Blood Relative (26 page)

‘I work with Agent Gerber,’ he said. ‘I have been asked to apologize to you for any alarm she may have caused, but also to assure you that the danger you face is very real. Please come with me. Immediately.’

For a moment more I stood there, dumb and indecisive. Then Kamile sniffed back her tears and said, ‘You should go. But wait one second …’

Weiss grimaced impatiently, itching to be off, while Kamile darted behind her reception desk, rummaged in a drawer and then handed me a business card. ‘If you need to call me about Haller,’ she said. ‘Or if you need help.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, taking the card and shoving it in a trouser pocket.

‘Now we go,’ Weiss snapped, and I followed him out of the office. When we reached the landing he ignored the lift, but opened a side-door onto the emergency staircase.

‘Go up!’ he hissed in a harsh, urgent whisper. ‘Fast! I will follow you.’

I started running up the stairs in front of me. As I rounded a corner between one flight and the next I glanced back over my shoulder and saw Weiss behind me. He was looking back down the stairwell and this time he did have a gun in his hand. For the first time, the seriousness of my situation became real to me. Weiss wasn’t fooling. He really thought there would be someone after us. And if he was armed, the chances were that they would be, too. I felt the skin on my back prickle in horrible anticipation of the bullets that might soon be ripping into me.

He glanced back up at me and gestured angrily upwards: ‘Don’t stop!’

I ran again, sprinting up the stairs with frantic urgency. At the top of the stairwell there was a fire door. I slammed the metal bar down and felt a blast of icy air as it opened onto a walkway that ran along a narrow strip of flat roof, the tiles dropping away sharply on either side. The building was shaped like a hollow square with a courtyard in the middle, as were those on either side. We were on the side of the square nearest to the road.

Down below, three men ran into the courtyard. One of them looked up, caught sight of us and pointed upwards. The middle of the trio barked orders and the first man ran towards the ground-floor entrance of the building we’d been in, while the other two ran back out of the courtyard into the street.

‘
Scheisse!
’ Weiss swore as he glared down at the courtyard then started speaking rapidly in short, decisive sentences, his German too fast for me to be able to translate. I realized he had to be wearing some kind of earpiece communications device. He ran past me and dashed out across the slippery, ice-encrusted walkway, beckoning me to follow.

We were heading towards the scaffolding-covered building next door to Haller’s office. From the roof I could see that it had been weatherproofed, with plastic sheeting rising up the full height of the front and rear elevations and over the roof between them. There was just enough open space, though, for us to be able to duck under the plastic. Beyond us stretched another walkway and we made our way along it, heads bent and shoulders hunched beneath the plastic covering. The roof was bare of its tiles, leaving an open wooden ribcage of joists with nothing between them but air. Down below, the floors and ceilings had been stripped away, with only a few paths of loose planking left over the beams and floor joists to allow the builders to get around.

I tried not to look down at the dizzying, vertiginous drop, telling myself that I had spent my whole working life walking round half-finished buildings. This wasn’t any different.

Weiss seemed indifferent to his surroundings, moving at a brisk, simian trot, his gun held out ahead of him, occasionally glancing round to check on my progress or peering over the edge of the roof to look out for any threat below. Somewhere down below us a light had been rigged, casting a spectral glow around the interior of the building and throwing grotesque, elongated shadows of our bodies across the plastic above our heads.

We reached the door at the far end of the roof that led to this building’s emergency stairs. It was unlocked, and opened at Weiss’s push. The stairwell itself seemed untouched by the renovations, with walls and steps of chipped and flaking painted concrete and a bare steel handrail. He started running downstairs, two or even three steps at a time, at a worryingly ankle-twisting, neck-breaking pace, then stopped on a small landing opposite a door onto one of the vacant floors and craned his head forward, listening for sounds of pursuit like a hunting dog sniffing the wind. There were none, so down we went again, grabbing the handrail for dear life as we leapt the last half-dozen steps and swung round, barely touching the ground, to race down the one below.

The stairwell was going by me in a blur of concrete and steel and the sliding and slapping of our shoes on the ground. It was all I could do just to keep my feet on the steps without getting them tangled or slipping as the descent raced on. I was barely conscious of the dark forms, barely registered as men, that suddenly appeared round the corner of the flight below, or the fact that Weiss had stopped dead so instantly that I careered into the back of him.

