by Lars Kepler
He’s naked, and has spilled wine over the leather upholstery. In the distance is the sound of an airplane. The morning light hits the dusty windows.
Reidar gets to his feet and sees Veronica curled up on the floor in front of the fireplace. She’s wrapped herself in the tablecloth. The party downstairs is still going on but is more subdued now. Reidar grabs the half-full bottle of wine and leaves the room. He has a throbbing headache as he starts to climb the creaking oak stairs to his bedroom. He stops on the landing, sighs, and goes back down. He carefully picks Veronica up and lays her on the sofa, covers her, then retrieves her glasses from the floor and puts them on the table.
Reidar Frost is sixty-two years old and the author of three international best-sellers, the so-called Sanctum series.
Thirteen years ago, Reidar Frost ended up alone. Something happened to him that should never happen to anyone. His son and daughter vanished without a trace one night after they sneaked out to meet a friend. Mikael’s and Felicia’s bicycles were found on a footpath near Badholmen. Apart from one detective with a Finnish accent, everyone thought the children had been playing too close to the water and had drowned in Erstaviken fjard.
The police stopped looking, even though no bodies were found. Reidar’s wife, Roseanna, couldn’t deal with their loss. She moved in temporarily with her sister, asked for a divorce, and used the money from the settlement to move abroad. A couple of months later, she was found in her bath in a Paris hotel. She’d committed suicide. On the floor was a drawing Felicia had given her on Mother’s Day.
The children have been declared dead. Their names are engraved on a headstone that Reidar rarely visits. The day they were declared dead, he invited his friends to a party, and he has kept it going ever since.
Reidar Frost is convinced he’s going to drink himself to death, but at the same time, he knows he’d probably kill himself if he was left alone.
12
A train is thundering through the nocturnal winter landscape. The locomotive is pulling almost three hundred meters of boxcars behind it.
In the cab sits the train engineer with his hand resting on the controls. The noise from the engine and the rails is rhythmic and monotonous.
The snow rushes out of a bright tunnel formed by the two headlights. The rest is darkness.
As the train emerges from the broad curve around Vårsta, the engineer increases speed.
He’s thinking that the snow is so bad that he’s going to have to stop at Hallsberg, if not before, to check the braking distance.
Far off in the haze, two deer scamper off the rails and away across the white fields. They move through the snow with magical ease and disappear into the night.
He brakes gently as the train heads out across the high bridge. It feels like flying. The snow is swirling and twisting in the headlights.
The train is already in the middle of the bridge, high above the ice of Hallsfjärden, when he sees a flickering shadow through the haze. There’s someone on the track. The engineer sounds the horn and sees the figure take a long step to the right, onto the other track.
The train is approaching very fast. For half a second, the man is caught in the light of the headlights. He blinks. A young man with a dead face. His clothes are trembling on his skinny frame, and then he’s gone.
The engineer isn’t conscious that he’s applied the brakes and that the whole train is slowing down. There’s a rumbling sound and the screech of metal, and he isn’t sure if he ran over the young man.
He’s shaking and can feel adrenaline coursing through his body as he calls the emergency number.
“I’m a train engineer. I’ve just passed someone on the Igelsta Bridge. He was in the middle of the tracks, but I don’t think I hit him.”
“Is anyone injured?” the operator asks.
“I don’t think I hit him. I only saw him for a few seconds.”
“Where exactly did you see him?”
“In the middle of the Igelsta Bridge.”
“On the tracks?”
“There’s nothing but tracks up here—it’s a fucking railroad bridge.”
“Was he standing still, or was he walking in a particular direction?”
“I don’t know.”
“My colleague is alerting the police and ambulance in Södertälje. We’ll stop all rail traffic over the bridge.”
13
The emergency control room immediately dispatches police cars to both ends of the long bridge. Nine minutes later, the first car pulls off the road from Nyköping with its lights flashing and makes its way up the narrow gravel road alongside the train tracks. The road leads steeply upward and hasn’t been plowed. Loose snow swirls up over the windshield.
The policemen leave the car at the end of the bridge and set out along the tracks with their flashlights on. It isn’t easy going. Cars are passing far below them on the highway. The four railroad tracks narrow to two and stretch out over the industrial complexes of Björkudden and the frozen inlet.
The first officer stops and points. Someone has clearly been walking along the right-hand track ahead of them. The shaky beams of their flashlights illuminate footprints and traces of blood.
They shine their flashlights into the distance, but there’s no one on the bridge as far as they can see. The lights at the harbor below make the snow between the tracks look like smoke.
Now the second police car reaches the other end of the deep ravine, more than a kilometer and a half away.
The tires crunch on the gravel as Police Constable Jasim Muhammed pulls up along the railroad line. His partner, Fredrik Mosskin, has just contacted their colleagues on the bridge over the radio. The wind is making so much noise in the microphone that it’s difficult to hear, but they pick up that someone was walking across the railroad bridge very recently.
The headlights illuminate a steep rock face. Fredrik ends the call and stares blankly ahead of him.
“What’s happening?” Jasim asks.
“Looks like he’s heading this way.”
