16.6.2014

This morning, Commander Kaspar Manstein, the head of the BfV, requested my audience with Heidi to report their findings. Deeming this meeting important, I phoned my husband in his separate office of the matter, and we made our way over to the BfV department after lunch with Jollenbeck, who had stopped by to drop off a supplementary report to the BfV, so we invited him to attend the meeting with us, as we felt that Jollenbeck would benefit well from learning of the BfV's findings.

Commander Manstein reported that overall, they could not isolate the culprit behind the disappearings of the NDP personnel that our local police forces had been attempting to arrest. All the evidence that they had discovered was inconclusive - the BfV's interviews with the neighbors, family, associates, and acquaintances of known NDP personnel who had yet to be arrested but had disappeared instead could deduce nothing that pointed to any one potentially responsible party, so in this regard, we have no leads.

However, according to many of the interviewees with whom the BfV had spoken, roughly 48%, Manstein stated that the disappeared NDP members had all received a mysterious phone call, a mysterious email, a mysterious letter, or mysterious text message shortly before their disappearance. Almost all of these interviewees had reported that the contents of such mysterious communiques were ominous, to say the least. Those who had received phone calls or voice mail had heard a robotic or synthetic voice telling them that they would become part of the "Nacht der Untoten"...the "Night of the Undead", whatever this means. The written mediums also delivered the same message, preserving this subtle phrase of "Nacht der Untoten". Also very interesting (or chilling, depending on your perspective) is that each disappeared NDP member that the BfV investigated appeared to have received this message in a customized manner that suited them. For example, one such suspect was a known journalist for a small but well-circulated extremist political magazine in Southern Germany, and she received her message in the form of a typed email with no return address. Another suspect wrote small novels as a side hobby, from what the BfV was told, and somehow the deliverer of these messages knew this and delivered a hand-written note in very neat handwriting, envelope, and even stamp, which was completely unnecessary since there was no return address on the envelope either and thus had to be delivered by hand. (No one in that suspect's neighborhood had seen anything near that man's house during the days leading up to his disappearance.)

And all messages were signed, "The Sheriff".

I thought we were reviewing the synopsis for a scary movie at first.

Clearly, all of us agreed that whoever the culprit was behind the disappearings of our wanted NDP personnel, this culprit knew these people, whether or not the NDP members knew the culprit back. This culprit was powerful enough to make them disappear entirely off the face of the Earth, as it seems, simply by knowing them. I asked Manstein if he and his men had already tried searching for this "Sheriff" individual whose name kept getting mentioned in the signatures of these letters, emails, what have you, and he replied that they already had but found nothing.

"Whoever he is, he was at least gracious enough to have left us with a name," he chuckled. I suppose the rest of us were inclined to agree.

The other crucial finding in these reports from the BfV was that there were many NDP members who were most likely not true members of the party at all. Manstein reported sadly that upon speaking with the family and friends of many NDP party members who had already been arrested and detained, his men discovered that there had been more than sufficient evidence to suggest that many NDP members were never the kind to join the party at all in the first place. In fact, many of them had joined extremely recently - some as late as hours before the Hanover Massacre. Several NDP members' families had been shocked and saddened to learn that their loved ones were being imprisoned for being a part of the NDP when they themselves had no idea about their loved ones' affiliation with the party.

"We can safely assume that something is going on in this country that is turning some of the youth into mindless supporters of the party," Manstein concluded.

Statistics showed that the vast majority of the NDP's recent recruits and a corresponding percentage of those imprisoned and disappeared were young adults from the ages of sixteen to twenty-eight. There were a few outliers, such as a few middle-aged individuals and even an elderly senior who had joined the party back in February, but for the most part, young adults were affected. The most curious statistic of all, however, was that a large plurality of these NDP personnel lived in northern Germany, along the coast, although the rest were relatively evenly spread out throughout the country.

Jollenbeck, being the action-oriented sergeant that he is, offered to lead his men in the GSG-9 in a search for this man or woman named "Sheriff'. He said that he knew a few prominent police detectives and would get into contact with them to see if they could pinpoint the identity of this "Sheriff" person or otherwise gather some kind of information on him/her. Manstein also suggested that Gernot and I authorize the deployment of BfV agents to lurk about in hotspots around the country where young people frequented and gathered, especially in Northern Germany, where it was mentioned that a large plurality of the recently converted NDP members originally came from. Heidi also added that with the newly passed Bundestag bill that authorized an enlarged defense spending plan, she would be able to use some of the funds to recruit the assistance of blacklisted private anti-terrorist units to further our efforts to solve this rapidly expanding mystery. By this point, none of us really know if this is still a manhunt at all.

