Ask No Mercy (Max Anger Book 1)

by Martin Österdahl

  Lazarev had thought the professor had died in the explosion at the university, but apparently he had escaped that fate. He would discuss how this could have happened with Rector Levy at the earliest opportunity. After the young librarian had handed over the photographs from the library and told him what searches Mishin had carried out using the computers in the reading room, everything had become clear. The old professor had been working for the Swedes the whole time.

  Precisely as Lazarev had suspected from the beginning.

  It hadn’t taken the vory long to find him. They had offered to take care of him, but this was something Lazarev wanted to do himself.

  He opened the door to the shed, a changing room with a sauna, and nodded at the fifteen men who had assembled there this morning. Before he went in, he took a quick look at the river. Two men stood in water up to their waists, resting their elbows on the ice. They wore ridiculous wool hats like the ones children wore, and they seemed entirely absorbed in the chess set between them.

  Farther out in the river, Lazarev saw the man he had been looking for; he was lowering himself into the ice water completely alone.

  Lazarev undressed and left the shed without having warmed up in the sauna first. Wearing a burgundy towel around his waist, he took a few long steps out onto the ice.

  The man in the hole had his back to him. His body was immersed in the water, and he was snorting a little; only his head was above the surface. He seemed to be in an almost meditative state, as if what was going on was actually the purification the religious fools claimed took place.

  So you’ll have a healthy year.

  “Young man,” said Lazarev. “Do you mind if I share this hole in the ice with you?”

  Afanasy Mishin hardly looked around.

  “Of course not, my friend. Please do.”

  Lazarev slid down into the cold water with his back to the sharp edge of the ice, which was ten centimeters thick. Mishin still had his back to him, but when Lazarev’s feet made contact with the muddy river bottom, Mishin turned around.

  Their eyes met.

  Mishin opened his mouth.

  “You?”

  63

  Max ran as fast as he could from the Primorskaya subway station to the bathing spot in the Neva River. The sidewalk was slick, and he slipped a few times on his way to the riverbank, but he never lost his footing completely. He saw Ilya’s jeep coming toward him at full speed.

  Ilya braked to a stop right next to Max and jumped out of the car. They ran down the steps together. When they got to the ice, Max looked for Mishin but didn’t see him anywhere.

  He hurried over to a man who was sitting on a bench putting on his boots and asked him whether he had seen Mishin.

  “Afanasy?” said the man. “Try the sauna.”

  He pointed at the shed.

  “Mishin?” Max called through the door of the shed.

  Three naked men were standing in the changing room. They looked at Max.

  “Have you seen Afanasy Mishin?”

  The men shook their heads.

  Max closed the door and hurried back out.

  Down in the water, a man shouted. He was standing there with water up to his waist, playing chess with another man. There was something about his shouts. Max couldn’t make out what he was saying, but there was no mistaking the horror in his voice. The lively activity around the bathing spot suddenly came to a stop. An ice-cold wind swept over Max from the river and the sea beyond it. It felt like the north wind back home, a wind that could seal all life in a capsule of ice.

  The chess-playing man climbed out of the ice as though it had suddenly caught fire. He knocked the pieces over as he tried to get to his feet. The other man stayed where he was, his gaze directed downward, at the black water.

  Then he screamed.

  “Man in the water! There’s a man in the water!”

  Max ran the rest of the way to where the two men were. The other man was also trying to get out of the hole in the ice, using only one hand to push himself up. With his other hand, he was holding on to something that lay in the water.

  By combining their efforts, Max and the older man managed to raise the body out of the water. Max turned it over so he could see the face. But he already knew who this was.

  Mishin stared at him.

  Max felt for a pulse. Nothing. He pounded the chest. Nothing happened.

  You can’t die. Come on, now!

  But Afanasy Mishin was lost.

  64

  The police arrived at the scene and started to cordon off the area. Max and Ilya walked back to the car; there was nothing more they could do. Max punched in Sarah’s number, but the call didn’t go through. He tried the number at the house in Tyresö. In Stockholm it was three hours earlier, long before dawn.

  Finally, Sarah answered. Max got straight to the point and told her what they had concluded about Nestor Lazarev’s past and his proximity to Stalin and his innermost circle. Then he told Sarah what had happened near the banks of the Neva River.

  “Good lord, is it true? Has Afanasy Mishin been murdered?”

  “I got there too late.”

  “You can’t continue with this, Max. You have to come home now.”

  “Not before this is finished. Not now, when we’ve finally located the base. I think Pashie’s there, and I’m going to find a way to get in.”

  “You’re putting your life in danger!” Sarah exclaimed. “You don’t even know whether Pashie’s alive, and you’ve got no real proof, just circumstantial evidence.”

  Max took a deep breath; he didn’t have the energy to argue about this.

  “Have you gotten hold of Carl Borgenstierna yet?”

  Sarah sighed.

  “Carl Borgenstierna is no longer at the hospital, and I haven’t found out where he’s gone. However, I do know more about what happened when the bombs fell in 1944. A spy was in prison in Stockholm and was released three days after the city was bombed.”

