A Fear of Dark Water (35 page)

‘I’ve got good news and bad news, Anna. The good news is that I’m not growing paranoid in my old age.’

‘The tail? Are you sure?’

‘Positive this time. I’ve just passed the Fischmarkt. Could you contact Ops Room and ask for a marked car to be on standby down at the junction of Grosse Elbestrasse and Kaistrasse? It’s quiet enough down there for us to pull them over and have a chat.’

‘I’ll do it now. But I’m coming down too.’ She hung up before Fabel had a chance to answer. He continued to head west. Again there was no sign of the VW on his tail. They had been stopped at the traffic lights and had obviously decided to use the opportunity to open up a little space between them and Fabel’s car.

He was on St Pauli Hafenstrasse when he saw it again, three or four cars back. These guys were good. Or they had help. Fabel began to wonder about what could have been attached to his car during his guided tour of the Pharos.

Anna called him on his cellphone. ‘The uniform guys are in position.’

‘Good. Chummy is still on my tail. I’m on Hafenstrasse – could you tell the uniform unit to be ready to pull him over?’

‘Sure. I’ll be there myself in a couple of minutes.’

Fabel hung up and checked his mirror. There was only one car now between him and the big VW. He thought he could see the outlines of two men through the darkened glass.

‘Let’s make this interesting,’ he said to himself under his breath. He spotted a narrow cobbled roadway off the main carriageway. It led to the other side of the riverside buildings and the water’s edge. This was an access way that no normal traffic would use. The opposite lane was clear of oncoming traffic, so Fabel swung across to the left without indicating and slammed on his brakes, pulling into a parking bay at the edge of the water. The car behind drove past, the driver blasting his horn at Fabel’s failure to indicate. He saw the VW thunder past the road end too: either the driver felt he could not make the sudden turn or was trying to convince Fabel that he was not really following him.

Fabel called Anna. ‘The Tiguan has just passed me. I didn’t give him an alternative. Tell the uniform unit he’s heading their way and to pull him over. I’ll be right behind him. If he’s pulled over or double-backed, I’ll let you know.’

He had just begun to twist around in his seat to start reversing back out onto the main road when he saw a four-by-four hurtling towards him. The car had only just registered in Fabel’s brain when it slammed into the back of Fabel’s BMW. He was thrown violently forward, only to be caught painfully by the inertia reel of his seat belt.

‘Bastard!’ he shouted into the rear-view mirror. He slammed on the brakes and undid his seat belt. He tried to work out what had happened. He was not sure, but he thought that the four-by-four was another make. Not the same car that had been following him. Two cars?

At least that made things easier in one way: he could detain the driver for careless driving, or on suspicion of drunk driving. He twisted round to see the four-by-four reversing back from the impact. There was the ugly sound of grinding metal as it did so and a tinny clang as something from the rear of Fabel’s car hit the cobbles of the wharf-side roadway. He could see it was not the VW: this vehicle was a Land Rover.

Fabel had just reached for his door handle when the Land Rover smashed into the back of his car again. This time he was thrown forward without the restraint of his seat belt and his chest slammed painfully against the steering wheel, forcing a pulse of air from his lungs. Winded, he gasped for breath, his body screaming for oxygen. Between desperate gasps, he fumbled to free his service automatic from its holster. Another impact. The SIG-Sauer automatic jumped from his tremulous fingers and fell into the footwell. He turned again in his seat. The Land Rover was reversing away fast. Fabel felt faint and sick from lack of oxygen and his chest hurt with every breath, but he desperately sought to make sense of his situation. He reached for his phone. In the rear-view mirror he saw the car’s huge dark bulk loom at him as it slammed once more into the rear of his BMW. But this impact was different. This time the engine of the Land Rover screamed as the driver floored the accelerator.

Fabel realised what was happening. The bastard was trying to push him off the wharf and into the river.

He instinctively pushed the footbrake to the floor. A useless exercise, he realised immediately, so he slammed the BMW into reverse and pushed back against the four-by-four. It was an unequal struggle and his tyres squealed and smoked as they spun impotently on the smooth cobbles.

He had to get out. He had to get out before the car went over the edge. But he was on the wrong side of the car, the water side. He stared wildly at the grille of the Land Rover, which completely filled his rear-view mirror. Filled Fabel’s universe. Fabel had just decided to risk making the jump when he felt suddenly weightless, and realised that his car had gone over the edge.

There was another impact, this time as the car hit the surface of the water and Fabel was thrown around in the metal confines of his car. Everything went dark and for a moment he thought he had passed out, until he realised, as the passenger cabin of his car filled with cold, oily, dark water, that he was sinking to the bottom of the River Elbe.

Chapter Thirty

He had found out her name remarkably easily. Getting around the encryption had not been difficult. It had taken Roman less than half a day to decode and transfer the information.

Meliha Yazar.

The woman he had seen in the café had been Meliha Yazar. Roman felt a profound sadness at the idea that such a beautiful woman would now be dead. So would he be, soon.

He had stopped hating Meliha for leaving the phone for him to find. With that act – which he now felt was not as random as it had first seemed, maybe she had seen him, recognised something in him – she had given him a great gift, for now Roman knew something about himself that he had not known before. He was brave. He had always thought of himself as cowardly, but now he realised that he was not afraid of dying. They would kill him, but before they did he would make sure that the information he had, that she had entrusted to him with that simple act in the café, would be passed on to the policeman Fabel and others. Roman realised that sending the information by email would never work. He recognised the sophistication of their expertise and the scope of their technical resources. He genuinely admired some of their work. Truly creative.

But they were dangerous. The first thing they would do when they traced Roman would be to wipe out his email traffic and blogging presence. To silence his electronic singing.

