Ask No Mercy (Max Anger Book 1)

by Martin Österdahl

  “Question three: People to contact: Example . . .”

  Carl looked at the woman whose name might have been Yvonne. She was staring at the screen of her cell phone; perhaps she was sending a message to someone. Someone she wanted to contact. He looked at the stack of mail on the table, at the album and at the letter from Max.

  People to contact?

  He looked at the old photograph at his side.

  “For betraying Mother Russia, I deserve to die.”

  Her voice never fell silent.

  When he had seen her alive for the last time, in the last hours of February 22, 1944, her body had been covered by a white sheet. Where her right leg should have been, the sheet had fallen flat, straight down to the stretcher from the raised position of her hip bone. Her stomach had looked as if it had been punctured. Carl had hardly been able to recognize her.

  He had seen the transformation, a last exhalation, so weak that he had nearly missed it—a little disruption of the air around her, and then a stiffness that fell across her face like a veil. It was the terrible beauty of release from pain. But her pain had taken up residence in Carl’s body. He had wanted to turn his eyes inward so that he would never see anything again. The image of her in that peaceful moment remained printed on the insides of his eyelids forever. An image he could never share with anyone.

  He couldn’t make himself leave her side, leave her where she lay on the stretcher, not even to go to that other room, to the shrill screams that were coming from there.

  People to contact?

  He had made contact. Not with Max, but with a person close to him.

  Had she cared? Had she taken what he had said seriously? Had they put everything together now, she and Max? And would that finally lead to redress and peace?

  Or would it lead to even more suffering?

  Carl’s eyes wandered from the letter from Vektor to the old framed photograph.

  Perhaps he could find peace at last if the evil was defeated and he got his revenge?

  Yvonne looked up from her cell phone and saw that Carl was no longer interested in the White Archive.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Borgenstierna,” she said. “Can I help you in some way?”

  Yes, go home to your family, thought Carl. I know exactly what I want.

  Then he told her what it was.

  No burial. No favorite pajamas. Cremation, no fancy urn. He knew exactly where: in the Woodland Cemetery’s memorial grove. There, at the foot of a little tree, his ashes would be spread. No sign, no gravestone, no name. His existence would be erased, just as they had erased hers. Put him there. There, she was waiting for him.

  After fifty-two years.

  After the woman had noted Carl’s wishes, gathered her papers, and put them in her purse, she rose to leave. She had picked up the White Archive, and she laid it on Carl’s desk.

  “I’ll leave this here with you, Mr. Borgenstierna. Sometimes people change their minds.”

  67

  The sun lit up the harbor as Max and Ilya returned to the Baltic Point. The area somehow managed to look even bleaker in the clear light. They parked the jeep a few blocks away and tried to look uninterested as they walked toward the hangar.

  During the night, they had identified nearby buildings that could be used as hiding places. They had decided on a building in the same area as the hangar, a dilapidated and abandoned gymnastics hall. They climbed into the building through a door opening at the back and crouched down as they walked up the stairs to the upper floor.

  The building had been stripped of everything of value. The sheet-metal roof was gone; reinforcing bars sprayed toward the night sky from blocks of concrete like branches on a dead tree. All the windowpanes had been broken. The doors that had led from the stairwell to the upper floor were missing. There were pools of water on the concrete floor. Remnants of plastic sheets fluttered in the wind over thresholds and in door openings.

  Max stepped over to one of the broken windows, stood with his shoulder to the wall, and glanced diagonally down toward the hangar. His heart was pounding in his chest; he felt the heartbeats like hard whip strokes along his ribs and up toward his temples. He kept seeing the dead Mishin; he had to blink to see the abandoned marine center and the hangar next to it once again.

  Are you in there, Pashie? And are you in there? The guy who wanted to take a picture of Mishin for a literary magazine?

  His jaws tensed when he thought of the skinny young man with the glasses and the cardigan.

