Forty Hours: A breath-taking thriller Read online

  Hesse nodded. “Eventually.”

  “Could Ben do it?” Faris asked.

  Hesse shrugged. “Ask him.”

  Faris went back into the bedroom, lifted his dusty sweatshirt jacket and pulled his new phone out of it. With it and the charger in one hand, he walked back over to Hesse while dialing Paul. When he had him on the line, he asked to speak with Ben. The Forensics Institute specialist sounded grumpy when he picked up.

  In a few sentences, Faris explained to him what Hesse had discovered. “There really is a trojan on my computer. Could you determine where it came from?”

  Ben muttered something that sounded like “decompile.” Then, “It could take a while,” he added.

  “How long?”

  “Too long for our needs, I’m afraid.”

  Faris looked at Hesse. “Thanks, Ben,” he said and was about to hang up when Ben distinctly cleared his throat. “Yes?” Faris asked.

  “I would never ever advise you to do anything illegal,” Ben said quietly. “That’s obvious, right?”

  “Of course!”

  “But there are people out there who don’t have to follow the rules as much as we do.”

  “You’re talking about Niklas, right?”

  Ben murmured something unintelligible. “I have to go now.” And with that, he simply hung up.

  Faris ended the call too. While sticking his phone and the charger into his leather jacket he asked again, “Could you find out who put that trojan on my computer? Quickly, I mean.”

  Hesse grinned. “Yeah, but I’ll need to make a quick run home. I need a few of my toys to do this.” He started to close the laptop but hesitated and shot Faris a questioning glance. “Alright?”

  Faris didn’t think for long. “Alright,” he said. “But I’m coming with you.”

  *

  At the youth hostel, lunch was served at eleven-thirty, and since Jenny and Pia had missed breakfast that morning, they decided to replace that meal with pasta and meat sauce.

  They had just sat down with their plates, when a deep voice with a slightly amused undertone spoke up behind Jenny. “This isn’t exactly calorie-friendly eating.”

  Pia, who was sitting opposite Jenny, looked surprised. Jenny quickly swallowed the bite she had already taken and turned around. Her heart did a somersault when she saw that it was the guy from yesterday. Today, his tattoos were covered by a long-sleeved t-shirt, the front of which featured a picture of some heavy metal band. With a grin that looked a little sheepish, the young man pointed at the unoccupied chair at Jenny and Pia’s table. “May I join you?”

  Jenny nodded. “Sure.” She felt her cheeks flush and was glad that she had put on a little makeup this morning. Hopefully, her blush wouldn’t show up as clearly.

  With fascination, she watched him turn the chair around, so that its back faced the table, and then sling one of his long legs over the seat before sitting down. “Not that you need to do that,” he said, smiling roguishly.

  “Huh?” Pia said. Her fork was floating halfway between her face and the plate.

  “Count calories,” the guy clarified. “With your figures, you could treat yourselves to a little spaghetti Bolognese, in my opinion.”

  “That was a compliment,” Jenny declared, and she almost started laughing, because at that very moment a fat clump of sauce tumbled off of Pia’s fork and splatted onto the table. “A little,” she chuckled.

  The guy grinned back. “I’m Dennis,” he said, introducing himself good-naturedly.

  Jenny and Pia did the same. “What are you doing here in Berlin?” Pia asked, having already scraped the sauce off the tablecloth and smeared it on the edge of her plate.

  “Attending the church convention. What about you?”

  Jenny stared at Dennis in disbelief. “For real?”

  He laughed again as he fished a roll out of the basket sitting in the middle of the table. “Yes. What’s so weird about that?” he asked, as he tore his roll in half.

  Jenny shook her head. “Nothing, just …” She suddenly didn’t know what to say.

  “You don’t look like someone who goes to worship services or Bible studies,” Pia offered helpfully. “We thought you were here for the music festival.”

  Jenny envied Pia the self-confidence she radiated as she smiled at Dennis. She didn’t seem even slightly embarrassed. Jenny realized that this annoyed her.

