‘Tilt your head close to mine,’ she hissed at the man. He was tall, nearly ten centimetres taller than she was. ‘Make it look like we’re a couple and you’re talking to me.’
Maybe, she thought, the manoeuvre had worked: maybe they had crossed her off their list and were seeking some other woman approaching, alone. She thought about the man on her arm. The fake Uncle Georg had probably looked at her as she had passed, but she had turned her face away as if looking out across the water. Only this man had seen her up close. If she got out into Poseldorf, she would take him up a side street. She didn’t have the silencer on her gun, so she would finish him with her knife.
If she got out into Poseldorf.
They had passed a Hamburg Parks Department van a couple of seconds ago, with a group of workmen standing beside it. She felt like laughing: they could have thrown in at least one older or overweight cop, just for appearances. The workmen had special weapons and training written all over them. Polizei Hamburg MEK unit. Six of them. Body armour under overalls, probably. She knew that these men could move fast and could keep pace with her on a long foot-pursuit. To become a member of the Polizei Hamburg’s MEK squad you had to be able to run three thousand metres in less than thirteen minutes thirty seconds. But the body armour would slow them. Legs and heads. If it came to it, she would go for legs and heads. They had a massive advantage in numbers and equipment, but she had a big advantage in knowing that they would do it all by the book. By numbers.
Fabel was watching her and hesitating, she knew he was. Every second he hesitated brought her closer to the city, to streets and people. Once she was there she could get away. And if they came after her she would create so much havoc. She would lose them in a tidal wave of dead civilians.
The polycarbide knife. The Beretta. Three spare clips, fourteen rounds each, in her shoulder bag.
She could see straight up Alsterchausee. The trick was not to start rushing. She kept calm. Kept her grip on the hostage constant and firm. She was nearly there. He wasn’t going to call it. Fabel wasn’t going to call it.
Uncle Georg.
They had Uncle Georg. Then the realisation hit her. They didn’t have Uncle Georg: he was dead. She dug deep into herself to feel something. And she had to dig deep. So little feeling.
She thought about the talks they had had together. She thought about when she had been fifteen and he had taught her everything she knew. She remembered sitting on the grass outside the training school on a summer’s day. She had felt the sun prickle on her neck. She remembered the cool orange juice they had drunk together and the few moments they had chatted — Uncle Georg, Liane, Margarethe and her — about silly, inconsequential things.
‘This is a golden moment,’ Uncle Georg had explained. ‘Between meetings, you should enjoy these moments. Savour them.’
And in that golden moment she had truly felt that the other girls were her sisters; that Uncle Georg really was her uncle. She had glimpsed a life that she had never known. It had been a perfect golden lie for a perfect golden moment. But even in that lie she had discovered what it must have been like to have been part of a family.
And now Uncle Georg was dead.
For a moment, in the middle of the chill Hamburg winter, she felt the warmth of that long-gone summer afternoon. She found the pain, the grief that she had dug for.
It was then that she heard them running towards her from behind, shouting for her to let her hostage go and to stand still.
Fabel had called it, after all.
Chapter Seven
1
Anke Wollner spun around, pulling the man she held captive in front of her as a shield. She knew, of course, that there would be other MEK and Criminal Police closing in behind her, but the main threat would come from the front. The six MEK men had broken into three teams of two. Standard formation, by the book.
She saw the other cop, the woman dressed as a jogger. She was yelling at Anke to stand still. Anke fired twice at the woman cop, hitting her in both legs. She went down and started to scream. Anke aimed for her head but was aware of the MEK officers advancing towards her, three moving, three covering. She fired into the face of the first. The others opened fire, but their shots went wide: they were clearly afraid of hitting her hostage. She fired twice more. One miss, the second took off the side of an MEK man’s head. Two dead cops. One heavily wounded. They would pull back to avoid any civilian injury. Anke backed up towards Harvestehuder Weg, keeping the hostage in front of her. He was shaking violently and she was having trouble steering him. Checking behind, she saw two cops duck down behind a parked car. She fired into the windows, shattering them and sending glass flying. She fired three shots into the petrol tank, then a round onto the asphalt where the petrol had already started pooling. The sparks from the round hitting the road ignited the petrol and the rear of the car lifted into the air as the tank exploded. She heard screams from behind the car and other officers came running up. She could see a car screech to a halt further up Harvestehuder Weg, stopped by a uniformed officer.
Anke released her grip on the hostage and sprinted in the direction of the car. As she did so, she turned and shot the hostage once, in the stomach. He fell down onto the road, vomiting blood onto the wet street. Then he started screaming. They would have to deal with him. As Anke ran towards the car she heard automatic fire. Something slapped the back of her calf and she was surrounded by the angry hornet zipping of bullets around her, but she kept running. They had to control their fire. There were houses to the left of her and a stray bullet could take out a civilian. That was their number-one disadvantage. She didn’t care who died or was injured: they had to.
A uniformed officer to her left turned and reached for his side arm. She kept running, her Beretta stretched out in her rod-steady arm. She fired twice and hit the uniformed cop — who she knew would not be body-armoured — twice in the chest. The driver of the car sat gawp-mouthed. Anke ripped open the driver door and pulled the driver, a young woman, from the VW Polo. Anke then shot her in the legs: another casualty to slow things up. She slammed the Polo into gear and reversed at high speed up Harvestehuder Weg. There were more shots and the windscreen shattered, but Anke didn’t turn. If they were going to hit her, they would. Her only chance was to get away as fast as possible. She spun the car into a 180-degree skid on the wet street and floored the accelerator again. She could see blue lights in her rear-view mirror.
They were chasing her.
‘The one thing about a police chase,’ Uncle Georg had told her, ‘is that the police will almost always win. Make them think they’re in a vehicle pursuit and then get out of the vehicle as quickly as possible.’
She took the corner at Poseldorfer Weg at high speed, tyres screeching. Turning sharp right into a side street, a cul-de-sac, she pulled into the kerb, reversing to park normally behind another car. She saw the blue lights flash past the road end. A second police car slowed down almost to a halt at the end of the cul-de-sac, obviously checking it out, before taking off after the first car.
Anke got out of the car as quickly as she could, but found her leg was stiffening up. She could feel the wet in her shoe and inside her trouser leg. She couldn’t look now. She needed to get away. Put as much distance as possible, as quickly as possible, between herself and the car.
She still had her shoulder bag strapped across her chest. She released the empty magazine from the Beretta’s grip and slammed in a full one. She walked without limping along the quiet street and took a sudden left turn through the gate of one of the houses. She could see it was a substantial villa that had been converted into apartments. She walked up to the main door as if she had done so every day in her life and checked the names on the buzzer board. There was an apartment with two different surnames. It was by no means guaranteed, but she guessed it was lived in by an unmarried couple without kids, probably a younger couple. They would probably be out at work. She pressed the buzzer. No answer, which was what she wanted. She then proceeded to press every buzzer until she got an answer. An older woman’s voice.
‘Delivery,’ said Anke.
The door lock was buzzed open. Anke pushed open the door and shoved the toe of her boot in to stop it
