X Ways to Die

by Stefan Ahnhem

  Putting the so-called admission in front of Swedish detective inspector Fabian Risk and asking him to sign it had been a new low point in his police career. But he’d done it. Even though the shame of it would haunt him for the rest of his life, he’d followed Sleizner’s explicit order.

  But when the Swede had shaken his head, stood up and made clear he was about to walk out since there was a suspected terrorist out there to arrest, he’d been unable to do anything other than stand there in the middle of the road, staring into the headlights.

  And now he was sitting at his desk in the open-plan office with his phone to his ear, overcome with anxiety. He, who was usually always hungry, hadn’t been able to get so much as a bite down since breakfast. Even a few sips of water had necessitated a dash to the bathroom, where he’d thrown them back up along with a lot of bile.

  His body was on strike. But then, he was in deep shit and about to drown. And yet he would have done the same thing again if given the chance.

  He gave up on his fifth attempt to get hold of Sleizner to inform him about what had happened and cracked his neck to try and dispel his headache. Making up a story in which the Tivoli guards hadn’t managed to apprehend the Swede or in which he’d pulled his weapon to get away from them would only make matters worse once the truth came out.

  No one could sniff out a lie like Sleizner, and then he could forget about promotions and having his own office, more money and, above all, being in charge of the interesting cases. They were going to have to put off redoing the kitchen, too, and he would have to have that conversation with Lone about closing her plastic-free baby shop and finding a real job instead.

  She would obviously fly off the handle and launch right into her well-practised diatribe about how she’d stayed home with the children so his career wouldn’t suffer, and it was her turn now, even if she had to divorce him to get it.

  And that was just the Sleizner aspect of the problem. The real meltdown would happen if the information the Swedes had given them turned out to be correct. Then it wasn’t just a lost promotion he needed to worry about, he was going to have to find a new job.

  The best he could hope for now was that all of it would amount to nothing. That it would turn out to have been conjecture, like Sleizner had said. At the end of the day, most alarms were in fact false. Ninety-six per cent of the time, the fire department was called out needlessly, for instance.

  The same was true of terror attacks. How many false rumours to each one with substance? At the same time, every last one of their recent big terror attacks had been preceded by warnings of some kind, that was undeniable. Warnings that had been played down, overlooked and for various reasons consigned to the spam folder.

  The question was whether this was going to be yet another in a series of attacks where it was revealed afterwards that they’d been aware of the threat but hadn’t taken it seriously. If that happened, his head would be the one to roll. Especially when it came out that he’d put all his energy into trying to arrest the one police officer who had actually tried to stop the attack.

  But the whole thing was just a bunch of flimsy suppositions. He didn’t really know anything. Not until he spotted his colleague Morten Heinesen’s stressed yet restrained gait as he made his way through the open-plan office towards his desk.

  It was no longer flimsy supposition.

  The Swedes had been right.

  It was really happening.

  Whatever it was, it was happening right now.

  73

  PONTUS MILWOKH SHOOK his arm as he gazed out across the area below the roller coaster. Paramedics had arrived and were just now concluding that the man in the red shirt was beyond their aid. The shot had been perfect, even though he’d been in motion, and the fact that no one else had been hurt definitely merited a gold star.

  He’d never understood the people who stood around watching. They were everywhere. As soon as disaster struck, they popped up out of nowhere with their dull eyes and camera phones. It was as though they took pleasure from the fact that it hadn’t happened to them. That they weren’t the ones being covered and carried away on gurneys.

  At least the Danish police seemed to have finally caught on. Sirens were wailing in the streets outside Tivoli now, and he could even see special operations teams arriving. But he wasn’t worried. He left things up to the dice. Like now, for example, when he stopped shaking his arm and checked the outcome.

  Three – Change weapons

  It was the third time since he started. If it had been up to him, he would have had a few more goes with the rifle. It was undoubtedly the best weapon from up here at the top of the roller coaster.

  But the dice had spoken and he could only hope it would choose the crossbow or the rifle again. What he would do if it was the knife, rope or poison, he had no idea. Or even worse, if he rolled a five, which meant he could only use his own body.

  Another train full of Tivoli visitors was unlikely to go by anytime soon and he wasn’t allowed to change his position at will. In the worst-case scenario, he would have to wait in place until the police came to arrest him and at best get one of them before it was all over.

  Was this the dice’s way of telling him it was time to wrap up? That it was tired of him? He hadn’t made so much as one mistake since starting this task. On the contrary, he’d delivered more than could reasonably be expected, considering the pressures of the situation.

  Only the boy had bothered him. It was the first time he’d felt an instinctive resistance to obeying the commands of the dice. But he’d checked himself and done as he was told, and strangely, afterwards, he’d felt stronger than ever.

  Maybe that was the point. It almost felt like it might be. As though the boy had been significant. As though the dice had decided it was time for the circle to be complete so he could move on. Was there a better way of escaping your childhood than destroying yourself as a child?

  He shook his left arm again until he was sure the dice was ready to make a decision.

