Craig Russell - The Valkyrie Song

A table became free in the corner and they took their beers across to it. As Fabel chatted with his friend, he felt himself relax. Otto was one of the most clumsy and disorganised people he knew, yet Fabel knew that this bumbling two-metre-tall gawky tangle of chaos had one of the sharpest minds he had ever encountered. They had been friends since their first meeting and Otto had the ability to puncture Fabel’s occasional bubble of self-indulgence or self-importance. As they talked, Fabel became distracted: there was an older man by the bar whom Fabel knew he had seen before but couldn’t place. The man was dressed casually but everything about him reeked of wealth: his white hair was immaculately groomed and he wore an expensive-looking deep blue cashmere sweater. He looked out of place in the bar but Fabel guessed he was here as an indulgence to his companion, an exceptionally pretty woman who stood to his side and three decades behind him.

‘I’m guessing she went for his looks and personality.’ Otto had followed Fabel’s gaze to the couple. ‘It’s called hyper-gamy, Jan: the tendency for women to select partners of a higher socio-economic level. We should consider ourselves lucky that Else and Susanne weren’t too fussy.’

‘They’re not a couple,’ said Fabel. ‘She’s a diversion for him. That’s not what’s bothering me. It’s the guy — I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before. Do you know him?’

Otto reached into his jacket pocket, put his glasses on and leaned forward, peering in the couple’s direction.

‘For God’s sake, Otto.’ Fabel eased his friend back. ‘You know you said you could always become a policeman if the book trade died off? Forget it. I’m guessing you’d find covert surveillance difficult.’

Otto grinned. ‘Call it hiding in plain sight. As a matter of fact I do know him. Well, not know him, know of him. That’s Hans-Karl von Birgau. He’s some kind of business big shot, from an aristo family. I can’t for the life of me remember the kind of business he’s in. Does that help?’

‘Not really.’ Fabel frowned. ‘I just can’t remember where I’ve seen him before, but I have. Somewhere.’

‘Maybe he double-parked his Rolls-Royce and you gave him a ticket.’ Otto laughed heartily at his own joke.

The older man and his young consort faded from Fabel’s thoughts when they moved through to a table at the back of the bar. Fabel and Otto stayed in the bar for another hour or so, although Fabel, as usual, switched to Alsterwasser shandies.

Fabel suggested they get a taxi and he would drop Otto off on his way back home. After the warmth of the pub the night air was cold and damp. The breeze had picked up into a wind which maliciously threw chilled pellets of rain in their faces. Fabel had called for a taxi on his cellphone and he was annoyed to see that it hadn’t arrived. He spotted von Birgau and his youthful companion as they dashed past them from the pub. Lights flashed on a brand-new Range Rover Vogue that was parked a little way down the street. The man and the girl climbed in and they drove off.

‘Maybe it was his daughter,’ said Otto, with a wry smile. A beige Mercedes pulled up and Fabel found himself checking its roof sign and licence number before getting in. Otto did most of the talking until they pulled up outside his house. Fabel was aware that he was tired. And something was nagging away at the back of his head.

‘Altona,’ he said when the taxi driver asked him where to go after they had dropped Otto off. They had only travelled a few blocks when his cellphone rang.

Fabel knew the restaurant. He and Susanne had eaten there once or twice over the last three years. It was that kind of restaurant: only the seriously rich or seriously careless with their money could afford to be regulars there. It had huge picture windows that looked out across the harbour. Or at least it used to have huge picture windows. Fabel got the taxi to take him as close as it could to the restaurant: the road was blocked by two huge green MOWAG armoured cars, the word POLIZEI emblazoned white on their angled flanks. Three Heckler-and-Koch-armed MEK police officers, in full riot gear, blocked his path.

‘Fabel, Murder Commission.’ He showed them his ID. ‘Bomb?’

‘Looks like it, Chief Commissar,’ said one of the MEK officers, a woman. ‘It was planted in a car, from what we can see.’

‘Is the area safe for me to go in?’

‘Yes, Chief Commissar. The forensics team are still in there, though, doing their stuff.’

‘I’ll try and stay out of their way.’ Fabel walked down the street towards the restaurant. A few of the street lights had been blown out and temporary lighting had been set up on stands to allow the police and forensic technicians to do their job. The glass-covered road and pavements glittered in the arc lights as if strewn with jewels.

‘Thanks for the call, Sepp.’ Fabel extended his hand to a tall heavily built man with a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once. Criminal Chief Commissar Stephan Timmermann of the Polizei Hamburg’s Anti-Terrorist Branch shook Fabel’s hand.

‘Hi, Jan. Think nothing of it. We thought it was terrorists to start with, but the target was Gennady Frolov. He has his new yacht moored in the harbour. The Snow Queen. He was in the restaurant for some kind of business meeting when his car went up. And boy, did it go up. I remembered that memo you circulated asking for background on Frolov, so I thought you might be interested and gave you a shout.’

‘I appreciate it, Sepp. Any fatalities?’

‘Unbelievably, no. A few injuries, none too serious. The restaurant had valet parking — you know, like the Americans — and they use walkie-talkies to communicate from the maitre d’ to the carhops so that the cars or taxis are always waiting as soon as a guest exits the restaurant. We reckon that by sheer chance the frequency they transmit on was the same as the remote trigger for the bomb. The maitre d’ radios for a car and boom, you’ve got a two-ton bulletproof Mercedes scattered across Hamburg in bite-size pieces.’

‘It must have been a big bomb,’ said Fabel. The cold night air was helping him to shake off the fuzziness he still felt from his beers with Otto.

‘It was,’ said Timmermann. ‘I reckon it was placed underneath the chassis. The car was one of those heavy bulletproof jobs, like I said, and its mass actually absorbed a lot of the blast. But I think that was the intention. The Merc was designed to withstand bullets from outside, so the bomber placed the device underneath, knowing that the blast energy would be concentrated in the cabin of the car. It’s called confined detonation velocity. However, it still produced enough explosive brisance to shatter every window around. But whoever planted this device knew there would be a limit to the shrapnelisation of the car body — because it was so heavily reinforced. All the injuries to bystanders are from flying glass.’

‘What kind of bomb?’

‘Early days, Jan, but you know we’ll be able to put it together. However, if you’re asking for my initial feeling, it would all indicate a blast velocity of somewhere around the eight-thousand-metres-per-second mark. That means it wasn’t TNT. My money’s on military-grade Composition C or some other RDX-based explosive. Electrical ignition. And remote radio initiation seems obvious. One of the lab rats has picked up a fragment of what looks like a semiconductor. Very professional job — except the one thing the bomber forgot to do was to build in a signal shield. That’s why the busboy’s radio set the bomb off.’

‘Is Frolov one of the injured?’ asked Fabel.

‘No. He was inside the restaurant and away from the windows. One of his bodyguards was outside at the time and has had her eardrum burst. Martina Schilmann. Ex-Polizei Hamburg. Of course, you know her, don’t you? Weren’t you and she…?’