Forty Hours: A breath-taking thriller Read online

  Forty Hours

  Kathrin Lange

  First published by Lume Books in 2021

  Copyright © Kathrin Lange 2021

  Lume Books

  30 Great Guildford Street,

  Borough, SE1 0HS

  The right of Kathrin Lange to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE: Hour 1 to Hour 14

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  PART TWO: Hour 15 to Hour 28

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  PART THREE: Hour 29 to Hour 40

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Darkness. Enveloping him like a blanket, winding around his body, his waist, arms and legs. He can practically feel it against his bare skin.

  Bare skin?

  The idea seems to be toying with his very sanity. Why is he naked? The question cuts through the murkiness in his mind, prompting further questions. His arms. Why can’t he move them? And why do the muscles on his sides tremble when he tries to raise his arms? Something is pressing against the soles of his feet. Something rough, like unseasoned wood. Fine splinters pierce his flesh.

  He feels no pain.

  The quivering of his muscles, the pricks in his skin – vague impressions, at best. Every sensation is two-dimensional, like shadow figures on a wall.

  He stops his futile struggles and, instead, concentrates on his eyelids. He is sure they are open, but the darkness doesn’t clear. He squeezes his eyes shut. And reopens them. His lashes are stuck together, but he manages to pry them apart. The darkness hasn’t vanished, but a faint light is now shimmering within it. A light at the end of the tunnel, a blurred gray rectangle.

  Where am I?

  The question floats to the surface of his mind, yet immediately plummets back into the depths of his confusion.

  He blinks. Once. Something is pricking his eyes. He blinks again, his eyes feeling like stones sinking deeper into their sockets. He blinks a third time and realizes that the gray rectangle in front of him is an open door. His sense of balance returns, but what he feels now contradicts everything he expected. He is regaining consciousness, isn’t he? Then why isn’t he lying down like normal? He is vertical and has no idea why.

  So he waits.

  His skull feels as if it has been stuffed with cotton, but his other senses are slowly emerging. A continual beeping. A regular rhythm. He raises his head, which had lolled forward onto his chest. And all at once, the pain strikes.

  At first, dull and distant. An unrelenting burning in his hands and feet, agony unlike anything he has ever experienced.

  A shiver shoots through his body. A sob catches in his throat as he finally grasps what has happened. He blinks again, shuts his eyes as tightly as possible. Tears them open again. And then it all becomes clear: In front of him, a wall. Gray tiles, evidently very old. The open door. Pale light streams in, but he cannot see past it.

  He turns to the right, gazes down his outstretched arm. Sees something red but has no idea what it might be. Then he catches sight of his hand. Twisted, jutting into the air, a claw, every muscle tensed.

  His trembling intensifies.

  He looks in the other direction. The same horrific sight: an outstretched arm, the red thing, which he now vaguely recognizes as a rope encircling his upper arm. The contorted fingers, and in the middle of his palm – an iron-gray jewel. No! His mind wants to scream, but he resists.

  He jerks his head back, banging his skull against something hard. He glances down. His body is stretched out like his arms. His first impression was not mistaken - he is in fact almost naked with only a cloth wrapped around his waist, nothing more. Goosebumps cover his bare chest, as red rivulets trickle down it and bright spots dance before his eyes. Is he hallucinating? And then he notices something else.

  Fascinated, his gaze comes to rest on a third iron-gray object: the one protruding from his feet.

  A nerve-wracking beeping fills his ears. An IV drip is suspended close to his face, its tube tickling his cheek. And now he realizes what the beeping is: a cardiac monitor. If he twists his head around as far as possible, he can see it. The bright spots on his chest! They aren’t hallucinations. They are electrodes recording his heart functions.

  He leans his head back against the wood.

  And the all-important realization finally dawns on him, dissipating his confusion. The gray objects are nails.

  He opens his mouth.

  And laughs.

  PART ONE

  Hour 1 to Hour 14

  Father, forgive them,

  for they know not what they do. (Luke 23:34)

  Chapter 1

  Faris Iskander’s eyes were burning. For some months now, he had been unable to shake his leaden weariness. Months in which he had only slept a few hours each night. Months in which, whenever he finally managed to fall asleep, he would wake up with a panicked scream from the same recurring nightmare.

  The desperate weeping of a child. Fire, closing around him …

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger. He had been standing at the bedroom window for ages with a mug in his hand, staring out into the gloomy night, which was now gradually giving way to an equally dismal morning. An old Metallica CD was playing in the background. Faris had turned the volume down out of consideration for the other tenants, but he could still hear James Hetfield singing Ride the Lightning. He had the song on repeat. He closed his eyes but reopened them right away, because his eyelids felt like sandpaper. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour. Besides briefs and t-shirt, the only thing he wore was the leather strap Laura had bought him on their vacation in Egypt. He never took it off. The Arabic characters branded into it – Laura and Faris – were barely legible at this point, which seemed to him an appropriate analogy for their relationship. Laura had left him, a good two years ago now. Even the explosion which had nearly blown Faris to pieces hadn’t inspired her to return.

