Ask No Mercy (Max Anger Book 1)

by Martin Österdahl

  “But it’s on the TV news!” David exclaimed. “What else do you want from me?”

  David’s ability to speak had returned, and he wanted to ask Ray one question after another. You’re not an illegal gambling king, are you? You’re a helicopter pilot and master of some fucking martial art, and you’re not a friend of any of those trainers at all, are you? That damned Astrakhan wasn’t as injured as everyone claimed, right? But he managed to remain silent. He waited for what would happen next.

  He realized he wouldn’t be able to trick Ray. That Ray knew a great deal about telecommunications.

  Ray didn’t react to David’s outburst at all. He handed David a slip of paper that bore the name and address of an institution he didn’t recognize. Then he gave him the new instructions; it was ridiculously simple. At first David felt almost humiliated by the simplicity of the task, but soon this feeling transformed into relief. It would take him, at most, a few hours. But then? Would they be finished with each other then?

  Once again, he weighed the alternatives. He thought about what Ray had said and not said. If you don’t do what I say, our next meeting will be at your home.

  David took hold of the door handle.

  “You’ll have it in a few days,” he said. He opened the door.

  27

  Max was sitting on a chair in the bathroom at the dormitory. Ilya was cleaning his cuts with disinfectant, working away without talking, focused, experienced. His long fingers were nimble; they moved in and out of the toiletry bag and passed over the cuts on Max’s hands. If life’s lottery had played out differently, Ilya’s hands could have been those of a surgeon.

  “Does that feel okay?” he asked when he was finished.

  “It feels good,” said Max. “Thanks.”

  Ilya rinsed his hands and dried them with a towel.

  “When are you planning on telling me what’s actually going on?” Ilya was looking at Max’s reflection in the mirror.

  Max met his gaze. As always, the vein under Ilya’s left eye was pulsing.

  “You’re in danger, Max. Serious fucking danger.”

  Max got up and splashed water on his face with his relatively uninjured hand, passed the hand through his hair, and dried his face.

  “What’s your understanding of the situation at this point?” he asked.

  “Your girlfriend has pissed somebody off. Somebody who’s organized. That bomb wasn’t just supposed to destroy the department; it was also supposed to eradicate everything Pashie had worked on. Maybe it was also supposed to kill you. You can’t go on sleeping here; you have to set yourself up somewhere else and use a different name.”

  Another name, thought Max. He and Pashie had played that game. What do you want my name to be? What do you want me to look like? The Russian girls at the university had taught her how to play; they did it a little too often and with a few too many people.

  “Maybe you want me to be a Swedish girl?” Pashie had once said. “A Kajsa? I think I would like a blend of Englishman and Scandinavian; that must be optimal. You can be Paul Olsen. My Paul.”

  Now, Max nodded at Ilya. “I’ll check into a hotel under another name. Pay cash. But what about you? You don’t want out, do you?”

  He knew the answer already. Ilya was fast-thinking, crystal clear. He might become a good lawyer despite everything.

  “Tell me what I can do,” Ilya said.

  “That Margarita I told you about, the woman who works for St. Petersburg GSM—she knows more than I managed to get out of her.”

  “I’ll check her out.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  Ilya’s surgeon’s fingers slid back into Max’s bag. He fished out the pill bottle and held it up in front of Max.

  “Alprazolam?” he said, shaking the bottle in Max’s face. “That’s Xanax. This is strong stuff.”

  Max had no desire to talk about the bottle, about the side effects or the withdrawal symptoms. Nor did he want to talk about the doctor he had to visit every three weeks to get the prescription renewed.

  “Have you become an addict now? Because your girl disappeared?”

  Max swallowed. “It has nothing to do with Pashie.”

  Ilya pulled out a chair and sat down across from Max. “Okay. I see a few challenges here.”

  He rubbed his oily hair, and Max wondered whether it was time for Ilya to give a little speech and ultimately announce that he would probably need to be paid a bit more. God help them the day he became a lawyer.

  “There’s a risk that you’re going to flip out. Or fall asleep all of a sudden.”

  “I won’t.”

  “No, because you’re the Man of Steel from Sweden. This stuff has no effect on you? I’ve seen junkies that munch these to get through the night.”

  “My doctor prescribed them. The first time was after I came home from Bosnia. The second time was a month ago.”

  “What happened in Bosnia?”

  Max turned to the mirror. Tensed the muscles in his stomach and chest. Ilya looked at his reflection.

  “You know what happened in Bosnia. Everybody knows.”

  “Okay, if you don’t want to talk about it.” Ilya laughed briefly. “What happened a month ago, then?”

  “My mother died.”

  Ilya looked at him in surprise.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, handing Max the bottle. “It’s not easy to lose your parents, not this early.”

  “Don’t you trust me anymore?”

  “I trust you as I trust very few people in this world. Just tell me one thing.”

  “Sure,” said Max. “What do you want to know?”

  “When you feel anxiety because the two women you love are gone, or when the memories of the war come back to you at night, it’s benzo that keeps you under control. You’ve got three pills left. What happens when they’re gone?”