  “A spy?” said Max. “The person who was in my hotel room and saw all my sheets of paper took a single sheet from the wall. The one with the names Wallentin and Borgenstierna on it.”

  “According to my source, Borgenstierna was involved in the legal aftermath. He took care of all the damages claims for the government and the insurance companies.”

  Sarah took a shaky breath.

  “This feels almost too big, Max. The spy was convicted of industrial espionage. He had stolen secret research from the government research institute FOA.”

  “What kind of research was this?”

  “It was a discovery that changed battlefield communications. The technology developed by FOA in the forties laid the foundation of a whole new industry. The telecommunications industry. Cellular telephones.”

  She was very interested in the technology.

  St. Petersburg GSM.

  An attack on Telia’s network in Sweden.

  Vektor’s telephones tapped.

  The picture was becoming clearer and clearer. The stolen research from FOA had started everything.

  Money—technology—politics.

  Everything was coming together.

  Sarah went on talking in a low, calming voice. She told him that after the bombs had fallen on February 22, 1944, a diplomatic protest had been Sweden’s only response. A convicted spy had been released, and it had all been hushed up. Three days later, the spy had been smuggled out of the country and reunited with Stalin in Moscow.

  The official Swedish line had been that the bombing had occurred as a result of a navigation error by the Soviet Northern Fleet.

  A Swede says nothing.

  “In Sweden, the spy always used an alias,” said Sarah. “His real name was never known to the public.”

  “He was called the Goose,” said Max. “He’s walking the streets of Saint Petersburg as Nestor Lazarev. He’s the chairman of St. Petersburg GSM, and he’s just restarted his personal war against Sweden.”

  65

 
; Charlie Knutsson was standing on a ladder next to the oldest apple tree in his garden on the island of Värmdö. Stockholmers didn’t take care of their apple trees properly. There were a lot of strange ideas about how and when they should be pruned. Some claimed they didn’t need to be pruned at all.

  Charlie had taken a little bit of Kivik with him when he had established a household here, and it was a true pleasure to care for his most beloved tree in the early spring.

  A car pulled onto the gravel on the other side of the house. Who could it be? He wasn’t expecting a visitor today.

  He couldn’t tell from the footsteps who was approaching, and he could see nothing but branches, so he climbed down.

  Frank?

  “Hi, Charlie!” said Frank Ståhl, who was tramping across the wet lawn in a green hunting jacket and heavy boots.

  Charlie had never seen him like this; they’d always met at one of the more upscale restaurants around Stureplan, and Frank always wore a suit and tie and polished shoes.

  Charlie had always had to keep after Frank if he’d wanted to make a meeting happen. Now Frank had suddenly come to see him—at his home on Värmdö, far from the center of the city.

  “I’ve almost lost count of all the times I’ve invited you out here and you haven’t been able to come,” said Charlie. “Did I forget I’d invited you today?”

  He offered Frank his hand, and as usual, Frank squeezed it much too hard.

  “Can I offer you anything? A cup of coffee, perhaps?”

  “Thanks but no thanks, Charlie. I have to hurry back to the city. But there’s a matter I want to talk to you about personally, face-to-face.” Frank’s lined face wrinkled up even more.

  What was this?

  “Do you remember our conversation about Telia?” Frank asked.

  Charlie nodded. “Has anything else happened?”

  “A name has come up during the investigation. A name that worries me a great deal. A name you know.”

  Who could it be? Frank seemed to be waiting for some sort of reaction.

  “Whose name is that?”

  “David Julin’s.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Charlie had a hard time keeping from laughing, but then the laugh died in his throat. He remembered the call from David, how strangely upset he’d been. Because Charlie had gotten David’s wife out of a jam at the supermarket. Charlie had sensed that something hadn’t been right, but surely David couldn’t be involved in this?

  “Isn’t he one of our most important partners?”

  “That’s exactly what worries me,” said Frank. “Have you noticed anything odd about him recently?”

  Charlie shrugged, didn’t know what to say. Should he tell Frank that David had shouted at him on the phone? Threatened him?

  “What kind of motive could David Julin have for breaking into our system?” Frank asked.

  Money? thought Charlie. The sale of his company had earned David over a hundred million kronor. He had donated a significant sum when Vektor was established. Surely he didn’t need money.

  “Is a police investigation of David in progress?”

  “We’re discussing this only with a small group of trusted individuals,” said Frank. “And you’re one of them.”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Have you been in contact with him recently?”

  Suddenly Charlie felt as if he was being interrogated.

  What was Frank really doing here? There was someone else he wanted to talk to before he said any more to Frank Ståhl. So that he wouldn’t make her life any harder. What if they were really in trouble? After all, they had young children. Three of them. Could Frank know about what had happened at ICA? About the call from David? He would have to play a cautious game with the truth now.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can help you. I don’t have much contact with David. I have no idea why he would commit a crime against Telia. It seems completely absurd.”

  Frank nodded. “Thanks, Charlie. Let me know if the situation changes.”

  He turned around and walked back toward his car.

  Charlie felt his heart rate starting to return to normal as the distance between him and Frank increased.

