Forty Hours: A breath-taking thriller Page 3

Tiger Boy threw back his head and burst out laughing. Faris suddenly remembered the caller on his phone, but he didn’t have time to care about him at the moment. “Get out of here!” he ordered. “Leave these people alone.”

  “Who do you think you are?” The young man advanced a step.

  Faris didn’t move. He slowly slid his right shoulder a little forward, seeking to stabilize his stance.

  Two of the gang members planted themselves on either side of their leader, while the other two nervously shifted their weight from one leg to the other.

  “I think we should …” the priest began, but Faris interrupted him with a wave.

  “Move back!” he ordered him, without taking his eyes off the gang.

  The sounds behind him indicated that the priest was doing as he had asked.

  “Come on,” he heard the cleric whisper. “We should do as he says.” Then steps, moving away.

  The volume of the group’s conversation made Faris think that they had retreated to the foot of the escalator which led up to Wilmersdorfer Straße. He would have preferred them to leave the station altogether, but at least the remaining passengers were giving them a wide berth. He willed himself to relax, pushing to the back of his mind memories of a very similar situation just a few days earlier.

  The gang leader lunged quickly to punch him in the chest, but Faris grabbed his hand, jerking it hard and causing the man to lose his balance. At the same moment, he ducked under the heavily muscled arm and straightened up behind Tiger Boy’s back.

  “I told you to get out of here!” he hissed in his ear.

  Tiger Boy tried to break free, but Faris’s grip on him was firm. Without much effort, he twisted the guy’s wrist. The young man stood up on his toes with a yelp of pain. The burn scar on Faris’s chest began to throb dully, but he was used to that. The pain no longer presented a hurdle.

  “Let go of him, kaffer!”

  The noise of a switchblade opening was loud in the silence that followed this demand. One of the two flanking gang members now took a small step forward.

  Faris looked straight into his eyes. “If you don’t stop moving,” he said quietly, “I will snap your buddy’s wrist, as well as his elbow,” he snarled provocatively through his teeth. “And yeah, that’s extremely painful.”

  To reinforce his words, he increased the pressure on the wrist just a little. Tiger Boy gave a stifled cry of pain.

  The blade was lowered.

  “That’s good,” Faris said. “As soon as you idiots vanish, I’ll let him go.”

  The young men obeyed without any protest. They turned toward the exit and slid past the nuns and teens who fearfully moved as far from them as possible. The priest was the only one who didn’t move. He glared darkly at the four guys, and it seemed that at least for this one moment, he wanted to seem bold and daring.

  Faris waited until the men had disappeared. As the sound of an approaching train rushed toward him out of the tunnel behind, he pushed Tiger Boy away. The guy spun around, but instead of also taking to his heels, he leaped at Faris. His punch, fueled by extreme frustration, was aimed at his opponent’s head.

  However, Faris had not merely reckoned on this happening – he had hoped for it. He pivoted deftly, sending his right fist into Tiger Boy’s stomach. The young man folded in half. Faris followed this with an uppercut and almost delivered a third blow. In the nick of time, he caught himself and stepped back.

  Another punch would have been unnecessary.

  Tiger Boy landed on his knees, clutching his stomach with both hands. Blood was gushing from his nose, staining his wife-beater shirt. Woozy, he swayed a little as a warm gust of air, smelling of oil and metal, announced the approaching train.

  Faris’s hair fluttered. He grabbed Tiger Boy and yanked him roughly to his feet. He then turned him around and shoved him toward the escalator.

  “Get lost!” he said, coolly. “Or I’ll keep going.” Half of his words were swallowed by the sound of the train’s brakes.

  This time, Tiger Boy had had enough. On unsteady legs, he stumbled toward the escalator.

  The train pulled to a stop. The doors opened with a hiss and released people onto the platform. The priest hurried toward Faris with the older of the two nuns in his wake.

  “Thank you so very much!” she cried, her pale eyes filled with concern. “Are you hurt?”

  Faris rubbed his aching fist and tried to suppress the satisfaction this short fight had catalyzed inside him.