  Flash before my eyes, sang Hetfield. Now it’s time to die.

  It had been stiflingly hot in the city over the past few days, almost like the height of summer, but a thunderstorm had hit Berlin the night before, and the temperature had dropped noticeably. So much so that Faris had closed the window during the night because he felt cold. He could see his reflection in the windowpane. His face a pale oval, floating ghostlike in the darkness, framed by longish black hair. His shirt’s V-neck revealed part of the dark red burn scar that stretched across his chest and right bicep. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. As dawn broke, his silhouette faded. He sighed and once again became aware of the cup in his hands. With a weary smile, he toasted himself
, put the mug to his lips, and drained it.

  The bitter liquid seared his throat, and he grimaced.

  The protagonist in the Metallica song woke up from his nightmare, and Faris envied him. He remembered the box on the top shelf of his wardrobe where he normally kept his gun. He exhaled deeply through his nose. The box was empty at the moment, as Faris had recently been suspended from duty as an officer of the State Office of Criminal Investigations.

  Pull yourself together, he admonished himself. There was nothing worse than people who wallowed in self-pity. Yet he wasn’t immune to it, in the small hours of the morning. That was when the memories crept up to torture him, and the pictures and sounds he had been carrying inside for ten months refused to leave him in peace.

  The child crying. A wave of fire rolling towards him. Then blood and corpses. Soft moaning. Heart-rending screams …

  Faris shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He had gotten lost in his thoughts again. Now, it was completely light outside, and Metallica was still playing in the background. Three floors below him the Berliners had long since begun their day’s work – he would gladly have joined them.

  He gazed into the empty cup and sighed, then turned away from the window and walked out of the bedroom. He crossed the tiny corridor without glancing into the mirror on the wardrobe. He knew, without looking, that his eyes had the burning expression of a crashing junkie. In the long term, lack of sleep was worse than anything dropped cold turkey. He walked over to the kitchen counter and picked up the glass carafe to pour himself a refill. The coffee had been stewing on the hotplate for hours and now tasted like sludge. Whatever! At least it was hot.

  As Faris took another sip, a chirping noise interrupted his thoughts. For a moment, he had no idea where it was coming from, but as it grew louder, he recognized the sound. It was the new phone he had bought the day before.

  Faris cast a disgruntled glance at the coffee maker before switching it off, setting the mug down, and going in search of his phone. It wasn’t in his leather jacket or in the jeans he had carelessly dropped onto the bedroom chair the night before. He finally discovered it underneath the Haruki Murakami novel he had left open on the bedside table. He fished the phone out and stared sullenly at the flashing blue display. Private Number, it said. After spending two hours yesterday trying to understand all the unnecessary functions of the device, he had lost all interest in entering his few contacts, but even if he had, it wouldn’t have been of any use to him now. The caller had blocked their own number.

  After stepping back to the bedroom window and casting a glance at his barely-recognizable reflection, he took the call.

  “Iskander.”

  “As-samu alaikum, Faris.” The voice was electronically distorted to a deep bass.

  The blood in Faris’s veins froze.

  Chapter 2

  As-samu alaikum.

  It had been ten months since Faris had last heard these words, and he was immediately catapulted into the past. He was no longer in his bedroom, but in the foyer of the Klersch Museum. The blue lights from a battalion of squad cars were flashing across the walls beside him. His stomach felt as though it had been turned inside out, and the headset which his colleagues from the Forensic Science Institute – FSI for short – had given him was pressed against his ear. In front of him, on the other side of the richly ornamented double doors, behind which the kidnapper had barricaded himself with his hostages, a child was crying. It was the soft, hopeless noise made by someone who knew they were going to die.

  “One question, Faris.” Faris heard desperation resonating in the voice of the hostage-taker. “A dark-skinned man, a belt, ten kilos of explosives. What do you get when you combine these?”

  In a vain attempt to keep his acute fear under control, Faris clenched his right hand into a fist. He had to sound calm, he knew that much. He slowly ran his tongue across his lips.

  “Let’s talk,” he said. “I was born in Alexandria. I’m a Muslim, like you …”

  But the hostage-taker interrupted him mid-sentence. “Wrong answer.” The sound of the voice made something in Faris’s chest tremble.

  “Listen …” he shouted. But it was too late.

  “As-samu alaikum, Faris Iskander,” the hostage-taker said.

