious zeal. That was just another of the absurdities in this case, he thought. It had been a non-religiously motivated attack that had driven Hesse off the deep end and inspired him to take up his crusade against all the world’s religions.
“But I sadly realized that my father was a religious maniac, a man who had psychologically abused his son for years. Alexander was just as mad as he was.” Hesse sniffed. “Did you know that he thought I was an angel, that first time I showed up at their door? At first, it was a test. I just wanted to find out how crazy Alexander was. When I realized that his fanaticism was full blown enough for him to actually crucify his father, my plan for all this fell into place.”
His gesture encompassed the entire airport. All at once, he no longer looked merely calm. He straightened his shoulders, and his face radiated a feeling that annoyed Faris. He suddenly looked … satisfied.
*
For some reason, the video up on the screen gave Jenny goosebumps. The first words of the conference motto stood in blood-red letters up on the large screen.
The Word of God
Suddenly chaos broke out in the crowd, and police officers stormed through the stadium’s entrances.
“What’s going on?” Dennis mumbled. He now removed the arm he had slipped around Jenny’s waist earlier.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice announced over the stadium’s loudspeaker, “due to an unforeseen turn of events, we are asking you to promptly make your way to one of the exits. Please remain calm. You are not in danger.”
Jenny’s hand flew up to her mouth. She watched as the crowd began to move toward the exits. There was pushing and shoving in some spots, but the event organizers and the police had the situation under control. Working in coordination, they prevented panic from breaking out. When Jenny was only a few steps away from the exit, she noticed that the glow sticks were being collected from all of the worshippers.
Her blood turned to ice. She immediately sensed that something bad was about to happen.
The image up on the big screen started to flicker. The red letters faded.
For a moment, the picture was black.
And then the video started up again.
*
Hesse’s self-satisfied expression pushed Faris over the edge. He was suddenly no longer able to keep himself under control.
He rushed forward, grabbed Hesse’s collar, and yanked him up onto his feet.
“Come with me!” he snarled, and before the other officers could intervene, he dragged Hesse out the door and toward the top of the stairs. “You’re going to tell the men downstairs how they can cut off the transmission signal!”
As they stepped into the restroom, they found the two medics working frantically. The beeping on the heart monitor had accelerated drastically and was now a shrill staccato.
“Shit!” one of the medics exclaimed. “He’s crashing!” Feverishly pulling out a syringe, he inserted it into Ellwanger’s arm.
The explosives experts looked as if they had all the time in the world. They didn’t lift their heads but remained focused on their efforts to disable the transmitter. Their heads were leaning over the opened guts of the monitor, and they were whispering to each other.
“Right or left?” one of them asked the other. He was holding a small pair of wire cutters and moving it back and forth between two thin wires. “The odds are fifty–fifty.”
“Just stay calm,” the other replied. His words and unruffled voice stood in such stark contrast to the medic’s flurry of activity that Faris had to shake his head.
“Something here isn’t right,” he heard the medic say. The beeping slowed down for a moment, then sped up again.
Faris wrenched his concentration back onto Hesse. The unease he had felt before now returned. He slowly reached a hand under his jacket and felt for the gun that he had stuck there after the reporter’s arrest.
Hesse saw him, and his eyebrows rose slightly. Faris suddenly registered the heightened tension between him and Hesse, and he tightened his grip on his gun. A chirping sound broke the silence, and Faris winced in surprise. He pulled his hand back out from under his jacket, and without taking his eyes off Hesse, he answered his phone.
It was Gitta.
“Alexander is dead,” she said. She sounded as guilty as if she herself had been the cause.
“What happened?” Regret flooded Faris’s body, and for a moment, he was so distressed that the paramedics’ flurry of activity and the sudden excited murmuring of the explosives officers retreated into the background. He had wished something different for Alexander, had hoped that the young man would someday successfully work through everything that had happened here and possibly lead a relatively normal life.
“He hanged himself,” Gitta reported. “With his shoelaces.” He could hear the tears in her voice.
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” Faris declared.
