In the Dark Page 2

  Niko thinks for a moment. ‘Agreed.’

  They follow Egger and the woman into the warehouse.

  And Aaron knows: that was the first mistake.

  She had wanted to go in armed, with a calf holster under her loose trousers, but the decision was up to Niko, who already knew Egger. ‘He won’t even trust someone as beautiful as you. He’ll frisk us both.’

  He didn’t. Why not?

  Aaron glances behind her. The Catalans shake their heads as Token-Eyes holds out a pack of cigarettes to them. Good lads, she’d worked that one out on a shooting training course; she wanted to know who she was entrusting her life to. Afterwards they were all invited to dinner at Ruben’s house. Children clambering over the furniture, laughter, paella, brandy from Andorra that brought tears to their eyes.

  Later she had gone out on to the terrace to smoke. Trees struck deals with the wind. Windows shone through their branches as if in an advent calendar. What could Aaron expect on the third of December? Party music, nearby. But Aaron was far away. Jordi came and scrounged a cigarette. They smoked like two people who know that there isn’t a chocolate behind every little window.

  Jordi said: ‘I’ve been doing this for too long. I’ve stopped sleeping. In January I’m getting a desk job.’

  The warehouse door falls shut behind Aaron. A coffee depot. The smells are so intense that for a moment she gasps for breath. Dandelions, caramelized sugar, damp pipe tobacco, freshly split wood.

  On a sack of coffee, a tube. The painting.

  Aaron asks: ‘May I?’

  The woman hands her the tube.

  Aaron has unusually good hearing. Once at the range Pavlik rolled out some cartridges from the ammunition store.

  Aaron knew without looking: five.

  Now, when she hears three faint pops, one after the other, she knows that there’s no painting in the package.

  That Jordi will never get his desk job.

  A Remington suddenly appears as if by magic in the hand of the man who calls himself Egger. Aaron leaps over sacks, feels the bullets splitting the air, rolls away and jumps to her feet in a single movement, sees Niko falling to the ground, runs in a zigzag to the hall at the back, and meanwhile a red-hot pincer grabs her arm and she can think nothing but Niko! Niko! Niko!

  Two doors, a game of roulette. She stakes everything on red, pulls the right-hand door open and finds herself in a pitch-dark corridor. She stumbles forwards, feeling her way, until she bumps into a wall. Black. Wrong door, blind alley. She presses herself into a niche in the wall. Something hot runs down her arm. No pain. The light goes on. Like a machine, her heart pumps raging fear into her bloodstream. Light footsteps. The woman has taken off her stilettos and is barefoot.

  Another five metres. Aaron sees the light switch on the opposite wall. Too far away. She spins the thought like a coin, trying to find an alternative.

  Doesn’t find one.

  Four metres.

  Three.

  Aaron flies out of the niche. The woman fires. Right hand, graze wound. Aaron hammers her fist against the switch. Darkness. She drops to the floor, fires two shots that miss their target. She performs a quick scissor kick, which cracks against the woman’s ankle and knocks her over. Her index and middle fingers jab into the woman’s solar plexus and she gasps for air. Aaron notices that the woman is bending her gun arm, she grabs her head, twists it violently around and hears her neck breaking.

  She takes the pistol, feels that it’s a Walther and removes the magazine. Empty. The machine she has for a heart pumps desperation into her veins. But perhaps there’s still a bullet in the barrel.

  Please, please, please.

  Aaron is shaking too hard, she can’t gauge the weight. She doesn’t dare pull back the slide to see, too loud.

  Her heart rate is far too high. It needs to get down to between sixty and seventy, and she’s at over two hundred. In this state she couldn’t even pull the trigger.

  Aaron forces herself to breathe slowly with her diaphragm, enlarges the volume of her lungs, supplies her muscles with oxygen and allows herself half a minute to bring her heart rate down. Enough?

  She stands in the dark. Takes one last deep breath, in, out. Her right hand feels the light switch.

  Now.

