A shadow falls, p.17
A Shadow Falls, page 17
part #2 of Jenny Aaron Series
Not even Pavlik or Sandra. Aaron would have pushed them away, the same way she had already done.
He had to promise me never to abandon you.
That day, Pavlik broke his promise. And how many has she broken? To share everything, be it pain or happiness. To be truthful. Not to risk her only friend’s life in the interest of egotism.
She pushes herself up, unlocks the door. It’s silent in the room. She feels her way to the bed and lies down. Pavlik is emanating heat like a fire brick. She hears his heart beating in the darkness.
‘There were two things that I kept secret from you,’ he whispers. ‘That was one of them. The other is that Sandra and I were at the funeral. We respected your wishes. But after we saw you at your father’s grave we didn’t say a single word all day. I went to the Department, which was pointless, I was just pretending to be there. Lissek sent me home. The twins kept asking about you. They were too young to understand why you didn’t come to visit us anymore. Leo said: “But we can see for her.”
‘One night I woke up and Sandra wasn’t lying next to me. Her car had gone, she didn’t answer her phone. I was going mad with worry. It was already light when she came back. She had driven to the Tegeler See, to the little beach where we had that picnic, do you remember? There she buried all the photographs we had of you. She told me that she had to stop looking at them all the time, because it made her so sad that her heart wouldn’t beat properly anymore. Last Friday, when you were in bed, we bundled Jenny into the car and dug the box with the photographs up again.’
*
Ten perfect moments for Aaron:
the intro to ‘Purple Rain’
her first gun
meeting Sandra
suddenly standing in front of Magritte’s Empire of Light
biting into a pastrami sandwich
hiding in her grandparents’ cherry tree
the first sentence in Frisch’s I’m Not Stiller
bungee jumping
the final image in Hitchcock’s Vertigo
in this filthy dump with Pavlik
*
They lie motionless for a long time.
Then Aaron sits up. ‘Have you called Demirci?’
‘First we should consider our options.’
‘You have to get the hell out of Morocco. I have an appointment with Veit Jansen.’
‘We,’ he corrects her.
‘I can’t ask that of you.’
‘Don’t go silly on me.’
‘How do we get out afterwards?’ Aaron asks. ‘We’re being sought for several murders. There may be facial composites of us in circulation.’
‘There are. I’ve had a look at them online. I’m one metre seventy, with a potbelly and Mediterranean appearance, most likely Italian or Spanish. You’ve got chubby cheeks like Renée Zellweger and a tendency to warts. It hasn’t occurred to anybody that you’re blind.’
‘I feel a little hurt.’
‘Don’t be so sensitive. The police aren’t our main problem, it’s the Broker. He has unlimited financial means. Using the large airports and border crossings is out of the question.’
‘Lissek’s piggy bank,’ she says.
‘That’s what I was thinking.’
Lissek practised creative housekeeping and siphoned a little bit off every year. Over time, a seven-figure sum had built up. This secret fund served to pay for operations which were so expensive that Lissek would have had to replace a first-rate strategy with a second-rate one. Aaron remembers how Krupp once had to buy a Ferrari 599 in Dubai because it was part of his cover story. Lissek reluctantly released the three hundred thousand Euros. Things took a turn for the worse when Krupp wrote the racer off on his very first outing and it emerged that he had forgotten to insure it. Legendary sentence: ‘It was all in Arabic.’ Lissek was truly unbearable for weeks. During this period, it was also Lissek’s birthday. The troop clubbed together. When they gathered at the Irish pub, the Ferrari they had hired was parked outside. Pavlik handed Lissek the keys with a grin: ‘You can drive around in it for twenty-four hours. That’s twenty more than Krupp had.’ Lissek cracked up.
‘Does Demirci know about the piggy bank?’ she asks.
‘Yes. Lissek told me how she reacted to the information.’
‘Calmly?’
‘It was eleven in the morning, she asked him to hand her the office booze.’
Aaron has strength again for a quiet laugh.
