Angel in the Shadows Read online

  We’d appreciate you sharing those facts with us.

  And that’s what he did. Thoughtfully, in guarded terms. They wouldn’t get him on a slip of the tongue, a show of weakness or even a hint of uncertainty.

  During the first interview, it became clear the suspect had more information than he was willing to share upfront. He was prepared to release that information only in exchange for witness protection. That was the reason why Detective Calvino left the room, to consult with me.

  The silence. Scratchy throat. The urge to stand up and shout: get the hell out of my face! Detectives investigating other detectives. Backstabbers dressed in better weekday suits than he wore on Sundays and holidays. Besides, he had better things to do than rat out his own men. He still had to deal with that Afghan boy. The one who was found dressed as a girl, involved in the hit-and-run. Sort out matters that had led him to a Dutch minister’s inner sanctum, where he’d seized a computer. A computer with sickening images of children; photos that made his stomach turn. But these bastards in their everyday Hugo Boss monkey suits weren’t interested in that. No, they were more concerned with some Russian lowlife who was found in a puddle of blood with a gaping hole in his head just minutes after Detective Calvino had left the interrogation room.

  Were you aware that the suspect was alone in the company of Detective Diba? The man with whom – according to phone records we found – he’d had regular contact for many years.

  No, I wasn’t aware of it. I was told that one of my sergeants had temporarily taken Calvino’s place. But apparently he was dismissed by Detective Diba.

  And you weren’t aware that the suspect was handcuffed during the interrogation?

  No.

  He felt like they wanted to drive him into a corner, make him complicit in the matter, trap him, if need be, with a misplaced word, so they could accuse him of giving inconsistent answers. Push him up against the ropes, make him sweat, let him feel who had the upper hand here, let him know how badly he’d actually botched it, by looking the other way for years. Something a capable chief inspector would never’ve tolerated. He mustn’t give them the chance.

  You mentioned the suspect was pushing to be placed in witness protection. Do you really believe that such a person commits suicide by beating his head against a table?

  I’m not in a position to judge. You’re the ones conducting the investigation into all of this.

  Touché, you motherfucking morons.

  He’d seen the Russian. Up close and personal. In handcuffs – his cracked skull lying on the table. A sergeant had supposedly sent out for coffee. Coffee for whom? Not for the Russian, who later joined the spirit world in the ambulance en route to hospital. Certainly not for Detective Diba, who disappeared without a trace, only to throw himself off the Rembrandttoren a few hours later. Thirty-six storeys high. His body hit the glass entranceway canopy with such force that he was impaled on its steel points. They needed a crane to lift him off. Diba, who was not buried with police honours, but swept under the rug like a nobody. And Calvino missed out on the promotion he deserved. Radjen chastised himself for not making the slightest effort to check in on Calvino – officially, because he didn’t want to appear partial. But the real story, of course, was that he was too chicken. If he’d had to face his most talented detective, in whom he recognized his own passion, he wouldn’t have known what to say.

  The essence of the story – the case of the ‘hit-and-run kid’ – was becoming too much of a strain. A Russian suspect who’d indicated that the Russian energy conglomerate AtlasNet had something to do with it all had been killed by a detective during interrogation. One of the main suspects in the case was a Dutch minister who, thanks to the protection of the Public Prosecutor’s office, could keep working as though nothing had happened.

  Chief Inspector Tomasoa, you’ve indicated you were not aware of the unwarranted activities of Detective Diba nor those of Detective Calvino. You’ve also indicated you have no knowledge of what actually took place during the fatal interrogation that night.

  Correct.

  Are you actually aware of anything going on under your command?

  It felt like he’d forgotten how to breathe. His blood ran cold; his heart seemed to stop. He’d managed to hide his feelings, stared at them coldly. The men didn’t say anything else, made some more notes or pretended to, and turned off the camcorder. He’d shaken hands, fastened the middle button of his blazer and left the room. He was determined to prove he was right, solve this mystery, unravel the whole tangled mess and severely punish the guilty parties.

  If forced to resign, he would do so with his head held high.