  A second later, the door exploded in a rain of splintering wood as a wave of fire rolled towards Faris and engulfed him …

  The memory of the detonation and the merciless pain that followed caused Faris to gasp for breath, standing there in his bedroom.

  The caller on the other end of the line laughed, the distortion of his voice causing it to sound like a rattle. “You remember!”

  Faris’s heart raced. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. “Listen,” he began, shivering as he realized that this had been the last word he uttered to the bomber last year.

  “Tsk, tsk,” was the caller’s disparaging reply. “You should’ve learned something by now.”

  Faris gritted his teeth. “Who are you?”

  There was a slight pause before the caller replied. “You have no idea?”

  The explosion in the museum … Faris saw himself flying through the air, slamming into the wall … He had been too seriously injured to get back up, but before he lost consciousness, he had stared through the opening where the door stood shortly before. Smoke blocked his view, and as the members of the special task force stormed the hall, his strength evaporated. He lost consciousness. The last thing he saw was a dismembered finger with red nail polish, lying directly in front of him on the blackened tiles and pointing at him as if in accusation.

  Faris cleared his throat. Keep calm. This unknown caller couldn’t be the bomber from back then. That was impossible!

  “Our FSI guys swore that no one could survive an explosion like that,” he murmured. Ben Schneider, one of the FSI experts, had put it more colorfully: “That blew the bastard sky high.”

  The man laughed again.

  Faris swallowed hard. “What do you want?”

  “Check your inbox!”

  Faris pressed his lips together and tapped his phone’s small screen. He opened his email app, and his inbox appeared. There was a single message in it. Faris opened it. No message, just an attachment. Faris clicked on it.

  A film began to play.

  The first three or four seconds of the footage were blurred. Nothing but a few gray and black splotches, and a little green and blue. Heavy breathing could be heard, a noise reminiscent of suppressed sobbing, then incomprehensible mumbling. In the next moment, the image sharpened.

  And Faris froze.

  He could see a man lying with outstretched arms on a cross-shaped beam construction. The picture zoomed in on his pale face, which was covered in blood that streamed from under a crown of thorns. His eyes were unnaturally widened in horror. The camera panned down the body of the man, on whose chest light-colored circles could now be seen. They seemed totally out of place at first glance, but on closer inspection, Faris realized they were electrodes.

  The picture zoomed out again.

  Another man appeared in the frame, but although the first man could clearly be seen, this one had his back to the camera. The hood of his sweatshirt was pulled down over his forehead, completely hiding his face. He was holding a long nail and a heavy hammer.

  Faris drew his breath in sharply through his teeth. Powerless, he watched the man with the hood kneel down next to the other one. How he set the tip of the nail in the center of the victim’s palm.

  And raised the hammer.

  The blow was powerful, driving the nail through flesh and bone, and deep into the wooden beam below.

  Faris watched it in petrified horror.

  The victim threw his head to one side, but didn’t cry out, simply moaning softly. Blood gushed from the wound, looking almost black.

  “Shit!” mumbled Faris.

  The hooded figure then nailed the other hand down. When he turned to his victim’s feet, he began to tremble, however. This ti
me his blow wasn’t precise enough to drive the nail all the way through the feet and into the wood. The man had to take another swing. The crucified man moaned again as the nail was driven through his feet.

  Breathing heavily, the man set the hammer aside. For several seconds, he remained kneeling. Finally, he picked up two red ropes, which were carefully coiled beside the cross. He wrapped one around each of his victim’s upper arms and tied it off. He then attached an array of cables to the electrodes on the crucified man’s chest and connected these to a small box, which he clamped to the man’s loincloth. Only then did he get awkwardly to his feet. He stepped to one side and disappeared from the picture. A regular, rapid beeping began, and Faris guessed that a cardiac monitor had been switched on.

  A heavy chain rattled.

  The cross started to rise. The camera zoomed in on the victim’s face, and Faris couldn’t take his gaze from the man’s eyes. Something new was mixing with the horror in them – a kind of blankness, suggesting the influence of drugs. This was probably why he hadn’t yelled out in pain. The picture zoomed out again to show the entire scene. When the cross had almost reached its vertical position and gravity began to pull on the man’s body, he threw back his head and let out a scream. The beeping of the cardiac monitor quickened. Faris’s stomach lurched.

  For a moment, the camera continued to display the picture of the crucified man, then the screen went blank. The film was over.

  Faris stared at the small screen. With his free hand, he brushed his hair back from his sweaty forehead.

  He slowly lifted the phone back to his ear.

  “Did you watch the video?” came the caller’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” said the man on the other end of the line. “Trust me, it’s genuine.”

  Faris didn’t reply.

  The caller gave a derisive snort. “The man on the cross is in my power. And now I want you to do the following. Go to the Bismarckstraße subway station. Now.”