“What did they say about blood? Was there much blood?”
“I didn’t hear.”
“Let’s go and look,” Jasim says, opening his door.
The blue emergency lights play upon the snow-covered branches of the pine trees.
“The ambulance is on its way,” Fredrik says.
There’s no crust on the snow, and Jasim sinks in up to his knees. He pulls out his flashlight and shines it toward the tracks. Fredrik is slipping on the track bed but keeps climbing.
“What sort of animal has an extra asshole in the middle of its back?” Jasim asks.
“I don’t know,” Fredrik mutters.
“A police horse,” Jasim says.
“What the…?”
“That’s what my mother-in-law told the kids.” Jasim grins and heads up onto the bridge.
There are no footprints in the snow. Either the man is still on the bridge, or he’s jumped. The cables above them whistle eerily.
The lights of Hall Prison are glowing through the haze below.
Fredrik tries to contact their colleagues, but the radio just crackles.
They head farther out across the bridge. Fredrik walks behind Jasim with a flashlight in his hand. Jasim can see his own shadow moving across the ground, swaying oddly from side to side.
It’s strange that their colleagues from the other side of the bridge aren’t visible.
Out on the exposed bridge, the wind from the sea is bitter. Snow is blowing into their eyes. Their cheeks turn numb with cold.
Jasim screws up his eyes to look across the bridge. It disappears into swirling darkness. Suddenly he sees something at the edge of the light. A tall stick-figure with no head.
Jasim stumbles and reaches his hand out toward the low railing; he sees the snow fall fifty meters onto the ice.
His flashlight hits something and goes out.
His heart is beating hard, and he peers forward again but can no longer see the
figure.
Fredrik calls Jasim back, and he turns around. His partner is pointing at him, but it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying. Fredrik looks scared and starts to fumble with the holster of his pistol, and Jasim realizes that Fredrik’s trying to warn him, that he was pointing at someone behind his back.
Jasim turns around and gasps for breath.
Someone is crawling along the track straight toward him. Jasim backs away and tries to draw his pistol. The figure gets to its feet and sways. It’s a young man. He’s staring at the policemen with empty eyes. His bearded face is thin; his cheekbones are sharp. He’s swaying and seems to be having trouble breathing.
“Are you injured?”
The young man tries to speak, but coughs and falls to his knees again.
“What’s he saying?” Fredrik asks, with one hand on his gun.
“Are you injured?” Jasim asks again.
“I don’t know, I can’t feel anything, I—”
“Please, come with me.”
Jasim helps him up and sees that his right hand is covered with red ice.
“I can’t….The Sandman took us….I can’t wake up….”
14
The doors of the emergency entrance at Södermalm Hospital close. A red-cheeked nurse helps the paramedics remove the stretcher and wheel it toward the ER.
“We can’t find any identification. Nothing.”
The patient is handed over to the triage nurse and taken into one of the treatment rooms. After checking his vital signs, the nurse realizes the patient is in critical condition.
Four minutes later, Dr. Irma Goodwin comes into the ER, and the nurse gives her a quick briefing: “Airways free, no acute trauma, but he’s got poor saturation, fever, signs of concussion and weak circulation.”
The doctor looks at the charts and goes over to the skinny man. His clothes have been cut open. His bony rib cage rises and falls with his rapid breathing.
“Still no name?”
“No.”
“Give him oxygen.”
The young man lies with his eyelids closed, trembling, as the nurse puts an oxygen mask on him.
He looks strangely malnourished, but there are no visible needle marks on his body. Dr. Goodwin has never seen anyone so white. The nurse checks his temperature from his ear again.
“Forty degrees. A high-grade fever.”
Dr. Goodwin ticks the tests she wants to run on the patient, then looks at him again. His chest rattles as he coughs and briefly opens his eyes.
“I don’t want to, I don’t want to,” he whispers. “I’ve got to go home, I’ve got to, I’ve got to—”
“Where do you live? Can you tell me where you live?”
“Live?” he asks, and gulps hard.
“He’s delirious,” the nurse says quietly.
“Are you in pain?”
“Yes,” he replies with a confused smile.
“Can you tell me—”
“No, no, no, no, she’s screaming inside me, I can’t take it, I can’t, I…”
His eyes roll back. He coughs and mutters something about porcelain fingers, then lies there gasping for breath.
Irma Goodwin decides to give the patient a vitamin B shot, antipyretics, and an intravenous antibiotic, benzylpenicillin, until the test results come back.
Through the door ahead of her, she can hear the staff nurse talking on the phone. Another ambulance is on its way in—a case of kidney failure. The staff nurse is putting together an emergency team and calling a surgeon.
Irma Goodwin stops and goes back to the unidentified patient’s treatment room. The red-cheeked nurse is helping the other nurse clean a bleeding wound on the man’s thigh. It looks like the young man ran straight into a sharp branch.
She stops in the doorway.
“Add a macrolide to the antibiotics,” she says decisively. “One gram of erythromycin, intravenous.”
The nurse looks up.
“You think he’s got Legionnaires’ disease?” she asks in surprise.
