Private Berlin Read online

  “I’m calling you under orders from my supervisor,” Dietrich said, the annoyance evident in his voice. “Our meeting at my office is canceled.”

  “What?” Mattie said, growing angry. “You said—”

  Dietrich cut her off. “What I am about to tell you is not, I repeat, not for public dissemination. Are we clear?”

  That took Mattie aback. “Yes.”

  Dietrich cleared his throat. “As you might imagine, because of the nature of the building we found a great deal of blood evidence, so much that I decided to take twenty random samples and have them run overnight. Of the twenty, twelve were animal—four swine and eight bovine. The remaining eight were human. I’m sorry to say that four small spatters have been identified as Chris Schneider’s. The other four were completely unlike one another.”

  Mattie froze, blinking, trying to understand what he was telling her. “You found blood from four other people besides Chris?”

  Dietrich hesitated, coughed, and then replied, “That is correct, which is why we are returning to the slaughterhouse this morning. And it turns out our forensics teams are under heavy demand at the moment. Though I am opposed to this, my supervisor would be pleased if Private Berlin’s forensics team could help us examine that slaughterhouse in more detail.”

  “We’ll be there in an hour,” Mattie promised, and hung up.

  CHAPTER 23

  AT TEN FIFTEEN, Mattie, Burkhart, Dr. Gabriel, and three Private forensics techs entered the slaughterhouse carrying equipment, including blue lights, cameras, thermal imaging systems, and a pressurized tank attached to a hose and nozzle.

  Hauptkommissar Dietrich was already on site, waiting for them along with Inspector Sandra Weigel and a Kripo forensics team.

  “We’ll assign you a piece of the floor and wall,” Dietrich told Gabriel, whom he eyed with open distrust after the hippie scientist removed his jacket to reveal a bright orange sweatshirt featuring Bob Marley’s image.

  Gabriel smiled agreeably. “I’m calling this place eighty meters by forty.”

  “Roughly,” the high commissar replied. “So?”

  “So let’s reduce the space,” Private’s forensics expert replied. “Or at least let’s understand the full dimensions of what we’re dealing with.”

  Dietrich looked at him suspiciously. “How?”

  “Superpressurized luminol fog, my own invention,” Gabriel said as he retied his gray ponytail and tucked it up under a surgeon’s cap. Then he put on goggles, picked up the pressurized tank, and twisted the valve.

  “Shut down the kliegs, please,” he called.

  Dietrich nodded to his assistants. They killed the lights, leaving the place dim and shadowed. Rain pattered on the roof.

  “Start recording,” Gabriel told two of his technicians who waited with video cameras mounted on tripods.

  Private Berlin’s chief scientist aimed the spray wand toward the western end of the building, then squeezed a lever trigger. With a burst and hissing, a fine aerosol fog of luminol, hydrogen peroxide, and hydroxide salt shot from the wand, widened into a cloud that drifted into the rafters, crept down the walls, and settled on the floor.

  “Sonofabitch,” Burkhart said.

  Awed and horrified, Mattie nodded.

  It was like looking at depictions of galaxies—tens of thousands of stars in clusters, splashes and pinpoints, a chemiluminescent, glowing-blue constellation of blood.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE CHEMICAL REACTION ended in less than thirty seconds. The blue glow died and the slaughterhouse returned to its ruined self. The sheer scope of the blood evidence revealed by Dr. Gabriel’s device stunned everyone into silence.

  Except for Weigel, who whined, “It’s everywhere, High Commissar!”

  Dietrich scowled at her. “As I said last evening, Weigel, this was a slaughterhouse. Luminol only gives us an indication of the presence of iron in blood hemoglobin. It says nothing about that blood’s source.”

  Dr. Gabriel cut in. “In any case, we’ll have to microgrid the place, sample every three inches, say.”

  Dietrich looked annoyed. He hesitated and then nodded with little certainty before saying, “I think six inches will do.”

