Ask No Mercy (Max Anger Book 1)

by Martin Österdahl

  “It’s certainly a similar area. This is a little farther from central Saint Petersburg.”

  The telephone rang. Max picked up the receiver and heard Mishin’s voice.

  “Max, come to the National Library of Russia as early as possible tomorrow morning. I’ve found an article in an American magazine that contains an Afghan woman’s description of a man she calls the Butcher of Nawzad, her hometown. This man is a colonel general in the GRU.”

  “No picture?” asked Max.

  “Her testimony describes the man. I think you’ll find this description interesting. A rumor that circulated among the Spetsnaz soldiers who besieged the town has it that this is the man who was behind the catastrophe at the Shutul Ravine.”

  Max thought of the margin notes in Pashie’s book and the photograph he had found under the rug in Domashov’s apartment and given to Mishin.

  Lazarev.

  The man who seemed familiar for some reason.

  Probably the man who had abducted Pashie.

  51

  Max had collapsed on the armchair and was staring out at Nevsky Prospekt, which was cloaked in darkness. The TV was on, but only to break the silence. Anything to banish his thoughts, thoughts of Pashie and of St. Petersburg GSM and the evil spreading from it.

  Hardly a soul was moving down there on the boulevard. He counted the seconds between passing cars. When the telephone rang, he glanced at the clock. It was a quarter past twelve. It wasn’t quite as late where the woman calling him was.

  “Hello, Sarah,” he said.

  “Hello,” she said with the slightly hoarse voice she had when she’d been smoking too much. “I spent half the day in a little shop in Vasastan looking through old posters for Swedish newspapers from the forties. From all the newspapers dated from the first of February to the first of March 1944, to be exact.”

  Max was surprised by the warmth that filled him. Sarah was completely on his side now. He wasn’t alone any longer.

  “What did you find?”

  “A poster that referred to the bombing of Stockholm by Soviet planes. My heart stopped beating when I saw it. Particularly because of everything that’s going on over there now. I tried to dismiss it and looked through all the other posters, but I didn’t find anything that seemed to fit as well.”

  Bombs falling on Stockholm? Hadn’t he heard about that? If only he had had more time for his own research—if only he’d gotten started with it earlier.

  “The Russians claimed it happened because of erroneous navigation by the Northern Fleet out of Leningrad,” Sarah went on. “Supposedly, the intended target was Turku.”

  “The Northern Fleet out of Leningrad? What was it they bombed?”

  “Military and civilian sites at several locations in the northern Stockholm archipelago, in Nacka, and around Strängnäs. But the largest bomb was dropped in Stockholm, on an open-air theater in the Eriksdal area, which seems insane. But there’s so much about all this that’s strange. I have to keep digging.”

  “When did the attack occur?”

  Max heard Sarah take a deep breath at the other end of the line.

  “That’s just it, Max. On the twenty-second of February 1944. The night before your father was born.”

  Stockholm, October/November 1943

  “It has to happen soon,” said Tatyana.

  There was unease in her eyes. Unease that had been there since her journey to Moscow and had grown stronger with the recurring nightmares.

  The curtains were drawn. Behind those, they could hide from the world. The night was a refuge, but it was much too short. Now a new day awaited. A day that would force them to live apart.

  Almost six weeks had passed since she had given him the microfilm. An incomprehensibly long time.

  It had seemed unreal to walk into the office of the organization that called itself the Intelligence Office. Contact had been established via Carl’s friend the minister of justice. The minister was a firm opponent of the Intelligence Office and believed that the General Security Service, to which the Intelligence Office belonged, had come into existence without the consent of the Swedish government. But when Carl told him about Tatyana, he had nevertheless agreed to contact the undersecretary, who in turn had arranged a meeting for Carl.

  The meeting took place in an oblong room with no windows. Just inside the door was a coat-tree with three hats and trench coats on it. Along one side of the room stood four desks with chairs on all sides. Nothing lay on the desks, not a single document. Somewhere in the room, a radio was playing the song Tatyana liked so much and sang to practice her Swedish, Ulla Billquist’s catchy tune “Min soldat.”

  Normally he couldn’t keep from smiling when he heard it. But no one was smiling here. Two men, dressed in well-pressed gabardine trousers, white cotton shirts, narrow dark ties, and knitted vests, looked at him coolly and then turned their backs on him and disappeared into a back room.

  The one man who remained said his name was Hedin. Standing in the doorway, he asked Carl to state his business. When Carl told him why he was there, Hedin took the film and left the room to copy the material. He told Carl to sit at one of the desks while he was doing this.

  When Hedin came back, he was a changed man. He asked a number of questions Carl was unable to answer. What else was there? Was there any guarantee that the material hadn’t already left the country and reached Soviet leaders in Moscow? Hedin’s reaction told Carl this was big. A technological breakthrough from the geniuses at a Swedish military research institute that absolutely must be kept out of the hands of the enemy.

  Hedin and his colleagues at the Intelligence Office were aware of the nature of the relationship between Carl and Tatyana. Carl had not counted on unconditional approval of this relationship, not now, not ever. He didn’t care. As long as they arrested her husband.