  Aaron turns on the light. Token-Eyes. Fifty metres away. Her finger twitches against the trigger. She’s never heard a better sound than that shot. She hits Token-Eyes in the neck. He turns around and topples over. Sixty drumming footsteps. Token-Eyes stares at the ceiling. His jugular isn’t injured, but he can’t move. Shock. There are three cartridges missing from his silenced Glock 33. Jordi, Ruben, Josue.

  Jump into the hall, stand, aim two-handed, reduce your body surface. No Egger.

  Niko! Niko! Niko!

  He is lying in the foetal position beside the empty tube. His shirt is wet with blood. She can feel his pulse. Aaron wants to shout, she’s so glad. Red foam appears on his lips. His voice is like his breathing when he sleeps. ‘Get out of here.’

  She tries to pull him up, ninety kilos of muscle, but can’t do it. Tries again. Tries and tries.

  Where is Egger?

  Niko grabs her hand. He pulls Aaron to him, puts his mouth to her ear. She understands the words but doesn’t grasp their meaning.

  ‘You’ve got to,’ he struggles to say.

  Egger appears magically in the warehouse as if suddenly appearing on stage. Aaron throws herself in his direction. They fire at the same time. Five shots that sound like one. He darts away. She doesn’t know if she’s hit him. No. Aaron hears him putting in a new magazine.

  Niko’s gaze. An eternity.

  She runs off. The Remington fires out a quick sequence of shots. Aaron wedges the Glock between her teeth and catapults herself into the open with a double flip. She takes a hit, her right arm again, and loses her balance. She crashes on to her back, fires two shots over her head through the door and rolls for cover.

  She sees the three corpses.

  Aaron wants to spring to her feet, but can no longer feel her own body. She prays that the auxiliary power unit will kick in and produce the five per cent reserve that a person still has when he thinks: it’s over.

  She bends her little finger.

  OK.

  Two fingers.

  OK.

  Move!

  She creeps to the Daimler. Collapses against the wheel.

  The key is in the ignition.

  The heavy limousine leaps away with a roar. Egger dives out of the hall. Bullets shatter the rear window. A bullet slices the back of Aaron’s neck. She swerves into the Via de Circulació. Five hundred metres at full speed. On the left she senses rough cliffs, on the right harbour lights race past like photons in a particle accelerator.

  Only now does she feel her bullet wounds. Her right arm seems to be made of ice, her hand a ball of flame. Blood runs down her back.

  Aaron looks in the rear-view mirror.

  And sees the Audi.

  She puts her foot on the accelerator and takes the vehicle up to two hundred and fifty. Eggers catches up. His car is half a ton lighter and twice as powerful. Ahead of her a van pulls out to overtake a truck. Aaron looks from the overtaking lane to the hard shoulder. The mirror scrapes a road sign, comes away and whirls into the darkness.

  Egger is jammed up against Aaron’s back bumper. They plunge into the tunnel in the Plaça de les Drassanes.

  Two hundred and sixty.

  Despairing, she is forced to admit: This is the best I can do.

  The Audi pulls up effortlessly beside her.

  Eggar and Aaron look at each other.

  A moment that outlasts the whole of time.

  In front of her she sees a shadow, a car. Her eye twitches to the carriageway, no hard shoulder, she can’t avoid it, knows she has only a few blinks of an eye left, as she raises the gun with her injured arm.

  Her finger is on the trigger, but Egger is faster.

  Something explodes inside Aaron’
s head. A lightning flash cuts through the world like a sheet of paper. Aaron sees everything in extreme slow motion, in dazzling white as if in a grotesquely over-exposed film: the roof of the car turning until it’s underneath her, the banknotes fluttering like dry leaves from the bag of money, her face in the rear-view mirror, amorphous landscape, snowy desert, eternal nothingness.

  Then the same thing all over again, but a thousand times faster, a single whirlwind, pain, screaming.

  And another lightning flash.

  In a nanosecond the world has ceased to exist.

  Aaron hears steel eating into the concrete and at last everything is still still still. The last thing she will remember will be the smell of coffee, as repellent as cold ashes.

  1

  The stewardess asks again: ‘With milk?’

