JF03 - Eternal Read Free

his outstretched hands. The bourgeois housewife dropped down onto one knee with astonishing agility and produced a handgun from inside her coat. She aimed at the tall dark-haired man and screamed at him to place his hands on his head.
    He snapped his head around to check the woman and the boy. The woman’s hand was rammed deep in her shoulder bag and the front of the bag burst open and burned as she pulled the trigger of the Heckler Koch MP5 machine pistol that she had hidden inside. Simultaneously, she pushed the boy sideways and down with a violent shove. The burst from the Heckler & Koch ripped angrily at the chest of the fake railway worker’s overalls and tore open his face.
    The blonde woman spun round, swinging the machine pistol, still in its ripped and smoking macramé bag, to bear down on the GSG9 cop dressed as a housewife. The policewoman snapped her aim from the man to the woman and fired twice, then twice more. Her shots hit the boy’s mother in the chest, face and forehead and she was dead before her falling body crashed onto the platform.
    The man saw the woman die, but there was notime for grief. He heard the screaming of a dozen GSG9 officers, in helmets and body armour, as they flooded out onto the platform from inside and around the sides of the station building. A group of them were gesturing furiously for the Dutchman to stop running and get out of their line of fire. The policewoman now swung her pistol to bear on the dark-haired man again. He struggled to free his Russian Makarov from his coat pocket and, when he did, he did not aim it at the policewoman or any of the GSG9 troops.
    The policewoman’s first bullet ripped into his chest at exactly the same moment that his round smacked into the back of the Dutchman’s head.
    Franz Mühlhaus – Red Franz, the notorious anarchist terrorist whose pale face had stared out at frightened West Germans from wanted posters from Kiel to Munich – fell to his knees, his arms hanging at his sides, the Makarov automatic lying limply in his half-open hand and his chin resting on his bloodstained chest.
    As he died, he could just see, on the fringes of his failing vision, the pale face, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed in a silent scream, of his son. Somehow, the dying Red Franz Mühlhaus found the breath to utter a single word, thrown out into the world with his final, explosive exhalation.
    ‘Verräter …’
    Traitors.

Part One

1.
Three Days Before the First Murder: Monday, 15 August 2005.
List, Island of Sylt, 200 Kilometres North-West of Hamburg
    It was a moment he wanted to hang on to.
    His senses reached out into every corner of the land, the sea and the sky around him. He stood on naked feet and felt the texture of the dry sand that abraded his soles and squeezed between his toes. He felt as if this place, this time, was all he could remember of himself. Here, he thought, there was no past, no future, only this perfect moment. Sylt lay long and thin and low in the North Sea, offering no profile to hinder the hastening wind that pushed at the vast sky above, seeking out the more substantial flank of Denmark beyond. As he stood there, the wind protested at his presence by tugging angrily at the fabric of his chinos, snapping the loose tails and collar of his shirt and flapping the broken wing of blond hair that hung over his forehead. It scoured his face and pushed into the creases of his skin as he stood watching the scurry of the clouds across the impossibly huge pale-blue shield of the sky.
    Jan Fabel was a man of a little over medium height and in his early forties, but a certain boyishness lingered indistinctly, like a reluctant evictee, in hisappearance, in his lean, angular frame and in the flapping blond hair. His eyes were a pale blue and shone with intelligence and wit, but at that moment were reduced to narrow slits in the folds of the creased face that he presented to the angry wind. His face was tanned and unshaven and, just as the lingering