A fear of dark water

Chapter Twenty-Four

The interview lasted all morning and into the afternoon. Van Heiden arranged for lunch to be brought up from the canteen.

It was the strangest position for Fabel to find himself in. No one actually used the word suspect, but that was the noun Fabel would have attached to himself. Before they had started to discuss Muller-Voigt’s death, van Heiden had actually reminded Fabel of his rights under the Basic Law of the Federal Republic.

‘Just to keep things right,’ van Heiden had said. Presumably that was why he had also had their conversation recorded. Menke, the BfV agent, had sat in on the discussion.

‘You cannot seriously be suggesting that I had anything to do with Muller-Voigt’s death?’ Fabel had protested.

‘Of course not,’ said van Heiden. ‘But we have to be seen to do this all above board.’

So they had sat and gone over every detail of every conversation Fabel had had with the Senator. When he had left to visit him, when he had arrived.

‘I wouldn’t have thought it would have taken you so long to get there,’ said Menke.

‘I lost my way a little,’ explained Fabel. ‘I ended up going through the centre of Stade.’

‘But you’d been to Muller-Voigt’s house before.’

‘A couple of years ago, yes.’

Van Heiden, not the most extemporary of thinkers, had a list of questions prepared on a notepad. He worked his way through them, taking notes, asking supplementary questions. Pausing to frown every now and then. Menke contributed little, but Fabel noticed that the few questions he did ask were much more relevant than those that Fabel’s boss asked. At three-thirty van Heiden switched the recorder off, indicating the end of the formal interview.

‘Well?’ asked Fabel. ‘Do I go back to my desk or down to the holding cells?’

‘This is no laughing matter,’ said van Heiden.

‘I do not, in the slightest, find this funny. A man has been murdered within an hour of my talking to him, from what we can gather. He also happened to be a man I rather liked. And someone, somehow, is trying to frame me for it. And implicate me in a serial-murder case I’ve spent the last six months of my life working on. No, Herr Criminal Director, I do not find this a laughing matter.’ Fabel was aware he had started to raise his voice.

‘They’re not…’ Menke did not look in Fabel’s direction when he spoke.

‘What?’ Fabel frowned irritatedly at the security-service man.

‘They’re not trying to frame you,’ repeated Menke. ‘Or at least I don’t think they are. Like I said before, they’re trying to compromise you more than anything. Take you out of the picture. Make it impossible for you to lead the investigation into Muller-Voigt’s death, and/or the Network Killer murders.’

Fabel drew a breath. For the first time in the day he felt less isolated; but the knowledge that his own boss had not voiced a belief in his innocence seethed inside him.

‘It seems very elaborate,’ said Fabel.

‘To you or me, yes. But if you have access to the right technology and expertise, then causing this kind of confusion takes very little effort.’ Menke shrugged, but held Fabel’s gaze for a moment.

‘So where does this all leave me?’ Fabel asked van Heiden.

‘Maybe it would be good if you took some leave.’

‘In the middle of three major murder enquiries?’ Fabel was incredulous. ‘That’s giving whoever is behind this exactly what they want.’

‘That might not be a bad idea.’ said Menke. ‘For the moment…’

‘I’m not buying it. I’m the head of this Commission and if you’re telling me otherwise, then you can have my resignation this afternoon.’

‘And that would be exactly what whoever is creating this mayhem would want you to do,’ said Menke. Van Heiden said nothing; it was clear he was out of his depth and Fabel’s threat to resign had taken him aback.

‘Listen, Fabel,’ continued Menke, ‘the Criminal Director is right. To put it bluntly, you simply cannot be seen to lead an investigation when you are under investigation yourself.’ He turned to van Heiden. ‘Why not leave Werner Meyer officially in charge of the Muller-Voigt case and put another officer in to oversee the Network Killer investigation? That will leave Herr Fabel free to investigate the firebomb killing of Daniel Fottinger in the Schanzenviertel. In the meantime, I think it’s only fair that he is kept fully informed of developments in the other two investigations. He still heads the department.’

Van Heiden looked less than comfortable with the idea and said nothing.