I heard him mutter a curse: ‘
Fick mich!
’ which was followed immediately by a deafeningly sharp crack that reverberated round the stairwell. Weiss staggered back half a pace, uttered a pained, wincing grunt, fired his gun twice, shooting back down the stairs. Then he shouted, ‘Up! Go back up! Go! Go!’

I turned round and hurtled back up the stairs, trying to ignore the screaming protests from my hopelessly unfit thigh muscles and the desperate heaving of my chest as my oxygen-deprived lungs gasped for breath. My hammering pulse blurred my vision, and sweat was trickling into my eyes, but somehow I managed to spot the shadow of a man, up ahead of me, cast on the stairwell wall. Just a few more steps and he would see me too.

I’d just reached a landing. There was a door to my left. Without thinking, I lowered my shoulder and barged it open, yelling, ‘This way!’ at Weiss as I went.

The door opened onto one of the stripped-out floors of the building. There were no walls, no floorboards, no doors, no glass in the windows: just the structural features that were keeping the building upright. A thin line of planks streaked across the bare floor joists to the wall facing the street and then ran along the length of the wall itself. A man was standing there repointing the brickwork. He can’t have heard us at first over the music from the radio he’d placed in one of the empty window frames. But then he turned, frowning in puzzlement at the sound of our footsteps. His expression changed in an instant, and a look of shocked surprise flashed across his face as Weiss fired two more shots at our pursuers, keeping their heads down and buying us a few seconds of time. The builder dropped his sharply pointed trowel and the board on which he’d been mixing the mortar. They clattered onto the planking as he scurried away and cowered in the far corner of the building.

I raced onwards, the adrenalin rush of the chase banishing all my fear of falling. Barely stopping for a moment, I bent down, picked up the trowel and dashed through a gaping door frame that led out onto a small balcony.

The wall of plastic sheeting stretched in front of me as far as the eye could see, blocking me off from the outside world.

‘What are you doing?’ shouted Weiss.

He had taken cover to one side of the open door. As he darted out into the opening and fired another pair of rounds, I slashed at the nearest shiny green sheet with the sharp end of the trowel, desperately trying to pierce the building’s plastic skin.

At the second attempt the trowel caught in the plastic and tore a small hole. I reached forward, squeezing the fingers of both hands into the hole and pulling them apart to tear a bigger rent in the fabric. There were more shots and a harsh metallic clang echoed just to one side of me as a bullet ricocheted away. The hole in the sheet was as wide as my shoulders now. I reckoned I could squeeze my body through.

‘Follow me!’ I shouted to Weiss.

Then I pushed my way into the hole and flung myself out. And suddenly I was tumbling through the air, thirty feet above the paving stones of a Berlin street.

41

I landed on the rolled-up bales of loft insulation with an impact that caught me smack in the solar plexus, leaving me winded and gasping for air as I bounced and tumbled to the ground. Getting to my knees, I saw Weiss make a much smoother, more accomplished, landing. He ran across to me, wincing, and I saw for the first time that the left arm of his suit was torn and soaked in blood.

‘Get up! Keep moving!’ he said, dashing off towards the end of the street, barking out orders to whoever was on the other end of his communications link. From up above I heard the sound of more firing, but had no idea where the shots had gone. All I knew was that I had not been hit – not yet.

Seconds later, a silver Mercedes appeared round the corner of the street, raced in our direction and then slewed round in a screeching turn so that it stopped broadsides to us, right across the road. Weiss ran up to it, flung open a passenger door and then grabbed me and shoved me onto the back seat. A moment later he too leapt in. The car was already moving, racing back the way it had come, by the time he’d closed the door behind him.

It took me a few seconds to get my breath back. Then I looked across at him. ‘Who …?’ I couldn’t complete the sentence. The adrenalin that had kept me going through the past few crazy seconds was ebbing away, leaving me stranded. My ears were ringing from the gunshots, my body ached from the fall and my brain had just ground to a halt.

