“Digital darkness. Shit, shit!”
Never before had there been so much shouting and swearing among Hacker Republic. Plague saw no alternative but to call Chief Inspector Bublanski.
CHAPTER 21
June 22
Bublanski was sitting in his office on Bergsgatan, talking to Imam Hassan Ferdousi. By now he understood how Jamal Chowdhury’s murder had come about. The whole Kazi family—apart from the father—had been involved, along with some Islamists in exile from Bangladesh. It was a somewhat sophisticated operation, but no more so than the initial crime investigation should have been able to unravel without third-party help.
For the police, it was nothing short of a disgrace. Bublanski had just had a conversation with the chief of Säpo, Helena Kraft, and was now discussing with the imam how the police could do better at anticipating and preventing violent crimes like these in the future. But his mind was really elsewhere. He wanted to get back to the investigation into Holger Palmgren’s death, and especially look into this Professor Steinberg.
“What was that again?”
The imam had said something which Bublanski did not fully understand, but before he could enquire further, his telephone rang with a Skype call from a user who called himself TOTAL FUCKING SHITSTORM FOR SALANDER, and that in itself was pretty weird. Who would call themselves that? Bublanski answered his mobile and at the end of the line was a young man shouting at him in rather graphic Swedish.
“I’m not going to listen to a single word you say until you’ve introduced yourself,” Bublanski said.
“My name is Plague. Switch on your computer and open the link I’ve sent you, and then I’ll explain.”
Bublanski hesitated at first, but he kept listening to the man, who was using swearwords liberally interspersed with incomprehensible computer terminology, but who nonetheless was precise and clear in what he had to report. Bublanski was finally persuaded to open the link, and, overcoming his confusion and his scepticism, he sprang into action. He mobilized a helicopter and patrol cars from both Stockholm and Uppsala to head for Vadabosjö. Then he and Amanda Flod ran down to his Volvo in the garage. He decided it would be safer to have her drive as they sped northwards to Uppsala, blue lights flashing.
—
The man next to him had saved him from a serious assault. Blomkvist was still not certain he understood why. But it had to be a good sign. They were no longer in the same opposing roles of investigative reporter and quarry as they had been back in the Alfred Ögren lobby. There was a shared bond between them, and Blomkvist was now in his debt.
The sun was beating down outside. They were in a small, top-floor apartment on Tavastgatan with attic windows looking out over Riddarfjärden. A half-finished oil painting of an ocean and a white whale was propped on an easel. There was harmony in the painting, despite an unconventional combination of colours. But Blomkvist turned it to face the windows. He did not want any distractions.
The apartment belonged to Irene Westervik, an elderly artist who Blomkvist knew only a little. But he felt a certain fondness for her. She was wise and inspired confidence, and lived at a remove from the endless churn of current affairs. Sometimes she enabled him to look at the world from a broader perspective. He had called her from the taxi to ask if he might borrow her studio for a few hours, perhaps for the rest of the day. She had met them in a pale-green dress at the street entrance, and had handed over the keys with a gentle smile.
Now Blomkvist and the man, who was presumably Daniel, were sitting in the apartment facing each other. To be on the safe side, their mobiles were switched off and they had put them on a shelf in the galley kitchen. It was sweltering beneath the roof, and Blomkvist had tried and failed to open the studio windows.
“Was that a syringe in that man’s hand?”
“Looked like it.”
“I wonder what was in it.”
“In the worst case, synthetic curare.”
“Poison?”
“Yes. A heavy dose knocks out everything, including the respiratory muscles. You suffocate.”
“You seem to know all about it,” Blomkvist said.
The man looked sorrowful, and Blomkvist’s gaze turned to the window and the blue sky.
“Can I call you Daniel?” he said.
The man was silent. He hesitated.
“It’s Dan,” he said. “I got a green card, became an American citizen and changed my name. Now I go by Dan Brody.”
“Or Leo Mannheimer.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“A bit peculiar, wouldn’t you say?”
“Indeed.”