‘If you don’t mind me saying, Herr Menke, you’re taking a very profound interest in the workings of the Polizei Hamburg. And in protecting my career prospects.’

‘We have areas of mutual interest, Herr Fabel,’ said Menke. ‘As you’ve already guessed.’

‘These people you say have the technological expertise and resources to pull a stunt like this. The Pharos Project?’

Menke smiled. ‘I suggest you read that file I gave you. Very carefully.’

After van Heiden and Menke left Fabel’s office, Anna Wolff came in.

‘You’re in trouble,’ she said bluntly.

‘Tell me about it,’ Fabel sighed, leaning back in his chair.

‘Not with Robocop and the Spook.’ She grinned. ‘Susanne’s been on the phone.’

‘Oh, shit…’ Fabel jumped up and looked at his watch. ‘I was supposed to pick her up from the airport.’

‘An hour ago. Don’t worry — when she phoned she was pretty pissed off, but I explained that things were serious. I sent a car to pick her up and take her back to your flat. But I’d give her a call if I were you.’

‘Thanks, Anna. You tell Susanne anything about what’s been happening?’

‘’Course not. But I did say it was serious. Well, it’s always serious, but I told her it was more serious than usual. That you’d had a rough time and I was sure you’d explain.’ Anna crossed her arms and frowned. ‘You okay?’

‘What did the Criminal Director tell you?’

‘That we were to keep you under close surveillance and not let you into the incident room in case you saw your picture at the top of the suspects board.’ Anna’s delivery was deadpan.

‘Very funny…’ Fabel made an impatient face.

‘He told Werner and me that you would have to withdraw yourself from the Muller-Voigt and Network Killer investigations but that you were still head of the Commission. He kind of suggested that you would be taking a break. He also said that Werner was top dog on the Muller-Voigt case and Principal Chief Commissar Bruggemann will be coming in to head up the Network Killer caseload.’

‘Nicola Bruggemann?’

‘We stay assigned for the meantime, but she runs the show.’

Fabel nodded. He knew Nicola Bruggemann well: she headed up a specialist child crime unit, which, inevitably, often had to work closely with the Murder Commission.

‘Nicola Bruggemann is an excellent officer.’ Fabel invested his tone with a warning. ‘Don’t be… don’t be your usual contrary self, Anna. It’s not Nicola’s fault I’ve been… what have I been?… not suspended or reassigned… reallocated. I need you and Werner to stick to the Network Killer case like glue. And, obviously, I want to be kept fully informed of developments. In the meantime, I need to get all the information on the Schanzenviertel arson attack.’

Susanne was waiting for him when he got home. There was no anger in her expression, just concern. And she looked tired. Her concern deepened as Fabel went through everything that had happened during her absence.

‘God, Jan… I can’t leave you alone for a minute. What happens now?’

‘I don’t know. It’s all over the place. I’ve been reassigned to take personal charge of this death in the Schanzenviertel: the guy who died when his car was torched. Officially, I’m still running the show with the other cases, but…’

‘Who do you think is behind all of this? I mean, it takes a lot of organisation and resources…’

‘I’ve already had that conversation.’ Fabel held up the file. ‘My spooky pal Fabian Menke suspects the Pharos Project. What the connection between an environmental cult and a serial rapist and killer could be is beyond me, but Muller-Voigt expressed real fears about them. He reckoned that his girlfriend was investigating them and that was why she disappeared. I have to say that it is more than a coincidence that all official records — all computerised records — of this woman’s existence in Germany seem to have disappeared into the same black hole as my text messages. It’s also a hell of a coincidence that Virtual Dimension, this role-playing crap site that all the Network Killer’s victims were logged into, is also owned by the Korn-Pharos Corporation.’

‘You think this cult has targeted you as well?’ Susanne frowned.

‘My guess is that they suspected that Muller-Voigt knew more than he did and passed some of that on to me — enough to start me looking in places they don’t want me looking. The problem is that I’m not as smart or well-informed as they suspect.’

‘But you’re the police, for God’s sake. They can’t take on the police or the government and get away with it.’