  “Why is it taking so long?” asked Tatyana, lying next to him in bed.

  “They’re preparing an arrest. It’s a sensitive operation. We have to be patient a little while longer.”

  “What happens then? What’s going to happen to him?”

  “He’ll be convicted of espionage against Sweden and locked up for the rest of his life.”

  Carl caressed her cheek and stroked her hair. She played with the hair on his chest.

  “When it’s done we’ll be free, Tatyana. I’m going to see to it that your marriage is annulled.”

  She breathed out, a heavy sigh. “Friday evening we’re going to the opera. Tell them that. They’ll have their chance then. Later it will be too late; I’m soon going to be showing.”

  “Showing?” said Carl. “What do you mean by ‘showing’?”

  She took Carl’s hand and placed it on her belly. Her eyes were shiny.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Carl paced back and forth in the apartment. He seemed to be looking at the clock every minute or minute and a half. On the streets below, cars and pedestrians were circling around Norra Bantorget. He looked down at the square body and round extension of the restaurant Rotundan. The innovative functionalist architecture made the building almost appear to hover above the ground. Neon signs shone on the facade. The restaurant was closed for the day; the terraces were empty, and down on the square, lines of people snaked from bus stops.

  He looked at Carlbergska Huset—the headquarters of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation—and the dance hall Vinterpalatset, to which many expectant couples were walking hand in hand. It would soon be time for the evening’s dancing to begin. Carl longed for days when he and Tatyana would be able to go there, hand in hand, and enjoy themselves as free individuals who loved each other, like the other couples who were out in the Stockholm night.

  A man called Andersson was supposed to take Tatyana directly to the apartment after the arrest. That was when their new life, their life in the open, was supposed to finally begin.

  The black Bakelite telephone sat silently on the table. Carl felt compelled to make sure it was still working. I
t had been over thirty minutes since the opera performance had begun. Legally, the case was cut and dried. The government would not have approved an arrest without knowing that the evidence was sufficient to support a conviction.

  His heart was pounding in his chest. When the clock at Adolf Fredrik Church struck a new hour, he jumped. Something must have gone wrong.

  He walked over to the telephone again and called the number that was only to be called in emergencies. He said his name and the name of the person with whom he wished to speak—Hedin.

  Carl heard the call being transferred several times. He tried to imagine what was happening to the signal, how it jumped from the Intelligence Office’s headquarters to offices near Gustav Adolfs Torg, where the eight-man task force was establishing a base from which to run the arrest operation.

  Suddenly that aggressive voice burst from the receiver. “Yes! This is Hedin!”

  “Where are you?” asked Carl. “Why haven’t you called me?”

  “Complications have arisen.”

  Complications? thought Carl. What kind of complications?

  “How is Tatyana? Where is she?”

  No reply.

  “Hedin?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Tatyana?”

  “She’s being interrogated right now.”

  Carl jerked.

  “You promised Andersson would take her straight here!”

  “Can you be sure she’s free of guilt, Carl?”

  It was as though time had suddenly stopped. What was it Hedin was insinuating?

  “She gave us the stolen material!”

  “That could have been a move by the other side. This is bigger than we could ever have suspected.”

  “It was a move I made!”

  “Evidently this man is something beyond what we thought he was. We’re trying to gauge the extent of the damage caused by this operation. And since you say this was a move made on your initiative, I’m going to see to it that you straighten out this mess.”

  Carl tried to understand what Hedin was talking about. What had he meant when he’d said the man was something beyond what they’d believed?

  “What’s happening, Hedin?”

  “The government’s involved. The Russians have already been in contact. What kind of agreement is going to be reached in the end, I don’t know.”

  What was it they were negotiating about? Why hadn’t they brought Tatyana to him as they’d promised?

  Then he remembered her nightmares. A dark door in precious wood, with carvings and a brass handle that reflected her tortured face.

  “Please, you can’t hand her over to them. That would be a terrible mistake! They’re going to kill her!”

  MONDAY, MARCH 4

  52

  On his way to his meeting with Mishin, Max sipped the coffee he’d taken with him in a paper cup from the Grand Hotel’s breakfast service. He’d resisted the temptation to take the last benzo and been awake all night. The brief moments of rest that had come to him after his conversation with Sarah had been interrupted by the sounds of explosions, ricocheting bullets, and screaming seals and by images of Pashie’s blood on the bathroom mirror. The boundaries between then and now, day and night, waking and sleeping states were being erased more and more. This morning he had caught sight of a slip of paper bearing the text “Bomb attack Stockholm 1944: Eriksdal Theater.” But he couldn’t remember having put it up.

  He looked at his Russian cell phone again. No one had called. No one had texted. His hand was shaking. Surely he couldn’t be experiencing withdrawal symptoms already? Could it happen that fast? Would he get through another night without a pill?

  Ilya parked the jeep outside the entrance to the National Library of Russia’s new building on Moskovsky Prospekt after taking a long drive past the bowl-shaped fountains in its cobblestoned front courtyard. The new building was primarily a storage facility but also housed newly furnished reading rooms with personal computers connected to the internet. Mishin met them at the entrance, between two of the light-gray limestone pillars.