“Do you want to tell me the story, Dan? We’ve got plenty of time. No-one will come looking for us here.”
“Is there anything stronger to drink?”
“Let me look in the fridge.”
Blomkvist found several bottles of white wine, a Sancerre. This is my new normal, he thought bleakly—drinking through interviews. He helped himself to a bottle and found two glasses.
“Here,” he said, filling them up.
“I don’t really know where to begin. You said you’d met Hilda. Did she talk about…” Again Dan hesitated, as if reluctant to mention a name or an event that filled him with fear.
“About what?”
“Rakel Greitz?”
“Hilda told me a lot about her.”
Dan just raised his glass and drank, grim and resolute. Then slowly he began to tell his story. It began at a jazz club in Berlin, with a guitar solo and a woman who could not take her eyes off him.
—
They had driven into a forest and stopped. The inside of the van was unbearably stuffy, and all that could be heard from outside was the sound of birds and insects. The engine idled. Salander was thirsty and she felt sick from the chloroform or maybe from the beating. She was still lying on the floor, tied up, but when she got to her knees nobody objected, although they glared at her the whole time. The engine was switched off and those on the bench nodded at each other. Benito drank some water to wash down a few tablets. She was ashen-faced and did not move as Bashir and the other man stood up. Salander could now see the man’s tattooed forearms and the emblem on his leather vest: SVAVELSJÖ M.C. The same motorcycle gang which had been allied with her father and her sister. Had Camilla and her hackers cracked Salander’s address?
Salander studied the back door of the van and tried to recall the action with which it had been opened when her mobile was thrown into the road. With mathematical precision she recalled the force in the movement, or rather the lack of it.
She could not remove the rope around her hands, but she should be able to kick open the door. That was good, as was Benito’s head injury and how jittery the men seemed. Bashir grimaced, just as he had in Vallholmen, and drew back his right foot to kick her. She absorbed it, over-reacting a little. Not that she needed to. It was a violent kick which caught her in the ribs; then she took another one in the face and feigned being dazed, but all the while she was watching Benito.
From the outset, Salander had had a feeling that this was first and foremost Benito’s show. She would have the last word. Now she was bending over her grey canvas bag on the floor and taking out a red-velvet cloth. The men seized Salander roughly by the shoulders. This did not bode well, especially when Benito pulled a dagger from the bag—her Keris. It was straight and shiny, and it looked very sharp, with a long gold-tipped blade. The handle had been carved to represent a demon with slanting eyes. It was the kind of weapon that should have been in a museum, not in the hands of an ashen-faced psychopath with a bandaged head who was now examining the knife with a demented tenderness.
In a reedy voice Benito explained how the Keris was to be used. Salander did not listen attentively, it didn’t seem necessary, but she heard enough. The Keris would be stabbed through the red cloth just beneath the collarbone, straight into the heart. The blood would be wiped off onto the cloth on its way out. It was said to require extraordinary skill. S
alander went on making a careful inventory of everything in the van—every object, every accumulation of dust, every moment of faltering concentration. She glanced up at Bashir. He gripped her left shoulder and looked determined and tense. She was going to die, and he was fine with that. But he didn’t look especially pleased, and it was plain to see why. Essentially he was the helper of a woman, and that can’t have been easy for someone who thought of women as no more than whores or second-class citizens.
“Do you know your Koran?” Salander said.
She could tell right away by his grip on her shoulder that her question had unsettled him. She went on to say that the Prophet had condemned all types of Kerises—they belonged to Satan and the demons—and then she quoted a sura, one she had invented. She gave it a number and urged him to look it up. “Check it out and you’ll see!”
But Benito stood up with her dagger and said: “She’s full of shit. The Keris didn’t even exist at the time of Mohammed. Now it’s a weapon for holy warriors the world over.”
Bashir seemed to believe her, or at least he wanted to believe her. “OK, OK, get a move on,” he said, adding something in Bengali for the benefit of the driver up front.
