‘Red Franz Muhlhaus?’ said Maria incredulously. ‘Without even getting into the whole reincarnation thing, your arithmetic is all wrong. You were born long before Muhlhaus died.’
‘You don’t understand.’ He smiled patronisingly. ‘I was the father and the son. My lifetimes overlapped. I saw my own death from two perspectives. I am my own father.’
‘Oh. I see. I’m sorry, Frank.’ Maria understood it all now. ‘Red Franz Muhlhaus was your father?’
‘We were always on the run. Always. We had to dye our hair. Black.’ Grueber ran a hand through his thick, too-dark hair. ‘Everyone would notice our red hair otherwise. And then we were betrayed. My mother and father were both murdered by GSG Nine troops. A sacrifice organised by those traitors. I watched my father die. I heard him say “traitors”. I was taken away after that. The Gruebers adopted me. They had no children. They couldn’t have them. But they brought me up as if the first ten years of my life hadn’t happened. As if I was their own and always had been. After a while, even I started to feel like all that had happened before had just been a bad dream. I found I couldn’t remember things. It was like all that life was being wiped out. Erased.’
‘What happened, Frank? What happened to change you?’
‘I was at university, studying archaeology. I visited the Landesmuseum in Hanover. It was there that I saw him. Red Franz. He was lying in a display case, his face rotted almost to nothing, but with that glorious mane of red hair still intact. I just knew, in that instant, that I was looking at the remains of a body that I had once occupied. I realised that we can look upon ourselves as we once were. As we lived before. It was then that it all came back to me. I remembered my father telling me that he had hidden a box in an old archaeological site. He had told me that if anything ever happened to him, I was to find the box and I would know the truth.’
Grueber let the thick plastic sheeting fall to veil the horror of Cornelius Tamm’s flayed body. He walked over to one of the cabinets ranged along the cellar wall. When he turned his back, Maria struggled furiously to free her hands from the rope bonds. But they were too well tied. Grueber took a rusted metal box from the cabinet.
‘My father’s secret diary and details of his group. I remembered where he’d said it was hidden. Exactly. I went and dug it up and it told me the whole story. And it gave me the names of all the traitors.’ Grueber paused. ‘But it was more than my memory of my childhood that returned that day as I looked down on Red Franz. It was my whole memory. My memory of all that went before this life. I knew that the body I looked at had once been mine. That I had inhabited it more than one and a half thousand years ago. I also knew that I had inhabited my father’s body. That the father and the son were one. The same.’
‘Frank…’ Maria looked at the pale, boyish face. She remembered how she had christened him ‘Harry Potter’ when they had first met. How she had always seen him as a good man. A kind man. ‘You’re ill. You are suffering from delusions. We only live once, Frank. You have got things all… muddled in your head. I understand. I really do. Seeing your parents killed like that. Listen, Frank, I want to help you. I can help you. Just untie me.’
Grueber smiled. He eased Maria over to a chair and made her sit.
‘I know you mean well,’ he said. ‘And I know that when you say you want to help me it’s the truth, not some kind of ploy. But tonight, Maria, the biggest traitor of them all is going to die. He was my closest friend, my deputy in The Risen. He planned the Wiedler kidnap. It was he who pulled the trigger that killed Wiedler. An event he has tried to bury, along with me. He saw me as a hindrance to his political ambitions. Ambitions he continues to follow. But tonight those ambitions, and his life, will come to an end. I can’t let you interfere with what I have to do tonight. Maria. I’m sorry, but I can’t…’
Grueber took a roll of heavy-duty packing tape and wrapped it around Maria’s torso and the back of the chair. Binding her tight. ‘I really can’t allow you to stop me…’ he said, reaching for the velvet roll-pouch.
10.30 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg
Fabel and Werner pulled up outside Grueber’s house. The two silver and blue Polizei Hamburg cars behind them had killed their flashing lights at the corner and parked behind Fabel. Four uniformed officers got out.
Werner’s cellphone rang as they all gathered on the pavement. After a brief series of one-word answers, Werner hung up and turned to Fabel.
‘That was Anna. She and Henk weren’t able to get Maria on her cellphone or on her home number. They’ve checked out her apartment. Nobody home. They’re on their way over here.’ Werner looked up at the substantial bulk of Grueber’s villa. ‘If Maria’s anywhere, she’s in there…’
‘Okay.’ Fabel turned to the uniformed officers. ‘Two of you take the back. You two, come with us.’
The main entrance to Grueber’s house was made of oak and had the shape and substance of a church door. It was clear that it would not yield easily to a ram, so Fabel ordered the uniforms to smash one of the huge rectangular windows. He roughly recalled the layout from his brief stay as Grueber’s guest and guided them round to Grueber’s study.
‘When we smash the window, we need to get in and find Maria as fast as we can.’
At Fabel’s signal, the two uniformed policeman swung the door-ram hard and fast into the centre of the window, shattering the glass and the wooden ribs that held the panes in place. The space it cleared was not enough to allow a man to enter and they swung the ram twice more. Fabel unholstered his service automatic and climbed through the shattered window, clambering over Grueber’s desk and sending the reconstructed head of the girl who was two and a half thousand years old tumbling to the floor. Werner and the two uniforms followed him.
Ten minutes later they stood in the main hallway, at the foot of the stairs. They had checked every room, every cupboard. Nothing. Fabel even called out Maria’s name into the void of a house that he knew to be empty.
There was a knock on the front door and Fabel opened it, letting the other two uniformed officers in.
‘We’ve checked the gardens and garage. There’s no one there, Herr Chief Commissar.’
A car pulled up outside and Anna and Henk came running into the hallway.
‘Nothing…’ Fabel said grimly. ‘He’s obviously taken her with him.’
‘Herr Chief Commissar!’ one of the uniformed officers called from behind the ornate stairway. ‘There’s some kind of door here. It could be a cellar…’
10.40 p.m.
Frank Grueber had thrived on knowledge all his life. He had formally studied archaeology and history, but had spent so much of his spare time learning a multitude of disparate skills. His wealthy step-parents had provided him with the means to turn his entire life into one continuous training programme; an endless preparation for his life’s mission. Now, as he stood outside the home of his ultimate target, the sense of convergence was at its strongest. Overwhelming.
Grueber stood on the driveway to the house, the roll-pouch in one hand, Maria’s service pistol in the other, closing his eyes and taking a long, slow, deep breath. He let every emotion drain from his body. He allowed the great calm to descend on him: the calm that would allow him to act with perfect precision and deadly efficiency.
Zanshin.
10.40 p.m.: Osdorf, Hamburg
The small locked door was made of the same heavy oak as the entrance and would not yield to the kicks of the police officers. It was only after several hard slams with the door-ram that it eventually gave way.
‘Maria!’ Fabel called as he struggled through the door and into the cellar.
‘Over here!’
Fabel followed her voice, running through the vast cellar. He found her bound to the chair, close to the plastic-curtained area.