Ask No Mercy (Max Anger Book 1)

by Martin Österdahl

  “Four weeks?” said Sarah, much too loudly. Given the speed at which things were happening in Saint Petersburg, that felt like an eternity. “Isn’t there rush service? Can I pay extra to . . . ?”

  “No, you can’t.”

  There was something definitive in the man’s answer, and Sarah realized it wouldn’t be possible to negotiate with him. With its endless corridors and dark culverts, Radio Sweden was like a Soviet state with its income and wealth redistribution policies, its five-year plans, and its unmotivated personnel. It would be pointless to continue the conversation.

  Again Sarah thought of the article. It had been published in Stockholms-Tidningen, a newspaper that no longer existed in its original form. But Peter Tillberg, whom she had gotten to know in the military, was now a reporter at Dagens Nyheter.

  Perhaps he could help her?

  “We discontinued that service last year,” Peter said after she’d described what she needed and asked him whether it was possible to obtain newspapers from 1944. She’d called his cell phone, and his voice was accompanied by a loud crackling. “It cost much too much; people don’t call and order old newspapers anymore. Try the National Library. They’re in the process of establishing some kind of database of news media publications. It’s been extremely complicated for them to determine who has the rights to what, but I think they’ve put together a pretty decent amount of material—newsreels and newspapers. But you’d have to subscribe to their research service, and it would take you a few days to get access. Assuming you were approved.”

  Why did everything have to take such a damned long time?

  “But you know what you can do?” Peter continued. “There are quite a few little shops that specialize in ‘modern antiques’—old posters and newspapers and things like that. I sometimes go to those shops. There’s a good one on Surbrunnsgatan in Vasastan. Jocke, the guy who works there, knows his stuff. I’d think his place would be open on Sundays.”

  “Thanks, Peter.” She hung up.

  She’d have to make a trip to Vasastan.

  Charlie K opened the door to the steam sauna at Sturebadet. Every Sunday morning, Greger Lennström came to Sturebadet for water aerobics. You could always find him in the steam sauna afterward.

  “How was it today?” Charlie asked as he stepped into the sauna and waved his hand in front of his eyes so he could see through the steam.

  He thought he could glimpse a smile.

  “The girl who leads this session is entertaining. And it’s good for my knees, but of course this is the real payoff.”

  Lennström leaned back and took some deep breaths.

  “Everything going well at the office?” asked Charlie.

  “Things are rolling along. I’m needed less and less, Charlie, and I don’t know what I think about that.”

  For many years, Lennström had been one of Stockholm’s top experts on mergers and acquisitions. He was on so many boards that Charlie had lost count. Lennström had no doubt lost count himself. He held a number of board positions that paid extremely well, but he also performed a good deal of charity work for no fee. Including work for the Baltic Foundation.

  Charlie sat down next to Lennström on the bench.

  “The Baltic Foundation seems to have shut down,” he said. “For us at Vektor, that’s a little worrying because you’ve been so important to us.”

  Lennström shook his head. “Borgenstierna was an excellent lawyer in his day, but he’s become a strange old man. He sees the Russian bogeyman everywhere. In the end, it wasn’t working anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The companies that participated in running that foundation wanted to expand to the east, take advantage of the new opportunities, but Borgenstierna saw only threats. Most of them pulled out. I think that started a little less than a year ago. And actually I think it was Telia’s representative—you know, the guy who’s in the newspapers now . . . ?”

  “Frank Ståhl? The media-relations director?”

  “Exactly. They didn’t see eye to eye at all. Borgenstierna is opposing Telia’s eastward expansion. And he’s doing everything he can, exploiting any imaginable network and channel—he’s even trying to get pieces published on the newspapers’ op-ed pages. Fortunately, the press isn’t taking him seriously. Apparently, they argued about some company Telia was considering acquiring, somewhere in the former Soviet Union, I think.”

