The Valkyrie Song

10

He was hesitating. She could sense it. She knew it would be Fabel, head of the Murder Commission, who would have oversight of the operation. She cursed her stupidity: after all these years, after all the coded messages and rendezvous with Uncle Georg, she had simply not considered that it would be a set-up. She should have thought it through. Especially that other announcement, in the wrong place.

‘I have a wife and children,’ said the man whom she held tight with her arm looped through his. ‘Please don’t kill me.’

She pressed the barrel of her Beretta PX4 Storm automatic harder into his ribs, urging him forward with a tug on his arm. ‘If I were going to kill you, you’d be dead already. If anything happens to you it’ll be the fault of the police. I know what I’m doing, they don’t. If you want to stay alive and see your wife and kids again, then shut up and keep walking. Once we’re in the city and I can lose myself in the crowds, I’ll let you go.’

She kept their pace even, unhurried. There had been a cop behind her, closing the gap as she had approached the bench. That was what had alerted her first. Then that stupid woman pretending to be a jogger. But, of course, she had realised from twenty metres away that it wasn’t Uncle Georg on the bench. It was a stupid, clumsy set-up and she had been stupid and clumsy to walk into it.

He’s watching me now, she thought. My money would be somewhere in an upper storey on Harvestehuder Weg.

‘Tilt your head close to mine,’ she hissed at the man. He was tall, nearly ten centimetres taller than she was. ‘Make it look like we’re a couple and you’re talking to me.’

Maybe, she thought, the manoeuvre had worked: maybe they had crossed her off their list and were seeking some other woman approaching, alone. She thought about the man on her arm. The fake Uncle Georg had probably looked at her as she had passed, but she had turned her face away as if looking out across the water. Only this man had seen her up close. If she got out into Poseldorf, she would take him up a side street. She didn’t have the silencer on her gun, so she would finish him with her knife.

If she got out into Poseldorf.

They had passed a Hamburg Parks Department van a couple of seconds ago, with a group of workmen standing beside it. She felt like laughing: they could have thrown in at least one older or overweight cop, just for appearances. The workmen had special weapons and training written all over them. Polizei Hamburg MEK unit. Six of them. Body armour under overalls, probably. She knew that these men could move fast and could keep pace with her on a long foot-pursuit. To become a member of the Polizei Hamburg’s MEK squad you had to be able to run three thousand metres in less than thirteen minutes thirty seconds. But the body armour would slow them. Legs and heads. If it came to it, she would go for legs and heads. They had a massive advantage in numbers and equipment, but she had a big advantage in knowing that they would do it all by the book. By numbers.

Fabel was watching her and hesitating, she knew he was. Every second he hesitated brought her closer to the city, to streets and people. Once she was there she could get away. And if they came after her she would create so much havoc. She would lose them in a tidal wave of dead civilians.

The polycarbide knife. The Beretta. Three spare clips, fourteen rounds each, in her shoulder bag.

She could see straight up Alsterchausee. The trick was not to start rushing. She kept calm. Kept her grip on the hostage constant and firm. She was nearly there. He wasn’t going to call it. Fabel wasn’t going to call it.

Uncle Georg.

They had Uncle Georg. Then the realisation hit her. They didn’t have Uncle Georg: he was dead. She dug deep into herself to feel something. And she had to dig deep. So little feeling.

She thought about the talks they had had together. She thought about when she had been fifteen and he had taught her everything she knew. She remembered sitting on the grass outside the training school on a summer’s day. She had felt the sun prickle on her neck. She remembered the cool orange juice they had drunk together and the few moments they had chatted — Uncle Georg, Liane, Margarethe and her — about silly, inconsequential things.

‘This is a golden moment,’ Uncle Georg had explained. ‘Between meetings, you should enjoy these moments. Savour them.’

And in that golden moment she had truly felt that the other girls were her sisters; that Uncle Georg really was her uncle. She had glimpsed a life that she had never known. It had been a perfect golden lie for a perfect golden moment. But even in that lie she had discovered what it must have been like to have been part of a family.

And now Uncle Georg was dead.

For a moment, in the middle of the chill Hamburg winter, she felt the warmth of that long-gone summer afternoon. She found the pain, the grief that she had dug for.

It was then that she heard them running towards her from behind, shouting for her to let her hostage go and to stand still.

Fabel had called it, after all.