been afraid. She had kept looking at the door of the cafe as if she was expecting someone to follow her in. Above all, it had been the way she had put the phone down on the table, placed her paper napkin over it and walked out, forgetting the phone was there. That was why he had taken the phone: not because she had forgotten it and he could return it to her, but because everything about her leaving it behind was fake. She hadn’t forgotten it: she was leaving it somewhere she knew it would be stolen if found.
It was intriguing. She was intriguing. And, for a moment after she had left the cafe, Roman Kraxner, the obese, balding computer geek turned fraudster became his online persona of Rick334, private detective out of New Venice. After paying his bill he had squeezed his bulk past the table she’d been sitting at. He had pretended to drop the hand-held PDA he had been working on onto the table and, when he had picked it up, he had palmed the Nokia.
It was a subterfuge that had been totally unnecessary. No one had been looking in his direction. It was one of the consolations for the fat or ugly: it was not just that people did not notice you; they made a real effort not to notice you.
Roman’s curiosity had been stirred even more when he had got home and flicked through the contents of the phone. There were no contacts in the address lists and Roman got the idea that the phone had been purged shortly before being dumped. All previous destinations in the satnav had also been cleared. The text messages, too.
But one thing had been left untouched: the ringtone. And it was set for everything: incoming calls, text messages, alerts. ‘Message in a Bottle’ by The Police. When Roman had seen that he had known instantly that all his instincts about the woman in the cafe had been right. She had deliberately left the phone for him to find. Like a castaway tossing a bottle into the ocean, she had put something inside this phone. A message. All Roman had to do was find it.
Not that that would present a problem to Roman: the great thing about cellphones was that they were a convergent technology — a phone was a camera, an organiser, a web browser, an mp3 player. Unlike earlier models, this generation of mobile was more computer than phone and Roman had the software to retrieve the data that had been dumped.
It was then that things had become very interesting.
Chapter Twenty
Anna Wolff stood by the window of Fabel’s office, looking out across the dark shapes of the trees in Winterhude Stadtpark. Outside, the light was fading but the sky, now clear of clouds, was a sheet of dark blue silk.
‘That was a long coffee break…’ She turned when Fabel came into the office.
‘What’s this? You our new time-and-motion monitor?’ He sat down behind his desk. ‘I’ve just had a very interesting chat with Fabian Menke of the BfV. About the Pharos Project.’
‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. That and what Technical Section have retrieved from the computers we seized this afternoon.’ Anna tapped a document folder on Fabel’s desk. ‘Interim stuff. As we speak, geeks are burrowing deeper and deeper into silicon.’ She imitated a small crawling animal, wrinkling her nose.
‘Anything hopeful?’
‘Absolutely nothing,’ she sighed. ‘It looks like these guys are clean. Weird, but clean. Of course, we did come up one computer short.’
‘I couldn’t take it away from him, Anna. If you had been there…’ Fabel frowned. ‘Actually, no… if you’d been there you would have taken it. And probably confiscated his wheelchair, too.’
‘We really do need to check it out,’ said Anna. ‘Even if he is physically unlikely to be a suspect, there may be something in his interactions with the victims that could give us something.’
‘I’m well aware of that, Anna. I’ve arranged to send one of Kroeger’s people around to Reisch’s home to check the computer.’ Fabel picked up the folder and flicked through the report inside. ‘I guess we just have to keep plugging away. Hit the next bunch of IP addresses.’
‘We could be at that for ever,’ said Anna.
‘It’s all we’ve got,’ said Fabel. He nodded to the chair opposite. ‘Sit down, Anna.’
‘I’m okay,’ she said absently. ‘I’d rather stand. I’ve been sitting all day and my leg stiffens up a bit.’
For a split second, Fabel found himself lost for words. Anna picked up on it.
‘Jan,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. I wish we could stop dancing around this. It wasn’t your fault.’
He stared at the report in front of him, more to avoid making eye contact with Anna than to study the file’s contents.
‘It was my fault,’ he said. ‘I was in command. Just like I was the night Paul was killed.’
‘This is a dangerous business, Jan. I know that and Paul knew that. You can’t legislate for every eventuality.’
‘I dream about him all the time,’ Fabel said in a flat, quiet voice. ‘Nearly every week or couple of weeks. Always the same dream. We’re always in my father’s study, up in my parents’ house in Norddeich, and Paul talks to me. Not about anything important or significant. He just sits there and chats to me. But I know he’s dead. He has the wound in his head and sometimes he explains that it’s difficult for him to have an opinion or perspective on whatever it is we’re talking about, because he’s dead.’
‘I thought all the dreams had stopped,’ said Anna.
‘That’s what I tell Susanne. The official line. It’s tough living with a psychologist. I don’t know if she believes me, but that’s what I tell her. The point is, I know that if I had done things differently Paul would be alive, Maria Klee wouldn’t be in a mental hospital and you wouldn’t have got shot.’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry — can we drop it?’
‘You’re the boss.’ Anna smiled at him. ‘About the Pharos Project, if I show you mine will you show me yours?’
‘Go ahead…’ Fabel leaned back in his chair.
‘I don’t know why you wanted me to look into this for you, but I’ve been hearing some very dodgy things about Pharos. And — how you knew I won’t ask — but there is a connection with the murders.’
Fabel looked stunned.
‘You did ask me to look at this because there’s some kind of connection?’ asked Anna.
‘No… no, not at all — like I told you, it’s something unrelated.’
‘Then it’s quite some coincidence,’ said Anna. ‘It took a bit of unravelling, but Dominik Korn, who heads the Pharos Project, also heads the consortium that owns and operates Virtual Dimension, the simulated-reality game that all the victims were logged into. So why were you interested in Pharos?’
‘A long shot… I thought there might be a link to the other body we found. The wash-up.’ Fabel sighed. ‘There’s a woman who seems to have gone missing: Meliha Yazar. I think there may be a link to the Pharos Project. She might have been investigating them.’
‘What have you got yourself into, Jan?’ Anna left the window, came over to Fabel’s desk and leaned on it, the concern in her expression genuine.
‘Something I maybe shouldn’t have,’ he said, and meant it. ‘I got talked into it by Berthold Muller-Voigt. This is strictly between us, Anna…’
She nodded.
‘Muller-Voigt is involved with this woman…’ began Fabel.
‘And half the female population of Hamburg, from what I’ve heard,’ said Anna.
‘It’s not like that. Muller-Voigt is nuts about this woman. And he is really concerned about her disappearance.’ Fabel sketched out some of what had passed between him and the Environment Senator.
‘You know,’ said Anna when he was finished, ‘I think I’d better sit down after all. You have no idea what I found out about Pharos. If Muller-Voigt’s latest squeeze really was investigating them, then she could well have got out of her depth. The Pharos Project is the brainchild of Dominik Korn. Have you heard of him?’
‘Not until Muller-Voigt mentioned him to me,’ said Fabel.
‘That’s hardly surprising. Dominik Korn is one of the world’s richest men — worth billions, as is his deputy, Peter Wiegand — but he’s also one of the world’s most reclusive men. No one outside Wiegand and his circle of closest advisers has had contact with him for years. Occasionally he will take part in video conferences with other