  Mattie closed her eyes, seeing the glowing-blue galaxy of blood traces in her mind, and noticing that one area seemed more saturated than others. She went to the video camera and replayed it just to be sure.

  “What’s up?” Burkhart said.

  Dietrich was off talking to one of his forensics men.

  Mattie gestured to the glowing-blue pattern on the camera screen. “See where it’s more concentrated?”

  Burkhart looked and nodded. “Over in that corner.”

  They walked through the trash and filth to the corner and an iron sewer grate. They shined flashlights into a steel-lined well, seeing that at the bottom, some three feet down, there was a second grate of sorts where the metal had been perforated with pencil-sized holes.

  “Why isn’t there stuff on the bottom down there?” Mattie asked.

  Burkhart said, “I don’t follow.”

  “It’s like a drain catch in a kitchen sink, right?” she asked. “But in this trashed place, except for a few leaves, it’s clean.”

  Burkhart thought about that, and then said, “Well, maybe it is a catch, which means there’s something underneath it. Let’s take a look.”

  He squatted down, got his fingers entwined in the sewer grate, and with a grunt lifted.

  Mattie had expected to see the grate come free of the floor.

  But to her astonishment, the grate and the steel tube welded beneath it came up, leaving a gaping hole that gave off a horrible stench.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE HOLE IN the slaughterhouse floor stank of urine and something fouler.

  As Burkhart set the false well aside, Mattie held her arm across her nose and shined her light into a metal-walled shaft that dropped eight feet before giving way to four feet of space and then a gravel floor.

  “Probably a secondary drain field system,” said Dietrich, who’d come over, and looked somewhat rattled by their discovery.

  “Someone needs to go down, but it’s too tight for me,” Burkhart said.

  “Me too,” the high commissar said.

  Inspector Weigel peered down the shaft and shook her head. “There are rats down there. I can smell them. I hate rats. My brother had one. Used to taunt me with it. I hate them.”

  “Then I guess it’s me,” Mattie said.

  “You know I can’t let you—” Dietrich began.

  Mattie cut him off. “If I find anything, Hauptkommissar, I’ll back out. Besides, you’ll see what I see. I’ll be wearing a camera.”

  After hearing what Mattie proposed, Gabriel went out to his equipment van and returned with a white disposable coverall, a hard hat, goggles, knee pads, and a headlamp attached to a fiber-optic camera, as well as a radio headset with a supersensitive mic that he taped to the side of her neck, and a respirator to keep her lungs protected from any diseases that might be airborne because of all the rat feces.

  They put her in a climbing harness and attached her to a rope.

  “Sure you want to do this?” Burkhart asked.

  “No,” Mattie said before kneeling and backing slowly into the shaft.

  Burkhart and Dietrich lowered her while Gabriel watched a laptop receiving the signal from Mattie’s camera.

  The shaft was barely bigger than Mattie’s shoulders. For a moment she felt a growing claustrophobia, but then the shaft gave way to open space and her feet touched ground.

  She released the rope from her harness. Crouching down and swinging her headlamp, she saw that the gravel surface went out in all directions in a black space that swallowed her beam.

  “It’s like a huge drain field or something,” she said.

  “We can’t see very well,” Gabriel said in her ear. “Use your SureFire, too.”

  Mattie got out her flashlight and flicked it on, instantly hap
py for the powerful beam that shot through the space.

  She spotted something dull white about ten yards ahead behind a load-bearing steel column. Then she heard chattering to her left. She swung the beam and spotted dozens of rats watching her, and sniffing her presence, some of them scolding her angrily while others worked their chops.

  It was creepy, and she heard Niklas’s voice telling her to get out of there.

  Instead, Mattie crouched and duckwalked toward that white object behind the column. Three feet from it, she saw what it was, and froze.

  A bone stuck up out of the gravel.

  “That’s a human femur,” Gabriel said in her ear.

  Mattie swallowed hard and swung her lights deeper into the subbasement, seeing more bones.

  And then a human skull. And then two more.

  And then more bones and skulls, scattered like seashells everywhere.