  Halfway to the car, Frank suddenly stopped and turned around.

  “See you tomorrow!” he shouted. “At Vektor’s party.”

  When Charlie heard Frank’s car drive away, he tossed his gardening gloves and pruning shears on the ground and walked toward the house. In the hall, he dug his cell phone out of his coat pocket and punched in her number.

  The call went directly to voice mail.

  “Hi, this is Gabbi. Leave a message if you have one.”

  “Gabbi, this is Charlie Knutsson. We have to talk. I’m worried about David.”

  66

  The doctors had been apologetic, but they were all realists—good, hardworking women and men. They knew it, and Carl Borgenstierna knew it. For an eighty-four-year-old patient, the odds were poor.

  If it hadn’t been for his position and his bank account, they wouldn’t even have attempted the transplant. Now that the procedure’s result was known, Carl wondered why they’d even tried. Why try to stop nature from taking its course? They were all born with a capsule in their bodies. According to Carl Larsson’s famous painting, the capsule broke at age fifty and the poison began to spread through the body.

  Why had he tried to buy himself another five years? What was it he had thought the future would give birth to for a stupid old man?

  Accept the fact. The human body was created to die.

  Before he had lain down on the operating table, he had made one last attempt. The new capitalist class of emperors, the new czars. How could it be that people had bet their hopes on them? When the delegates had arrived for the annual conference in the town in the Alps, no one had wanted to meet with Yeltsin, the incumbent president. Everyone had wanted to meet Zyuganov, the leader of the KPRF, the retro-communist party. The man who was to preside over a return to Soviet government.

  Someone had to do something.

  The initiative connected with this meeting had originated with the Russian capitalists, and everyone—the Americans, the Germans, the British, the IMF, the World Bank—had rushed to embrace it as if clutching at straws. Perhaps it wasn’t all over, after all? An agreement without a precedent in world history. Confidential and unholy, all in the name of democracy.

  Carl had planned it for a long time. He had done what he had felt he had to do and acquired the ability to play a small role in the great drama in order to gain an answer to a question, an answer that had eluded him for half a century.

  Where is the monster?

  Had his actions been morally defensible? Carl found strength in what he and Wallentin had agreed on long ago.

  We do not practice democracy. We protect it.

  He found mental strength in the promise he had given Tatyana.

  That he would avenge her death.

  It amused him to see how the health-care workforces had switched: caregivers had replaced physicians. He had been moved from Södersjukhuset to a place run by nuns, east of the city and right on the Baltic coast. The irony was striking: to die he’d been placed next to the sea that had been at the center of his entire life. It was a last trick played by the sadistic god who controlled the world: letting him end his days on earth with his gaze directed toward the horizon and Russia beyond it.

  His room was like a hotel room with a sea view. They called it a hospice. Carl called it a place to die. Everything he could see from his window looked fine: the lawn; the row of trees where it ended; the sea, still partly covered with ice, beyond the trees. But the caregivers didn’t have time to take the patients farther than to the edge of the hospice’s grounds. Perhaps he’d see everything from above, sooner than he knew, when his soul left his fragile body and flew away.

  There was a knock at the door, but Carl didn’t turn toward it. He knew who it was. The nuns had booked this mornin
g’s meeting for him. It was as though he had been transformed into a prematurely born child. All he had to do for himself was breathe; other people took care of everything else.

  She was a woman in her forties. The company for which she worked was called Rigus and specialized in death.

  “We certainly don’t all get to plan our own funerals,” the nun had said.

  Now the woman from Rigus sat down on a chair next to Carl’s bed, under the wall-mounted TV and in front of a little desk. What was it she had said her name was? Carl decided her name was Yvonne.

  Yvonne laid a white folder next to the mail Carl had had forwarded, right next to the album with the purple lily on it he had made sure came with him from the hospital. At the top of the pile of mail lay the letter from Vektor, with a two-week-old postal cancellation—from the young man who had tried to contact him on a number of occasions and had even seen him lying sedated in the recovery room at Södersjukhuset.

  Max Anger.

  Now the head of Vektor had started looking for him, too. Sarah Hansen.

  Yvonne asked Carl whether he had a family lawyer or would like her to provide him with one. Carl smiled a little. One of the problems with Sweden today was that people no longer bothered to prepare themselves for meetings by doing a little research.

  I’m not just the family’s lawyer. I’m the nation’s.

  To the young woman, he said only, “Thanks, but that won’t be necessary. Everything is taken care of.”

  She asked whether Carl had burial insurance. That must have been the stupidest question Carl had ever heard. Why would anyone ever take out such a policy?

  Don’t worry, he wanted to say. I can pay for my own death. I’m not going to be a burden on anyone.

  Yvonne showed him a document she called “the White Archive.” Carl looked at the first question. “Disposal of the body: Example: I do not wish to be embalmed.” Embalmed? Like Lenin in the mausoleum on Red Square?

  “Question two: Clothing: Example: I would like to wear my pin-striped suit / my purple summer dress, or my favorite pajamas with underwear underneath.”