  Two – Crossbow

  It was the second-best option, though a crossbow was far from easy to operate. Especially at a distance. Granted, he had imported a Revengeance from Barnett in the US through Amazon. It was relatively easy to arm, despite reaching bolt speeds of almost 250 miles an hour. But at this distance, wind was a factor. And if the target was moving, there was a considerable risk the bolt could miss, which was out of the question under any circumstances.

  He unfolded the two cam limbs, cocked the thick string and placed the bolt in the flight groove. Then he let the weapon rest against the edge of the grey plastic that was meant to look like a mountainside and put his feet against the track for support.

  He judged the distance down to the open space between the Ferris wheel and the swing ride to be about three hundred feet and set the scope accordingly. The moment he put his eye to it, he felt like he was down there in the crowd.

  Like an invisible spectre, he hovered there right in front of them. He could even see the fear in some people’s eyes when they realized someone had been shot nearby.

  What he didn’t see was panic. No crowds stampeding in every direction, trampling each other to save themselves, like during a terror attack. Just a general worry about what had happened, which suited him perfectly. The calmer they were, the better.

  The man who finally caught his attention was, however, not on the ground, but rather sitting alone in one of the gondolas of the Ferris wheel with a red pocket square in his breast pocket. He looked like he was well into his sixties and, unlike the other visitors, was formally attired.

  He adjusted the scope and watched the man through the cross hairs as he went round and round until the Ferris wheel suddenly stopped and his gondola swung back and forth at the highest point while waiting for the lowest gondola to empty out and fill with new passengers.

  Meanwhile, the cross hairs wandered up to the red pocket square and then his index finger squeezed the trigger, releasing the latch holdin
g the string, which, aided by the two limbs, sent the bolt flying.

  It was over in less than a second, and it took him a while to realize the bolt had missed. Judging from the man’s surprised face, it had passed by about a foot to his left.

  The Ferris wheel began to turn again, which gave him plenty of time to cock the string, place another bolt in the flight groove and get into position. The man seemed to have regained his composure and was enjoying the view when the Ferris wheel stopped once more, setting the gondola swaying.

  This time, he adjusted his aim about a foot to the man’s right before releasing the bolt, which shot through the air almost soundlessly, pierced the left side of the man’s chest and, judging from the heavy bleeding that immediately soaked his shirt, went straight to his heart.

  74

  THE SOUND WAS coming through inverted. All the high frequencies in the clamour around Fabian had been turned down so low it had morphed into a constant deep rumble, like distant thunder. The only thing he could hear was his own hammering pulse as he pushed his way back up onto the roller coaster platform.

  Even though it had been fifteen minutes since the trains crashed into each other, the platform was still a pandemonium of guards, injured people and rubberneckers. ‘Police,’ he said, holding up his police ID for one of the guards blocking his path to see.

  ‘Get out of here!’ the guard bellowed. ‘Come on, get!’

  ‘I’m police! I have to get up there!’ He pushed past the guard. ‘Hello? Can you get me up there?’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ the guard roared, grabbing him from behind. ‘Fucking wanker, get out of here, and I mean now!’

  Fabian spun around and smacked the guard’s arms aside. Twice now he’d come stumblingly close to an arrest. He was not going to miss his third chance. But the guard didn’t back down.

  He did, however, turn to look when screaming suddenly broke out over at the Ferris wheel, which let Fabian wrest free of his grasp and climb into the empty train. Hoping for the best, he released the handbrake and the train began to move forward into the tunnel.

  Behind him, the guards were screaming, both at him and each other, but the further into the tunnel he got, the more distant they sounded, and once the chain between the tracks hooked onto the carts and started to pull the train up the lift hill, he could barely hear them at all.

  Two visitors had already fallen prey to Milwokh. Two completely innocent people. At least two. He was going to catch him this time. At any cost.

  The train came to a halt in the middle of the incline; someone had probably pushed the emergency stop. He saw no other option than to get out of the car and climb the last bit. But it was steep and considerably harder than it looked. He was positively dripping sweat and the injuries from his fight with Molander were making themselves known again. His entire body was screaming that it had had enough and needed a rest.

  Once he reached the top, he literally staggered across the fake lawn with the grazing cows on it towards Milwokh, who was standing with his back to him, shaking his left arm.

  ‘Pontus Milwokh,’ he shouted. ‘This is the police, and I’m ordering you to put your hands up and turn around!’

  Milwokh slowly raised his hands above his head. But instead of turning around, he disappeared over the edge.

  No… no, no, Fabian repeated again and again as he hurried over to the edge, where he spotted Milwokh, who had landed on an adjoining roof about ten feet further down and was now crawling away, vanishing around a corner moments later.

  The fall was too high, but that realization came too late; like Milwokh, Fabian had thrown himself over the edge without any idea of how to land safely.

  As he hit the roof, his phone fell out of his jacket pocket and bounced over the edge. Worse still was that despite his best attempt to bend his knees on impact, he could both feel and hear something snap in his hip.

  But it didn’t matter. Right now, only Milwokh mattered, which was why he clambered down from the roof to a smaller terrace from which he could hop a fence and get down to the ground via a column.