  ‘Black.’ Aaron reaches out her hand and feels the cup being placed in it. She hears the pilot’s voice: ‘In thirty minutes we will land in Berlin. It has already been snowing all morning. Please keep your safety belts fastened, we are expecting some turbulence.’

  Aaron forces herself to drink the coffee.

  Since she has been working for the BKA, the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation, in Wiesbaden, there have been several opportunities to travel to Berlin for work. The office has a branch in the district of Treptow, where the security group, the anti-terror centre and the ‘special unit’ department are based. But Aaron has always been able to avoid it.

  She grew up in the Rhineland, but in her early twenties she made Berlin her home, which it still is in some way even today, even though she hasn’t been there for five years. She feels that quite clearly, with every kilometre closer to the city. Impatience floods through her, the joyful anticipation of arrival, a tingle. It irritates her, because on this return journey, the twenty-four hours that she will stay, fear is her luggage.

  Five years. Aaron didn’t even close down her flat in Schöneberg; her father did that for her.

  In Berlin she left behind only a few people that she misses. The life she led hardly allowed her to have friendships. Pavlik and his wife Sandra were, in fact, the only ones. When she moved to the nameless Department at the age of twenty-five, he immediately took her under his wing.

  The only woman among forty men.

  It was from Pavlik that she learned that everyone, however long they had been there, had nights when the shivering came.

  That came as a great relief to Aaron: being hugged, and also being allowed to console others.

  Nonetheless, in the years that have passed since Barcelona she and Pavlik haven’t spoken. They talked on the phone occasionally for the first few months. But they were both helpless. Pavlik tried to act as if nothing serious had happened in Spain, and took refuge in coolness because it was the only way he could deal with it. And Aaron could find no words to express what it means for her, she still can’t even today. Eventually they only heard each other breathing. And then the calls stopped.

  Will I still recognize his voice?

  ‘We are now coming in to land at Berlin-Schönefeld. Please fold away your tables and put your seats in the upright position.’

  ‘Oh great!’

  When Aaron’s neighbour furiously throws her coffee cup at her, she realizes that she has left it half full on the table, and must have spilled it over the man’s trousers.

  ‘Are you blind?’ he snarls.

  ‘Yes.’

  *

  The ground stewardess leads Aaron into the hall – ‘I assume someone is coming to collect you?’ – and leaves her alone.

  As she stands there calmly, with her suitcase beside her, she could be a perfectly normal woman in her mid-thirties, tall and attractive. She doesn’t give away the fact that she is quivering inside because she knows who is going to collect her. Until recently she had worn the armband with three black circles on it that identifies blind people in Germany. But sometimes she would be standing on the pavement or in the supermarket, lost in thought, with no particular destination in mind, and all of a sudden she would be grabbed out of nowhere and dragged away because some over-keen assistant thought that she wanted to cross the road or get to the escalator. When she protested, the baffled person would just leave her there, completely overwhelmed, and creep away. And she no longer knew where she was.

  Aaron taps her watch. The computerized voice tells her: ‘Sixth of January. Wednesday. Fourteen minutes and seventeen seconds past eight.’

  Perhaps they’d got the wrong flight. What then? A taxi?

  That’s a nightmare. You go and stand where the first taxi might be, hear the boot being packed and travel destinations named, next car, doors closing, driving away, and you’re left standing there like a Jehovah’s Witness. Waving would look ridiculous. Luckily a driver eventually bawls her out: ‘Hey, are you getting in or not?’

  Suddenly Aaron knows that Niko has been standing there looking at her all along.

  Shot to the spleen and the lungs. Lost two litres of blood.

  Survived.

  At last he touches her shoulder. ‘Hi.’ He hugs her as if they’d said goodbye only yesterday.

  Aaron smells iodine. Cut himself shaving. She doesn’t want to, but her left hand does, reaches under his leather jacket and brushes the grip of the gun. A Makarov Single Action.

  He takes her suitcase and they walk to the exit. In the old days Aaron usually wore flat shoes. Now that she’s blind, her steel spike heels are her echolocators. Against a hard surface like this one, but only in places that are quieter, in enclosed spaces. Aaron drifts through a cathedral of noise, the whispers, shouts and chatter of many voices, rattling luggage trolleys, ringing mobile phones, squealing babies, a metallic announcement in bad English and another, in German, which interrupts and squabbles with the first. She is forced to take Niko’s arm.