  “Really?” Dennis took a bite from his roll and chewed contemplatively. His eyes twinkled with amusement. “What do you need to wear to attend a church conference? An overcoat and orthopedic shoes?” He peered over the edge of the tabletop at Pia’s feet, which were clad in modern, knee-high boots with heels.

  “Something like that,” Pia giggled. “What are you doing today?”

  “I thought I would look around Berlin some. This afternoon, there’s a lecture on the Sermon on the Mount that I’d like to hear.”

  “You’re serious about that, aren’t you?” Jenny now cut in.

  Dennis turned to face her, and she felt simultaneously hot and cold. “Of course.” He tugged at his t-shirt. The rest of his roll sat abandoned on the table.

  “You like the Sermon on the Mount?” Jenny bit her lip. Why did every sentence she managed to squeeze out sound so wooden?

  “It’s a cool story, don’t you think? And you? What are the two of you doing?”

  “We went to Museum Island yesterday,” Jenny answered hastily. Crap! He had to think she was a total dumbass. She hadn’t even answered his question.

  But Dennis simply nodded with interest. “And? Was it interesting?”

  Jenny gulped as he now stared right at her. His eyes were dark brown, which she had already noted the previous day, but now she noticed that his pupils were ringed with honey brown. Gorgeous eyes. “Yes,” she said, as Pia exclaimed, “No!”

  “Aha!” Dennis laughed. “It’s good that you both agree.”

  Jenny threw Pia a dark glare. “The Rosa Luxemburg exhibition is good!”

  “True,” Pia admitted. “But how about we spend the day together and paint Berlin red? We wanted to take a city tour. The Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, all the touristy stuff.”

  “Sounds tempting.” Dennis didn’t look at Pia as he said this. His eyes were on Jenny. “What do you think?”

  “About what?” Jenny’s head was spinning. All of a sudden, she felt terribly warm! And then that question! Things couldn’t get any worse at this point!

  “About the possibility of my joining you. You haven’t said anything about that, and I don’t want to be a burden to anyone.”

  “You aren’t.” Jenny bit her lip. Why couldn’t she show just a little more enthusiasm? After all, Dennis was really nice, and she would be ecstatic if he spent the day with them.

  “Honestly?” He looked so intently into her eyes that she couldn’t breathe.

  “Honestly!” With a jolt, she stood up. She had to get out of here, or she’d pass out. “It would be great if you came along.” With those words, she fled the cafeteria. The last thing she heard was Dennis’s startled voice.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  Chapter 12

  Berlin’s lunchtime traffic was always horrible, so Faris decided it would be best for him to leave his car where it was and to ride along with Hesse on his motorcycle.

  They always met in bars or restaurants, so Faris hadn’t been to Hesse’s place since the reporter’s return to Berlin. It now occurred to Faris, as they snaked at breakneck speed between the densely packed cars, that he had no idea where Hesse was living these days.

  He leaned a little to the side, to ask Hesse this very question. The airstream roared past his ears, as the helmet that Hesse had insisted that he wear pressed uncomfortably against the laceration on his forehead.

  Hesse turned his head for just a moment and grinned at Faris before concentrating on the traffic once again. “Just wait. You’ll be surprised!”

  *

  And Faris actually
was.

  Hesse left the City Ring Road, taking the Tempelhofer Damm exit. He drove past the Air Lift Memorial and along Columbiadamm Road until they reached the former gate to the old Tempelhof Airport.

  “Don’t tell me that you live in this huge box?” Faris exclaimed, after Hesse had parked his bike.

  The reporter was still grinning.

