‘Not another inch, you fucker,’ Kaja barked next, and Mats needed a second to comprehend that she meant Valentino instead of him. After the shot he’d reappeared in the entry to business class.
‘Clear out or we’re all going down.’
Kaja pressed the gun barrel directly to the window pane of the exit door.
‘Easy, take it easy,’ Mats said, not sure what would happen if Kaja pulled the trigger. In the movies, anyone in the immediate vicinity was sucked out the window from the drastic change in pressure. He had no idea if that held true in reality but didn’t want to find out.
He found his way over to Valentino, who stared as if paralysed at the mother shot dead.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I just want to give him the baby. Please.’
Mats handed Valentino the baby, which had been screaming at the top of its lungs since the bang.
‘Get it to safety,’ he told Valentino, not even sure if there was a safe spot on board. Then he pulled the curtain shut again and went back to Kaja.
She was sweating; her pupils looked constricted. Signs of an abnormal psychological state, possibly from the poisoning as well. Either way, the situation had changed irrevocably. Kaja had killed. She’d already sunk her teeth in and would do so again, and very soon. Unless someone stopped her. And the only one who was capable on board was him. Her psychiatrist, who knew her mind and her wounds better than anyone on this earth.
He knelt down. Felt for Salina’s pulse, knowing it was pointless, but he needed to do something to fathom the horror. A terrible thought hit him: If Salina was the ‘voice’, then the only person who knows about Nele’s fate is now dead.
‘Where’s my daughter?’ he said, because he had to ask the question. Even though he was certain that Kaja hadn’t lied to him before.
‘I really don’t know,’ she said, and again he believed her.
Mats shut his eyes briefly and collected himself. He stood up.
‘It’s over,’ he said flatly, as much to himself as to Salina’s murderer. He pointed at the corpse on the floor. ‘This person has no more control over you. You can put away the gun.’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
He tried making eye contact, but she avoided him.
Kaja sweated heavily, rash spots blemished her pale face, saliva leaked from her mouth. The poison was beginning to wreak havoc inside her, and Mats expected to hear a second shot any moment.
‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ she said to him.
The game was over, no one left to save them. Neither him or Nele and certainly not Kaja, who’d sentenced herself to death.
The only thing still in his power was preventing an even greater catastrophe.
And it was the only reason why he was even speaking with Kaja and not collapsing in front of her in tears.
‘I don’t understand all this, not by a long shot, but enough to piece together some of the facts,’ he said, as calmly as he could. The world around him had shrunk. The aeroplane and all the people in it didn’t exist anymore. It was just Kaja now and him and his words, which found their way out of his mouth as if on their own:
‘Amelie is the wife of Dr Klopstock and wanted to create new business from psychological fitness tests like those already being discussed for pilots after the Germanwings attack. My guess is, it has to do with Klopstock’s lab and sinfully expensive psychological checks but also blood tests to determine whether any passengers or crew have taken psychotropic drugs. But that required a law, so to get it up and running they were going to need an incident on board an aircraft, just like the one you two caused here today. Amelie Klopstock promised you a huge sum of money for playing along, and you, you felt cheated by the whole world anyway, which was why you wanted to secure at least some of the money in compensation. But now you’ve seen who actually filmed that video, and you realise that Amelie never considered you an equal partner. Instead, she was controlling you like a puppet from the very start.’
‘Bravo!’ Kaja imitated applause. ‘You covered it. But you know what I don’t get? How can one person be so smart and stupid at the same time? Amelie was manipulative. But me, I was, and you’ve never understood this, Dr Krüger, a thousand times worse. Because I wanted it.’
‘What?’
‘The school shooting.’
Mats nodded. ‘Yes, we talked about that. You wanted to take revenge for that video and kill everyone who talked badly about you.’
‘No. I’m not talking about the second time. I’m talking about the first.’
‘Say again?’
‘I planned it together with Peer.’
Mats gasped.
Was Kaja really telling him this?
