But she wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. Maria knew that the surveillance operation was probably still active, but this time she would work around it. Large police operations like that always looked at the bigger picture, building connections, establishing command structures, identifying key locations; hundreds of experts working on the detail while the investigative management stood back to see the whole. But the core of Vitrenko’s operations was people trafficking. These weren’t stolen cars, the licence numbers of which could be logged and filed. These were people and at the heart of each statistic lay a human tragedy. That would be Maria’s way in. To start with the victims and work back. And because she was here unofficially – without authority or even legitimacy – she could work with the gloves off. It was something she had to do alone, but she found herself wishing that Anna Wolff was there. Anna was no great lover of rules, but Fabel and Werner were both sticklers for procedure. Anna would be willing to break heads and bend rules; Maria was going to have to work the same way.
Maria placed her SIG-Sauer service automatic on the bed next to the laptop. And then the other gun: a 9mm Glock 26 Compact. Maria had studied law before becoming a police officer, all set for a high-flying career. The law had been everything to her, the thread that held the fabric of society together, that gave order to the world. In obtaining this other gun she had, for the first time in her life, broken the law. Maria was still a police officer. It would be her training and skills that would lead her to Vitrenko. But then… then, if she were to get that far alive, it would be the Glock in her hand. Maria had no intention of arresting him.
She went through the files on her computer again. The Farmers’ Market: that was what the organised sale of humans from Ukraine, Russia, Poland and elsewhere in the East was called. Not a title invented by the investigators, but the name given it by the criminals who organised it. A fitting title for the sale of people as meat. She opened up a spreadsheet document on which she had plotted all the salient points of the investigation. It was a view of a torn spider’s web: as many connections missing as there were present. There was practically nothing for Maria to go on. Vitrenko’s organisation was supremely well constructed: layers of management and production, just like any corporate structure, but engineered in such a way that each level operated without knowledge of who was on the tier above or below. Even on the same organisational level, ‘cells’ often operated without knowledge of each other. Each cell was led by a pakhan, or boss, who took his orders from a ‘brigadier’ who ran as many as ten pakhans. The foot soldiers never knew who the ‘brigadier’ was who transmitted their orders to them through their pakhan. Added to this was the use of freelance specialists who were not full-time members of the organisation and who were often not Ukrainian or Russian. In this way, the Ukrainian Mafia had a completely different form from the Italian Mafia. It was also infinitely more difficult to investigate and prosecute than its Italian counterpart.
But Maria didn’t need to find evidence. She wasn’t interested in building a case. All she wanted to do was find Vitrenko.
Maria laid another file next to the other items. A face looked out from a military service photograph. Colonel Vasyl Vitrenko, formerly of the Berkut counter-terrorist Spetsnaz. Maria had stared at this face so often, so intensely, that it should have lost its power to churn her gut. It hadn’t. Every time she looked at the bright green Ukrainian eyes, the high, broad cheekbones and wide forehead framed by thick butter-blond hair, she felt a twinge in her chest, just below the breastbone. Where her scar was.
Of course, Vitrenko would probably look nothing like that now. Turchenko, the investigator who had been killed on his way to Cologne, had been certain that Vitrenko would have changed his appearance radically, probably by cosmetic surgery.
‘But you can’t change those,’ Maria said to the photograph. ‘You can’t change your eyes.’
5.
The bar was dimly lit and Annett Louisan played in the background. The decor was conspicuously trendy, the clientele well heeled and the drinks expensive. Oliver realised that this was going to cost him a fortune before they had even left the bar. He sat on a bar stool, leaning on the counter, drinking a cocktail made with white rum and looking at his reflection in the smoked-glass mirror behind the bar. He smiled a knowing smile to himself. Things were never what they seemed to be; people were never who they seemed to be. Oliver was handsome; his clothes were as trendy and expensive as any in the bar; he certainly was intelligent, highly educated; he was a respected professional with an excellent income; and since he’d arrived in the bar he had caught the eye of several attractive women. If anyone knew that he was here to meet a professional companion, they would have found it difficult to understand. But Oliver understood. And he was quite comfortable with the reasons why he found himself in a situation like this. His needs were so specific.
He reflected on this for a moment as Annett Louisan held a particularly breathy note in the background. Oliver had never had to spend anguished hours trying to isolate some subliminally erotic encounter that would explain his ‘predilection’. It was all so classically Freudian: involving, as it did, a female cousin, a particularly languorous summer by the sea, and a singular moment in which his understanding of what it was to be a creature of flesh had been born.
Oliver’s cousin Sylvia was two years older than him. She had always been there somewhere in the background of the family landscape but, because his uncle and aunt lived far out in the country near the coast, she had not figured much in his early consciousness. Oliver’s first real awareness of Sylvia had been an awareness of her curves; when he’d been fourteen and she sixteen. Sylvia’s figure had been full but not fat: she was voluptuous but firm, sturdily, lithely athletic. She was the daughter of Oliver’s mother’s brother, but she had borne no resemblance to their side of the family: she had had her mother’s red-blonde hair and freckled skin. Sylvia had always been an outdoor girl. Adventurous, robust; but even at sixteen too charged with feminine sexuality ever to be considered a tomboy. Despite her being naturally pale, Sylvia’s complexion had been burnished a light gold-bronze and the freckles darkened by long summers under the seaside sun. More than anything else, Oliver remembered her figure: perfectly rounded breasts and, most of all, her big, beautiful, glorious bottom.
There had been a group of them that day, including Oliver’s younger brother and sister and Sylvia’s three giggling, stupid sisters. Oliver had been annoyed that so many other younger children had come along. Instinct told him that he needed to be alone with Sylvia, without telling him what he actually should do if they did find themselves alone.
It had all happened during a family holiday far up in northern Germany: a shoulder of land near Stufhusen separated the exposed western shore from the Wattenmeer mudflats and a broad, sweep of golden sand scythed into the North Sea and sparkled under a cloudless sky. It was an idyll for a child: an environment almost empty of people and consequently without the interference of grown-ups, the houses scattered across the low, flat landscape.