  He threw off the blanket and felt the chilly dampness in the room. He heard his sleeping wife heave a deep sigh. Her life, their life, one long-drawn-out sigh.

  On his back, with his eyes closed, he was once again under the tent canvas, which was fiercely flapping in the gale-force winds whistling between the hilly slopes of Trasimeno. With every gust, every distant sound of thunder, he again had that feeling of being in complete control, like before, in control of the future, no matter how little there was left of it.

  He made a decision. He would take control of time.

  He’d organize it according to how he saw fit, as he’d done in his twenties, as he’d done for years, as he perhaps still did in the eyes of his trusted colleagues and those who served directly under him.

  Through the echoing thunder came a soft, urgent hum. He involuntarily glanced at the bedside table. His mobile phone was luminous and vibrating. With that he became acutely aware of his own breathing, the rain clattering against the window, the soft sighs of his wife in her sleep.

  He turned on his side, reached for his phone, picked it up and heard a woman’s voice – one he recognized. He hadn’t heard it in weeks; he’d missed it. But what that voice had to say hit him hard.

  The way lightning could strike a solitary tent pitched on the shores of a lake.

  2

  Anya Kozlova sped through Moscow with the fanaticism of Formula 1 drivers who race the streets of Monaco during the annual Grand Prix. Curves were taken almost perpendicularly – preferably on two wheels – merging was tantamount to cutting off other cars and braking seemed to be a capital offence. All of it irrelevant if you were driving a Hummer, but this was a Škoda Felicia from the 1990s.

  Paul recalled something Farah had once said: ‘Better to do something bordering on insanity than go insane doing nothing.’ The immediate consequence of this was that he was now sitting speechless, sweating bullets, beside Kamikaze Anya in her battered Škoda.

  The term ‘suicide mission’ popped into his head.

  Appropriately, because they were on their way to the place where – as one of Moskva Gazeta’s editors had discovered – the executed black widows from the Seven Sisters had been taken. Police headquarters at 38 Ulitsa Petrovka had given orders to agents on duty at the bureau in the nearby Tverskoy district the night of the hostage-taking. They’d followed the Alpha Spetsnaz anti-terror commandos into the Seven Sisters building. After seizing all the explosives and the dead rebels’ personal belongings, they’d transported the bodies directly to the Potemkin Hospital morgue.

  Farah had repeatedly tried to tell Paul and Anya about what had happened to her in the Seven Sisters. She had to wrap her head around so many confusing details, put them together like pieces of a puzzle.

  In the process, she remembered the woman who’d started filming her the moment the condor sat her down in front of the camera. Her striking blue eyes, her white skin, the diagonal scar that ran across her right cheek – visible because she didn’t wear her black headscarf like the other women, with only their eyes showing. She had her scarf tightly wrapped around her head, so you could see her entire face.

  With the help of Farah’s description, Anya feverishly scoured through old files on her laptop. She thought she’d seen the woman before.

  And her hunch was right, because she located the photo
she had in mind. There she stood, somewhere in Alkhan-Kala, a wintery village south-west of Grozny: a young woman in her late twenties in khaki fatigues, who wouldn’t look out of place at boot camp. Blue eyes. Her blonde hair sticking out from under her military cap. A rifle slung over her shoulder. With that scar running diagonally across her right cheek.

  She wasn’t Russian, but nor was she Chechen. She’d asked Anya who she worked for: without a hint of emotion, almost casually, yet at the same time commanding authority. Anya told her she was a journalist from the Moskva Gazeta. ‘Anti-Potanin,’ the woman responded in a friendly tone. ‘Then, as far as I’m concerned, feel free to do whatever you want.’ She spoke Russian with a Baltic accent. Anya thought she came from Estonia. Later she heard about female snipers who were active in that area. Women who could shoot off a Russian officer’s balls from a few hundred metres away. Mercenaries. Super Snipers. According to unverified reports, they were all women from the Baltic region.

  The woman was as much a Muslim as Farah was a terrorist. She must have been the one who’d filmed Farah with her mobile after she was dragged into the Seven Sisters.