*
Demirci owns three encrypted phones. A work one, a private one and one on which you can always reach her, even if she’s in a meeting at the Chancellery.
She answers immediately.
Pavlik puts the phone on speaker. ‘It’s us.’
‘One second.’ Demirci whispers to someone: ‘Not now.’ She closes a door. ‘I’m listening.’
Pavlik provides her with a rundown of the past ten hours.
She asks the right questions:
How is Aaron? How much is Pavlik handicapped by the injury? Is the hotel safe?
‘I’ve looked at a map,’ he eventually says. ‘There’s a town on the edge of the Sahara. Erfoud. It has a small airfield. Send us a jet.’
‘When can you get there?’ Demirci’s voice is so calm one would think she was arranging a business lunch.
‘That depends on Veit Jansen,’ says Aaron. ‘We need information on him. All we know is that he lives here.’
‘That can wait. First we get you back.’
‘No. We can use him to get to the Broker. We might never have this opportunity again.’
‘Why should we trust Holm?’ Demirci interjects.
‘Because I know him better than anyone else does.’
There is silence at the other end.
‘The fund he made us aware of is important,’ Aaron adds. ‘A large-scale terrorist attack is being planned.’
Demirci says: ‘Assuming you find Jansen, how long would you need to get to Erfoud?’
‘Eight hours,’ Pavlik calculates. ‘But not with the van. The engine sounds as if it’s about to die. We can rule out car hire, no doubt they’re monitoring every rental place. The Peugeot is standing in the car park, but we hired it with our American passports, so they’ll already be looking for that. I have to steal a car.’
‘Too risky. The registration would be forwarded to all patrol cars.’
‘Do you have a better idea?’ Aaron asks.
‘The liaison officer will take care of it.’
‘He just let us walk into the trap at the bank.’
‘Leave the BKA to me,’ Demirci insists.
‘Something else: I need to know which operations my father carried out in the two years before he retired. At some point during this time his path crossed with the Broker’s.’
‘OK. Ms Aaron?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m very sorry.’ Demirci ends the call.
‘She didn’t even break a sweat,’ says Aaron.
‘That’s why she’s got the job.’
‘And not a single word about Bas Makata.’
‘She will have her own thoughts on the matter.’
‘Do you still think about it?’ she asks.
‘Sometimes it catches me out when I wake up.’
‘Our doubts don’t count, only our actions.’
‘That’s Lissek’s line.’
‘And true.’
They both leave it to the other to tear open that particular wound.
But for today there are wounds enough.
Pavlik rings Sandra. He tells her how things stand, doesn’t gloss over anything, he’s as honest as she demands. Then he goes into the bathroom to clean the guns; it’s compulsory after a fire exchange, to avoid the risk of the gun jamming. And it stops them going round the bend.
Aaron goes to stand beside him. He silently hands her one of the guns. She takes it apart, places the breechblock, spring and barrel in the basin alongside the parts of the other Glock and carefully rubs Ballistol onto everything. The smell is as familiar to her as that of her skin. She grows calmer with each action. When everything has been rubbed dry, they put the guns back together without taking heed of which part belongs to which weapon.
The notion pleases her.
Aaron lays down on the bed while Pavlik showers. She finds herself thinking about the safe deposit box number again.
Forty-seven.
It reminds her of something, but she can’t lay her finger on it. Is it another encoded message from Holm? He loved playing mind games.
Woyzeck.
Judith Traherne.
Forty-seven.
I am overwrought. It probably doesn’t mean anything at all.
Her ears are bored. She hears a bed rhythmically creaking overhead. The fan is whining. A television is on somewhere. Tourists out on the street. Time stands still like a guard in front of the Royal Palace.
One hour. Two. Three.
There’s a knock. Pavlik draws the Glock. ‘Oui.’
‘It’s me.’
He lets the liaison officer in. ‘Ah, what an honour.’
‘Seems I’m your dogsbody,’ Harry forces out.
‘Like in the Rue des Berbères?’ Aaron asks.