  Outside the cold hits her in the face. Snowflakes dance on her skin. Niko’s light, sinuous gait, which can’t deceive her, because she was once a beast of prey like him.

  Aaron clicks her fingers hard several times, knows that Niko is surprised, doesn’t explain, taking her bearings. Each object reflects sound differently, has a wavelength of its own. But one problem, of course, is the backdrop of sound. When she walks through the city for too long, by evening she’s in bits and her head is throbbing.

  ‘Careful, there’s a litter bin.’

  She knew that already. Not least because she can smell bananas and rancid hamburger.

  Even better would be clicking her tongue, her sonar with which she produces sounds close to her ear in such a way that they aren’t diverted and scattered. The echoes model the world, illuminating them like a stroboscope. Aaron can determine the size and density of objects at a distance of between five and two hundred metres, and receives a pixelated image of them.

  Like a bat or a dolphin.

  At first she couldn’t believe it. In the rehab clinic there was a woman who had been blind for some time and who came every day to stand by the patients during their first desperate weeks. She went walking with Aaron in the clinic’s gardens, stopped, clicked her tongue and said: ‘On the right there are six trees. Beeches, chestnuts or oaks. On the left two, but smaller, maybe plane trees.’ She thought the woman was pulling her leg. But a doctor who came by was not surprised and confirmed it. ‘But they aren’t planes, they’re young birches.’

  The woman clicked again and tapped Aaron on the arm. ‘There’s a house over there. I would say it’s a hundred metres away. And there’s a car parked about twenty metres ahead of us.’

  It was true.

  Aaron thought: I’ve got to be able to do that as well.

  People who are blinded later in life seldom master this skill as well as people who have been blind since birth and practised it all their lives. But Aaron has trained as if possessed, which is how she has always faced every challenge.

  Her first success was the alleyway between two buildings at the clinic, which she recognized by the draught and heard immediately after
wards. Aaron’s clicks bounced off the walls of the buildings, whirred to and fro and back to her, until the sound finally dispersed. She explored the alley and bumped against the container she had located. Victory!

  But Aaron only uses the click sonar when she’s alone. In Niko’s presence it would seem silly. Would he think she was Flipper?

  Aaron stops. ‘First let me have a cigarette.’ Niko could have no idea how long it took her to practise bringing the match to the cigarette as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and look casual about it.

  He asks: ‘How are things at the BKA?’

  ‘Good. What about you?’

  ‘A lot of paperwork. Boring.’

  Of course. That’s why you’ve got that Makarov on your hip. There’s a good argument for that little trinket: the extremely light trigger resistance.

  When she’s sure he can’t hear her, she clicks her tongue, a power click with her lips parted in an O. She locates a street lamp. Or two? Off to the left a pillar. Advertising? Ventilation? On the right is a coach, engine running, a noisy school class, scraps of words, a Scandinavian language.

  What Niko calls seeing is only an echo of light. That’s why he can see the lamp post, the pillar, the coach, the schoolchildren.

  So now she’s in Berlin. How does she know that? Because the pilot said: ‘We will shortly be landing in Schönefeld’? Because someone is shouting through an open car window: ‘God alive, I can’t believe these car parks!’? Wiesbaden is the silent corridors in the BKA where she initially thought: Am I alone here? Frankfurt green sauce in the canteen, children’s laughter in the playground behind her house, the rattle of the Nerobergbahn. All the cities she travels to leave her with the textures of the hands she has shaken, the spices in the food, the call of a muezzin, the different noise of police sirens, a gust of wind in a huge square. That’s London, Cairo, Paris for her. And Berlin? Warm, breathing fur cuddling up to her, a cry in the night, but also the feeling of having been almost happy.

  *

  City freeway northbound. Aaron concentrates on the sound of the windscreen wipers that are wiping away the snow. She tries to synchronize her heartbeat with the constant, even interval.