  What was her exact role during the hostage drama? With whom had this woman been in contact? The answers might lead Paul and Anya to the reasons behind the hostage-taking, even shed some light on Valentin Lavrov’s possible involvement.

  Three days had passed since the crisis had ended. Two things were noteworthy. First, no official Chechen resistance group had claimed the attack, just as nobody had claimed responsibility for the Russian apartment bombings earlier. And second, no images of the terrorists were circulating in the media.

  The Potemkin Hospital loomed large in the soot-filled mist. Because of the smog, caused by the forest fires and the scorching sun, the poplars had hardly any foliage. Spotted brown-black leaves were strewn across the hospital lawn, which had a cinder hue of its own.

  Ambulances sped away and returned: the number of heatwave victims increased daily. To avoid panicking the Muscovites, the state media reported much lower numbers of deaths than those officially recorded.

  The second they passed through the massive revolving glass door into the hospital’s entrance lobby, Paul was ready to turn on his heels. A soul-crushing sense of hopelessness grabbed him by the throat. Decay, he thought. Disease and decay. The worst thing you can ever experience as a human being.

  ‘The Prime Minister visited here a few weeks ago,’ Anya said without a trace of emotion. She shoved the Nikon into his hands. ‘The hospital corridors he was scheduled to visit were renewed with plastic panelling and the floors re-covered with linoleum. But the second he left, the panelling and linoleum were pulled out and sold off.’

  Anya announced their arrival at the front desk. To get full access to the hospital morgue as quickly as possible, she’d called Potemkin’s press office to say the Moskva Gazeta wanted to do an article about the cuts the Russian government was planning for the healthcare sector. Thirty hospitals, including Potemkin, were threatened with closure. Three thousand medical personnel would end up on the street. The hospital board agreed that in exchange for this article Paul and Anya would get unlimited access to the entire hospital, so that they could take some photos.

  A plump woman in her mid fifties, with bleached-blonde hair and an unusually friendly smile for a Russian, introduced herself as Olga. She worked in the Communications Department and apologized for the bluish haze hanging everywhere in the building.

  ‘The air-conditioning system is on its last legs and refuses to work in this heat.’

  Anya got straight to the point. ‘What happens to heatwave victims who die?’

  ‘They all end up in the morgue, which has been chock-full for days.’

  ‘A morgue packed to capacity with no air-conditioning. A perfect metaphor for the effect of the cuts. Let’s start there.’

  Olga’s eyes frantically darted back and forth between Anya and Paul. ‘It has to be a hard-hitting article, Olga,’ Paul said. ‘Hard-hitting. So people wake up.’

  After Olga had given them masks soaked in cologne, she hesitantly pushed opened two large swinging doors that gave them access to a dimly lit antechamber, three by three metres in size. The place smelled like all the hospital’s garbage had been dumped there.

  Paul pressed the mask closer to his face, inhaled through his nose and realized it didn’t help much. He felt himself getting dizzy, but pushed on.

  The next swinging door led them into a large tiled room, badly lit by old-fashioned fluorescents. Then they entered other tiled areas. Around seven. Without asking permission, they opened the doors of large metal cabinets and pulled out half-rusted shelves holding strangers, some in body bags. Paul shot photos.

  The flash was like lightning striking. Each new dead face an unanswered question.

  Due to lack of space, the dead were also laid out on tables, on rickety stretchers, even on the ground. They had young faces, old faces, their mouths were often open. They had glassy eyes, as if they still couldn’t believe they’d never see the light of day again.

  In the fifth room they found them.

  The black widows, stark naked, each with a dark-red hole in the middle of her forehead.

  Olga’s voice was flat and uncertain. ‘I’m not sure we’re allowed to be here.’

  Paul and Anya simply ignored her. In the light thrown by Anya’s mobile, they gazed at their faces. Faces of young women from the North Caucasus. Women who’d lost their husbands and often their children in Chechnya’s struggle for independence. Women who’d finally felt so trapped they saw no other way out besides blowing themselves up in markets, metro and train stations for money. Women with Kalashnikovs who’d held students hostage. Women who hadn’t gone to hell, but ended up somewhere even worse. Here in this basement.