  He looked around as he half lay down on the ground and, defying the pain, pulled his leg as hard as he could in the hopes of popping his hip joint back into place. But Milwokh was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Which way did he go?’ he shouted at some people standing around staring at him as he pushed himself back onto his feet. ‘Answer me! Where did he go?’

  ‘I think he ran that way,’ a woman behind him called out just as he spotted something whizzing by a few feet away, so quickly it was almost invisible.

  Fabian didn’t understand what it was until it had already burrowed into the stomach of the woman, who had been walking towards him, but who now collapsed instead.

  He limped over to her. She was lying on her back in a growing pool of her own blood with the bolt sticking out of her stomach.

  ‘What happened?’ she said.

  ‘You’ve been shot in the stomach with a crossbow bolt,’ he said as calmly as possible. Then he took off his jacket and tied it as hard as he could around the woman’s waist and the wound as curious people began to congregate around them. ‘But it’s going to be okay,’ he continued. ‘Everything’s going to be okay. You just have to stay awake.’ He looked up at the crowd. ‘Could someone call an ambulance. Please! Anyone! An ambulance!’

  ‘I’m a Swedish doctor and I’m already in contact with them,’ said a man in shorts, sandals and a HIF baseball cap, who emerged from the gaggle with a phone to his ear and immediately knelt down and began checking the woman’s eyes as he talked to the paramedics. ‘Yes, she’s conscious. But I would guess there’s severe internal bleeding.’

  ‘Could someone call my husband?’ the woman asked in a voice that sounded distinctly weaker than before. ‘Someone has to call my husband.’

  ‘Where’s your phone?’ Fabian asked.

  ‘In my handbag.’

  ‘The ambulance will be here very soon,’ said the doctor, who was already examining the bloody area around the bolt.

  ‘My husband, he’s waiting for me. He won’t like it if no one calls him.’

  ‘Don’t worry, everything will be fine.’

  Fabian opened the red handbag the woman was still holding and took out her phone. That was when it hit him. The colours. Milwokh was choosing his victims by colour. The man he’d strangled on the roller coaster, the one who had been shot right after and now this woman.

  They’d all been wearing red.

  In the form of a red-and-green Tivoli uniform, a shirt or, in this case, a handbag.

  ‘My husband,’ the woman said. ‘You have to call my husband.’

  ‘Could you help her call her husband?’ Fabian handed the phone to a young woman and turned to the people standing behind him. ‘If you’re wearing anything red, remove that piece of clothing immediately,’ he shouted as he kicked off his red trainers, only to discover that the toes of his socks were also red.

  People gave him and each other uncomprehending looks.

  ‘Listen to me!’ he went on, pulling off his socks. ‘I’m a police officer. You have to take off anything red! And you have to do it now!’ Then he stood up, yanked the red baseball cap off the doctor’s head, started pushing through the crowd and limped away in the direction the bolt had come from.

  Most signs pointed to the dice having ordered Milwokh to change position from as high up as possible to keep moving or possibly push into the crowd.

  Both alternatives should mean that he was still nearby. But he couldn’t see him anywhere, and in an attempt to get a better overview, he climbed onto a bench, leaning on his uninjured leg. But there was still no sign of him. Maybe he’d been ordered to change positions again. Maybe he’d rolled a one and was on his way out right now.

  At least some people had heeded his advice and removed their red clothing, though most were busy filming with their phones as though they were on a beach, completely unaware that a tsunami was on its way.

>   Once again, Fabian noticed the almost imperceptible movement through the air, invisible to most. This time, he realized instantly that it was another crossbow bolt, and instead of following it to its victim, he looked in the opposite direction and saw a man standing with his back to him about a hundred feet further down the path. A man with shoulder-length black hair, who was already shaking his left arm again.

  75

  THREE DEAD AND one seriously injured.

  So far, Jan Hesk thought grimly to himself as he received the information from one of the Tivoli guards with a curt nod, after which he went on alone towards the big lawn in front of the main stage. How many victims there would be before this was over was anyone’s guess.

  Once the first shock had worn off and the dust had settled, there would be a lot of questions. That much was certain. People would ask how something like this had been allowed to happen. Why the public still wasn’t safe after all the things that had already occurred, and if there had been any warning signs.

  Every stone would be turned, and investigative journalists would dig ever deeper into the shit. Conspiracy theories would surface about how the police had known but tried to cover it up, and in part, they would be right.

  But only in part. No one would fully take into account the fact that everyone involved was human. People with flaws and shortcomings. Regular people with rents and car loans to pay. Who were trying to do their best despite having a boss with his own, radically different agenda.

  None of that would be considered extenuating once it became clear the Swedes had done everything in their power. That they’d contacted and informed the Danish police the second they’d discovered signs pointing to Tivoli. That they’d reached out to him again and again to try to work together.

  And now here he was, stuck so deep in the shit he risked falling over if he so much as twitched. The slightest error at this point, and he would have to go into exile.

  But dark as things may look, there was still a chance he could turn this into something positive, and if he failed, he had only himself to blame.