  He led Faris onto the old airport grounds, past buildings still wrapped mutely in the corsets of their ponderous Nazi facades. It had been years since Tempelhof was operational. Back when it was shut down, there had been heated discussions in the city about what to do with the historically significant buildings and the long runways. The Berliners living in the adjacent neighborhoods had quickly taken over the landing strips for use as a recreational park, but even yet today, there were no formal solutions concerning what to do with the huge buildings, which stretched for thousands of meters. Following a campus party at the old airport some years ago – during which programmers, bloggers and inventors from sixty-six countries had gathered – a handful of attendees had stayed behind. Like the European squatters of the mid-eighties, they had simply commandeered the complex and lived there for several years. As far as Faris knew, the police had received orders not all that long ago to break up the illegal commune in the airport building.

  He now followed Hesse through one of the smaller sets of double doors, down a short corridor, and up a narrow stairway. After passing through one other door, they found themselves in the middle of the airport’s abandoned terminal building.

  Faris stood stock-still. “Wow!”

  This terminal was tied to one of his earliest childhood memories. He must have been around four. His parents, along with Faris and his older sister Anisah, had just arrived at Tempelhof from Egypt. Faris recalled how he had stared out through the giant glass doors to where a steady, gray rain was falling from an equally gray sky – a rain unlike anything he had ever seen before. And he also still remembered turning around and seeing tears running down his mother’s face. It was the first time he had ever seen her cry. Back then, he had wondered how the raindrops outdoors had reached his mother’s cheeks.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?”

  Faris gave a start. He had been so wrapped up in the past that he hadn’t noticed when Hesse stopped beside him. The luggage carousel was here as well; and the check-in counters, which ran along the long sides of the terminal, were still intact. The squatters had colorfully painted the panes and the walls of the small counter cubicles, so they looked like a collection of little hippie cottages. Two withered yuccas were standing in front of one such “cottage”, and the nooks and crannies everywhere were filled with filth, empty bottles, plastic bags, and garbage of all kinds.

  “I thought we’d cleared out the commune,” Faris murmured.

  Hesse gestured possessively across the whole expanse. “You did. I got here after that.” He glanced at Faris. “Come on.”

  They crossed the terminal hall and walked up one of the two staircases that led to where the restaurant had been located on the gable end of the building. Up here, there was a gallery-like collection of offices. A strange smell was floating in the air, a combination of vapors from ancient flooring materials and all the rotting trash. Faris grimaced in disgust.

  Hesse led him through the gallery to one of the offices. Unlike the other doors, the one to this office had been carefully fitted with a padlock. The reporter fished out a key, opened the lock, and invited Faris to enter.

  “Wow!” Faris exclaimed for the second time as he stepped over the threshold.

  The former office was perhaps twenty-five meters square, and its blue carpeting, like the flooring out in the passageway, had clearly seen better days. Every centimeter of the floor area was being used. There were at least a half dozen computers standing around – some sitting on a massive oak table that looked like it had been salvaged from the dump, while others were simply standing on the floor. Thick cables snaked across the floor before vanishing into old cable ducts or into black boxes, the short sides of which held little flashing green and red LEDs. Besides the computers, there was a narrow plank bed that sat against the milk glass panes across from the door, and a small kitchenette that had apparently been left behind by the airport’s former food service provider. All in all, the space looked exactly as Faris imagined a computer freak’s residence would. As soon as the door closed, you forgot where you were.

  Hesse deposited Faris’s laptop on the oak table, before pulling out an old desk chair which he kicked towards Faris. “Sit down! I need to start up the computer, and that’ll take a moment. I’ll make us some tea, and then we can start.”

  He walked over to the kitchenette, filled a pot with water from a large plastic canister, and submerged an old immersion heater in it.

  “The power’s still on?” Faris asked in amazement. He ignored the proffered chair and remained standing.

  Hesse nodded as he rummaged through one of the cupboards for a tea tin. “I have to be a little creative, but yes. Unfortunately, someone would notice if I kept all the computers running at once, so I have to turn them off from time to time.” He spooned the loose-leaf tea into a tarnished tea ball and hung it inside a porcelain teapot decorated with pictures of roses, which looked about as out-of-place here as a Persian carpet would in a homeless shelter.