‘From what I’ve found out so far, the Pharos Project and the Korn-Pharos Corporation have between them several hundred times the budget and ten times the manpower of the Polizei Hamburg. This isn’t just some commercial concern or cooky cult, Susanne — this is more like a state but without physical borders. There’s no way I would underestimate Pharos or how far they would go to achieve their goals. I think that could be a fatal mistake.’

‘If you and Menke are so sure Pharos is behind all of this, why can’t you bring people in for questioning?’

‘After my interrogation by van Heiden I talked to the State Prosecutor’s Office. We just don’t have enough to justify a warrant. And in any case, we’re talking about a corporation and a cult — groups of people, not individuals. We’re still far, far away from placing an individual at any of the murder scenes. Oh no, I forgot, we can place one individual at the murder scene… there’s a bronze sculpture covered in fingerprints in the evidence store. Unfortunately those fingerprints just happen to be mine.’ Fabel let go a long sigh. ‘Sorry. The point is that we don’t have enough to get a warrant and, even if we did, we don’t know what or who we’re looking for.’

Susanne came over to him and brushed a lock of blond hair back from his brow. ‘You’ll get there. Try not to worry. Just do what you always do and look at the big picture. No one else does it the way you do. You hungry?’

Fabel shook his head. ‘I’m going to catch up with my reading.’ He dropped the file onto the kitchen table. ‘Maybe you’re right, but somehow I think this particular picture is too big even for me.’

As he read the BfV file, Fabel found himself being drawn deeper and deeper into something more complex and wide-ranging than he had ever imagined. And a way of perceiving the world that he really could not understand.

He read again what Anna and Muller-Voigt had already told him: that Dominik Korn, the reclusive genius billionaire with joint US/German nationality, had taken over his father’s business empire and built it into the Korn-Pharos Corporation, the world’s number one environmental technologies group; how he had invested millions in environmental projects, including the ill-fated Pharos One deep-sea exploration to discover the true impact of deep-water oil drilling. As it turned out, Korn’s concerns had been proven correct with the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; but the maiden voyage of Korn’s submersible had ended in its own disaster, with Korn suffering massive neurological damage as a result of his unprotected ascent.

No one saw much of Dominik Korn after that. He had been seriously ill for months and had made only one brief appearance — at a press conference, wheelchair-bound and speaking with an artificial voice through a computer — about a year after the accident. He had turned this one appearance into a clarion call for mankind to disengage from the environment, to reduce its impact on the natural world to zero. An impossible goal. But environmentalists around the world had been inspired by Korn’s courage and commitment. Fabel could see why a young Meliha Yazar would have drawn comparisons with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Korn really did seem to offer a new and radical vision. He had proposed a completely new political structure for the world, where global concerns like the environment were dealt with at a global level; that no one nation should have rights or control over any given natural resource. Much of Korn’s early reasoning made sense to Fabel, although he could see that even these original ideas would have been seen as dangerous to both commercial vested interests and national governments.

But after that single appearance, Korn had become more and more reclusive and his pronouncements, made through the Korn-Pharos press office, had become increasingly bizarre. He announced the foundation of the Pharos Project as an international environmental movement and his philosophy of disengagement became more and more extreme. It was once he started to call for the strict control of the human population — for euthanasia and enforced sterilisation — that alarm bells started to ring. Especially in Germany.

As the Pharos Project became quasi-religious and its attitude towards detractors more aggressive, one name pushed its way to the front with increasing frequency: Peter Wiegand. Wiegand was Korn’s deputy. It had been Wiegand who had been in charge of Korn’s rescue from Pharos One and who, after his boss had been incapacitated, had taken over the reins until Korn had been well enough to take control again, albeit from a motorised wheelchair and out of public view. Wiegand was a German national and the movement set up a European headquarters in the Federal Republic, while officially maintaining its main base in the United States. The truth was that the German headquarters, the architecturally innovative Pharos, on the south bank of the Elbe, was seen as the real world HQ of the Pharos Project. Korn may have been King, but Wiegand was his Prince Regent.

When the editor of a boulevard-press newspaper had compared some of the Pharos Project’s policies with those of the Nazis, and had alluded to the cult’s deputy as ‘Pharos’s Himmler’, Wiegand had sued for massive damages, and won.

