X Ways to Die

by Stefan Ahnhem

  The slut had shed her skin and hideous though her new style was, he had to admit she looked tastier than ever. That made him both aroused and even more furious than before.

  The phone suddenly vibrated in his hands, and he saw that he’d received a notification from his calendar app about a meeting on Wednesday afternoon. He clicked it and realized it was from that relentless IT bloke, Mikael Rønning. Security update of your mobile phone as agreed on Wednesday 27 June 2012 1–3 p.m. He had definitely not agreed to that.

  If not for Sade’s soothing voice, he would have called that idiot up and yelled at him until he became a bed-wetter again. But as it was, he let it go and instead turned his attention to the pictures Dunja or her little Indian man had taken in his home, and as he did so, he suddenly noticed something he should have seen straight away.

  Every picture was taken from more or less the same angle. Which was to say from the panorama windows, or, rather, from outside them. In other words, they hadn’t broken into his flat, they’d stood on the balcony and used the zoom. Granted, the balcony was bad enough, but it was still considerably better than having her snooping around his flat.

  He chuckled and shook his head. Say what you want, she certainly knew how to keep a man on his toes. He was finally in a better mood. He’d thought he was going to have to crawl around on all fours all night, looking for hidden cameras. Suddenly, the night was young. Maybe he should do a quick workout at home, a few quick sets of push-ups, pull-ups and Turkish get-ups. Just to get the blood pumping before freshening up and heading over to The Club.

  He turned Sade up and had already walked over to the exercise corner in front of the mirror wall when another message made his phone buzz. Hoping to be able to dismiss it as unimportant, he glanced at it while unrolling his gym mat and lining up his weights.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t something that could just be ignored. That was frustrating, to be sure, but at least it was also something that made him feel happier.

  As the head of Copenhagen’s homicide unit, he obviously had access to all police databases and reports, as well as countless other documents by default. But since a year or two back, he’d made sure to implement a search function that allowed for the flagging of one or more search terms, and the moment any of them were inputted into a police or wider government database, he was notified by text.

  It went without saying that his top two search terms at the moment were Dunja and Hougaard, closely followed by Qiang-Wei Hitomu Oisin. But none of those were in the message. Instead, it was two completely unrelated words that had become increasingly interesting to him since he’d saved the life of the man in question exactly one week ago during a police raid in Snekkersten.

  He’d already received them once on Monday. That time, it had been about a visit to Helsingør Prison, which had immediately made him start contacting people and taking the necessary steps. Now, two days later, the same two words appeared again, and he wasn’t about to let them pass by unnoticed this time either.

  Fabian and Risk.

  The two words together.

  That was all he needed.

  32

  THE RUMBLING OF the powerful diesel engines rolled out across the dark water as coastguard vessel KB 202 steered up alongside the Hallberg-Rassy, which had lowered both its jib and two-thirds of its mainsail.

  Fenders were hung. Ropes were thrown, hauled in and cleated until the two boats became one, though from a distance the yacht, despite its size, looked tiny next to its visitor.

  He was sitting about a hundred yards away, feeling impressed by his new biocular device. An Armasight Discovery 5X. It was his first time using it and out here in the dark, in the middle of the sea, it was really showing him what it could do. Gone was the blurry green night-vision image of old. With the Armasight, he could study them in close-up detail. If not for the lack of sound, it would have been like being on board, and he was pleased to conclude that it had been worth every penny.

  In a way, he’d been lucky. He could just as easily still have been swimming around, looking for his rubber dinghy. As it was, it had taken him forty-five minutes, and he’d been on the verge of giving up when it suddenly appeared out of nowhere, slowly bobbing towards him. He’d even managed to hang on to the sword, if only because it had got caught in one of the loops on his wetsuit during the few seconds he’d been unconscious.

  And yet, lucky was the last thing he felt.

  He’d only just finished cleaning up after the debacle with the little girl and had finally been able to relax and look forward to his next task. A task that, no matter how you looked at it, could only be described as a complete disaster.

  Was he losing it? Had he just been too busy to notice? His powers, if he’d ever really had any, were they deserting him? It felt a bit like they were.

  He was aware, of course, that chance had a will of its own, and maybe on balance he’d actually been lucky. But still, these past few days it was almost as though the dice had been working against him.

  At first glance, the Hallberg-Rassy had been the perfect target. The dice had spoken, and for a few minutes he’d been utterly convinced there was a higher purpose to their paths crossing.

  Then, everything had gone wrong. Absolutely everything.

  Just boarding the boat had been difficult. In order to avoid detection, he’d had to kill the engine a hundred feet away and silently glide the last part of the way. But he’d underestimated his speed and even though he’d rushed to push off, his bow had bumped into their hull.

  But no one had seemed to notice the thud. He’d realized why after he stepped over the lifeline and saw the flickering blue light through one of the windows. They’d been watching a film, which was somewhat remarkable considering they were still in the middle of the heavily trafficked Öresund.