  Max glanced at Ilya, who wasn’t watching the hangar but had his gaze fixed on Max.

  “I’m going in now,” said Max.

  Ilya shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t expect you to come with me, but I have to get to Pashie now.”

  Max walked toward the stairs, but Ilya grabbed his arm. Hard. Max turned toward him, saw the blood pulsing in heavy surges in the exposed vein under his left eye.

  “Take your hand off me.”

  Ilya pulled his Makarov from his waist holster. “We might as well shoot you here and now. It’ll be easier for me to send your body back to Stockholm. I won’t have to go in there and get it.”

  Ilya pointed at the hangar with his pistol.

  Max twisted, but Ilya’s grip was firm.

  “So this is where it ends?”

  “Not at all,” Ilya said. “Not if you calm down and listen to me.”

  Max saw the strength in Ilya’s look. The fire of his friendship. He nodded, and Ilya slid his pistol back into its holster.

  “These people have already shown that they’re willing and able to kill people in a number of different ways. Assume they’re heavily armed.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Max. He was tripping over his words; his breathing was hectic. It was as if all his body’s settings had been turned up to maximum.

  Ilya furrowed his brow. “Have you run out of those pills?”

  Max shook his head. One left.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m pissed off.”

  Ilya nodded.

  “If you want revenge, you have to listen now. We can’t get in that way, not in the middle of the day. We’re going to wait here, we’re going to rest until darkness falls, and then we’re going to plan to get in a different way.”

  68

  Sarah leaned back heavily in her chair and looked out the window, at the trees bending in the wind down on Valhallavägen. Her thoughts always returned to her phone conversation with Max, to what he had told her and what she had concluded herself. Pashie might be held prisoner in a hangar. Mishin was dead. A man who had been convicted of espionage in Stockholm in 1944 was calling himself Lazarev and was the chairman of St. Petersburg GSM. Borgenstierna was no longer at Södersjukhuset.

  Sarah didn’t usually get worked up, but this was too much. She took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. First their phones didn’t work, then private data disappeared, then Charlie told her someone was spying on them. What did this mean for them? For Sweden’s security?

  It had taken them two years to establish their presence in Saint Petersburg. Now they were back at square one. Sarah didn’t see how they could keep going anymore.

  Where was Carl Borgenstierna? Was it possible he was being cared for at home? In the residence in Gamla Stan? There was a shop on the ground floor; Sarah had walked past it a few times. She would have to get in there somehow.

  She cursed herself again. She should have listened to Max from the beginning.

  And then there was the text message she had gotten last night. Sarah reached for her phone, brought up the message. She didn’t know how many times she’d read it. With every word the temperature of her body rose, from her loins up to her throat.

  I can’t stand it at home. I have to come over to your place tomorrow night.

  The worry she felt, about Vektor’s future, about Sweden’s future. Her longing for this evening. So many feelings crashing into each other.<
br />
  Suddenly the screen of her cell phone went blank.

  What was this now? Sarah took out the battery, got a safety pin out of her purse to pick the SIM card out, rubbed the card clean on her blouse, blew on it, and put it and the battery back in place. But the phone still didn’t work.

  She looked around her office. How was she going to manage without a cell phone? She’d had it for a year and a half, and now, when it suddenly didn’t work, she couldn’t even get through an afternoon.

  She could call Max from her landline at home. But Gabbi? They’d sent each other quite a few text messages. Pretty private stuff. Where were those messages now? Where did texts go? The dead chunk of plastic she was holding in her hand didn’t give her access to them—that was for sure. Could she call Gabbi from her home phone? What if Gabbi didn’t answer a call from a number she didn’t recognize? She didn’t want to give up their night together.

  Did Telia still not know who was responsible for those attacks? Was someone simply sabotaging Vektor’s telephones? Was her cell phone ruined forever now—was the software somehow corrupt?

  Sarah pressed a button on the in-house telephone on her desk.