  “No.” He avoided the nun’s efforts to grasp his hands to examine them herself, jerking his head toward the train. “You should get on, or you’ll have to wait for the next one.”

  The priest nodded. “Thank you,” he added as well.

  With a sweeping gesture, he herded his sheep into a car. “Come along, Sister Xaveria!” he called to the eighty-year-old nun.

  She was the last to board, and before she stepped onto the train, she sent Faris a timid, slightly admiring smile.

  As he watched the doors slide shut behind her, Faris pulled the phone from his pocket. “Are you still …?”

  “Of course,” the caller interrupted him. “That was really impressive, Faris! Especially the moment you got yourself under control and didn’t hit him again.”

  Faris glanced up at the camera, whose black eye seemed to be mocking him. He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t reply.

  The train pulled out. The draft tousled Faris’s hair as the train disappeared into the tunnel, leaving him standing on the platform.

  “Boom!” the caller said.

  The next second, the blast wave from an explosion lifted Faris off his feet and hurled him against the wall.

  Chapter 4

  Alexander

  “EVIL IS THE RESULT OF HUMAN FREEDOM.”

  How much time had passed? Alexander didn’t know. He had collapsed at the base of the sink, but now the soft voice was calling him out of the darkness. On quivering knees, he got back to his feet, propped himself up on the dirty porcelain sink, and gazed out into the hallway.

  A delicate, splashing sound was echoing in his head again. Something was dripping onto the floor.

  Blood. It was trickling out of the crucified man’s wounds.

  He instantly felt sick again.

  “PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER,” the voice ordered sternly. But he couldn’t manage that. Alexander vomited again, this time missing the sink. Just as it had over the years whenever the whip had met bare skin, his vomit splashed across the old tiles. It felt like his stomach was trying to escape through his throat. His tongue was coated with an acrid taste. His eyes teared up as he stood for the second time.

  He felt so unbelievably weak.

  “IT’S ALL RIGHT,” the voice from the light said. “YOU DON’T NEED TO FEEL ASHAMED.”

  Actually, he felt a little better. Alexander turned around, trying to gauge his status. Much better, in fact.

  “Who are you?” he asked into the light, blinking. The figure within it was still just a blurry outline. “Are you an angel?”

  The voice laughed quietly. “MAYBE THAT’S WHAT I AM. A MESSENGER.”

  The crucified man groaned, and Alexander gave a start. “A messenger of the Lord?” he whispered.

  The laughter broke off. The voice said nothing, and Alexander was afraid he might have annoyed the messenger. The messenger of the Lord. He felt cold. The light was very bright, but something propelled him toward it. He wanted to see the angel, to touch it.

  “STOP WHERE YOU ARE!” the voice said harshly.

  Alexander hastily stumbled back to his old place, “O … of course,” he stuttered.

  It was quiet for a moment.

  “YOU ARE FORBIDDEN FROM COMING ANY CLOSER TO THE LIGHT,” the angel declared. “REGARDLESS OF WHAT HAPPENS.”

  Alexander nodded. “What should I do now?” he asked, tentatively. Blinded as he was, he could only make out the vague shape of the angel lifting his arm and pointing at the man on the cross.

&
nbsp; “TELL ME ABOUT HIM,” the voice ordered Alexander. “TELL ME EVERYTHING.”

  *

  Faris couldn’t breathe.

  The explosion’s blast wave had hurled him back against the tiled station wall, and everything around him had briefly gone black. As he regained full consciousness, sound was the first sense to return. Through the ringing in his ears, he could hear a child sobbing, but in the next second, he realized that he was mistaken. The crying wasn’t coming from a child but from an elderly woman not far from him. She was covering her mouth with both hands, staring at the chaos through wide eyes. Someone was screaming loudly in anguish. A man close by kept babbling, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” He seemed to be uttering this through a mouthful of cotton, as blood welled out of his mouth and nose.