  28

  “Looks like you lost, David,” a man called from one of the cubicles.

  A quick glance to the side and David found the man. A round, bald person wearing a striped shirt and suspenders. He sat bent over his keyboard with a grotesquely large baguette sandwich in his hand.

  David had sat behind the wheel in his car, rubbed his eyes, and looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror. They’re going to know something is wrong. You can’t go in like this.

  That was when he had thought of the duffel bag in the trunk. It had lain there since he had last played—five weeks ago. He had let the handle of his squash racket stick out. An hour of squash before lunch for a busy, high-flying entrepreneur—that was why his face was so red. That was what the fat, greasy man in the cubicle and all his friends would believe about him. David Julin—invent and harvest!

  “Fredrik Stenlund from Carnegie,” David said to the man. “A hell of a backhand.”

  “It’s Friday afternoon and you look like Monday morning.”

  David turned to him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  He regretted it immediately; he couldn’t draw attention to himself. But avoiding doing so was easier said than done with guys like this, colleagues who saw him as a superstar. He could very well have been an old classmate.

  The man held up his hands.

  “What I mean is that you look so fresh, as if you had just had the weekend off, while the rest of us are hanging by a thin thread and are just waiting to punch out so we can go home and rest.”

  David managed to smile. I wish it were four o’clock so you and everyone else would go home and leave me alone here. On the cubicle’s cloth-covered partition wall hung a brass plaque. It looked like the prize from a dog contest: “Best in Show—Lennart.”

  Lennart? David didn’t think he’d seen him before.

  “Lennart,” he said. “If you want to get ahead, a good way to start is to work late on Fridays and come in early on Mondays.”

  David walked toward the inner areas of the office. At the very back were two conference rooms. One of them was reserved for external consultants. The
SwitchCom logo was on the door.

  He closed the door behind himself, started the desktop computer, and took his own laptop out of his sports bag.

  He logged on to his work e-mail account. Among the hundreds of e-mails he hadn’t read, let alone replied to, was one marked High Priority and Confidential. It had been sent earlier today. The letters in the subject line were red: Internal investigation of the blackout.

  Had this message been sent only to him or to everyone? There was only one way to find out: open it and check. But what if the sender had used a read-receipt function that would send a message as soon as David opened it? In that case, the sender would know he had read the message right now, this afternoon, when a new penetration of the system was about to occur.

  He had to find out somehow. He had to ask someone. Someone he could trust. David looked around.

  Then he thought of the man with the oversized baguette sandwich and the thin hair. A person no one noticed, someone no one took seriously.

  He picked up the telephone on his desk, made sure he was connected correctly.

  “Lennart? Hi, David here. I’ve been busy with other things—what’s this blackout investigation?”

  Lennart emitted a short laugh. Hooted.

  “Are you kidding me? It’s been all over the news. All the data on our cellular subscribers’ SIM cards was erased, and we have no idea what happened.”

  “Aha. So that’s what it was,” said David, trying to laugh himself. “Of course I know about that. I thought this had to do with something else. So the police are looking into this now, or . . . ?”

  “No, no. It’s an internal investigation.”

  “Did you get that e-mail that . . . that was sent earlier today?”

  “Yes, we all got it.”

  “Okay, got it. Thanks, Lennart. Sorry to interrupt your lunch.”

  The internal investigation hadn’t been able to follow his tracks back to him. Fortunately. But this time he needed to be even smarter. It was one thing to hack into the system when no one expected it, when only standard protective measures were in place. Now, everyone was watching for new intrusions into the system.

  The blood was pounding in his temples. If Ray put pressure on him to do more, he would surely get caught. And then he would reveal everything.

  Could he do that? A month ago, Caspar had gotten his first computer. He loved it more than anything and had said he wanted to be just like his father.

  Through the glass wall of the conference room, David saw that computer screens were already being switched off.

  Go home, thought David. Take the weekend off. Go home to your wives and your happy houses. Open a bottle of wine, feel the satisfaction that comes from your meager monthly salary, from the remnants of it you’re allowed to keep after the taxman’s taken what’s coming to him and you’ve made your mortgage payment. Watch a little family entertainment on TV.

  David forced himself to look away. He turned on the laptop, which contained a processor eight times as powerful as the one in the desktop computer. I may be alone now, but they’re out there watching everything that happens to the system.

  David had to create a loop so no one would notice that he was behind this. Via four virtual private networks that sent IP addresses back and forth between hubs in Taegu, Charlotte, Belgrade, and Melbourne, masking them in the process, he sneaked into the company’s servers in an impenetrable disguise.

  The people watching now are seeing that something is happening, but they are as confused as hell, he thought.

  Once he was in, it was easy to locate the subscriptions Ray had identified.

  “I want a complete list of the subscriptions registered in the organization’s name. Their numbers and the contact information and home addresses for the respective numbers. I want detailed information about all traffic from their telephones, their conversations with each other as well as other conversations, who called whom, the length of the calls, and the geographic location the calls were made from. Is that clear, David?”