  CHAPTER 26

  “IT’S A BONEYARD,” Mattie whispered.

  “We see them,” Burkhart said in her ear. “Dietrich wants you out of there.”

  Mattie had no argument. She’d never been in a more frightening place in her life, and she wanted out before everything went claustrophobic.

  But as she pivoted to leave, her beams played across something twenty meters away. Mattie rocked back on her heels as if hit on the chin.

  Two fresher corpses lay there, both almost devoid of skin.

  A woman. A man.

  Clothes hung in tatters from them.

  Though she absolutely did not want to, she moved to within several feet of the bodies. She recognized a black ribbed turtleneck that hung off the larger of the two, and felt her whole world cave in.

  Mattie fell to her knees and stared, her breath coming hard and fast, echoing in the respirator and making her feel like a zombie, the living dead.

  “Mattie?” Gabriel’s voice came in her ear.

  “Do you see them?” she asked numbly.

  “Mattie, we do. Please, come up out of there.”

  “The bigger one is Chris,” she said.

  “My God, no,” Gabriel said.

  Mattie swooned and thought she was fainting.

  She rocked her head back, gasping and feeling drunk, when through the spots dancing before her eyes she spotted the first package. It was strapped to the ceiling support about four feet in front of her.

  It was about the size of a paperback book and wrapped in green wax paper that had Russian Cyrillic writing on it, and a fuzzy stamp in German.

  For several seconds nothing about the situation seemed real, and what she was seeing did not compute.

  But then she lolled her head over, seeing similar green paper packages strapped to the ceiling supports, scores of them.

  They were all connected with electrical wire.

  “Engel!” Burkhart yelled. “Those are bombs! Get the hell out of there!”

  CHAPTER 27

  ALL THINGS MUST pass. Isn’t that what they say, my friends?

  It’s certainly what my mother said the last time I saw her, traitorous bitch.

  All things must pass. As if that explains anything to a boy of eight. As if that justified what she’d done to herself, to my father, and to me.

  But this time, the old saw is true. All things must pass. I know it as sure as I know myself despite the masks I’m forced to wear.

  I’m musing this way in the driver’s seat of the ML500 because I’ve just driven by the entrance to the slaughterhouse at an insistent speed, as if eager to be somewhere else.

  There are more vehicles there than yesterday, twice as many, police cars and forensics wagons, and unmarked sedans, and the whole place roped off with yellow crime scene tape.

  But instead of feeling on the edge of panic as I did the day before, I go cold, almost reptilian inside. Pulling past the apartment buildings west of the slaughterhouse, I swiftly come to a difficult decision.

  A long time ago, very early in my life as a matter of fact, I learned that survival means acting in the moment with the best information you’ve got. With that many people inside, they were bound to find the secrets of the slaughterhouse eventually. It’s just logical.

  So I pull over several hundred yards away at the top of a slight rise where I have more or less a direct line of sight to the roof of the abattoir.

  For a moment, I feel stricken by nostalgia. The slaughterhouse has been part of my life for so long, I’m conflicted about what I must do.

  But there’s no way around it, is there?

  I open a paper bag on the passenger-side floor, and come up with an old, bulky Soviet-era military two-way radio with a whip antenna. I find the battery and snap it into the housing.

  I turn on the power switch. For a moment, the little bulb by the switch is dark and I feel concerned.

  But then it glows green.

  The air tastes bittersweet as I adjust the radio to a channel with a frequency I set almost twenty-five years ago.

  My fingers find the transmit button. My throat clicks with pleasure.

  Well then, my friends, I guess it’s about time we raised a little hell in Berlin, hmmm?

  CHAPTER 28

  “MATTIE!” BURKHART ROARED. “Get out!”

  Down in the basement of the slaughterhouse, Mattie snapped out of the haze of shock. She reached up, grabbed at the green wax paper, and tore off the area with writing on it.

  She took one last look at Chris’s body, and started going as fast as she could to the shaft, all the while fighting the urge to stop, lie down, and sob her heart out.

