sarin would kill a dozen people, maybe, if they came into contact with it. As a gas anyone who ingested it was dead. On a busy subway system that could mean thousands of people.
“In a moment your nose is going to run. You’ll feel a tightness in your chest, and your skin will feel as though it is shriveling around your body, becoming too tight for the flesh it contains. Then you’ll begin to lose your sight. Don’t be frightened, it will all happen very quickly,” she said, in the most soothing, sympathetic and psychotic voice he had ever heard. She was right, he could feel the snot running out of his nose already. “You’ll hardly know it is happening. A few moments of agony and then it will be over. I am going to die with you. I’ll hold your hand as we go, if that helps?”
He looked at her. She wasn’t mad. She wasn’t some raving fanatic. She reached out to hold his hand. He pulled away from her.
“What have you done to me?” he demanded. It hurt to talk. He felt the first flush of pins and needles creeping through his skin and down into his bones. She was right. It was happening quickly. He shivered once, painfully. He felt his gorge rise and leaned over, sure he was going to vomit. “What have you done to me?” he pleaded.
She ignored him. “In a few seconds you’re going to find it very difficult to breathe. It will feel like your entire body is shutting down. You’ll lose control of your body.” Her breath was coming harder now. She was gasping between words. “You will throw up. You will lose control of your muscles. In seconds you will soil yourself. There is nothing you’ll be able to do about it. It is death. Every nerve will cry out, and finally your flesh won’t be able to cope. You will twitch and jerk, wracked by spasms. The fit will be brief. As you go blind, you will suffocate. There is nothing you can do about it. You are already dead. We all are. Everyone down here is dead.”
He looked along the platform. The people were blurs, dark smudges leaning against the walls and each other for support. He could hear them coughing and gasping. Someone cried out, a woman, “Ich kann nicht sehen! Hilf mir, mein Gott, ich bin blind!”
He only understood the last word. He didn’t need to know any more to understand what was happening along the platform from him.
It had only taken seconds to spread.
He clutched at the woman beside him, trying to pull her toward him. His lips twitched, but the words wouldn’t come.
The world around him lost its shape, the blurred shapes of the damned spreading across his eyes until all he saw was black.
He heard the next train roll into the station, the doors hiss and the screams as people stumbled toward it as though it could bear them away to safety. He couldn’t see any of it. He couldn’t see the faces of the condemned pressed up against the glass. He couldn’t see them clawing at the platform, shivering and twisting as they tried to crawl another precious inch forward. He couldn’t see the fear on the passengers’ faces as they disembarked. It had been more than half a century since a train last rattled through Berlin carrying so many doomed souls. These passengers were just as dead, and just as unwitting.
He fell sideways, face hitting the floor as another wretched spasm wracked his body, and all he could think as he fought for that last breath was that their stupid argument had saved Sarah’s life.
And for that he was grateful.
8
Konstantin Khavin walked through a city in mourning.
The first reports of the horror on the U-Bahn had reached the surface. People stood around in shock, not really knowing if they were supposed to run or go about their everyday routines. Five stations had been hit, and if what he was hearing was to be believed, two of the S-Bahns as well as the city’s bus terminus. At least six busses had carried punctured sarin gas bags, dispersing the nerve gas all over the city. It was a brutal way to die.
A radio in an open window played “My Funny Valentine.” The vocal strain drifted across the narrow street, transforming it into something out of a Wim Wenders movie. A girl on the street corner sat making Chinese cranes out of scraps of paper. She lined them up along the gutter. There were hundreds of them. She looked up at him, eyes wide with sorrow, and said, “Dies, damit Gott sie nicht vergisst.” He knew what she meant: they are so God doesn’t forget them. It was a surreal and sad moment, this little girl mourning hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people she had never met. That was the power of a tragedy on such a huge scale. It hurt everyone. The suffering was collective. The mourning public, loud and heartbreaking.
The “other shoe” had dropped in the middle of the early morning rush hour when hundreds of thousands of people were on their way into work across the city, and every level of the public transport system had been hit.
Everything about it made Konstantin angry-he wanted to lash out, hit something, someone-but it was an entirely impotent rage. There was nothing he could do for anyone here, and there was cold comfort in knowing that they were right, that Berlin had been one of the primary targets. It had been a long time since he had left Mother Russia-so long in truth he found it difficult to bring back memories of her streets and her dizzying architecture. Now all he remembered were her crimes.
The world had changed around him in that time. There had been an ethic to terror once, it protected normal people going about their normal lives. They were shielded by some sort of covenant between the oppressor and the oppressed. Strikes were made against legitimate targets: military bases, intelligence operations, weapons stores, and with more localized terror campaigns like Northern Ireland the Provo targets were policemen, political movers and shakers, journalists and the like. They weren’t kids on the way to school. They weren’t mothers pushing baby buggies and balancing groceries. They weren’t the city’s financial wiz-kids, with their heads full of long-term futures. They weren’t the baristas and the store clerks and the bus drivers and the road sweepers that made day-to-day living so much more pleasant than it might have been. The face of terror had changed.
It was more Russian in nature.
Konstantin shivered at the thought.
He felt for these people even though he did not know them.
The old man was right: it was all about the spectacle. This fear was Russian. It dug deep into the psyche of the people. It hurt them where they felt safest-in their everyday life. It was like the KGB arrest squads that battered down the door at four a.m.-it was disorientating, frightening. They came in making noise, shouting, screaming, threatening violence while the suspect, naked and vulnerable, woke to the chaos of their forced entry. If they fought back, they were beaten. If they resisted, they were beaten. If they didn’t fall to their knees, beg, confess, they were beaten. If they weren’t alone, their wives, girlfriends or lovers were beaten to make them beg and plead. At four a.m. fear broke strong men. That was the Russian way.
He knew that because, once upon a nightmare, he had been one of those four o’clock men.
And now that same fear was being turned upon everyday people as they went about their everyday lives. Konstantin felt curiously at home in this violent society, more so than he ever could have in a world of poets and lovers. But then he had been raised with violence into a world of violence, so it was hardly surprising.
Konstantin was one of the few people on the street walking with a purpose. He was alert, eyes moving quickly from face to face, looking for guilt or complicity in any of the people he passed. Of course it was never going to be that easy. All he saw was shock and disbelief repeated over and over in every face. He knew what they were thinking: How could it happen here? How could it happen to us?
If the paper trail was to be believed, he lived month to month with very little to spare. He paid his bills on time. He had borrowed a grand total of eleven books from the library since coming to Berlin, none of the titles particularly surprising given his specialism. There were no untoward comings or goings registered against his passport number with immigration control. He was the very definition of an ordinary man.
All of that in itself interested Konstantin.
In his world there were no ordinary men.
Metzger maintained a small apartment in Charlottenburg, one of the more affluent boroughs of the old city. It was close to the University of the Arts, so what it cost in increased rent, it saved in convenience. The location