  With each new woman she saw, Anya shook her head.

  Once again, they could hear Olga’s agitated voice: ‘We really have to go.’

  Anya was now hanging right above one face. The last woman staring back at her with blank eyes.

  ‘Photo,’ she whispered unemotionally. ‘Photo.’

  Paul positioned the lens above the face. Despite the fact it was as white as marble and the eyes as lifeless as stone, he recognized their colour and that scar running diagonally across her right cheek.

  3

  After Farah cleared immigration and entered the arrivals hall, Jakarta hit her like a hot, wet flannel. Before she knew it she was besieged by a bunch of pushy guys and several older men with terrible breath, all trying to outbid each other. ‘Taxi, taxi! Hotel, good hotel! I take you lady, I take you!’ They were all smiles even as they were manhandling her. At one point she thought she’d lost her rucksack in the mêlée; the next moment someone slipped a fake Rolex around her wrist.

  She hotfooted it to one of the waiting buses indicating STASIUN KOTA as its destination. She’d heard about Kota, the original city centre. Apparently it was full of Dutch colonial buildings. There was a seat free in the back of the vehicle, close to an open window. The bus drove off, and, from the vantage point of the elevated motorway outside the airport, she watched the intricate labyrinth of the Indonesian capital unfold before her. The national monument towered above everything like a white-hot needle.

  Downtown, the bus got held up. Thousands of people with banners and flags came pouring on to the street from all directions. They were wearing swimming goggles and face masks, probably as a precaution against tear gas, and shouting slogans. ‘Kami sudah cukup dengan korupsi,’ an elderly man yelled. ‘We’re sick of corruption.’ The bus passengers leaned out of the windows to egg him on. To her surprise, she didn’t see any police or soldiers. After the procession finally disappeared in a cloud of dust, soot and exhaust fumes, the traffic got going again in fits and starts.

  The evening sky was practically purple by the time the bus reached its destination. Farah got off at Fatahillah Square, where a large number of colonial buildings were in a state of serious disrepair, and w
alked in the direction of a run-down suspension bridge, the old-fashioned type you saw these days only in Dutch villages. Soon, she found herself on the quay of the old port. Hundreds of wooden boats were moored here. Short, wiry men with heavy sacks scurried across the narrow gangplanks. Most of them were grey from the dust wafting from the sacks. Elsewhere, men balancing long beams of hardwood on their shoulders walked across another gangplank on to the quay.

  Boys stopping gullible tourists in an attempt to sell them ships in a bottle paid her no attention whatsoever. The men in the small boats offering tours of the harbour for a handful of rupiahs didn’t shout to her either. With her flip-flops, faded jeans, grey T-shirt and makeup-free face – and her Eastern features of course – she was apparently of no interest to them. It reassured her. Here she could do what she intended to do: disappear among the masses.

  At the nearby market, swarms of flies hovered above scraps of that day’s salted fish. Emaciated cats scavenged for waste underneath the stalls. The place stank of putrefaction and decay. She ended up in a maze of narrow streets full of half-empty fish stalls, lit-up food carts and small shops selling everything you’d need on a small fishing boat, from life jackets, nets and ropes to compasses, helms and anchors.

  In a tiny shop illuminated by strip lighting and crammed with sacks of rice, tins of food and Chinese waving cats, Farah found what she was looking for: an unlocked smartphone, a RedBerry, for the equivalent of less than twenty euro. Both its price and name betrayed its origins: Chinese imitation. She also bought an Indonesian prepaid SIM card and seven euros’ worth of credit. After receiving a confirmation text, she immediately sent a sign of life to Paul, as agreed.

  She saw the phone trying to connect with the international network and the short message doing its best to be sent. Even the fastest method of communication couldn’t dispel the notion that she was more than twelve thousand kilometres away from Paul – and with little if any help available for the time being. The enthusiasm with which she had conceived her impulsive plan to travel to Jakarta was gone. All she was interested in at this moment was finding an affordable place to sleep.