Harry’s cough suggests a case of pharyngitis. ‘You left five bodies behind in the souks,’ he wheezes. ‘I had to turn down the invitation to that party. In case you’ve wondered: the false personal descriptions are down to me. I know a few people in the police here. Cost me ten thousand Euros, Palmer will send the bill.’
‘Fair enough,’ she says.
‘Don’t get chummy with me.’
Something lands on the bed. A paper bag with sandwiches. Aaron smells chicken, curry, saffron. She realizes how hungry she is.
Pavlik grabs one too. ‘Have you got the car?’ he asks with a full mouth.
‘BMW 5 Series, it’s outside. Why don’t you take the next plane? You won’t have any trouble getting through customs.’
‘Not an option.’
‘Tangier? Ferry to Gibraltar?’
‘No.’
‘I could organize something in the south, straight across the desert, then over the border to Mauritania. We use the spot to shift informants out every now and then; we’re financing the house building of two customs officers down there.’
Pavlik decides to be straight with him too. ‘We’re doing it via Erfoud. Do you know it?’
‘You mean the airfield?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘It’s just a sand dune with a windsock. Resupply flights into the Sahara, geologists, hippies and Algerian smugglers. I would avoid Algeria if I were you. If you end up in prison there, you’ll have to hold onto your balls with both hands. And as a woman, I’d say you’re better off in Iran.’
‘We’ve booked a direct flight,’ Aaron replies.
‘Right.’ Harry is gripped by a coughing spell. ‘We’d have to take the road over the Atlas. On the side roads you often have to slow down to walking pace, sometimes you can’t drive at all. The pass is at fourteen hundred metres. Up there, it either rains cats and dogs or it snows like at the South Pole. Avalanches, landslides, mud. It’s a frigging donkey path.’
‘You’re OK,’ says Pavlik, ‘but that was it as far as you’re concerned. We’ll sort the rest. You should hit the sack with that fever you’ve got.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of trying to change your mind.’ Harry throws him the car key. ‘I’ve heard you’re looking for Veit Jansen.’
Aaron pricks up her ears.
‘Demirci called Palmer, who called his deputy, who called the group leader, who called my informant leader. I just earn my living chewing on dry crusts at the end of the food chain.’
‘You know who Jansen is?’ she asks.
‘Half a year ago, we were keeping tabs on an import-export firm in Würzburg. One of the deliveries to Casablanca caught our attention. I went to take a look. During the night, a lorry drove to Agadir, where they handed crates of explosives to an ISIS sleeper cell. I used the information to bring my account with the Moroccan secret service into the black. They shut down the cell and shared the results with us. A few months earlier, one of the terrorists had repeatedly phoned a man in Marrakech.’
‘Jansen,’ says Pavlik.
‘Why are you interested in him?’
‘The answer wouldn’t be conducive to your convalescence.’
Harry laughs silently. ‘He was a lobbyist for the German arms industry in Berlin until the end of the nineties. We didn’t cross paths during that time. By 2008, he had withdrawn from his activities and had bought a villa in Marrakech, out in the Palmeraie. Nothing had been heard from him after that. Until half a year ago.’
Aaron gets an uneasy feeling. ‘You’re talking about him in the past tense.’
‘They found him in the souks. Jansen was sitting on a chair as if he had nodded off, with an ice pick stuck in his back. A perfect job.’
The Broker.
Damn.
‘Perhaps his wife will be of use to you. Layla al-Jazari. Twenty years younger than him, she has Tunisian roots but is a German citizen. I ran a quick update: she still lives in Marrakech.’
15
The BMW is parked in an unlit car park behind the madrasa. Nobody takes any notice of Pavlik, apart from two fighting cats, which slink off hissing.
He aimlessly drives through the winding streets of the medina. He can hear the distant drums on the Djemaa el Fna. They grow quiet, until they are just a notion, a reminder of an evening on which the world hadn’t unravelled yet. Dark buildings stare at Pavlik. A cobalt blue night sky, the kind you see in old Hollywood films, stretches out above him.