‘Someone who fears what you know, or might find out. Fears it enough to kill Haller and try to kill you.’

‘But … but I don’t know anything!’

‘Not yet, maybe, but …’

There was a woman in the front passenger seat. She gave me a flicker of a smile and said: ‘Karolin Gerber. We spoke earlier on the telephone.’

‘Oh, right … hi.’

Weiss leaned forward and spoke to her in German. ‘Are we being followed?’

She tilted her head to one side and glanced in the wing-mirror. ‘No. You OK?’

Weiss glanced at the gaping hole of torn fabric, blood, skin and bare flesh with apparent disdain and said, ‘Just a flesh wound. Give me the first-aid kit. I will deal with it.’

Gerber did as she was asked, then Weiss passed the kit on to me.

‘Open it,’ he said, reverting to English. ‘Inside you will find a bandage. Tie it round my arm, tight. This will stop the bleeding. I will have it seen to properly later.’

As I was tying the knot I said, ‘So that day at the funeral, when you warned me to stay away from … from all of this. That really was a warning.’

‘Yes, what did you think?’

‘It sounded more like a threat.’

‘
Ja
, maybe … I wanted you to be a little scared. Clearly, you were not scared enough.’

‘But why did you steal my computer? Why did you wreck my brother’s study?’

Weiss looked at me pensively, weighing up the pros and cons of what he was going to do next. When he’d reached his decision he said, ‘At the start of my career I worked for an agency called the Bundesnachrichtendienst …’

‘The intelligence service,’ I said, remembering what Haller had told me during our first meeting.

Weiss raised his eyebrows in surprise, ‘Ah, so you have heard of it. Well, then you may know that we were involved in espionage and counter-espionage against the East and, in particular, the Stasi. That was where I first encountered a man called Rainer Wahrmann …’

That name, Wahrmann: I’d seen it somewhere before. I wracked my brain trying to make the connection as Gerber went on. ‘Wahrmann had a daughter, who was registered with the name Maria-Angelika, although you know her better as Mariana, your wife.’

Now I remembered: ‘That name … Maria-Angelika Wahrmann. It was on a list my brother made … girls born the same day as Mariana.’

Weiss nodded. ‘Precisely. Several weeks ago, your brother came to Berlin, trying to find the truth about his sister-in-law. He was a good reporter, well trained in gathering information. He made enquiries at the appropriate official agencies. These enquiries came to my attention. I must say I was somewhat concerned because it was possible that your brother was – though I do not think he knew it – on the track to discovering your wife’s true identity. But, you see, there are very good reasons why it has been obscured …’

‘What reasons?’

‘I will come to that … When I have answered your first question.’ Weiss gave me a wry half-smile: ‘A little patience, huh? So … it bothered me that if I knew your brother was here, other people might also discover what he had been doing…’

‘You mean Wahrmann?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Or Tretow?’

Weiss’s eyes narrowed: ‘You know about Tretow?’

‘He’s a property developer now. But in the old days he worked at the orphanage where my wife was sent. And someone was looking after him, warning off anyone who took an interest in what he was doing.’

‘And Haller, did he know all this, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you do not need to ask me why he is dead or who was attacking us just now. And you will also understand why I was concerned about your brother. I feared he was walking blindfold into a minefield.’

‘And then he died …’

‘Yes,’ Weiss agreed, ‘and in very extreme circumstances. And then your wife was arrested. I needed to know what had happened, exactly what your brother had known. So I came to England …’

‘And you broke into his house.’

‘I apologize, believe me, but I felt I had no choice.’

‘And you broke into my car and stole his computer.’

‘Again, it was unfortunate, but necessary.’

‘My house, the other night … was that you?’ I looked at Gerber: ‘Both of you?’

Their silence told me everything.

‘But why?’ I asked. ‘What was the point of it?’

‘Tell me, when you first discovered what had happened, could you believe it? For all the evidence against your wife, did it seem likely, or even possible that she was a killer?’

‘No.’

‘Me neither, but I knew of people who would have killed your brother without a second thought. So I wanted to go to the scene of the crime and see for myself. It was not my intention to disturb or alarm you. I had not realized you would wish to move back to the scene of the crime so soon.’