Chapter Text
“Darkness rises in all you do
And everything
goes back to the beginning”
Hollow Talk – Choir of Young Believers (Anders Rhedin, Jannis Noya Makrigiannis)
“The flame is not out, but it is flickering.” Ken Burns
The hostage was sweating.
Shirt soaked around the armpits, wet spots where the cloth was taut against his stomach. A sheen of sweat on his upper lip. A few tufts of hair on his cheek. Shaving had been hurried. She imagined he thought it was going to be another boring day seated at the cashier’s desk.
It wasn’t. And the enormity of the situation had collapsed on the hostage. And now he was struggling. Panicking.
The shooter was also teetering on the edge, although he was trying to hide the fear. Today, things did not go as well as he had planned. Robbing the store for alcohol drops should have been easy. He knew the staff had been told to hand over anything in order to protect their lives. Everyone knew that. It was policy.
However, two Polizeimeister walked into the store in the middle of the shouted demands. Both young men on their first patrol. Experienced police would have handled the incident calmly. These didn’t.
Now, body trembling, desperately wanted to run, the shooter anxiously looked around. Eyes darting, flickering everywhere. Still, he managed to hide a little behind the hostage who was extremely overweight. She idly wondered if the shooter was smarter than first thought. Usually, the desperate shooters take women. Not this time. He took the plump store clerk. The young female assistant had the sense to dive behind the counter. So, he grabbed the cashier. Maybe, he thought the hostage was big enough to hide behind.
‘Stay back!’ the shooter shouted, a growing nervous edge to his voice, shoving the weapon muzzle sharply into the fleshy neck of the hostage.
She heard the fear and nerves in his voice. Saw the hand holding the weapon quivering. Just a breath away from shaking.
A voice whispered in her earbud, ‘Kommissar…’
She heard the nerves in that young voice. Probably his first patrol as well. ‘Stay back,’ she murmured crisply. ‘Hold.’
‘Kommissar…’
‘I believe that was an order!’
The perpetrator was looking around wildly, the weapon moving around in a helpless arc around the hostages’ wide eyes. A Shauser 360 handgun. Police weapon. After he had emptied his cheap illegal pistol into the poor officers, he had snatched the dead man’s weapon.
Normally, service weapons could only be used by the assigned owner and selected colleagues. Weapons were keyed to the identification chips embedded in the wrist. In a sardonic twist of fate, the weapon was brand new and hadn’t been keyed to a specific Polizeimeister. Anyone could use it. Now the killer had it. And a hostage! It was a random string of circumstances that had to end at this moment. There wasn’t an alternative. There could not be failure.
She was not impressed by failure.
Her earbud softly whispered again. This time, it was the sniper on the roof. A more even tone. Experienced. ‘Kommissar, I can’t take the shot. He’s obscured by the hostage.’
‘Understood,’ she answered. There was nothing else to say. Her eyes were fixed on the gunman. The hostage was terrified. So was the gunman. One trembling man had brought Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm to a standstill.
‘I want all of you to stand back!’ The shooters voice was higher now. The panic and the fear, perhaps narcotics as well, combining into a dangerous cocktail. He pointed at her and she saw the hand was now shaking. ‘You! Freak! Get back! I’m getting out of here!’
She looked into the eyes of the hostage. Wide pale blue eyes. He had forgotten to blink and was frozen by fear. The light blue shirt with the store logo was soaked with sweat. Larger dark circles of sweat pooling under the arms, a big dark patch over the protruding belly. The stain spreading across the front of his trousers indicating he had pissed himself.
The killer wasn’t holding the hostage, so he had both hands free to hold the Shauser 360. Clearly, he wasn’t used to such a large weapon. Time was running out.
She had no choice…