Suddenly Benito seemed to be in a hurry, even as she was overcome by dizziness and lurched to one side. There was a sound high above them, the reverberations of a helicopter. Though it might not have had anything to do with them, Salander knew that her friends at Hacker Republic were unlikely to have been sitting around doing nothing. The noise was both promising because help might soon be at hand, and worrying because of the increased activity in the van.
Bashir and the other man were gripping her tightly as Benito advanced towards her, looking determined with her long dagger and red cloth. Salander thought of Palmgren. She thought of her mother and the dragon in Storkyrkan, and she braced herself against the floor.
Come what may, she had to get to her feet.
—
Dan sat in silence. He had reached a painful point in the story. His eyes flickered about and his hands shifted nervously.
“When Rakel said she would have me convicted for murdering my brother unless I cooperated, I felt helpless, I hardly knew what was happening. They made me wear sunglasses and a hat. It would be dangerous for there to be two Leos in the stairwell, she said—we had to get him out of the apartment while he could still stand. I saw an opportunity. If we could only get out, I thought, I’d be able to shout for help.”
“But you didn’t.”
“We didn’t meet anybody in the elevator or on the stairs. It was the day before Christmas Eve. Rakel’s sidekick—I don’t think John is his real name, in fact. She called him Benjamin several times. It was the man who attacked you this morning. Anyway, he…” Dan paused and took a deep breath. “He dragged Leo, who could only just stay upright, to a black Renault van parked outside. It was getting dark, or at least that’s how it felt,” he said. And he fell silent again.
DECEMBER, ONE AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER
Dan looked at the empty street before him—as weird as if he were in a stone-bordered, desolate nightmare. He might have run away to call for help. But how could he abandon his brother? It would have been impossible. They pushed Leo into the car and Dan asked:
“We’re taking him to the hospital now, right?”
“Yes,” Greitz said.
Did he believe her? She had just said there was no point, and had threatened him. He clambered into the car and focused on one thing: before she took his mobile he had managed to read online that a patient can recover from curare poisoning as long as respiration is maintained. He sat down next to Leo in the back seat. On the other side of him was the man Greitz called Benjamin.
Dan was concentrating on trying to help Leo breathe. Again he asked if they really were on their way to a hospital. Greitz, who was driving, was more specific this time. They were headed to the Karolinska hospital, and she even named the department.
“Trust me,” she said.
She claimed to have called ahead to warn specialists, who were preparing to receive Leo. Maybe Dan knew it was all nonsense. Maybe he was too shocked to absorb what was happening. It was hard to remember anything at all. He focused solely on keeping Leo’s breathing going, and nobody stopped him. That was something to be grateful for. Greitz drove fast. There was not much traffic and they came up onto Solnabron. The red hospital buildings seemed to rise like an apparition in the darkness, and for an instant he thought it might all be OK, in the end.
But it was no more than a smokescreen, an attempt to keep him quiet for a while. Instead of stopping, the car accelerated past the hospital, driving northwards towards Solna. He must have been shouting and lashing out because there was a sudden burning sensation in his thigh and he felt his protests grow weaker, less forceful. The rage and desperation did not leave him, but he felt his strength ebbing away. He shook his head and blinked. He strove to think clearly, to keep Leo alive. But he was struggling for words and finding it hard to move, and far away, as if through a fog, he could hear Greitz and the man whispering to each other. He lost track of time. At some point Greitz raised her voice. She was speaking to him now, and there was something hypnotic about her tone. What was she saying? She talked about everything he would get—about dreams fulfilled, about wealth, happiness.
With Leo gasping for breath beside him, the massive figure of Benjamin on the other side, Greitz sitting in the front talking about happiness and riches, it was…it was impossible to describe. It was beyond words.
—
Blomkvist might not ever be able to grasp it. But Dan had to try. There was no other way.
“Were you tempted?” Blomkvist asked.
The wine bottle was standing on the white coffee table and Dan felt an impulse to smash it over the journalist’s head.
“You’ve got to understand,” he said, trying hard to sound calm. “At that moment I couldn’t imagine my life without Leo.”