  Charlie wiped the sweat from his forehead. “But Borgenstierna can’t interfere in Telia’s business, can he? And if Telia’s management is angry with him—that’s not enough to justify shutting down a foundation that’s worked on behalf of refugees and supported business relationships across national borders in the Baltic region since the Second World War, is it?”

  Lennström sighed and leaned against the wall again. His shoulders gleamed.

  “There was a snowball effect. Borgenstierna became more and more introverted and contrary. No one wanted to work with him anymore. And then he evidently got this verdict from the doctors.”

  “I heard he was supposed to go to Switzerland in January. Do you know what he did there?”

  For a moment, the steam stopped pumping into the sauna. Lennström’s gaze became sharper. He leaned forward, and his big dog’s eyes watched Charlie.

  “What do all old men with delusions of grandeur do in Switzerland in January?” he asked.

  Then it fell into place. Of course.

  “Davos? The World Economic Forum?”

  Lennström grinned. “Borgenstierna said there was some kind of international cooperation, something to support democracy.”

  “But doesn’t everything at Davos have to do with extremely large sums of money?”

  Lennström laughed. “Sure. People pay small fortunes just to participate.”

  Damn, thought Charlie. Don’t tell me the old man’s given away the foundation’s remaining funds to some foreign democracy project. How could he have missed it? Money Sarah and Max could have put to good use.

  Charlie furrowed his brow, tried to think. How could he ask Lennström the question he wanted to ask without sounding like a sore loser in the fight over the foundation’s funds?

  “Is it in accordance with the foundation’s articles of association that the funds be placed outside the Baltic region?” he finally asked.

  “As I said, the Baltic Foundation was a one-man show, and once upon a time Borgenstierna was an excellent lawyer. He had a sound legal basis for doing whatever he felt like doing.”

  Charlie got up. He had had enough of the steam.

  42

  “The bosses don’t like to shit where they eat.”

  It was Ilya who had suggested the Grand Hotel Europe as Max’s new home in the city. Underworld showdowns didn’t occur in places the mafia bosses themselves liked to visit; it was some kind of code of honor. Even the most untrustworthy people could agree on a safe zone, and the Hotel Europe was the most dependable one. After he passed through the hotel’s rigorous security check, Max felt sure this was the right choice. The white marble floor in the lobby was sparkling clean, and the wine-red carpets on the entrance steps had been perfectly laid. Expensive but right.

  “Your passport, Mr. Olsen?” asked the man at the front desk with a smile.

  A gold tooth gleamed.

  “I was planning on paying cash,” said Max. He laid two stacks of bills on the counter. The man looked at the stacks in front of him. Max slid one of them across the counter. It would cover the cost of the room.

  “And unfortunately I don’t have my passport with me,” he continued, sliding across the other stack. “But I imagine this could serve as collateral for unforeseen expenses.”

  The man smiled again. “Of course, Mr. Olsen, of course.”

  Max installed himself in a belle chambre, a fifty-square-meter junior suite with a parquet floor, antique furniture, and a large living room with a floor-to-ceiling panorama window with a magnificent view of Nevsky Prospekt. It was more Sarah H
ansen and her friends than Max and Pashie, but he had chosen it for the sake of security, not luxury.

  Max sat down in one of the soft armchairs, took a sip of sparkling mineral water, and switched on the TV. A report from the Kremlin was being rerun. On wobbly legs, Yeltsin walked to a desk on which there stood only a small version of the new/old Russian flag. When Max saw how difficult it was for him to sit down on the chair, it was as if all his worst fears were justified. When the election campaign began, Yeltsin’s approval ratings had been in free fall; his unpredictable behavior had harmed his reputation. There had been so many scandals at this point. Ireland’s Shannon Airport two years earlier, when he had been too drunk to leave the plane and Ireland’s humiliated prime minister had had to wait on the runway. The journalist who claimed that the Russian president had appeared in public on Pennsylvania Avenue in his underpants, trying to flag down a taxi and order a pizza.