I agreed with Manstein's and Jollenbeck's suggestions but disagreed with Heidi's. We would only bring in private professionals if this situation was getting too out of hand or if national security was at stake. I also thought to myself that if we were ever in such a position, we could always call upon the assistance of Seal Team Six, who would respond to our emergency without demanding some kind of payment, though I do feel as though if I were to do so, I would be somehow using them for our own country's gain. In any case, I orderer Manstein to deploy his men accordingly and Jollenbeck to deploy his.

After the meeting, when Gernot and I drove home with Retia, I asked my husband if this kind of a situation was worth calling the men and women of the American task force. He advised that we ought to wait and see if our own men could resolve this situation by themselves, but if not, we would inform them. Gernot knows that this situation has a great potential to get very out of hand very quickly.

"I'm getting this feeling that we are delving into something we probably shouldn't, but as the leader of this country, I cannot afford not to," Gernot said while shaking his head. "Sometimes I wonder why I ever wanted to be Chancellor in the first place."

I remarked that both of us knew what we had been getting ourselves into. Wondering about something like that...obviously it was too late for such thoughts.

Khal arrived in the early evening to perform another one of Retia's checkups. I took this opportunity to talk to him about the recent developments we have been dealing with over the past few days, and Khal listened with keen interest.

"I have heard from my associates that apparently, this 'Sheriff" individual is considered an urban legend," Khal stated. "Do you know what an urban legend is?"

I said no. It seemed like a phrase that is only used by the youth, something that us older folk would not understand.

"Put simply, it is a modern-day myth, a modern-day supernatural phenomena that gathers publicity amongst the youth...is what I have been able to deduce. In regards to the Sheriff, from what I hear, the Sheriff is a mysterious online hacker who is able to find personal identities and histories of people and cause them to disappear. I suppose in light of these disappearances, it is less of an 'urban legend' and more of a cruel reality. Like a television show plot...except this is no television."

I wholeheartedly agreed. If only some plotlines were kept in fiction...

But speaking with Khal about the matter reinforced the fact that the Sheriff is now, in my mind, a very dangerous entity. Online persona or not, the disappearances are threatening enough that I now am considering him or her a threat to Germany's national security. As we enjoyed some lemonade that Gernot fixed while I was speaking with Khal, Gernot asked Khal what he thought we ought to do to see that this situation was to be resolved quickly and as peacefully as possible.

"Warn the rest of the world," Khal stated after thinking for a while. "Terrorist actions like the one in Hanover the past week should not happen elsewhere. In addition, there may be a larger force at work here, from what I am able to perceive. The NDP, as it seems, may only be one step in a much larger architecture. You must prepare accordingly."

When Gernot asked him how, Khal simply shrugged.

"You are the chancellor. I am but a doctor. My job is not to make national decisions. My job is to treat those who are affected by yours."

After Khal departed for the night, Gernot and I discussed how exactly we would go about "warning" the rest of the world. The Hanover Massacre had already been put on the headlines of all major newspapers in every first-world country across the world; it had already received enough publicity, and nations should have undoubtedly already bolstered their own defenses in response to potential terrorist attacks in their own regions as well. We could perhaps phone the top leaders of the rest of the European Union, or perhaps call an emergency meeting of the EU...but should we do something like that, others may scoff at the scope of our internal problems and possibly declare that our problems were our problems, and that warning others of it was to do no good. I pointed out to my husband that word of our enlarged military spending budget had reached the governments of our neighbors, and I could already sense the political tensions that were building between us because of it. Particularly of our relationships with France and Poland for reasons that should be obvious to any student of history and will thus go unmentioned. Some things never die...

To our surprise, Retia has started speaking in complete sentences tonight. At first I missed it, for I was reading the evening paper in our living room with Gernot, but he pointed it out to me, and we then started talking with our daughter. Her grasp over speaking is still shaky and incomplete, but she is trying her best to speak words that she hears her parents frequently speak or the ship girls speak frequently among themselves. Occasionally she yelled "FEUER! FEUER!" in the middle of our little conversation, making Gernot and I both laugh uncontrollably. It is clear to us who Retia's mentor for that was.

I did not receive a call from the girls today. I can only assume their training is getting the better of them over in England - today is a Monday, after all, so perhaps their training has been especially difficult today. At least they are training during the summer. I had done track and field in my high school days, and I much preferred training in the summer than in the winter. I do not like the cold...