‘I was his girlfriend. I wanted nothing to do with other boys, no matter what the girls in my little gang said. He was my one and all. I wanted to help him show all those fuckers who’d bullied him.’
Of course.
He could’ve slapped his forehead.
How could I have missed that, in all our therapy sessions?
They were a pair, a team. Partners in crime.
That was why Peer had taken Kaja hostage back then.
It wasn’t random. It was completely deliberate.
‘But I wasn’t able to do it. I wasn’t brave enough. I didn’t want him killing those girls in the shower too. I wanted him to stop. In the locker room, we had sex one last time. Then we were going to shoot ourselves, together. But I was too much of a coward. So he sent me away.’
‘Yet you did come back.’
For one last, intimate goodbye kiss.
Kaja nodded.
‘And then that video of my supposed rape got out. Which in reality was consensual. And all those things my schoolmates said? They weren’t ripping open old wounds, they were reminding me of how cowardly I was in betraying him. How I got scared and abandoned Peer.’
‘So you set off to complete his work, with a second school shooting?’
‘To make up for failing. To clear my guilt. Peer was my friend, but I never stood by him. When the others mimicked him, made fun of him, slit his bicycle tyres. I only ever met him in secret, kept him a secret from my little gang. He was just like me. We were soulmates. We’d meet without anyone knowing, listen to the same music, smoke weed and talk about death, and I was starting to realise just how connected we were.’
Mats reached for his nose without realising it, like he often did when trying to focus, and was punished with stinging pain.
At its root, the diagnosis was so simple.
Two shy teenagers, unable to communicate normally, feeling misunderstood. One bullied, the other torn apart inside, both, like so many young people, never finding a release for their emotions. So they planned to make a single loud statement, together. A volcanic eruption from which no one could hide.
Mats realised that he really hadn’t understood a thing back then in Kaja’s therapy. The whole time he’d believed that her schoolmates’ unfair smear campaign, the stinging mockery and shameful abuse from a video supposedly showing her rape, had caused her to experience a post-traumatic embitterment disorder. Yet it was her own twisted secret relationship with Peer Unsell that had damaged her. Her shame for not standing at his side at the end, despite the vows they’d made to one another. A guilt that eats away at a person inside like acid. Mats knew this from his own experience, having been tortured by it himself for years ever since leaving his wife’s death bed like a coward.
He swallowed hard, trying to suppress a crippling despair brought about by the hopeless certainty that he no longer knew how to save his daughter. But he also knew that Nele wouldn’t have wanted any more people to die on her account. So he kept trying to get through to Kaja somehow.
‘So, a year later you went back into school with a loaded weapon, to finish Peer’s crime.’
Kaja gave a sad sigh. ‘I wanted to collect myself first. Calm before the storm. I went into the bathroom. There I saw this sticker. Mental Health Hotline. Those stupid things were posted all over the school after the first time, and, shit, there I was getting cold feet again.’
‘Because you’re not a killer,’ Mats stated, and Kaja laughed, cynically, glancing at the corpse at her feet.
‘I’m not, huh?’
‘You don’t kill the innocent.’
‘No one is innocent. You especially, Dr Krüger. You screwed up everything.’
‘With my therapy?’
‘By talking me out of it. With your clever, empathetic talk, you took away my most fervent wish. To leave this world with a big, loud bang. I’ve dreamed of it ever since I can remember.’
‘No, you haven’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have let me discourage you.’
‘Just temporarily. Not even you can turn a wolf into a kitten. You can’t reverse it, can’t re-educate me. Come on, let’s go.’
‘Where?’
‘Where do you think? To the cockpit. How else am I supposed to make this thing crash?’
‘You won’t be able to get in,’ Mats said, recalling another detail from his aviophobia seminar. ‘The pilots are locked inside. The door is bulletproof. Not even that gun can open it.’
Kaja gave him a derisive laugh. ‘Guess the first thing they changed after that Germanwings pilot’s suicide crash? There’s now a security code you can use to trip the locking device. So that a pilot can never, ever lock themselves inside again. And I’ll give you three guesses as to who knows this code…’