The quiet weighed heavily on the Murder Commission team in the lobby, then it shattered simultaneously with the door above as the team burst it in. From the hallway Fabel and the others could hear the shouting of the MEK team. Then silence. Fabel indicated to his team to follow him up the stairs, pausing on the landing below. The MEK commander re-emerged from the apartment.
‘It’s clean. But wait there until the bomb squad check it out.’
At that, a second blue-overalled bomb technician rushed past them and up the stairs.
‘The hell with this,’ said Fabel. ‘Brandt has no idea we’re onto him. And this is his girlfriend’s apartment. He won’t have planted a bomb here. I’m going up.’ He took the stairs two at a time, following the bomb technician into the apartment, brushing aside the protests of the MEK commander. Werner gave a shrug and went after his boss, followed by Maria, Anna and Henk.
The apartment was small and everything about the decor and the furnishings suggested a feminine environment. Fabel guessed that Brandt did not spend a lot of time here. It had also been clear that the young archaeologist did not use the room at his mother’s house that much, and the thought crossed Fabel’s mind that Brandt perhaps had another place, a bolt-hole that they did not know about. There was not a lot of point in hanging around: the small flat was overfull with officers and Fabel knew at first glance that there was nothing to be gained by searching the place, although he would have to go through the motions of getting a forensics team in as soon as the flat was given the all-clear.
Maria’s cellphone rang. She struggled to hear the caller over the bustle in the apartment and stepped out into the hall.
It was one of those moments in which a thousand thoughts, a thousand outcomes, flash through one’s mind in a time too small to be measured. It started with one of the bomb technicians suddenly holding a hand up, his back to the rest of the police officers, and shouting a single word: ‘Quiet!’
It was then that Fabel heard it. A beeping noise. The second bomb specialist moved over to the first and removed his helmet, turning his ear to the sound. Everyone turned at the same moment, following the gaze of the bomb-squad men.
It sat on top of the CD player. At first glance it looked like simply another piece of audio equipment: a small grey metal box with a red light that flashed in time with the beeping sound.
As Fabel stared at the device, hypnotised by the red light flashing in rhythm with the beeps, he wondered why he was standing stock-still and not running for his life.
It was then that the beeping changed to a constant tone, and the red light on the bomb’s detonator stopped flashing and remained on.
2.20 p.m.: Eimsbuttel, Hamburg
When Maria Klee stepped back into the apartment, her cellphone still in her hand, the faces that turned towards her seemed drained of both their colour and expression.
‘I miss something?’ she asked.
‘Not exactly,’ said Fabel. ‘I think that something just missed us.’
The bomb-disposal technician stood with the grey metal detonator box clutched in his black-gloved hand, its wires trailing. When the light had turned to a constant red he had lunged forward and simply yanked the detonator and its wires free. ‘Nothing to lose,’ he explained afterwards. His colleague was now carefully taking the CD player and amplifier from the shelves.
‘Got it,’ he said, easing a small plastic-wrapped grey package from behind the unit. ‘It’s safe.’
‘Well done,’ said Fabel to the first technician. ‘If you hadn’t moved so quickly…’
The bomb-squad man shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I can’t take credit for that. I acted more from a reflex than anything else. It would have been impossible for me to move fast enough to disconnect the detonator in time. It was the device itself that failed. Misfired for some reason or other. My guess is that there was a fault in the detonator. I think it’s unlikely that the wires worked loose – from what I gather about the bomb under your car, this guy is pretty meticulous.’
The other technician carefully lowered the package of explosives into a thick-walled container. ‘The mass of the device was enough to kill everyone inside the flat, but it would not have compromised the integrity of the structure, other than blowing the windows halfway to Buxtehude.’
‘I guess I really did miss something,’ said Maria.
‘Who was that on the phone?’ asked Fabel.
‘Oh… it was Frank. I mean Frank Grueber. He’s back from the murder scene at Brandt’s mother’s house. He took some hair from Brandt’s bedroom. From a hairbrush. He managed to rush a DNA analysis to see if there is a familial link between his hair and the ancient hair.’
‘And?’
‘Enough common markers to suggest a very close relationship. Probably father and son. It looks like we’ve found Red Franz junior.’
There is a weariness that comes after being in a situation of great danger and threat. The adrenalin that has coursed through the body lingers and sucks up every last bit of energy. Muscles that have done nothing but have been drawn as taut as violin strings begin to ache and a jittery, nauseating exhaustion settles into the brain and body. As Fabel made his way back to his car, he felt totally spent.
Werner placed his reassuring bulk into the passenger seat of Fabel’s BMW. The two men sat for a moment, not speaking.
‘I’m getting too old for this crap,’ he said. ‘I really thought we’d had it in there. I’ve never been so scared in my life.’
Fabel sighed. ‘Unfortunately, Werner, I have been. That’s the third time I’ve been at the business end of a bomb and I’ve had enough. All I have ever wanted to do was to protect people. That’s what being a policeman has always meant to me – putting ourselves between the ordinary man, woman or child and danger. Years ago, when Renate and I were still together and Gabi was a kid, we went over to the United States for a holiday. New York. I remember seeing an NYPD police car go by. It said, in English, “ To Protect and Serve ” on the side. I remember thinking then that we should put that on all Polizei Hamburg cars. I thought: that’s what I do, what I am.’
‘Jan,’ said Werner, ‘it’s been a hell of a long day. Let me drive. I’ll take you home.’
‘What are we doing here, Werner? Some lunatic is wreaking revenge on people who conspired to kill others twenty years ago. A murderer killing murderers. You have to admit it, there is some kind of natural justice at work here. Our country was almost ripped apart by these wankers. I still have bullet fragments in me from an eighteen-year-old girl’s gun. And for what? What was achieved by Franz Weber’s death? By me blowing the face off a young girl who should have had her head filled by nothing more than boys and what she should wear to the disco? She would have been thirty-eight now, Werner. If I hadn’t killed her. If Svensson hadn’t got his claws into her, she would have been running her kids to school. She would have been going to the gym three times a week to try to reduce her waist. And maybe, now and again, she would have thought to herself, wasn’t I mad when I was young? What was I thinking about? She would have had kids, Werner. An entire generation has been wiped out because I squeezed a trigger.’
‘It’s what we do, Jan,’ said Werner. ‘If you hadn’t been there during that bank raid, someone else would have died. Maybe many more people.’
‘I want a new life, Werner. A life away from all of this. I have told van Heiden that this case will be my last. It is over – I am resigning from the Polizei Hamburg as soon as this bastard is behind bars. An old schoolfriend has offered me a job. I am going to take it.’