  But so far, so good, he’d thought as he lowered himself into the cockpit with the dice in his pocket and the sword in its sheath on his back, completely unprepared for that bloody brat to poke his head out of the aft cabin and stare at him, still half-asleep.

  They’d stood frozen as the seconds ticked by. The thought of jumping back into the rubber dinghy, cutting the line and hightailing it out of there had occurred to him. But he’d resisted the temptation.

  There had been three of them, potential pets not included. That meant each family member had to be assigned two numbers each. As the youngest, the child got one and two, the mum three and four and finally the dad five and six.

  The problem was that there had been no time to take out and roll the dice, which was a problem he’d have to solve for future high-stress situations. This time, he’d instead been forced to deal with the boy, who had been pulling air into his lungs to start screaming.

  Three quick steps later, he’d been on top of him, forcing him back down into the aft cabin. Then he’d closed the hatch from inside and gone to draw his sword, which turned out to be almost impossible in the cramped space. Especially with a kid kicking and fighting for his life.

  In the end, though, he’d managed to get the sword out and the sight of it had subdued the boy, which meant he could use his free hand to take out the dice and roll it. What happened next was something he’d prefer to forget.

  He’d suddenly been dragged backwards out of the aft cabin. Granted, he’d recovered quickly and got back on his feet, but the sword had not been on his side. If truth be told, it had turned out to be utterly useless. At least as far as weapons went. He’d kept hitting things with it and missing his target.

  Maybe he hadn’t practised enough. But in that moment, he’d felt like a clown, and when the boom knocked him out, the humiliation had been complete. The whole thing had been so embarrassing he’d deserved falling overboard.

  But at least the day was still young, so there was plenty of time for him to lick his wounds and recover. If not for the sudden visit by the coastguard, he would have lain down and closed his eyes for half an hour. To compose himself. As it was, he had to keep an eye on how t
hings developed.

  The worst-case scenario would be if they gave the family a lift to Helsingborg while a crew member sailed their boat back to shore. Unfortunately, that was also the most likely one. If that happened, he’d have to completely rethink everything. But he’d cross that bridge if he came to it. At the moment, all he could do was hang back in the dark and hope they would be alone again soon.

  The crew seemed to consist of three men. And one of them was, strangely enough, wearing civilian clothes. Even stranger, he’d been the first one to step aboard the yacht, and he was the one speaking to the family. He’d been at it for almost forty-five minutes now.

  Perhaps he was a police detective. He might even be one of the ones working with that Irene Lilja who had been terrorizing him over the past few days, which was yet another problem.

  At first, he’d assumed she was ringing his doorbell whenever she happened to be in the area and that she would give up and leave him alone before long. But when she’d continued to bother him several times a day, sometimes ringing the bell for minutes at a time, it had become obvious she was not the kind of problem that would go away of its own accord. And yesterday, when she broke in and searched his flat, aided by an entire arrest team, he’d barely had time to hide.

  It wasn’t an unfortunate coincidence. They really were on to him.

  Not only had they managed to find out where he lived, they’d sniffed out enough to know his next strike was going to take place out on Öresund. How else could they have got here so quickly?

  He had no answer, and ultimately, it didn’t matter. He would finish his task regardless. It wouldn’t be easy. But then, why should it be? Simple was often synonymous with boring and insipid. Thinking back, it had always been the difficult, almost impossible things that had interested him. Like that time when he was little and had done the impossible by running away from home with both his piggy banks and getting all the way to Tivoli in Copenhagen and having the best day of his life.

  Now, instead, he was lying out here in the dark and through his biocular he saw ropes being untied and then the two boats drifted apart.

  The wait was over, and he could feel his energy returning. Even the powerful but increasingly distant rumbling from the coastguard ship’s engines was like music to his ears.

  Even better was that none of the family members seemed to have left the yacht. All three of them were standing in the cockpit with their arms around each other, waving, like in a film with a happy ending when the credits are rolling.

  Completely unaware that the film had in fact only just begun.

  33

  JUST LIKE CLOUDS in a blue sky, the dark waves seemed able to morph into a thousand different shapes in the night, so long as one didn’t look too long or too hard. They were all more or less the same, and yet each was also unique, and through his binoculars they merged into an endless series of permutations of shades of black and steely grey.

  In a way, he should feel relieved. The family, which, ironically, he had met and talked to just a few nights ago, were still alive and had escaped relatively unscathed apart from the shock of it all. They had the boom that knocked Milwokh unconscious to thank for that. Luck had undoubtedly been on their side, and without it, their trip around the world could have ended very differently.

  And yet he felt anything but calm. He wasn’t seasick at all, but his insides were churning. Every alarm inside him was going off, flashing and screaming that he was wrong to turn back to shore and leave them alone in their yacht.

  He’d offered them everything from accompanying them back to Helsingborg to personally staying with them until they reached the nearest harbour. But the man had turned down every one of his suggestions. In return, he’d sworn to set a new course, for Halmstad, and to make sure they visited a trauma therapist before pushing on towards Gothenburg.