  What was Yeltsin going to tell the nation and the rest of the world now? Perhaps the government had considered the information coming from the provinces, where support for his campaign was practically nonexistent, and decided it was time to do something. Some of Yeltsin’s advisers had counseled him to cancel the election, which the constitution allowed him to do if he believed there was a threat to the security of the nation. But that would be a terrible mistake, thought Max. That would lead to unrest and maybe even civil war.

  Max reached for the remote control and turned up the sound, but it didn’t help much; it wasn’t easy to understand what the president was saying. Yeltsin began aggressively, blaming his catastrophic results on incompetence in the ranks of his own organization. He fired the entire campaign management and named two key players who would be brought in. Anatoly Chubais was appointed the new head of the election campaign. He was a man about whom Max knew a great deal—the most important proponent of the so-called shock therapy approach. Why, of all people, was Yeltsin bringing in Chubais, a man known for plundering the state for the benefit of the oligarchs? This appointment must mean something.

  The other key player was a woman named Tatyana Dyachenko. At first, her name didn’t ring any bells. But when Yeltsin spoke of her his whole manner changed, and Max put his hand to his head in frustration. She was Yeltsin’s own daughter.

  Game over.

  Max turned off the TV and went into the bedroom. Decided to put slips of paper up here, as he had in the dormitory. He started with the opinion poll and the document on election rigging he had gotten from Sarah and continued with the entities connected with Pashie’s disappearance and St. Petersburg GSM. Margarita; Rousseau; Domashov; the secretive chairman who might be the man in the photo he had given Mishin. The Ivanovich Foundation. He put their names up around the St. Petersburg GSM logo, the cosmonaut floating weightlessly in space. He circled the name Rousseau. He was the key.

  Max thought about what Domashov had told him about Pashie’s questions concerning St. Petersburg GSM, about the origins of the company, about the rumor that the technology had been stolen from Sweden. He wrote “the technology” on the same slip of paper he’d used to copy the marginalia from Pashie’s book. “The Shutul Ravine—the Colony Field. Money—technology—politics.” Next to the branch for St. Petersburg GSM, he put up the slips with the names Borgenstierna and Wallentin on a branch of their own.

  When he was done, he took a step back and looked at the line from “opinion survey” to “Borgenstierna.”

  The hotel room’s telephone rang. When he heard Ilya’s voice, Max immediately knew he didn’t have good news.

  “I followed the woman you told me about.”

  Margarita Yushkova, the woman who worked in St. Petersburg GSM’s accounting department.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Don’t worry—she’s still alive,” said Ilya. “But her boyfriend’s dead.”

  Max sat down heavily in the basket chair. “Who was her boyfriend?”

  “I have a feeling you knew him. French-sounding name, a slick redhead who wore expensive Italian suits.”

  Max closed his eyes. Not Marcel Rousseau. Not the man who had registered the Ivanovich Foundation. Not the man who had been the key to the whole mystery.

  “Damn, Ilya. Tell me it’s not true.”

  “Margarita wasn’t very happy about it, either.”

  Rousseau was the closest Max had come to Pashie.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Knifed to death in an industrial area, not far from a couple of pretty notorious nightclubs, places even I don’t go. No one knows what he was doing there.”

  A robbery that got out of hand? A drunken walk in the wrong area in the middle of the night? Rousseau didn’t seem like the type.

  “How did you find out about this?”

  “I followed Margarita to a café. She had the children with her. She had just hugged a friend when her phone rang. I saw her collapse and start sobbing uncontrollably. Her friend helped her to her feet, they talked, and then Margarita jumped into a taxi. She left her children with the other woman.”

  Max’s mind was racing. Something was happening now, but what? Max clenched his fist. Pull yourself together, damn it. Why had Rousseau been knifed? Had it just been an unlucky coincidence? Did such coincidences even exist?

  Had the monster Rousseau had been protecting turned against him?

  What did a woman who had concluded that she was in danger do? Where did she go? Home, to collect her things?

