The Valkyrie Song

Chapter Seven
1

Anke Wollner spun around, pulling the man she held captive in front of her as a shield. She knew, of course, that there would be other MEK and Criminal Police closing in behind her, but the main threat would come from the front. The six MEK men had broken into three teams of two. Standard formation, by the book.

She saw the other cop, the woman dressed as a jogger. She was yelling at Anke to stand still. Anke fired twice at the woman cop, hitting her in both legs. She went down and started to scream. Anke aimed for her head but was aware of the MEK officers advancing towards her, three moving, three covering. She fired into the face of the first. The others opened fire, but their shots went wide: they were clearly afraid of hitting her hostage. She fired twice more. One miss, the second took off the side of an MEK man’s head. Two dead cops. One heavily wounded. They would pull back to avoid any civilian injury. Anke backed up towards Harvestehuder Weg, keeping the hostage in front of her. He was shaking violently and she was having trouble steering him. Checking behind, she saw two cops duck down behind a parked car. She fired into the windows, shattering them and sending glass flying. She fired three shots into the petrol tank, then a round onto the asphalt where the petrol had already started pooling. The sparks from the round hitting the road ignited the petrol and the rear of the car lifted into the air as the tank exploded. She heard screams from behind the car and other officers came running up. She could see a car screech to a halt further up Harvestehuder Weg, stopped by a uniformed officer.

Anke released her grip on the hostage and sprinted in the direction of the car. As she did so, she turned and shot the hostage once, in the stomach. He fell down onto the road, vomiting blood onto the wet street. Then he started screaming. They would have to deal with him. As Anke ran towards the car she heard automatic fire. Something slapped the back of her calf and she was surrounded by the angry hornet zipping of bullets around her, but she kept running. They had to control their fire. There were houses to the left of her and a stray bullet could take out a civilian. That was their number-one disadvantage. She didn’t care who died or was injured: they had to.

A uniformed officer to her left turned and reached for his side arm. She kept running, her Beretta stretched out in her rod-steady arm. She fired twice and hit the uniformed cop — who she knew would not be body-armoured — twice in the chest. The driver of the car sat gawp-mouthed. Anke ripped open the driver door and pulled the driver, a young woman, from the VW Polo. Anke then shot her in the legs: another casualty to slow things up. She slammed the Polo into gear and reversed at high speed up Harvestehuder Weg. There were more shots and the windscreen shattered, but Anke didn’t turn. If they were going to hit her, they would. Her only chance was to get away as fast as possible. She spun the car into a 180-degree skid on the wet street and floored the accelerator again. She could see blue lights in her rear-view mirror.

They were chasing her.

‘The one thing about a police chase,’ Uncle Georg had told her, ‘is that the police will almost always win. Make them think they’re in a vehicle pursuit and then get out of the vehicle as quickly as possible.’

She took the corner at Poseldorfer Weg at high speed, tyres screeching. Turning sharp right into a side street, a cul-de-sac, she pulled into the kerb, reversing to park normally behind another car. She saw the blue lights flash past the road end. A second police car slowed down almost to a halt at the end of the cul-de-sac, obviously checking it out, before taking off after the first car.

Anke got out of the car as quickly as she could, but found her leg was stiffening up. She could feel the wet in her shoe and inside her trouser leg. She couldn’t look now. She needed to get away. Put as much distance as possible, as quickly as possible, between herself and the car.

She still had her shoulder bag strapped across her chest. She released the empty magazine from the Beretta’s grip and slammed in a full one. She walked without limping along the quiet street and took a sudden left turn through the gate of one of the houses. She could see it was a substantial villa that had been converted into apartments. She walked up to the main door as if she had done so every day in her life and checked the names on the buzzer board. There was an apartment with two different surnames. It was by no means guaranteed, but she guessed it was lived in by an unmarried couple without kids, probably a younger couple. They would probably be out at work. She pressed the buzzer. No answer, which was what she wanted. She then proceeded to press every buzzer until she got an answer. An older woman’s voice.

‘Delivery,’ said Anke.

The door lock was buzzed open. Anke pushed open the door and shoved the toe of her boot in to stop it closing completely. She pressed the old woman’s buzzer again.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Wrong address. I thought this was Poseldorfer Weg.’ After listening to the old woman’s complaints, Anke let herself in and eased the door quietly shut behind her. She stood for a moment and caught her breath, listening out for the sounds of a suspicious old woman on the stairwell. When she was convinced she was alone, she climbed the stairs to the first floor. She found the flat she was looking for and picked the lock.

Once inside, she checked every room to make sure that the flat was really empty. She looked down at the wooden floor. She had left bloody footprints all along the hall. That meant there was a trail all the way up the stairs and probably from the car. Even if it wasn’t visible, it would be very easy for a police sniffer dog to follow. She would have to be quick. Going through to the bedroom, she checked out the woman’s wardrobe. She was a size bigger than Anke, but that didn’t matter: a size smaller would have been useless. Anke laid out a range of trousers, jumpers and jackets on the bed and made a quick selection from them. She also found a shoulder bag to replace her own: smaller, but it would do.

The bathroom was small, and Anke had to lean against the wall as she eased out of her shoes, trousers and tights, leaving a pool of blood on the tiled floor. She turned her calf to examine the wound: the bullet had not lodged in her leg but had carved its passage by gouging out a chunk of flesh. There was no bath, but Anke was able to take down the shower head and run hot water over the wound before wrapping a towel tight around her calf. She found the bathroom cabinet and tipped everything out into the basin. She took a second towel and doused it with antiseptic. There was a bandage still in its wrapper but no other dressings. She went into the bedroom again and went through the drawers until she found a packet of sanitary pads which she took back through to the bathroom.

Anke removed the towel from her leg and pushed the antiseptic-soaked pad into the wound. The pain exploded hot and sharp and she suppressed a scream into an inhuman sound caged behind her tightly clenched teeth. Applying two sanitary pads to the wound, she bound them in place with the bandage. When she was finished, she washed her hands and the sweat from her face. There was a photograph on the dresser, presumably of the couple who lived in the flat. The woman was tall and slim like Anke and didn’t look a full size bigger, but she had dark hair and an olive tone to her skin. Anke reckoned her make-up would be heavier and darker than that which Anke normally used, and she spent five minutes in front of the mirror completely changing her face with a few strokes of the woman’s make-up brush. She then changed into the clothes she’d laid out, putting on a pair of knee-length boots under her trousers. It was a struggle to get the left boot zipped up over the wound, but Anke reckoned the boot would help keep the dressing tight and in place.

Once she had put on the change of clothes, including an ankle-length coat and a beret-style hat, Anke looked at herself in the mirror. A different woman with a different style, a different history, a different life.

Before leaving the flat, Anke tried to work out what to do with her discarded clothes. Her DNA would be all over them. But there again, she thought, her DNA was now all over half of Hamburg. There was no forensic distance this time.

It was over. She knew that. Uncle Georg was dead. Or captured. She had to get out of Hamburg. She had identities she could use, she had enough money to live on for the rest of her life. Maybe this could be a new beginning. The next twenty-four hours would tell.

She put the Beretta, the magazines, her polycarbide knife and the box of sanitary pads into her shoulder bag. She went over to the window and checked out the street below. It seemed quiet, but she could hear the sound of sirens in the streets all around. She was going to have to walk through it all and out of Poseldorf.

And then she would be free.