  “Why here?” Faris looked around and felt a hint of irrationality. Previously, Hesse had lived in a small apartment in Charlottenburg, and this change of residence was somehow – bizarre.

  “Why do I live here?”

  “Yes.”

  Hesse didn’t answer until the water started to boil. He extracted the immersion heater and poured the tea. The scent of cherries filled the room, intensifying Faris’s feeling of irrationality. “Well, because I don’t have to pay rent. Since your esteemed colleagues evicted the squatters and sealed up the building, I’ve had it all to myself. Nobody bothers me. Nobody even suspects that I’m in here.” He stretched out on his cot and leaned against the milk glass panes. “It’s perfect, I’d say.”

  Faris wrinkled his forehead. He gazed at Hesse inquiringly, but then his eyes fell on a framed photo standing in the midst of all the cables and devices, looking practically as incongruous as the teapot with the roses. He picked it up and studied it. It showed a dark-haired woman with a wide, cheerful smile and dangly gold earrings in the shape of little stars.

  “Is this the woman you left Berlin for?” he asked, turning the photo around so Hesse could see it. On the back side of the frame, a price tag from IKEA announced that the item had cost 8.99 euros.

  For a long moment, Hesse stared at the photo, and a shadow flitted across his face. “Yes,” was all he said.

  Since his return to Berlin, Faris had tried a few times to find out more about this woman, but the reporter had refused to talk. Faris had changed the subject every time to spare Hesse any further awkwardness. Although they talked about a lot of different things, women hadn’t really been among them, even before now.

  “She looks Arabic,” Faris said, setting the picture back in its place.

  “Hmm,” was all he received as an answer.

  Faris glanced back over his shoulder through the open door into the huge terminal hall. And all of a sudden – so unexpectedly that Faris almost registered it as pain – the state of mind he had been living in for months now received a name. Doomsday mood, he thought. He promptly felt such a profound loneliness that he started to shiver. He suspected that he wouldn’t make it here more than a couple of days before wanting to send a bullet through his skull.

  Hesse got up from his cot and removed the tea ball from the pot. The aroma of cherries intensified. He then poured the tea into two mugs and handed one of them to Faris. At almost that exact moment, several computers buzzed to announce that they were now booted up.

  “So,” Hesse declared, “we can get started!” He rubbed his hands together, and suddenly he was back to being the investigative journalist.
/>   Faris cleared his throat. Those few sentences about the unknown young woman in the picture had reminded him of Laura and their screwed-up relationship. He rotated the faded leather bracelet around his wrist and held back a sigh. “Good. You can have the whole story, but you have to promise me that you won’t publish it until I give you the green light!”

  Hesse rolled his eyes. “Come on, old man, I …”

  Faris shook his head determinedly. “No, Niklas. It’s really important. Promise me!”

  From beneath his disheveled hair, Hesse studied him. “But is it something big? It’s about the subway bombing, right?”

  Faris recalled his colleagues’ theory that the next attack would be at the candlelight Mass, and considered which bits of information he should reveal.

  Usually, an event would be canceled, and the population would be warned, whenever evidence indicated that an attack was being planned. However, in this case, such decisions would be postponed until concrete evidence proved when the next attack would occur. Forty hours was a long time, and besides, nobody knew how many bombs the attacker had hidden around the city and which he would detonate if they tried to intervene in his plans.

  What they needed more than anything else was information.

  “Yes,” Faris replied slowly after he had thought through all this. “It’s about the bombing in the subway. And we’re afraid there will be more.”

  Hesse’s eyes widened. “More attacks? Did he threaten that in his confession letter?”

  “Basically, yes. As you already know, my hands are tied. You would help a lot if you could figure out, as quickly as possible, the location from which the man sent the trojan to my computer.”

  Hesse stared at his hands. “You know that the methods I use won’t produce usable results, right? If we actually learn something, you couldn’t use it as evidence in court.”

  Faris nodded.

  “And you also know that working this case on your own could cost you your job, don’t you?” the reporter continued.

  Faris gritted his teeth and nodded again.