He had briefed and rebriefed the teams. But five valuable hours had passed since the botched storming of the Guardians’ squat and Fabel was afraid that the Pharos People would now be expecting a police raid. His own people were backed up by MEK officers of both the Polizei Hamburg and the Polizei Niedersachsen. The Harbour Police were leading the water-based assault. Fabel had no reason to believe the police would be resisted, and he had no evidence that the so-called Consolidators who took care of security would be armed but, as he had pointed out at the briefing, recent history was full of cults resorting to murder-suicide. He did not want this operation to turn into a German Waco.
Menke was there with his whole Pharos Project investigation team and Fabel had even roped in Kroeger and other officers from Cybercrime. It would be up to them to retrieve as much data as quickly as possible. Fabel knew that the Pharos Project would no doubt have some kind of self-destruct software for exactly this kind of situation.
Fabel, Werner and Bruggemann went on the lead Harbour Police boat. It was a fast rigid-hulled inflatable craft that tore through the river, lifting its nose out of the water and bouncing over any hint of a wave. The small flotilla stayed tight in to the shore to delay being spotted for as long as possible.
‘You all right, Jan?’ Werner shouted over the whine of the engine. Fabel sat crouched over, his jaw set rigid, clutching the sides of his seat tight.
‘I’m fine. Just not good on water.’
The Pharos was even more impressive from the water. The boat arced out a little into the river and swept between two of the twelve support pillars and under the projecting floor where Fabel knew Peter Wiegand had his office.
There was a jetty set centrally under the cover of the building. Two grey-suited Consolidators watched the approach of the police boats. One of them was talking — but not to his companion — and Fabel guessed that their arrival was being announced to the main building.
As they reached the jetty, Fabel received a radio message from Anna that her team was through the main gate and heading for the principal entrance.
The MEK officers secured the jetty, spinning the Consolidators around against the wall and checking them for weapons. Nothing.
‘That doesn’t mean the others aren’t armed,’ said Fabel. ‘Take no chances.’
A police raid has a contained violence, a force that is intended to dominate and establish control. For the innocent bystander caught up in it, and for most criminals, it is a traumatic experience; yet, as Fabel marched through the building, forcibly subduing any Consolidator they came across in the process, the cult members they encountered watched the police advance room by room with an absolute passivity. There was no panic. What concerned Fabel more was that there was no sign of anyone hunched over a monitor, desperately trying to delete data.
Peter Wiegand was waiting for them, as he had the last time they had spoken, in his office. He sat behind his vast desk with a studied serenity. His chief of security, Badorf, stood beside him, hands folded, like a butler waiting for instructions.
‘I take it you would like to have that chat you mentioned the last time you were here, Herr Fabel,’ said Wiegand, with a small polite smile that suggested he found Fabel slightly tedious. ‘The one at your office…’
Peter Wiegand somehow managed to convey a sense of authority, that he was a master of his environment, even though that environment was now one of the interrogation rooms in the Hamburg police Presidium. He sat composed as always, and neat. Wiegand’s neatness extended far beyond his tailoring. The beard was immaculately trimmed, his shaven head burnished. He was a shortish heavyset man, yet there was a compactness about him and a physical efficiency in the way he moved.
Sitting next to Wiegand was an attractive woman in her early forties. She had butter-coloured hair combed back into a French pleat and she was wearing a business suit that certainly had not a single synthetic thread in it and probably, thought Fabel, cost more than he earned in a month. Fabel had recognised her right away: Amelie Harmsen was not the kind of legal representative he was used to coming up against. She was one of the Hanseatic City’s most high-profile lawyers, known more for winning punitive damages for her celebrity clients than fighting criminal cases. Harmsen was certainly not an indoctrinated member of the Pharos Project. She was here representing Wiegand the billionaire, not Wiegand the cult leader.
‘I want to know how long you intend to detain my client, Principal Chief Commissar,’ she asked. ‘And if you have something of which you wish to accuse Herr Wiegand, then I would like to hear it. Now.’
‘As would I, Herr Fabel,’added Wiegand, with the same hint of bored disinterest.
Fabel smiled politely. Werner handed Fabel a folder, which he placed squarely on the table before him. He started leafing through the file’s pages.
‘You know, this is very interesting reading,’ he said conversationally. ‘Did you know that Daniel Fottinger studied philosophy at Hamburg University?’
‘No, Herr Fabel. I did not.’
‘Really? I would have thought you and he would have discussed such things. After all, the Pharos Project trades heavily on the philosophy of mind, wouldn’t you say?’
Wiegand said nothing, instead keeping Fabel locked in a cold, contemptuous glare.
‘He didn’t do too well with his studies,’ continued Fabel. ‘From what we’ve been able to find out, he had a tendency to become too fixed on one particular aspect of philosophy. Obsessive, almost. He lacked intellectual discipline, apparently. Not enough rigour. His dissertations were considered to be too narrow and ill-researched. Take this one: it was supposed to be a general exploration of Plato’s Theory of Forms, but it turns into a very, very discursive piece on Platonic Simulation.’ Fabel flicked further through the document. ‘But where it really gets interesting is when he gets into a discussion about qualia. Now, I’m no philosopher, but qualia seem to me the sensory experiences we have of the world, how we perceive our environment.’
‘Does tedium fall under that description, Herr Fabel?’ said Wiegand wearily. ‘I really do hope that you intend to make some kind of point.’
‘Well, let me put it this way. Daniel Fottinger’s personality, I feel, is revealed through these notes. Philosophy is, after all, all about making sense of the individual’s experience of the world. Fottinger was interested in a very specific concept related to qualia: the concept of the “philosophical zombie”. That is the idea held in some fields of philosophy that there is only a minority of people in the world who are real; that some people — most people, in fact — don’t really exist at all in the real sense of the word. They react to stimuli the way you would expect them to — they express feelings of sorrow, pain, anger, love… but they don’t really feel these things, because they have no real sentience.’
‘Point?’ asked Wiegand’s lawyer.
‘Simply that it’s interesting that these notes suggest that Daniel Fottinger was obsessed with the concept. Now, I’ve spoken to a lot of people about Herr Fottinger, and I’ve gained a bit of an insight into his personality. And I have to say it’s not a very pleasant personality. I believe that, as a young student, he was obsessed with these ideas because they fitted pretty much with his experience of the world.’
‘Which was?’ asked Wiegand.
‘That people didn’t really matter. Daniel Fottinger was a person completely devoid of empathy. He simply could not imagine that others had any kind of consciousness in the same way that he did.’ Fabel closed over the file. ‘Daniel Fottinger was, quite simply, a sociopath.’