“Let’s see what the test—”
Irma Goodwin falls silent as the patient’s body starts to jerk. She looks at his white face and sees him slowly open his eyes.
“I’ve got to get home,” he whispers. “My name is Mikael Kohler-Frost, and I’ve got to get home….”
“Mikael Kohler-Frost,” Irma says. “You’re in Södermalm Hospital, and—”
“She’s screaming, all the time!”
Irma leaves the treatment room and half runs to her office. She closes the door behind her, puts on her reading glasses, sits down at her computer, and logs in. She can’t find him in the Health Service Database, and tries the National Population Register instead.
She finds him there.
Irma Goodwin rereads the information about the patient in the emergency room.
Mikael Kohler-Frost has been dead for seven years, and is buried in Malsta Cemetery.
15
Detective inspector Joona Linna is in a small room whose walls and floor are made of bare concrete. He is on his knees while a man in camouflage aims a pistol at his head, a black Sig Sauer. The door is being guarded by a man who keeps his Belgian assault rifle trained on Joona the whole time.
On the floor next to the wall is a bottle of Coca-Cola. The light is coming from a ceiling lamp with a buckled aluminum shade.
A cell phone buzzes. Before the man with the pistol answers, he yells at Joona to lower his head.
The other man puts his finger on the rifle’s trigger and moves a step closer.
The man with the pistol talks into the cell phone, then listens, without taking his eyes off Joona. Grit crunches under his boots. He nods, says something else, then listens again.
After a while, the man with the assault rifle sighs and sits down on the chair just inside the door.
Joona kneels there completely still. He is wearing jogging pants and a white sweat-soaked T-shirt. The sleeves are tight across the muscles of his upper arms. He raises his head slightly. His eyes are gray, like polished granite.
The man with the pistol talks excitedly into the phone, then ends the call and seems to think for a few seconds before taking four quick steps forward and pressing the barrel of the pistol to Joona’s forehead.
“I’m about to overpower you,” Joona says amiably.
“What?”
“I had to wait,” he explains. “Until I had an opportunity for direct physical contact.”
“I’ve just received orders to execute you.”
“Yes, the situation’s fairly acute, seeing as I have to get the pistol away from my face, and ideally use it within five seconds.”
“How?” the man by the door asks.
“In order to catch him by surprise, I can’t react to any of his movements,” Joona explains. “That’s why I’ve let him walk up, stop, and take precisely two breaths. So I wait until he breathes out the second time before I—”
“Why?” the man with the pistol asks.
“I gain a few hundredths of a second, because it’s practically impossible to do anything without first breathing in.”
“But why the second breath in particular?”
“Because it’s unexpectedly early and right in the middle of the most common countdown in the world: three, two, one….”
“Got it.” The man smiles, revealing a brown front tooth.
“The first thing that’s going to move is my left hand,” Joona explains to the surveillance camera up by the ceiling. “It’ll move up toward the barrel of the pistol and away from my face in one fluid movement. I need to grasp the pistol, twist upward, and get to my feet, using his body as a shield. In a single movement. My hands need to prioritize the gun, but at the same time I need to observe the man with the assault rifle. Because, as soon as I’ve got control of the pistol, he’s the primary threat. I use my elbow against his chin and neck as many times as it takes to get control of the pistol, then I fire three shots and spin around and fire another three
shots.”
The men in the room start again. The situation repeats. The man with the pistol gets his orders over the phone, hesitates, then walks up to Joona and pushes the barrel to his forehead. The man breathes out and is just about to breathe in to say something when Joona grabs the barrel of the pistol with his left hand.
The whole thing is remarkably surprising and quick, even though it was expected.
Joona knocks the gun aside, twisting it toward the ceiling in the same movement and getting to his feet. He jabs his elbow into the man’s neck four times, takes the pistol, and shoots the other man in the torso.
The three blank shots echo off the walls.
The first opponent is still staggering backward when Joona spins around and shoots him in the chest.
He falls against the wall.
Joona walks over to the door, grabs the assault rifle and extra cartridge, and leaves the room.
16
The door hits the concrete wall hard and bounces back. Joona is changing the cartridge as he marches in. The eight people in the next room all take their eyes off the large screen and look at him.
“Six and a half seconds to the first shot,” one of them says.
“That’s far too slow,” Joona says.
“But Markus would have let go of the pistol sooner if your elbow had actually hit him,” a tall man with a shaved head says.
“Yes, you won some time there,” a female officer agrees.
The scene is already repeating on the screen. Joona’s taut shoulder, the fluid movement forward, his eye lining up with the sights as the trigger is pulled.
“Pretty damn impressive,” the group commander says, setting his palms down on the table.
“For a cop,” Joona concludes.
They laugh, leaning back, and the group commander scratches the tip of his nose as he blushes.
Joona accepts a glass of water.
Joona Linna is at Karlsborg Fortress to instruct the Special Operations Group in close combat. Not because he’s a trained instructor, but because he has more practical experience of the techniques they need to learn than just about anyone else in Sweden. When Joona was eighteen, he did his military service at Karlsborg as a paratrooper, and was immediately recruited after basic training to a Special Operations unit.