  Considering what he’d just been through, he’d seemed remarkably composed. Same with the wife, who had slept through the whole thing. But they were all in shock, no question about it. Especially the boy, who’d sat wrapped in his mother’s arms throughout their conversations, staring out into the dark as though expecting to see Milwokh come flying out of the sea at any moment.

  But the risk of that had to be considered minimal. According to the men from the coastguard, most signs indicated that he had drowned and would turn up bloated on a beach in Denmark or Sweden sometime in the next few days. Unless the body was sucked into the propeller of one of the many ships that passed through the sound.

  Most would see that as good news. Fabian felt the opposite. Not only because he was opposed to capital punishment, but also because no matter how you looked at it, it was a big failure on their part. They’d done everything they could, but at the end of the day, it was undeniable that they’d simply failed at their jobs, forcing nature to step in and mete out justice.

  Even worse was that they’d never get a chance to question him about what was behind the madness. In a way, that was actually the worst part. The way meaninglessness would ultimately triumph when the answer to the question of why from the victims’ loved ones was that it was all because of a dice.

  According to the boy, Milwokh had rolled a dice this time, too. Apparently a five. But what that meant was anyone’s guess and now it looked like they were never going to find out. A prospect so dark and depressing he preferred not to dwell on it.

  Maybe that was why he saw what he saw. A flight of fancy that manifested as an image on his retina. An illusion built on wishful thinking without any basis in reality. And yet he couldn’t ignore what looked like a dark rubber dinghy bobbing on the waves a few hundred yards away.

  ‘Stop,’ he bellowed and raced over to the cockpit. ‘You have to stop and turn on one of the searchlights!’

  ‘And why is that?’ asked the portlier of the two.

  ‘I think I saw the rubber dinghy.’

  ‘Think? Now, look here—’

  ‘Just do as I say!’ Fabian cut him off. ‘Before we’re too far away!’

  The portlier man emptied his lungs and turned to his colleague, who, after stroking his moustache for several seconds, finally slowed the engine and turned on one of the searchlights, which shot a beam of light into the night like a canon.

  Fabian rushed over to the searchlight and aimed it at the area where he’d just seen the boat. Unfortunately, he could see nothing other than waves surging and rolling over one another in a pattern that was simultaneously systematic and stochastic.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure it was a rubber dinghy you saw?’ the portly man asked as he exited the cockpit.

  ‘No, I’m not. But there was something there,’ Fabian replied, attempting to sound calm and rational. ‘Something dark floating about over there somewhere.’ He let the searchlight sweep the area, but there was nothing to see but a billowing darkness.

  ‘If you look at it long enough, you can end up seeing just about anything.’

  ‘That may well be. But I still want us to head over there and search the area, just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you do.’ The portly man let out a chuckle. ‘It’s like my children. They want Christmas year-round, but that’s not something I can give them. This is the exact same thing—’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ Fabian turned to the man, who just stood there with his ridiculous grin, apparently unperturbed by his outburst. ‘If it’s the overtime you’re so damn worried about, I promise you’ll get it. Okay? Just do as I say.’

  ‘Okey-dokey. It’s a deal. But be prepared to pay it out of your own pocket. Like I said, they’ve cut our budget to the bone, and I’m pretty sure—’

  ‘It’ll be taken care of. The question is, what are you waiting for? We have to get over there now, not six months from now.’

  The man gave his colleague a signal that made him go full steam ahead and make a tight turn back to the area in question. About a minute later, they slowed down again and Fabian was able to scan the dark, rippling surface with th
e searchlight.

  But not even with the aid of a vivid imagination could he see anything resembling a rubber dinghy.

  ‘Listen, I have no problem understanding why you’re so eager to find that dinghy, or whatever it is. But no matter how badly we want to help, we can’t just sit around out here and—’

  ‘Could you ask your colleague to kill the engines?’

  ‘Eh, what?’ The portly fellow seemed bewildered.

  ‘I’m sorry, that came out as a question. I was actually ordering you to go back in and tell your colleague to kill the engines. Now.’

  The man was about to object, but caught himself and instead signalled to his colleague to do as Fabian asked. The engines were turned off and the rumbling subsided.

  Fabian turned off the searchlight, closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths to slow his racing pulse, which had been pounding in his ears ever since they were hailed by the emergency operator about the attack.

  ‘I’m sorry, would you mind explaining what we’re—’

  Fabian shushed the man.

  His hearing was neither good nor bad. As often as a comment directed at him passed him by, he would pick up on things no one else heard. It could be anything from a faint, high-frequency hum whose source was impossible to locate to some new, strange sound emitted by the car.

  This time, though, he was pretty sure what it was as he turned to the other man. ‘Can you hear that?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘The outboard motor.’

  The man pricked up his ears, then shook his head.

  ‘It’s coming from over there.’ Fabian pointed west towards Denmark.

  The man shook his head again and shrugged. ‘That could be anything. It’s like my children, when they—’