He was quiet again.
“What was going through your mind?”
“Only one thing: how we would make it through this.”
“And what was your plan?”
“My plan? I don’t know. I guess I thought I’d play along and hope a way out would present itself. As we drove further and further into the countryside, I managed to regain some of my strength. I was looking at Leo the whole time. He got worse. He began to cramp again, he couldn’t move. Sorry, it’s hard for me to talk about it.”
“Take your time.”
Dan reached for his wineglass and went on:
“I had no idea where we were. The road was getting narrower. We were in a pine forest. Darkness had fallen and the snow had turned to rain. I saw a signpost. Vidåkra, it said. We headed to the right, onto a forest track, and after ten minutes Rakel stopped the car and Benjamin got out. He took something out of the trunk, and there was an unpleasant rattling noise. I didn’t want to know what it was. I was busy looking after Leo. I opened the door, laid him across the seat and started CPR. I had only a vague idea of what I was doing, but I tried. I’ve never tried so hard at anything in my whole life. I was dizzy and Leo had vomited without my even noticing it. There was a foul smell in the car. I felt like I was leaning over myself, can you understand that? As if I was giving breath to my own dying self. And the strange thing is that they let me keep at it. They were gentle with me now, Rakel and this guy Benjamin. It was odd, and I didn’t really understand what was going on. Rakel said in a soft voice that Leo was going to die. Soon the effect of the physostigmine would leave him, and nothing could be done. It was horrible, she said. But the good thing was that nobody would be looking for him. No-one would even wonder where he went—as long as I took his place. His mother was dying, she said, and I could resign from Alfred Ögren and sell my interest in the company to Ivar. No-one would be surprised. They had all known for ages that Leo’s dream was to leave the company. It was as if the scene was set for divine justice; I would get what I had always deserved.
I humoured them. I saw no alternative. I mumbled, I hemmed and hawed. They’d taken my phone, I think I told you, and I was miles away in a forest and I couldn’t see lights from a single house.
“Benjamin came back looking like a complete mess, soaked through with sweat and rain, muddy snow on his trousers. His woollen hat was askew. He didn’t say a word. A nasty, unspoken complicity hung in the air as Benjamin dragged Leo out of the back seat. Leo’s head hit the ground and I bent down to help. I pulled off Benjamin’s hat, I remember, and put it on Leo. Then I buttoned up his coat. We hadn’t even dressed him warmly: he had no scarf and he was wearing his indoor shoes, and they were untied, laces dangling. It was a scene from hell, and I wondered if I should run off to get help. Just take off into the forest or along the track and hope to find somebody. But was there time for that? I didn’t think so. I wasn’t even sure Leo was still alive. So I followed into the trees. Benjamin was dragging Leo along clumsily and I offered to help. Benjamin didn’t like that; he wanted to get me away from there. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Get lost, this isn’t anything for you,’ and he yelled for Rakel. But I don’t think she heard. The wind was blowing hard, rustling the trees. We were being scratched by bushes and branches and then we arrived at a large diseased-looking pine, next to which was a pile of stones and earth. There was a shovel lying nearby and for a moment I thought, or wanted to believe, that we had stumbled on some sort of excavation which had nothing to do with us.”
“But it was a grave.”
“It was an attempt at a grave. Not a very deep one. Benjamin must have had a hell of a time digging into that frozen earth. He looked exhausted as he put Leo on the ground and shouted at me to go away. I told him that I had to say goodbye, that he was a heartless bastard. He threatened me again, saying that Greitz had enough evidence to have me put away for murder. ‘He’s my twin brother, for Christ’s sake. Show a little consideration, leave me in peace. I’ll bury him myself. I won’t run away, and Leo’s dead anyway. Look at him,’ I yelled. ‘Look at him!’ And then he really did leave me. I suspected that he hadn’t gone far, but he did walk out of sight, and I was alone with Leo. I crouched on my heels under the pine tree and leaned over him,” Dan said.
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye Page 31