  “Good morning, Max,” Mishin said, shaking his hand. “It’s good that you could meet me here.”

  He nodded at Ilya. If he otherwise reacted to Ilya’s appearance, he didn’t show it.

  He led Max and Ilya through a large reading room and into the department of newspapers and magazines.

  Max looked around the room. From the ceiling hung the crystal chandeliers found in all Saint Petersburg libraries. The door handles were carved in the same magnificent eighteenth-century style as those in the library’s original building on Nevsky Prospekt. The brown wall panels had come here, too, as had the low table lamps with copper bases and bottle-green glass shades. What broke with the timeless elegance was the collection of newly installed beige plastic boxes bearing the IBM logo.

  There was no one in the room but a young man in a cardigan much too large for him, who was standing next to the information desk with a stack of newspapers in his hands.

  “What I was planning to show you is here,” said Mishin, sitting down at a computer.

  The young man in the big sweater dropped the newspapers on the desk with a thud, and Ilya immediately turned his head toward him. Max laid a calming hand on his shoulder.

  The man came over to their table.

  “Excuse me for disturbing you, Professor Mishin, but I wonder if you would mind if I took a photograph of you. I would like to have a picture of you to send to Nash Sovremennik, if you don’t mind.”

  Mishin looked at Max, who raised his eyebrows. Let him take the picture for that magazine; show him that it doesn’t bother you.

  Mishin nodded at the young man. “All right.”

  “Thank you very much. It’s a great honor.”

  The young man took out a Polaroid camera.

  “Are you two involved in the professor’s research work?” he asked, pointing at Max and Ilya.

  “No,” said Max.

  He stepped to the side and pulled Ilya along with him so they wouldn’t appear in the picture.

  “Thank you so much, Professor Mishin,” the young man said when he had taken two pictures.

  When they were alone again, Mishin smiled a little awkwardly.

  “I had to register here in order to be able to log on to the computers. Apparently he recognized my name.”

  “What have you found?” Max asked impatiently.

  Mishin turned to the computer.

  “Right. Sorry. Well, I started looking for articles on the Shutul Ravine because you had mentioned that Pashie had written that in the book she sent you. Of course, everything written in Russian turned out to be worthless. But I found a reference to the Shutul Ravine in an American magazine. The article includes a statement by an Afghan refugee in the United States, a woman. She describes an individual referred to in the article as the Butcher of Nawzad, which is a godforsaken town three hours northwest of Kandahar.”

  Mishin typed on the keyboard.

  “Read this.” He turned the screen toward Max and Ilya.

  The woman, who had insisted on remaining anonymous despite the fact that the events in question had transpired more than fifteen years earlier, described a Russian colonel general who had arrived in her town at dawn on a spring day in 1980. He had commanded a unit of fifty soldiers, a remarkably small group for a man of such high rank to be leading. It would prove to be the case that these men were experts in destruction and killing. The woman had written that she would never forget the man who led the group. When she saw him walking along the gravel path that led to her town, the sun had just passed the hills of Uruzgan in the east, and the dust had shone in the light.

  She had been up before the dawn to care for the few animals still living in the family’s barn when she saw the man coming. His body was distinctly silhouetted against the bright sun of the spring morning. He was a large man, tall and broad-shouldered, bigger than a typica
l Russian officer. He had distinct features that made him stick out—a long, slender neck and a small head, as if someone had set a bird’s head on his huge body.

  After the Spetsnaz battalion took control of the town, the woman heard the men recount legends about their leader. They called him the Goose. With a combination of admiration and fear, the soldiers told what he was capable of. What he had done at the Shutul Ravine was an example of what could happen when people didn’t listen to reason, his reason.

  Later the men had a piano brought from God knows where. The people of the town had never seen such an instrument, much less heard one. The colonel general had sat down and played. The music had been like nothing the woman had heard in her life. Melancholy and hope had bored into her body and taken over her soul. How could a man create such beauty and wreak such destruction with the same hands?

  The woman would never forget that moment. Later, when she had found a new home in the United States, she had identified the music as Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23.

  What had happened the next morning would always haunt her, and every time she heard Mozart’s famous piano concerto, the memories returned.

  The Goose’s men had emptied the stores of food and raped the women of the town. When they had finished with this, they had lined up the men on the road that passed through the town and ordered them to get down on their knees. Then they had shot them and set the town on fire.

  War is madness.

  Max turned away from the screen, didn’t want to read on. Ilya stood next to him with clenched fists. The root under his eye seemed to have grown.

  Mishin cleared his throat.

  “Yes, it’s horrible reading,” he said. “I concluded that this man belonged to the GRU’s second independent Spetsnaz brigade. It was created in 1962 and served in the Afghan war, from 1979 until 1989. The second brigade had a focus on Scandinavia and the Baltic states, but it could be used anywhere the general staff considered it to be needed.”

  “Long, slender neck and a small head,” said Max.