He also knew that he could not simply rely on Fabel, because the chances were he would soon be dead too. Roman and Fabel both represented the outer radiations of a spidering spread of knowledge that had to be contained. A circle that had to be closed.

But that was in the real world. And Roman existed in more than the real world. He knew the truth and the falsity of their fantasy of a digital otherworld. It existed, but it was not somewhere you could go unless you accepted the total death of the ego. A soulless shadow of reality. He knew. He had spent so much of his young life there.

He finished decrypting the files. And there it was: he had found the secret about the Pharos Project that they could never allow to be known. They had been mad to think that they could keep something like that hidden from the world. But, there again, the Big Lie was always the most enduring, the easiest to sustain.

As soon as he had finished transferring the file to the various formats he wanted, Roman went around his apartment, opening the curtains. He struggled with a couple of the half-light windows but managed to get them open and allow some air into the apartment.

Then he went out.

It was sunny. The first really sunny day of the year. The Wilhelmsburg street was full of noise after the quiet of his apartment. He thought about the Albanians who lived below him who had not really been noisy; it had been Roman who had been intolerant simply because he had been unable to remove himself that one step further from mankind and the real world. There had, Roman realised, been people just like him throughout history. The medieval monks who chose the austerity of a monastic cell and the virtual reality of religion; the ancient philosophers who hid in caves or barrels and commented on the human condition from which they had disconnected.

It took him a long time to walk into town. But he had been determined to walk. It meant that every now and then he had to lean against a wall to catch his breath, and he sat down every time the opportunity presented itself on a municipal bench or, on one occasion, even on a lidded waste bin.

He saw the way others looked at him. But today Roman did not care. Today he had a mission to fulfil, a purpose that was, for once, not all about him. He went to the DeutschePost office first and bought five padded envelopes, dropped a memory stick and a handwritten note into each. He paused for a moment before he let the envelopes slip from his grasp and into the mail chute; in that moment, he thought of Meliha, the woman in the café, the woman behind the truth. He hoped that somehow, somewhere, she would be aware of what he was doing for her.

After the post office, Roman went to an ATM and withdrew five hundred euros, folded the notes neatly and placed them in a sixth envelope. On the way home he visited two more ATMs, using a different card each time; each time removing five hundred euros. By the time he reached the main door of his apartment building, Roman was wheezing and sweating profusely. He leaned against the wall and looked up at the sky. High above him, the distant glint of a passenger jet left a trail of vapour, like a needle running white thread through blue silk. There is never just one reality, he thought as he watched the jet, wondering what the passengers saw of Wilhelmsburg from that altitude. There are as many realities as there are people on the planet: reality is what lives in each person’s head. When they kill me, he thought, my reality will end, but I will have no sense of it ending. Just as I was not aware before my birth, I will not be aware after my death, so all time only exists as I perceive it. Time began with me and will end with me. I am immortal.

When he had recovered enough, he entered his apartment building and started the slow, painful climb up the stairs. His breathing was even more laboured by the time he reached the door of the apartment beneath his. When the Albanian opened the door and recognised Roman, his face darkened with dull anger; then he seemed to notice the state Roman was in and the anger was replaced by concern.

‘Are you all right? You no look so good …’

‘Jetmir …’ Roman spat the words out between rheumy wheezes. ‘That’s your name, isn’t it … Jetmir?’

The Albanian nodded and moved out to help Roman. Roman nearly laughed: Jetmir was a small, wiry, dark man whom Roman reckoned would be crushed to death if he fell on him.

‘You come in. You not well man. I get doctor, maybe.’

‘No doctor, Jetmir. I’m sorry. I’m the one who kept calling the police. You knew that anyway, but I’m telling you now, it was me and I’m sorry.’ He pushed the envelope containing the fifteen hundred euros into the Albanian’s hands. ‘Take it. I want you to have it. I know you don’t have a lot of money.’

The Albanian stared at the cash. ‘Why?’ he asked. But he made no attempt to return it.

‘Because I’ve been a bad neighbour. And because I want you to do something for me. It’s payment in advance.’ Roman paused. A pain started to shoot across his chest and down his right arm. He grabbed the Albanian’s shirt front and pulled him close. With his other hand he shoved a second envelope against his chest. ‘This is for the police,’ he said. ‘It’s very important that they get this. There are bad men coming, Jetmir. They’re coming for me.’

‘Then I get police now …’

‘No!’ Roman shouted and tightened his grip on the small Albanian. ‘No. That could be dangerous for you and your family. Listen, if anything happens to me, you’ve got to give that envelope to the police. But only to a policeman called Fabel. Jan Fabel. His name’s on the front. Have you got that? Don’t give it to anyone else.’

The Albanian nodded vigorously. ‘You wait here, I get you some water.’

It took a full fifteen minutes for the pain to ease and for Roman, sipping slowly at the water, to get something of his breath back. While they sat together on the stairs, Roman and the Albanian talked. They chatted about the most inconsequential things, about Jetmir’s home in Albania, about his children and how they sounded just like Germans. But throughout the whole conversation the earnest expression of concern never left the Albanian’s face. Roman remembered how the Albanian had tried to talk to him when the family first moved in, how they had made an effort to befriend him. He felt bad when he thought about that. They were people, after all; not just a noise, an annoyance, on the periphery of Roman’s existence.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Roman, slowly and painfully easing himself up from the stairs. ‘I’ll be fine. Just don’t forget your promise.’

‘I won’t forget. We is good neighbours now. You are my
fqinj
. We look after each other.’

The Albanian helped Roman up the rest of the stairs to his front door.

‘I’ll be fine now. Thanks for your help, Jetmir.’ Roman unlocked his door, smiled and waited until he heard the Albanian shut his own door one floor down. Only then did Roman step into his apartment.