Fabel could see where the BfV’s concerns had come from: Pharos fitted almost all the criteria for a destructive cult and an anti-democratic philosophy. There was the usual unquestioning adoration of the leader, one who was conveniently distant and aloof and whose disabilities had been turned into an expression of his particular breed of asceticism. And there was the total subjugation of the individual: when you joined Pharos your identity became subsumed into the single greater consciousness. And that meant, of course, that any personal wealth you might have would become the property of the cult. It was the first step in your disengagement from the physical world. Like most cults, Pharos had its Day of Judgement: The Consolidation.

An hour became two, then three. Eventually Susanne came into the kitchen and made a sandwich, placing the plate on top of the open file as Fabel was reading it. She handed him an opened bottle of Jever beer.

‘Eat,’ she said and sat down at the table opposite him.

‘Don’t tell me you’re getting domesticated…’ said Fabel, examining the sandwich suspiciously.

‘I’ve realised my mistake in going to university and having a career and everything. I’ve decided to stay at home and pander to your every whim.’ Susanne nodded at the sandwich. ‘It’s all my own recipe. Bread, butter and cheese.’

Fabel smiled and took a bite, leaned back in his chair and sipped his beer.

‘I now understand why Menke has been so cooperative,’ he said. ‘The BfV’s Cults Unit has an entire team working on the Pharos Project. They can’t get anything on them; nor can the FBI, who are equally suspicious. The Pharos Project has its European headquarters a little way along the Elbe and even the Polizei Niedersachsen has a team monitoring them.’

‘So what’s the Pharos Project’s particular angle? A meteor that’s going to take them to a different galaxy? Escape from the control of giant lizards who have disguised themselves as Freemasons? Or just that Jesus is coming in a spaceship? That’s always a good one.’

‘You know what the singularity is?’

‘Listen, smart-ass, just because I’ve made you a sandwich doesn’t mean my brains have turned to mush. Of course I know what the singularity is: the predicted point in history when computers and machines will be able to build other computers and machines that we can’t because of the restrictions of human intelligence. God knows how many science-fiction films have been based on it.’

‘The Pharos Project has a different definition,’ said Fabel. ‘They believe that we will become much more intelligent because we will become “one” with technology. That we will augment ourselves through genetic engineering and by basically adding bits to ourselves. Nanochips in our brains, microscopic machines to patrol around inside us to destroy cancer cells or dredge cholesterol from our arteries and help us live longer — that kind of thing.’

‘Yep… I’ve heard that interpretation of the singularity as well. Transhumanism, posthumanism… kick-starting the next phase in human evolution ourselves.’

‘Well, that’s what Dominik Korn seems to be into.’

‘Understandable when you already spend your life connected up to tubes and computers twenty-four hours a day. He has to believe there’s a better machine to sustain his existence just around the corner.’

‘Well, from what I’ve read here, the Pharos Project believes that mankind will be able to disengage from the environment by “uploading itself” onto some kind of computer mainframe.’

Susanne took a bottle of white wine from the fridge and poured herself a glass. ‘I’ve heard that hokey before,’ she said. ‘The concept that we’ll be able to digitise human consciousness and store it on whatever computers evolve into.’

‘You don’t believe it?’

‘I’m a psychologist, Jan. I deal with the human mind every day. There is an inherent randomness to human thought, to the electrochemical signals in the brain, the firing of dendrites, that give it a complexity that no computer could ever replicate. If I say the word “tree” to you, then your brain takes that input and generates thoughts relating to that concept. Okay, a computer can do that, have an idea of a tree. But if I say the word “tree” to you ten seconds later, although you have a central concept of what a tree is, the stimulus of that single word will fire off a thousand new thoughts, completely different from the first time. To develop a computer capable of housing the human intellect, you would have to synthesise the organic structure of the brain.’ She shook her head, with a dismissive laugh. ‘Digitising human consciousness? It’s a pile of crap, Jan. It can never be done.’

‘How can you be sure? Surely in the future…’

‘Okay, let’s not even think about a computer. The brain transplant has been the stuff of horror movies since Frankenstein. The brain is the home of the mind, of the personality, right?’