  There were only three subscriptions on the list. All three specified the institution as a billing address. Two of them were registered to the same person, a woman named Sarah Hansen. The third was registered to a certain Max Anger.

  David opened the log for one of Sarah Hansen’s subscriptions. Almost all the calls associated with it had been routed to country code 7. What country was that? He opened a browser and soon found the answer—Russia. He thought of Ray and the video he had sent. Could Ray be Russian?

  He looked at Sarah Hansen’s other subscription. There was a long list of numbers, most of which were Swedish but a fair number of which were international. Sarah seemed to spend a lot of time talking on the phone, but she could hardly have used both of these subscriptions herself—she couldn’t be in two places at once. The first subscription must have been used by a person who was physically in Russia.

  One of the numbers Sarah had called most recently was one David recognized. He switched to the list of calls received and found the number there, too. They had spoken with each other less than an hour ago.

  Was he losing his mind?

  Sarah Hansen? He had never heard the name before.

  He went back to the browser to double-check, a completely unnecessary exercise to confirm what he already knew.

  We live side by side but know nothing about each other.

  The number Sarah Hansen had called an hour ago belonged to Gabriella Julin. Gabbi.

  His wife.

  He took out his cell phone. Sent off a quick text.

  Who is Sarah Hansen?

  29

  Max caressed the pill bottle, let his fingers run across the hard plastic. Finally, he managed to tear his gaze from the bottle and look away, at the wall with the slips of paper on it. After Ilya had left the dormitory, Max had put up two new sheets of paper: “St. Petersburg GSM” was written on one; “St. Petersburg Times” on the other. On another sheet of paper, he wrote down what Pashie had written in pencil in the book she had tried to send him. The number 44 with a triangle around it. The words “money—technology—politics.” The Stalin quote. Then the incomprehensible references to “the Shutul Ravine” and “the Colony Field.”

  What did all this mean? Where had it led Pashie?

  He picked up the telephone receiver and called Sweden.

  “Hi, Sarah.”

  Sarah drew a breath. “Oh, it’s so good to hear your voice. I was just talking to Mishin.”

  Max jerked; the pill bottle rattled. “Is Mishin okay? Did he tell you what happened?”

  “He was shaken,” said Sarah, and it sounded as though she sniffled briefly. “He told me that when he came back from lunch there were emergency-response vehicles everywhere at the university. He said he tried to get in touch with you but didn’t have your new cell phone number.”

  Max pressed the pill bottle against his forehead and told Sarah about how the whole world had exploded when he was on his way to the university. About the dead and injured. About the chaos. About Ilya’s suspicions.

  “Do you also believe the department was blown up because you’re looking for Pashie?” Sarah asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve given myself away yet. But someone wanted to close down that department. And kill everyone who had anything to do with it.”

  “You were lucky to survive, Max.”

  Sarah fell silent.

  Max saw no reason to respond. Lucky? Had he been lucky? How could one speak of being lucky in situations like this? Max saw the woman, how the blood had pumped out of her neck. Who was she? Who was grieving for her now? And the department’s young intern, Vladislav. All Max had saved of him was a foot. Lucky felt like a poorly chosen word.

  Max sensed that Sarah was thinking of the consequences of everything that had happened, things he hadn’t yet had the energy to think of. Their operation in Saint Petersburg was back at square one. With both Pashie and the department gone, they were more poorly equipped than
ever to fulfill their obligations to their clients and sponsors. Charlie K, who had come up with the brilliant idea of cooperating with Mishin, wouldn’t be happy.

  And the election was getting closer and closer.

  Max checked the pill bottle. There were only three pills left.

  Let’s hope bombs don’t go off every day.

  “I suppose there’s no point trying to convince you to come home?” said Sarah, breaking the silence.

  Max picked up one of the pills and balanced it on the top of his middle finger. Light blue, two milligrams, round, slightly biconvex. Without a groove because the pills were not to be split or crushed.

  Max laid the pill on his tongue, filled a glass with water, and swallowed the pill whole.

  Two left. What happens when they’re gone?

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” Sarah continued.

  Yes, you can send me a new round of alprazolam, he thought.

  “Can you check whether St. Petersburg GSM was on the list of companies we sent to Pashie?” he asked.

  “After our meeting in the boathouse, I took a look at it. St. Petersburg GSM is one of the companies. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  Max could feel the warmth from the fast-working anxiety-reducing pill spread through him. The drowsy, calming benzo feeling surrounded him like healing cotton in the midst of this hell.

  I need more pills. He’d have to do what Russians had done for centuries and drink vodka instead.

  The tiredness came quickly. He didn’t want to fall asleep while he was talking to Sarah.

  He looked over at the wall. The names Wallentin and Borgenstierna shone in the light of the streetlamps outside.

  “Can you try to get in touch with Borgenstierna for me?”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll have to trust me, Sarah. Something tells me Pashie may have tried to help me with my research.”

  Sarah sighed.

  “Okay, I’ll try. Is there anything else I can do?”

  “I need money,” he said. “I’ll have to check into a hotel.”