His left calf itches, although he lost it on a country road eight years ago. He’s got used to the fact that it helps if he scratches his right cheek.
Sometimes it’s good to feel what you’ve lost.
On several occasions, he chooses a narrow lane in which pursuers would have to show themselves. When he is sure that he doesn’t have company he enters Layla al-Jazari’s address into the navigation system. He chooses a roundabout route, which will first take him south and then northwards along the Circuit de la Palmeraie. Minutes later, he’s accelerating on the arterial road. The rich varoom of the two hundred horsepower engine gives him a fake sense of security.
Aaron wanted to come along. Pavlik persuaded her to stay. She should get some sleep, wouldn’t be able to do anything anyway, will be safer in the hotel.
All good reasons.
In truth he simply needed to be alone.
The two of them are bound by the strongest friendship he’s ever known. Perhaps friendship isn’t even the right word. They have wrested each other away from the maws of death, that stays forever.
Her father was so much more for her.
Pavlik knew of Jörg Aaron long before he met his daughter. Mogadishu was part of the syllabus when he was being trained as a lone fighter and sniper with the mountain troops. Whenever it had been paramount to think of every contingency, and not to leave anything to chance, his sergeant used to say: ‘Do it like Jörg Aaron.’
In later years, they came across each other professionally. Pavlik soon attracted the older man’s attention during joint training sessions between the GSG 9 and the Department. When he couldn’t entice Pavlik away, Jörg Aaron accepted the fact like a gigolo swallows the rebuff of an attractive woman. Though the next time they met, he did greet Pavlik with the comment: ‘Ah, here’s the man who kicked me in the balls.’
He was jovial without being chummy, witty without the need for smut, and he commanded respect without putting others down. Yet there was something about him that Pavlik didn’t like. It took him a while to figure out what it was: ruthlessness.
This didn’t manifest itself through domineering or irresponsible behaviour towards his men. But it was Pavlik’s impression that Jörg Aaron made decisions on his own, and would cast any objections aside. In his position that was dangerous. That was why Pavlik hadn’t let himself be wooed. He wasn’t going to tell Aaron this; in any case she wouldn’t want to hear it.
Her father noticed that Pavlik treated him with reservation and therefore did the same in return. They were professionally respectful towards each other, but that was all. This changed when Aaron joined the Department. It was just nuances, a long handshake, a glance. Jörg Aaron didn’t need to spell it out: he hoped that Pavlik would keep an eye out for his daughter.
Was he a good father? Aaron wouldn’t understand the question. He was everything for her and she for him. But what should Pavlik think of a man who puts a gun into the hands of a twelve year old and drills her until she outperforms him with it?
She was still a babe in arms when Jörg Aaron decided she would become a policewoman. He plunged her mother into misery. Pavlik remembers her clearly, a woman who must have been beautiful once, but who had aged prematurely. She never stopped seeking the little girl with plaits in her daughter.
He thinks of what his father-in-law said to him once while they sat fishing: ‘Children don’t owe their parents anything, and they in turn owe them everything.’
That is true.
Aaron’s mother didn’t hold it against her daughter, she accepted that she followed her father, became a tiny speck on the horizon and finally disappeared altogether. She punished her husband by leaving him. If it hurt him, he certainly didn’t show it. But there came a day when even Jörg Aaron had to look into the mirror. Pavlik remembers walking down the endless hospital corridor in Barcelona with leaden steps, and seeing Aaron’s father. He was sitting on a bench, clinging onto an empty coffee cup, all life drained from his face.
His wife had already been dead for two years. She was saved from witnessing this. Yes, he gave up everything for his daughter then. Without him she would be dead. But without him she would also never have become the woman whose ambition earned her a mortal enemy in Holm.
She fulfilled each one of her missions with an unrelenting drive. The point when one has to give up because it has become futile doesn’t exist for her.
Aaron’s father is one reason for this.
The other is the serial killer Runge.