‘Of course.’

‘So if a brain transplant were possible, the mind and personality of the brain donor would be transported to the recipient body, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wrong. If you transplanted a brain, you would be connecting it to a completely new endocrine system, a totally different physiology. Our moods, our variations in personality derive from the enzymes, hormones and chemicals produced in our bodies. The reason men are more aggressive than women isn’t complicated. It’s because men have testicles and women don’t, frankly. Move a man’s brain into a woman’s body and the mind would become feminised because it would be connected to a completely new chemistry that would actually create physical changes in the brain. So if you digitise and upload a human mind into a computer, you’re not going to end up with a human mind. At best it would be a self-aware computer program. Trust me, Jan, the concept of a man-machine singularity is a crock.’

‘Well, that’s the crock that the Pharos Project is peddling. And the Korn-Pharos Corporation is actively researching it. Korn-Pharos lead the world in computer simulations — and I don’t mean the kind of things you play on a games console. Korn’s father made his fortune developing computer models for the American military and then for NASA. These programs could create entire star systems, black holes, all that kind of thing. They started off as simple mathematical models but ended up entire hyper-realistic universes within a mainframe. According to Dominik Korn, Korn-Pharos are only a decade away from creating a hardware and software system capable of perpetually updating and repairing itself. Come the glorious day of the Consolidation, according to Korn, all the members of the Pharos Project will be uploaded into this super-realistic computer simulation that will allow them to live for ever in a world that seems as real as this. And by doing so they will save the real environment by being disconnected from it.’

‘That’s a novel twist: a cyber-afterlife.’

‘Afterlife is the key word. At least as far as the BfV Bureau of Constitutional Security is concerned. You upload your consciousness and then what? Where are you really? You’re mind is in two places at the one time — in the real world and in the virtual one. So as far as you’re concerned after the event, nothing has changed. Unless…’

‘Unless you cease to exist in the real world.’ Susanne put her wineglass down and shook her head slowly. ‘Mass suicide.’

‘Mass murder-suicide, more like. Let’s face it, it’s the staple of all of these cults. Jonestown, Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven’s Gate, Branch Davidians… And despite the hi-tech dress-up that the Pharos Project has given it, it’s the same old promise of transition to a higher plane. All you need to do is die.’

They were interrupted by the phone ringing. Fabel was surprised to hear that it was Astrid Bremer from the forensics squad; Holger Brauner’s deputy.

‘You’re working late,’ said Fabel.

‘Yeah, third week solid backshift,’ said Astrid. ‘My social life is to die for. You want some good news?’

‘Oh yes, please,’ said Fabel.

‘I thought I would let you know that we have done a full fingerprint and trace analysis on the sculpture used to kill Muller-Voigt. Like you guessed, yours and Muller-Voigt’s are the only fingerprints on it and there’s no trace of any third-party DNA.’

‘Brilliant,’ sighed Fabel. ‘You’ve got an odd sense of good news.’

‘Well, actually it is. There are no other fingerprints because whoever hit Muller-Voigt with it wore gloves. There is evidence of smudging and smearing, including of your prints. It proves that you weren’t the last person to handle the sculpture. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you didn’t pull on gloves afterwards, but you know what I mean.’

‘Thanks, Astrid. It’s something, anyway.’

‘There’s one more thing…’

‘Yeah?’

‘We found some extraneous fibres at the scene. Grey fabric. My guess is from a man’s suit jacket. Were you wearing a grey jacket?’

‘No. Nor was Muller-Voigt.’

‘We know that. We couldn’t find anything in his wardrobe that would match.’

‘You can tell already?’

‘Yes…’ said Astrid. ‘This fibre is highly unusual insofar as it seems to have an incredibly high polyester content. What isn’t polyester is some other kind of synthetic fibre. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve seen. I mean, I know in the seventies people went mad for synthetic materials, but nowadays… Anyway, I’m going to send it off to a specialist lab to get a better breakdown of its composition.’

‘Thanks, Astrid,’ Fabel said, and put the phone down, trying to work out why he felt what Astrid had told him was significant.