mental disorders.’
‘Unlikely to have planned and executed the Schanzenviertel attack, then?’
‘I’m not saying that. Not by a long chalk. Freese is disabled, officially. Brain damage at birth, but that doesn’t seem to have blunted his intelligence. And he can function normally in many ways, but he does have all kinds of other problems, mainly neurological, and some that have made him outright delusional on occasion. But he’s smart enough, all right. He is, however, highly susceptible to manipulation, to suggestion. His mental state means he could be convinced of almost anything, if it’s articulated right and gels with his odd perception of the world.’
‘What is his problem?’ asked Fabel. ‘I mean specifically?’
‘It’s tragic, really. He really does experience reality differently from the rest of us: he suffers from almost constant promnesia, a highly disconcerting condition which is like having permanent deja vu. And he has frequent episodes of what the quacks call reduplicative paramnesia. When he’s in that state, the poor bastard thinks someone’s abducted him from the real world and built a perfect but counterfeit copy around him.’
‘I’ll ask my partner about it. She’s a quack, by the way.’
‘Is she?’ Menke looked only remotely embarrassed. ‘Ah, well, no doubt she can tell you more about the condition than I can. In any case, his condition has made Freese someone who can be influenced by feeding his paranoid beliefs. Not controlled, but influenced. The nature of his condition makes him easy meat for all kinds of mumbo-jumbo about quantum realities and environmental singularities.’
‘The kind of thing the Guardians of Gaia spout?’
‘And the Pharos Project.’
‘There’s a connection?’
‘Not that we can prove,’ said Menke. He paused as the two men watched a freighter, stacked impossibly high with containers, drift silently by. ‘But there has been a suggestion that the Guardians of Gaia are actually just a directly controlled arm of the Pharos Project.’
‘But surely their philosophies are totally different.’
Menke handed Fabel a sheet of paper with a handwritten note on it.
‘This is the last known address we have for Niels Freese. The second name is one that no one knows outside the BfV… except now you know. That is the name of the man we now believe to be the Hamburg commander of the Guardians of Gaia. If Freese carried out the attack that killed Fottinger — and it’s a big “if” — then that is the name of the man who ordered it.’
‘Jens Markull…’ Fabel read the name out loud. ‘Why the big secret about his name?’
‘He is… he was one of ours. You implied we must have infiltrators, undercover people working for us. Well, we do. He was one of them.’
‘He’s a BfV officer?’
‘No. Markull is simply someone whose principles were for sale. But it looks like something’s happened to make him shut up shop. We were getting really good intelligence from him, then it dried up. The last thing we heard was that he had met with some people from the Pharos Project. Then suddenly he’s promoted to Commander of the Hamburg division of the Guardians of Gaia and doesn’t seem to want to talk to us any more.’
Fabel put the note into his pocket and the two men started walking back to their cars.
‘There’s one thing I’d like to ask you about Niels Freese,’ said Fabel.
‘Go ahead.’
‘These neurological problems he has. Do they include a limp?’
Menke stopped and turned to Fabel, a look of surprise on his face. ‘Yes. As a matter of fact he does have a limp. The result of mild palsy caused by the oxygen deprivation at birth.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Heiner Goetz was a burly man just on the right side of sixty. He had thinning grey hair brushed back from a broad heavy forehead and large wiry eyebrows. A pair of wire-framed reading glasses had permanent residence on his heavy nose, balanced almost at the tip. Fabel always felt the glasses were a deliberate affectation: something to mitigate the fact that Goetz looked as if he worked on a building site. But Heiner Goetz was no bricklayer; he was the Chief State Prosecutor for Hamburg.
He sat and stared out of the window of his office on Georg-Fock-Wall as Fabel ran through, for the third time that day, his suspicions about the Pharos Project and its role in the disappearance and probable murder of Meliha Kebir, as well as the killings of Berthold Muller-Voigt, Daniel Fottinger and Harald Jaburg.
Fabel did his best, but knew that he had no hard evidence on which to base his claims. Securing any kind of warrant was a distant hope. He looked at his watch and glanced across at Werner Meyer whom he’d brought along with him. They had been talking it through for the best part of the morning and Fabel wanted to get back to the Presidium. After his conversation with Menke the previous day, Fabel had initiated a major manhunt for Niels Freese.
Goetz did not turn from the window when Fabel had finished speaking and gave no indication that he had heard what the Chief Commissar had said. Fabel remained patiently quiet: he had dealt with Goetz on countless occasions before and knew that the Chief State Prosecutor always took his time to think things through. Either that, or he enjoyed making police officers desperate to close in on a suspect sweat.
‘So all of these deaths have been sanctioned to keep a secret?’
‘That’s what I believe.’
‘But you have no substantiating evidence?’
‘None, Herr Goetz. We need the warrants to seize computers and compel testimony. It’s the only way we’re going to get to the bottom of this.’
‘Herr Fabel, you have been a police officer long enough to know that if I granted warrants on this kind of speculation, and the execution of said warrants yielded nothing material, then you and I would both be looking for another line of work before long. Now, if you had asked for surveillance warrants — wiretaps, email interception, that kind of thing, through which we could gradually harvest more convincing evidence — then I would have given that more credence.’
‘But don’t you see, Herr Goetz,’ said Fabel, trying to keep the frustration out of his tone, ‘such measures are futile against an opponent who is infinitely better resourced in terms of technology than we are. There is no form of electronic surveillance that they would not immediately spot and counter.’
Another silence as Goetz continued to stare out of the window.
‘All this internet business,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s a whole new environment for crime and we don’t have the laws or even the basic understanding to combat it. About six months ago there was a case put up to me, not by your commission but by one of the child protection agencies. This girl — fifteen, if I remember right — threw herself under an S-Bahn train. She’d been a victim of so-called cyber bullying. She couldn’t get away from it. It was relentless — vicious, vile stuff sent constantly to her computer, to her phone… it was a real campaign to destroy the spirit of a human being and it was facilitated by all of this technology that’s supposed to make our lives better. She felt she couldn’t escape it so she threw herself in front of a train. Fifteen. A life over before it had properly begun. I really wanted to go after the girls who had driven her to it, but the laws aren’t there. The understanding isn’t there. That poor girl, driven to that…’
Turning suddenly from the window, he leaned forward onto his desk, the heavy shoulders hunching.
‘We’ve got four dead victims — and from what you’ve told me, these people have the arrogance to believe that they can go on killing whoever they feel is in their way, including a Hamburg State Senator, and attempting to murder a senior Hamburg police officer. If there’s one thing that really gets me fired up, gentlemen, it’s when someone thinks they’re beyond the reach of the law.’ Goetz slammed his open hands down on the desktop. ‘I’ll grant your warrants. Search, seizure and arrest. I’ll try to get them ready for this evening, but there’s a jurisdictional crossover because of the location of the Pharos or whatever they call this cult commune. I need to speak to the Lower Saxony Prosecutor’s office.’
Fabel stood up, beaming. ‘Thank you, Herr Prosecutor…’
‘When do we execute the warrants?’ asked Werner once they were back in the pool car Fabel had been given.