  Faris turned over, coughing. The impact had knocked all the air out of his lungs. His burn scar hurt, but this was the old, ordinary pain, nothing new or more intense. This time, the fire surge hadn’t reached him, just the blast wave. He propped himself against the wall and tried to get his bearings.

  “Have mercy, Lord!” screeched the woman close to him. Faris’s ears rang shrilly.

  He lurched to his feet, his head clanging like a giant bronze gong. He shook it a little to try to clear the haze that was collecting before his eyes. A figure swayed toward him. A woman in a red dress.

  She was saying something to him, but he couldn’t understand it. Her voice also sounded muffled and distant.

  The fog finally cleared. The clanging in Faris’s skull subsided, and only the ringing in his ears remained. However, it, too, was abating, so that he could now understand the woman.

  “What did you do?” she screamed.

  He coughed one last time, spitting out soot and ash. He then straightened up to his full height. “What are you talking about?” He still felt breathless.

  “You blew up the train!” the woman shrieked.

  Faris couldn’t wrap his mind around this. His gaze fell on the phone that the explosion had blown a good distance away from him. He glanced at the camera which had been sheltered from the blast wave by its niche. The black camera lens stared apathetically at Faris. He ignored the woman’s screams and filtered out all the other sounds around him as he concentrated completely on his phone. The screen was glowing through the dust that was slowly starting to settle over everything. To Faris, the distance to the device seemed further than to the moon, but he managed to stumble over to it, lean over, and pick it up.

  “And after they prayed,” he heard the distorted voice of the caller, “the place where they were meeting was shaken. That is the first part of the verse we were talking about earlier, Faris. Isn’t that marvelous? So very ironic!” A quiet chuckle was half lost in the ringing in Faris’s ear.

  The hairs on the back of Faris’s neck rose. “You bastard!” he gurgled.

  He thought about the group of teens who had boarded the train along with the nuns and the priest, but this image was overlaid by another picture that appeared in his mind. A severed finger with red nail polish. With his free hand, Faris ran his fingers through his hair, pressing down on his skull as if he could save it from imploding. As he did this, he discovered that he was bleeding from a head wound. He stared for a moment at the blood on his fingertips before wiping them quickly on his jeans.

  “You blew up that train!” he stammered into the phone. “Why?”

  The woman in the red dress was still beside him. “You!” she yelled. She tried to grab Faris’s arm, but he yanked it from her grasp. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of two men in suits who were staring at him and whispering to each other.

  The caller laughed once more. “How ironic, Faris!” he said sarcastically. “They think you set off the bomb, and do you know why? Because you look Arabic, that’s the one and only reason.”

  Faris tried to shake off the woman by moving a few steps away. A man was lying there, stretched out on the floor. A young girl was kneeling next to him, pressing her hands on the bloody something that had once been his abdomen.

  “Papa!” she sobbed over and over.

  Faris pointed at the two of them. “Help them!” he ordered the woman in the red dress. “Call for an ambulance.”

  That worked. The woman left his side.

  Faris turned his back on her and the man with his daughter.

  “Why did you blow up the train?” he yelled into his phone.

  The blood from his wound was trickling into his eyebrows, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.

  The two suits were still whispering with each other.

  “They think they can read who you are from your face,” the caller sniggered. He was then quiet for a moment before continuing: “Do you remember the video I sent you?”

  “The crucifixion?” Faris took a deep breath. He might finally learn what all this was about. “Of course! Why?”

  “Somewhere out there, Faris, in your lovely Berlin, a man is hanging on a cross. Your task is to find him. As long as his heart keeps beating, all’s well. However, if it stops before you find him … Well, as the Bible verse says: the place where they were meeting was shaken. I think you know what I mean.” He paused.

  Faris struggled for clarity in the midst of his confusion. “But his heart could stop beating any moment,” he whispered, his voice tinged with horror.

  The stranger disagreed: “No, it won’t, and do you know why I’m so sure about this?”

  Faris shook his head. The muscles in his neck felt as if they were made of wire. “No.”