  “Margarita knows what happened to Rousseau,” said Max. “Come and pick me up as soon as you can. We have to find her before they do. They’re going to tie up all the loose ends.”

  43

  “Await further orders,” said Nestor Lazarev before he ended the call.

  He let his fingers rest on the desk, enjoying the feel of the massive piece of wood under his fingertips. Briefly touched the paper bag that lay next to the computer.

  Soon I will tell you what we are going to do with the people of Sweden.

  He had spoken with the soldier in Stockholm again. He was a good man, one of the best. Lazarev himself had trained him, transforming him from a thin teenager into a fully qualified Spetsnaz soldier who had been tested and had proved his worth in Afghanistan.

  Lazarev had written down the information he had received via the satellite phone. He had gotten confirmation that the organization in Stockholm had a person working in Saint Petersburg and that the person was indeed his prisoner, Pashie Kovalenko. Vektor had provided her with a Swedish cell phone so they could be in contact with her regularly.

  But where was that damned cell phone now?

  Lazarev hadn’t found it on her or in the little shed of a garage she lived in.

  His agent would send a full report on Vektor’s telecommunications traffic and cellular service subscribers through the usual channel.

  Lazarev swore. The information he had received was good information but not good news. He stood up, picked up the paper bag, and left the office. He opened the steel door and hurried down the stairs.

  Still angry, he opened the door to the storeroom and switched on a naked lightbulb.

  Pashie Kovalenko’s head was hanging; her chin was pressed against her collarbone. She tried to open her eyes, but even the weak light from the lightbulb hurt them.

  “You must be thirsty,” he said. “Hungry, too, perhaps?”

  Pashie couldn’t get out a sound through the plastic tube.

  Lazarev took the chair that stood just inside the door and sat down across from her. He opened the bag, took out the Moskovskaya vodka. He pushed the neck of the bottle into the plastic tube and poured vodka down Pashie’s throat.

  She twisted violently from side to side, began to cough and choke, tried in vain to push the vodka back up the tube. She screamed as loudly as she could, but then her throat gave up and she could do nothing but swallow the vodka in big, heavy gulps. When half of the vodka remained in the bottle, he removed it from the tube.

  Vodka ran from the corner
s of her mouth.

  “Food?”

  Pashie stared at him. Her gaze was firm, full of resistance. She shook her head.

  “I know you talked to Marcel Rousseau, the auditor at Brice & Stadthaller,” said Lazarev.

  He got no reaction from Pashie.

  “You won’t be talking to him again. I killed him with my own hands.”

  Still nothing.

  “Now it seems a young man is here looking for you.”

  Didn’t she jerk a little now?

  “An attractive young man.”

  Something happened to her gaze. It seemed to acquire a new focus.

  “Tell me about him.”

  He took hold of the plastic tube and twisted it around and out. Pashie began to whimper, and tears ran down her cheeks. It would really hurt when the barbs tore open the skin of her palate. She took a deep breath when the tube had come out of her mouth, swallowed and then bit her teeth together hard, closed her mouth for the first time in several days.

  “If you try to spit on me again,” he said, wiping the slime on the tube off on her cheek, “I’ll put this back in.”

  He twisted the tube.

  “I know the young man comes from Sweden. A certain Paul Olsen.”

  Now there was no mistaking it. It was hope that shone in her eyes.

  Hope will soon leave you forever, Tatar whore.

  “Tell me about your organization. Are you associated with MUST?”

  The name of Sweden’s military intelligence service didn’t seem to mean anything to Pashie. On the contrary. She just looked confused.

  He took a bit of rye bread out of the bag, held it to her lips.

  “Eat, girl.”

  He got a little bit of bread into her. She swallowed very carefully.

  “Talk now.”

  “I . . . don’t know,” said Pashie.

  Lazarev raised his eyebrows. “The only reason you are still alive is that I need information from you. If you give me information I consider significant, I will consider allowing you to live. If you do not, I will kill you very soon.”