“Damn it!” a paramedic exclaimed. “This heartbeat …”
Faris turned his back on the group.
Gitta sighed. “I know. But still …” She told him goodbye and hung up.
The paramedic’s eyes darted in bewilderment from Werner Ellwanger to the heart monitor. Faris pocketed his phone. “Your brother hung himself in his cell,” he informed Hesse.
The reporter didn’t respond immediately, but then began to laugh. “Judas!” he wheezed. “Just like Judas!”
He stopped laughing just as abruptly as he had started. His eyes showed amusement. “Say it yourself. It’s totally absurd!” For several seconds, he giggled unstably, and then his expression turned to one of cunning. “Alexander was the last victim but one,” he said.
After that, everything happened at the speed of lightning.
The beeping on the monitor accelerated again, becoming a swirling, panicked staccato. Hesse swiftly shook his shoulders, which momentarily puzzled Faris. But then the blood in his veins turned to ice. A small black box slid out of Hesse’s sleeve into his hand. The reporter fumbled with it, and Faris aimed his gun.
The shot echoed through the tiled room.
A red spot bloomed at the center of Hesse’s chest. The beeping of the heart monitor sped up.
Hesse looked down at his chest in astonishment, then lifted his head. Triumph glittered in his eyes. The black box slipped through his fingers and clattered to the floor. As the reporter staggered, Faris realized that the box was actually a remote transmitter.
Lilly! a voice screeched in his mind.
“Shit!” shouted one of the two bomb experts.
With both hands, Hesse tore open his shirt, and at first, Faris didn’t understand what the pale dots on his chest meant. But then the realization spread through his veins like ice water, and as Hesse collapsed, Faris understood.
They were electrodes.
The beeping on the medical device went crazy.
“Fifty–fifty!” the bomb tech yelled.
Faris couldn’t take his eyes off of Hesse’s face as his life ebbed away.
And then, Hesse was dead.
And as the beeping turned into a long, prolonged screech, Faris Iskander dropped his gun and
sank to his knees.
Epilogue
A ticking time bomb.
That was the accusation Faris saw in Dr. Geiger’s face that evening, when he was sitting across from her in an interview room at Keithstraße.
“You almost screwed everything up,” she said. She was standing in the center of the room, and the way she had crossed her arms didn’t completely conceal the pressure she seemed to be under. “If Officer Kellner from the bomb squad had picked the wrong wire to cut right before Hesse died, we’d all be outside right now, sweeping up a ton of rubble.”
All Faris could do was shrug. Over the past few hours of questioning, he had had to bear up under the same accusations, and he no longer had it in him to resist. How could he have guessed that the heart monitor was linked to Hesse and not Werner Ellwanger? He simply hadn’t known – and could not have. He honestly didn’t care if Geiger kicked him out to the curb. He closed his eyes and gazed into the chasm inside himself, to see if Hesse’s death had made it any deeper.
He couldn’t tell.
“Cases like this take a team effort,” he said placidly, recalling that Tromsdorff had said the same thing to him. If they were lucky, the powers upstairs would view it the same way, and SURV would be protected for at least a while from Geiger’s meddling.
Geiger untangled her arms. She held her hand out expectantly. “Your weapon.”
“I handed it in hours ago,” he mumbled. “I assume there’s no point in asking when I might get it back again?”
Geiger shrugged. Her normally perfectly styled hair looked slightly tousled.
Faris stood up. “Are we done now?” He was suddenly sick and tired of all this!
She blinked several times rapidly. “For now,” she said coolly.
*
Before Faris set off for home, he decided to make a quick stop at the War Room. For some reason, he felt a need to sit for a few minutes at his old desk and to say farewell to Paul.
Several hours had passed since the deployment, and he actually didn’t expect to find anyone around, but to his amazement, the team was all there. Tromsdorff and Gitta. Shannon, Ben and Marc. As if they couldn’t actually believe that they had managed to avert the catastrophe, the team – his team – was still sitting together and talking.
Forty Hours: A breath-taking thriller Page 31