  “Violet?” she said. “Would you call Telia’s customer service for me, please?”

  A fairly simple request, but Sarah assumed that Telia’s customer service department was having a rough time these days and that what she was asking would mean a long, frustrating wait in a telephone queue.

  “Has something happened?” asked Violet.

  “My phone’s not working. I don’t know what the problem is. There’ve been so many problems recently—they have to get this fixed somehow.”

  “I’ll call Telia.”

  “Thanks, Violet. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  His computer suddenly flashed a message. An incoming call from Vektor to Telia’s customer service.

  David Julin abandoned what he had been doing and stared at the screen. Now what Ray had predicted was happening—this was the beginning of the new assignment he’d been forced to accept.

  He put his headset on. His mouth was dry, and he took a sip of water.

  “Good afternoon, this is Telia customer service,” he said. “What can I help you with?”

  “Hello?” said the woman at the other end. “Is this customer service?”

  “Yes, you’ve reached customer service,” David said as calmly as he could.

  “Oh, good! I thought I’d have to wait a really long time.”

  Too eager. Calm down, now. You can’t make any mistakes here.

  “What can I help you with?” David asked again.

  “I’m calling for my boss, Sarah Hansen. We’ve had big problems with our cell phones, and now her phone has quit completely.”

  “Would you like me to send over a replacement phone?”

  “Oh, that would be great. Would you be able to send it over before she leaves work for the day?”

  “If not, we could send the phone to her home.”

  “That would be incredibly nice of you. I’ll tell her. This is with regard to the telephone associated with the number . . .”

  David didn’t need to write down the number the woman read off. He already knew it by heart.

  “No problem, we’ll take care of it. I’ll see to it that someone delivers the phone to Sarah Hansen at home.”

  69

  Max heard his father rummaging around in the basement. He could imagine the tabletop covered with books, notebooks, and newspapers. A bottle of Bell’s Blended Scotch Whisky. Max heard him mumbling. Was he talking to himself now? Max reached for the telephone on the little blue night table and lifted it to his ear.

  “I want to talk to the lawyer,” his father said into his ear.

  “Who is this? Do you know what time it is?” said a woman. “You’ve called Dr. Wallentin. There’s no lawyer here.”

  “Let me talk to the doctor, then. Tell him it’s Arholma calling.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the woman. “But you’ll have to accept that this conversation is going to end now.”

  “Put your husband on now!”

  Max heard a little bump when the woman put the receiver down. Max held his breath. His father breathed heavily in his ear.

  “With whom am I speaking?” a man asked with a deep, sleepy voice.

  “I’m calling from Arholma. You know, that godforsaken little speck in the sea? It’s been twenty-five years since you were here last.”

  “How did you find me?” asked the man.

  “It took me a while,” said Max’s father. “Hello? Are you still there?”

  “This is a mistake,” the man said. “A terrible mistake.”

  “Twenty-five years.”

  “Listen to me,” the man said in a voice that was now determined, wide awake. “Are you calling me from your home?” All background noise was suddenly cut off; it sounded as though he had covered the microphone with his hand. “This conversation is going to end now.”

  “Wait—”

  “No,” said the man. “This never happened, you understand? You won’t get a second chance.”

  “Hello? Wallentin?”

  There was a click from the receiver. Then Max could hear only his father’s erratic breathing. As quietly as he could, he hung up the phone.

  He started when he heard the sudden howl. It came up through the floor tiles. Papa was throwing things around down in the basement; soon Max heard the whiskey bottle crash to the floor. Papa screamed louder.

  Louder and louder.

  Max was freezing when he woke. A few yards to the left of him, Ilya sat sleeping with his back against the bare concrete wall; he had abandoned his sentry post. In many ways Ilya was a great person, but he obviously wasn’t cut out for the military.

  These are my affairs, not yours, my friend. You must feel you’ve sold yourself far too cheaply. Even though you thought you were pushing it when you said fifteen thousand dollars.