  “Because God is on my side, Faris. As I hammered the man on the cross, I put myself into His hands. Do you know what divine judgment entails?”

  Faris nodded.

  “You let God decide,” the caller explained, nonetheless. “If He agrees that my effort is just – and I’m firmly convinced that He will – He will make sure that the crucified man survives for the next forty hours. Forty hours from right now, Faris. Do you understand?” He sounded more than amused now; he sounded enthusiastic. “Oh! And to answer your question, I blew up the train to show that I’m serious about this.”

  As he was speaking, Faris pressed the balls of his thumbs against his wound to stop the bleeding and lowered his arms. He simply couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “Why?” he whispered, glancing at his watch. It was a few minutes after eight.

  “Maybe I want to be a beacon for others. Who knows? By the way, starting right now, my instructions about not talking to your colleagues are null and void. You are welcome to bring SURV on board.” He hesitated, then added: “Find the man on the cross within the next forty hours. Or as-samu alaikum.”

  The prolonged beep on the phone indicated that the connection had been broken. In Faris’s ear, it sounded like a scream.

  “As-samu alaikum,” he croaked.

  This was a corruption of the traditional Arabic greeting. It didn’t mean peace be with you. It meant death be with you. Faris had no time to mull over the meaning of these words, because at this juncture, the two suits screwed up their courage and stepped toward him resolutely.

  “Hey, you!” one of them called.

  He was taller than Faris and at least thirty kilos heavier. He had clenched his hands into fists and was holding them in front of his massive body like a prize boxer.

  Faris lowered his phone. “What?”

  “Don’t move!” The second man now took a step closer. He looked slight compared to the other man, but he also looked wildly determined. The eyes that met Faris’s were filled with loathing.

  Faris had made no move to leave, but now wasn’t the time to point out this detail to the two would-be heroes. He wanted to say something, but the slim man didn’t let him get a word in. “I said, don’t move!” His voice cracked.

  And before Faris realized what was happening, he jumped forward and grabbed his arm.

  Faris took a step back. “What are you …?”

  “Shut the fuck up!” the man growle
d.

  His grip was firm. As Faris tried to jerk away, he realized the muscles in his right shoulder were no longer following orders. Something must have gotten pulled in the explosion. Nonetheless, he was still able to free his arm from the man’s grasp.

  “You blew up the train,” the skinny one yelled.

  Faris sidestepped the one built like a boxer, but the man refused to give up. “You son of a bitch!” he wheezed, as he pulled his arm back.

  Faris blocked his punch. “You’re making a m …”

  His shoulder protested, and his head was swimming with the after-effects of the explosion. He saw the next blow coming, but couldn’t avoid it quickly enough. He was hit in the neck and then, immediately, in the mouth. As his lip split, he could taste blood.

  “Listen!” he cried. “I’m a poli .…”

  “He’s the bomber!” he heard the skinny guy shout. “I saw the whole thing. He was holding his phone and set the bomb off with it.”

  While all this was going on, a group of onlookers had been gathering to watch, and the mood of the crowd was growing blatantly aggressive. To Faris, the people with their pale, dusty faces, burning eyes and slumped postures looked like zombies.

  “Probably ISIS,” someone mumbled.

  Faris’s ears were roaring. He focused on the boxer, but he sensed a movement behind his back. He was about to spin around, but it was too late. Arms tightened forcefully around his chest. He tried to slip free, but in vain.

  “Damn it!” he cursed. “You’re making a mistake! I’m a policeman!”

  “Terrorist!” a shrill voice screeched. It belonged to the woman in the red dress who was still kneeling beside the injured man. He could see the hate in her eyes.

  He once again tried to break out of the arms locked around him, but then he gave up. He allowed the boxer to step close to him and grab his upper arm, while the man who had caught him from behind took hold of the other one. With legs apart, Faris stood there, surrounded by all the ghostly figures with their hate-filled gazes, feeling as if he were trapped in Dante’s Inferno. A kick in the back of his knees almost knocked him to the floor. He fought to keep his balance.