key people in his business empire. He lives on a massive yacht. And I mean massive. It would make the average Russian oligarch feel inadequate.’
‘Why is he so reclusive?’
‘Apparently he had a diving accident that caused him to have some kind of cataclysmic stroke brought on by severe decompression sickness and other complications. He shouldn’t be alive; it was a miracle that he survived it, but it’s left him in the same kind of condition as the guy you interviewed earlier today. Since then he’s needed round-the-clock care.’
‘And he’s also head of this cult?’
‘Guru number one, apparently. He may sound like a nut-job, but he’s said to be as rich in brains as he is in cash. His IQ is said to be off the scale. He studied…’ Anna referred to her notebook ‘… oceanography, hydrology and environmental science in the United States — he has dual German and US citizenship, by the way — then did a doctoral thesis in hydrology, and then went on to become a hydrometeorologist.’ She looked at her notes again. ‘ Studying the interaction between large bodies of water and the climate. Korn became the world’s leading expert on ecohydrology. That’s what he was doing when he had his accident. He had designed this unique submersible for research work and was taking it on its maiden dive when it all went tits-up.’
‘His accident?’
‘And his epiphany, apparently.’
‘Yes…’ said Fabel. ‘Muller-Voigt made mention of some kind of revelation at the bottom of the sea.’
‘Right up until the accident, the Pharos Project had been an oceanographic research study. Korn had poured millions of his own money into it. It was examining the environmental impact of various human activities at the deepest ocean levels. Then, after his accident and the damage it did to him, Korn changed the nature of the Pharos Project. To start with it became a lobbying body, campaigning against oil exploration in deeper waters. It gained a lot of credibility after the BP thing in the Gulf of Mexico. Then Korn approved members of Pharos getting involved in protests and direct action. After that, about nine months after his accident, Korn started to talk about his epiphany and what it meant.’
‘Which was?’
‘All his adult life, Dominik Korn had positioned himself as a disciple of deep ecology — apparently that means he believed that human beings shouldn’t see themselves as distinct from the ecosystem and that they should work to shape the environment sympathetically while preserving biodiversity, all that sort of stuff. But after his accident he totally rejected the concept of deep ecology and started spouting his theories of disengagement. He claimed his experience five thousand metres down had revealed some kind of universal truth to him.’
‘Don’t they all,’ said Fabel. ‘Going by the number of cults there are, there must be a hell of a lot of universal truths.’
‘Well, Korn’s particular revelation was that he had been damaged because he had been a human in an environment humans had no place being. The philosophy of the Pharos Project is that mankind should remove itself from the environment.’ Anna shrugged. ‘This disengagement he talks about.’
‘Where did you get all this stuff?’
‘The federal boys,’ said Anna. ‘I’ve got a contact there. An ex-boyfriend, actually. He was pretty cagey. He said this was a big thing for the BfV. The French security services and the American FBI are all over the Pharos Project too, apparently. He doesn’t know exactly what it is about it that’s flipped their switches, but the Pharos Project is on all kinds of hot lists.’
‘So I gather. Your sniffing around on my behalf was noticed.’
‘Menke?’
‘Yep. He knew all about your enquiries. Your ex-boyfriend was obviously so cagey that he felt he needed to cover his back.’
‘So what did Menke tell you?’ asked Anna.
‘Less than you’ve told me, but enough for me to see that if Meliha Yazar had been snooping around Pharos, then Muller-Voigt might be right about her being in danger. Menke’s promised to send me some information over later.’
‘But?’ Anna raised an eyebrow.
‘But I think our interest is unwelcome. To be fair, I haven’t confided in Menke about Muller-Voigt or his concerns about Meliha Yazar. Menke did tell me that the Pharos Project meets all the criteria of a destructive cult. Particularly its dictatorial control over its members. Menke wasn’t too specific, but it seems it’s the same old thing: conversion becomes indoctrination becomes brainwashing. He did say that Korn has added his own twists here and there. The other thing that distinguishes Pharos is its financial clout. The inner chamber of the Project are all board members of the various companies in the Korn business empire. And from what you’ve said, that includes the developers of Virtual Dimension.’
‘Maybe we should make your unofficial snooping into Meliha Yazar an official investigation. If you think she might be the wash-up. We could get familial DNA…’
Fabel shook his head. ‘It’s not as straightforward as that… Anyway, I still think it might be a wild-goose chase.’ He looked at his watch and saw it was eleven-thirty. ‘It’s late. I’m heading home. We’ll pick this up in the morning.’
Fabel tried ringing Susanne’s cellphone again as he came out of the elevator and crossed the Presidium’s basement garage. He cursed when he once more got her answering service: he left a message, telling her that this was his temporary cell number and asking her to check in with him.
Fabel hadn’t eaten since lunchtime and he didn’t feel like cooking for himself so he decided to eat somewhere on the way home. Driving through the night-time city, his mind wandered and ranged over everything that had happened over the last forty-eight hours. Two bodies in the water. Two different MOs. He guessed that the press would be all over the second body by the morning and van Heiden would be on the phone to him again to state the obvious. But the strange thing was that his conversation of the night before with Muller-Voigt, and everything he had found out since about the Pharos Project, were what really haunted his thoughts.
It was only after Fabel stopped his BMW that he realised what he had done. It had been as if he had been on autopilot. He had driven down to the harbour. He knew why he had done it and he felt a leaden sadness coalesce in his chest. He had been working late and had wanted to eat something on the way home so, as he had so many times before, he had driven down to the harbour to buy a beer and something hot to eat from Stellamanns’ Schnell- Imbiss snack bar.
Dirk Stellamanns had run the harbourside snack stand since his retirement from the Polizei Hamburg. Like Fabel, Dirk was a Frisian by birth and, as the experienced officer, he had shown Fabel the ropes when he had first entered the service. He had taken him under his wing, and the two had only ever talked to each other in Frisian Low Saxon. Throughout the years, and despite Fabel’s rise through the ranks, the two men had remained close. Then, after his retirement, Dirk had set up his immaculately kept snack stand — a caravan with a serving window and canopy and surrounded by parasol-topped waist-high tables — smack bang in the middle of what had been his old beat, in the shadow of the dockside cranes that loomed above it.
Fabel visited regularly to grab a beer and something to eat, particularly when something was troubling him. Seeing Dirk, and hearing his accent that was as broad and flat as the landscape they had both grown up in, had always cheered Fabel up. Stellamanns had been that kind of man: no matter what life had thrown at him, he always seemed to remain cheerily philosophical about it.
Fabel stepped out of his car, stood in an illuminated pool of cobbled road, and looked over to a vacant patch of scrubland next to the dock road.
The summer before, on a particularly hot day, Dirk had been doing his best business of the season. He had built up a huge clientele of lorry drivers who would stop on their way into or out of the docks. He had been working over the stove when it happened: a massive heart attack that had killed him before he hit the caravan floor.
For those few minutes while his mind had been preoccupied with other things Dirk had still been alive in Fabel’s subconscious, his snack stand still open for business as usual.
The world was changing around Fabel. And, like everyone else, he sometimes lost track of the changes. People he had thought of as constants, as always being there, suddenly were no longer there. It depressed and annoyed him that, for a moment, he had forgotten that Dirk had died. He had often done the same thing when he had thought of his childhood home in Norddeich; that his long-dead father was in fact still alive and sitting in his study, bent over some old map of the coast, his glasses perched precariously on the tip of his nose. It was what you