  When she reached the bottom of the shaft, she looked up and saw Burkhart looking down at her with great concern. “Clip in,” he ordered.

  Mattie stuffed the green paper in the pocket of the coverall, attached the line to her harness, and yelled, “I’m on.”

  She rose instantly. She guided herself into the narrow tube and closed her eyes at the tightness of the passage until Burkhart snagged her by the back of the harness, lifted her, and set her firmly on the slaughterhouse floor.

  Mattie trembled as if she’d just been blasted by cold air. “Did you see?”

  She addressed the question to High Commissar Dietrich, who appeared stunned. “How many bodies are in there?”

  “Twenty? Thirty? Like I said, it’s a boneyard.”

  “I don’t care what it is, we are getting out of here, now,” Burkhart said. He looked at Dietrich. “The place looks booby-trapped. Get your people out now, and call in a federal bomb squad.”

  Dietrich hesitated, clearly upended by the scope of what lay before him.

  Burkhart got more insistent. “Hauptkommissar, I worked for GSG 9 in an old life, and I’m telling you to get your people out until the experts can get in there.”

  Dietrich’s face contorted and then paled. He looked over at Inspector Weigel and the rest of his team watching him.

  “Out!” the high commissar finally barked. “Everyone. Take only the essentials. Now!”

  The ten people inside the slaughterhouse went into gear, grabbing computers, cameras, and the evidence samples they’d already gathered. In under a minute they were all hustling through the barn and out the front doors.

  The rain had settled to a mist as they came out and trotted back toward the road to Ahrensfelde. Mattie followed Burkhart mutely, feeling battered by what she’d seen underground.

  Chris was gone. He would always be gone.

  When she was almost to the police barrier the first bomb detonated.

  Mattie spun around.

  Smoke and dust billowed out the windows and doors before a giant, deafening eruption hurled Mattie off her feet and blew the slaughterhouse to smithereens.

  BOOK TWO

  WAISENHAUS 44

  CHAPTER 29

  JACK MORGAN WALKED down a hallway in a large two-story apartment north of Monbijou Park in central Berlin.

  He was following a slim, pale man in his late twenties with ice-blue eyes, pierced eyebrows, a long black trench coat
, bleached white hair, and leather half gloves with studs, all of which made him look like he belonged in a vampire movie.

  But Daniel Brecht was one of Private’s best detectives in Europe, a fascinating character who slipped easily through cultures and languages.

  Brecht shifted a black book bag to his left shoulder, wrapped his studs on the door, and turned the handle. They entered a dark room that smelled of sex.

  Brecht flicked a switch. Light flooded the bedroom.

  An angry, fit, caramel-colored man shot up in bed and began shouting at them in Portuguese. Morgan didn’t understand a word Cassiano was saying.

  Brecht did. He flashed his badge, which cooled the soccer player. That’s when Morgan noticed the woman, a blonde with enormous breasts, who lay passed out next to Cassiano.

  It surprised Morgan. Earlier he’d seen Internet photos of the striker’s wife, Perfecta, a Brazilian model with stunning, exotic looks and an incredible body. The woman in the bed looked plain in comparison.

  Over the next five minutes, Brecht interrogated Cassiano and translated for Morgan.

  “You know Christoph Schneider?” Brecht asked. “He works for Private.”

  The striker shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

  “Where’s your wife?” Brecht asked, nodding at the passed-out woman.

  Cassiano shrugged and smiled. “Perfecta’s on a photo shoot in Africa. Be back the day after tomorrow.”

  “Be tough if she found out you had a sleepover,” Morgan said.

  The athlete sobered. “Okay. So I met with Schneider for ten minutes last Monday. He asked me about games where I played poorly earlier in the season.”

  “You mean these?” Brecht asked, removing an iPad from his carryall. He gave it a command and a clip played of Cassiano missing a great pass.

  “We looked at all the videos this morning,” Morgan said. “You don’t look anything like the scoring machine you are in other games.”