  Max got up and went over to a broken window with a view of the marine center and the hangar. Had Lazarev come here while they’d both been sleeping? Had he been here the entire time?

  It would be dusk soon; the light in the abandoned building was weak.

  Max switched on the flashlight Ilya had brought from the jeep. The wall Ilya was leaning against was covered with graffiti.

  “Fuck OMON!”

  “HUNGER.”

  “Death to Gorbachev!”

  “September 14, 1991—the last dance of the Cossacks!”

  “Long live Vympel!”

  Next to the doorway, someone had painted a caricature of one of the Spetsnaz symbols, a clenched fist gripping a Kalashnikov rifle. The middle finger of this fist stuck up, and the barrel of the rifle had been replaced with a veined penis.

  The wall on the other side of the room had been decorated with more graffiti—more detailed, like cave paintings, scenes of play and pain, children holding each other’s hands, children running in a forest, children hiding. But there were also paintings of weapons and tanks.

  A large figure had been painted in the middle of the wall. It looked like a forest creature, a tall witchlike figure with short legs and a long torso. Its arms reached for children who were trying to run away. In its hands, it held long knives covered with blood. Beyond the path on which the children were running, a bonfire of sticks and branches was burning. Under the bonfire was a foundation built of skulls.

  The figure was neither woman nor man. It had long, stringy hair, and simple, ragged clothes hung on its almost anorexic body. In the background, tree trunks and roots intertwined with each other and the forest. In the treetops, Orthodox crosses hung over the flames from the big fire.

  What had inspired these horrible images? What did they represent? And who had created them?

  Max looked down at the hangar. A lone car arrived, a black Mercedes. The electric gate opened, and from his raised position Max could see the courtyard beyond the gates. Soon more cars arrived,
six in all.

  “Ilya. We have visitors.”

  Ilya woke immediately. He walked over to the other window and stood as Max was standing, with his back to the wall and with his head tilted to the side so he could look diagonally down through the window at the hangar.

  “Someone seems to have planned a gala evening.”

  The men stepped out of their cars. They greeted each other, shook hands, embraced each other, kissed each other. This went on for five or six minutes. Then a long black limousine turned the corner onto the street on which the hangar stood. Two motorcycles drove in front of it; an accompanying bodyguard car followed it. The limousine was a ZiL; the brand’s status put Western brands like Rolls-Royce and Maybach in the shade. On Moscow streets, there were lanes named after it, the so-called ZiL lanes, which only high-ranking party members were allowed to use. In the beginning ZiL had been called ZiS, Zavod imeni Stalina, but after Soviet leaders condemned the cult of Stalin, the company had replaced Stalin’s name with that of Likhachev, the factory director, and changed the short form to ZiL.

  “A celebrity guest?” asked Ilya.

  “Come over here,” said Max, waving his hand.

  He walked over to the stairwell, shone his flashlight along the walls. At the top of the stairwell was an iron ladder that led up to the roof beams.

  “If we can get up there, we’ll be able to see better.”

  They climbed the ladder and caught sight of a little platform around the chimney they could stand on. When they managed to get there by balancing on a roof beam, they concealed themselves behind the chimney and observed what was going on in front of the hangar.

  The two motorcyclists parked and went and stood on either side of a worn metal door. They were dressed in black leather jumpsuits and black helmets. Two men got out of the escort car. They were solidly built and dressed in identical gray coats and shiny leather boots. They disappeared from view when they walked back toward the gate. One of the limousine doors opened; a foot, a leg, and then a second leg emerged. A man straightened up his long body and stretched to his full height in the courtyard. Everything around the man seemed to shrink, even the huge limousine. The man was wearing an elegant brown overcoat. He turned his head to both sides as though he was adjusting his neck. That long neck looked as if it belonged to a bird, and it was hidden by the collar of a turtleneck sweater. His head was disproportionately small compared to the rest of his body.