He snapped his head around to check the woman and the boy. The woman’s hand was rammed deep in her shoulder bag and the front of the bag burst open and burned as she pulled the trigger of the Heckler Koch MP5 machine pistol that she had hidden inside. Simultaneously, she pushed the boy sideways and down with a violent shove. The burst from the Heckler amp; Koch ripped angrily at the chest of the fake railway worker’s overalls and tore open his face.
The blonde woman spun round, swinging the machine pistol, still in its ripped and smoking macrame bag, to bear down on the GSG9 cop dressed as a housewife. The policewoman snapped her aim from the man to the woman and fired twice, then twice more. Her shots hit the boy’s mother in the chest, face and forehead and she was dead before her falling body crashed onto the platform.
The man saw the woman die, but there was no time for grief. He heard the screaming of a dozen GSG9 officers, in helmets and body armour, as they flooded out onto the platform from inside and around the sides of the station building. A group of them were gesturing furiously for the Dutchman to stop running and get out of their line of fire. The policewoman now swung her pistol to bear on the dark-haired man again. He struggled to free his Russian Makarov from his coat pocket and, when he did, he did not aim it at the policewoman or any of the GSG9 troops.
The policewoman’s first bullet ripped into his chest at exactly the same moment that his round smacked into the back of the Dutchman’s head.
Franz Muhlhaus – Red Franz, the notorious anarchist terrorist whose pale face had stared out at frightened West Germans from wanted posters from Kiel to Munich – fell to his knees, his arms hanging at his sides, the Makarov automatic lying limply in his half-open hand and his chin resting on his bloodstained chest.
As he died, he could just see, on the fringes of his failing vision, the pale face, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed in a silent scream, of his son. Somehow, the dying Red Franz Muhlhaus found the breath to utter a single word, thrown out into the world with his final, explosive exhalation.
‘Verrater…’
Traitors.
Part One
1.
Three Days Before the First Murder: Monday, 15 August 2005.
List, Island of Sylt, 200 Kilometres North-West of Hamburg
It was a moment he wanted to hang on to.
His senses reached out into every corner of the land, the sea and the sky around him. He stood on naked feet and felt the texture of the dry sand that abraded his soles and squeezed between his toes. He felt as if this place, this time, was all he could remember of himself. Here, he thought, there was no past, no future, only this perfect moment. Sylt lay long and thin and low in the North Sea, offering no profile to hinder the hastening wind that pushed at the vast sky above, seeking out the more substantial flank of Denmark beyond. As he stood there, the wind protested at his presence by tugging angrily at the fabric of his chinos, snapping the loose tails and collar of his shirt and flapping the broken wing of blond hair that hung over his forehead. It scoured his face and pushed into the creases of his skin as he stood watching the scurry of the clouds across the impossibly huge pale-blue shield of the sky.
Jan Fabel was a man of a little over medium height and in his early forties, but a certain boyishness lingered indistinctly, like a reluctant evictee, in his appearance, in his lean, angular frame and in the flapping blond hair. His eyes were a pale blue and shone with intelligence and wit, but at that moment were reduced to narrow slits in the folds of the creased face that he presented to the angry wind. His face was tanned and unshaven and, just as the lingering boyishness in his posture hinted at the youth who had preceded him, the silver that sparkled in the gold of his three-day-old stubble prefigured the older man to come.
A woman approached from the dunes behind him: she was as tall as him and was dressed in a shirt and trousers of white linen. She also was barefoot, but carried a pair of low-heeled black sandals in one hand. The wind wrapped itself around her too, pressing and smoothing the white linen sleek against the curves of her body and making wild cables of her long dark hair. Fabel did not see Susanne approach and she stood behind him, dropping the sandals onto the sand and snaking her arms through his arms and around his body. He turned round and kissed her for a long time, before they both turned back to face the sea.
‘I was just thinking,’ he said at last, ‘that you could almost forget who you are, just standing here.’ He looked down at his naked feet and pushed at the sand with his toe. ‘It’s been wonderful. I’m so glad you came with me. I just wish we didn’t have to leave tomorrow.’
‘It has been wonderful. It really has. But, unfortunately, we have our lives to get back to…’ Susanne smiled consolingly, and when she spoke her voice was spun through with a light Bavarian accent. ‘Unless, that is,’ she continued, ‘you want to ask your brother if he needs another waiter.’
Fabel drew a deep breath and held it for a moment. ‘You know, would that be so bad? Not to have to deal with all the crap and the stress.’
She laughed. ‘You’ve obviously never worked as a waiter.’
‘I could always do something else. Anything else.’
‘No, you couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I know you. You would start missing it within a month.’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe you’re right. But I feel like a different person here. Someone I prefer being.’
‘That’s just being on holiday…’ The wind blew a webbed veil of hair across Susanne’s face and she tugged it out of the way.
‘No, it’s not. It’s being here. It’s not the same thing. Sylt has always been special for me. I remember the first time I came here – I felt I’d known it all my life. This is where I came after I was shot,’ Fabel said, and his hand brushed, involuntarily, against his left flank, as if he were unconsciously checking that the two-decades-old wound had really healed after all. ‘I guess I always associate this place with getting better. With feeling safe and at peace, I suppose.’ He laughed. ‘Sometimes when I think of the world out there…’ He nodded vaguely over the sea to where the mass of Europe lay unseen. ‘The world we have to deal with, I get scared. Don’t you?’
Susanne nodded. ‘Sometimes. Yes, I do.’ She circled him with her arm and placed her hand over his, over where his wound had been. She kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m getting chilly. Come on, let’s go and eat…’
Fabel did not follow right away. Instead he let the North Sea wind scour his face for a few moments more, watching the waves froth against the wide shore and the few wind-driven clouds scud across the huge shield of sky. He listened to the cry of the seabirds and the fuzzy roaring of the ocean and wished, desperately, that he could think of some alternative to becoming a waiter. Or any alternative to becoming, once more, an investigator of death.
Fabel turned and followed Susanne towards the dunes and his brother’s hotel and restaurant that lay beyond.
The North Frisian island of Sylt lies almost parallel to the coastline where the neck of Germany becomes Denmark. Sylt is now connected to the mainland by a thread of man-made causeway, the Hindenburgdamm, upon which a rail line conveys Germany’s wealthy and famous to their favoured domestic holiday location. The island also has a regional airport and a regular ferry service running to and from the mainland, and in summer the narrow roads and traditional villages of Sylt clog with shining Mercedes and Porsches.
Partly in reference to his hotel’s origins as a farmhouse, Fabel’s elder brother Lex habitually described these affluent seasonal immigrants as his ‘summer herd’. Lex had run this small hotel and restaurant in List, at the northern tip of Sylt, for twenty-five years. The combination of Lex’s indisputable talent as a chef and the restaurant’s unbroken view over a scythe of golden sand and the sea beyond had guaranteed a steady stream of guests and diners throughout the season. The hotel had originally been a traditional Frisian farmhouse and had retained its facade of Fachwerk oak beams and sat solidly, turning its wide-roofed, resolute shoulder to the North Sea winds. Lex had added the modern restaurant extension, which wrapped itself around two sides of the original building. The hotel offered only seven guest rooms, all of which were booked up months in advance. But Lex also had a separate small suite of rooms tucked into the low ceilings and wide beams under the rafters of the old farmhouse, which he never let out. He kept these rooms for use by family and friends. Most of all, he kept them for when his brother came to stay.