A small lake glittered behind some of the trees. He couldn’t see a farm. He walked over to a lone mailbox that stood deserted in the shadow of some overgrown lilacs, the lid covered in green moss. Fabian picked up a stick and scraped the moss off. A faded blue label read BRUNNER.
A path led him onward from the mailbox through the lilacs. Once he was on the other side of the bushes, he could see a flash of something in the air above the trees. As he got closer, he realized that it was a large, round, gleaming lens mounted on a pole that was attached to the roof ridge of one of the buildings.
He didn’t spend long trying to figure out what the lens was for and continued down the overgrown path to the farm, wondering what it would be like to live this far out in the middle of nowhere. He probably wouldn’t last more than a few days before absence of city air drove him crazy. This would pretty much be the perfect place if you wanted to be left alone and undisturbed. There were no neighbours as far as the eye could see, no access roads, no one to watch you. Was that what Urs Brunner was after?
In any case, it had obviously been a long time since Urs had been here, maybe even several years. Fabian waded through the high grass toward a building with mossy-grey, fibre-cement siding. He walked around the corner, stopping mid-step to try and digest what was before him. Either he was dreaming, or the killer was a much bigger mystery than he ever could have imagined.
About twenty metres in front of him, there was an identical building to the one he was currently standing beside. But the area between the buildings was extremely puzzling. The grass had been neatly manicured, as if it were a golf green ready for Tiger Woods’s most crucial putt. There was a hedge, a few inches high, in the middle of the lawn, which framed a rectangle of neatly raked gravel. Fabian thought it looked like a gravesite and estimated it was about three by four metres.
He walked across the lawn to the grave-like area. What he saw fundamentally changed the investigation in a single blow. Everything they knew had suddenly become useless and they would have to start over from the beginning. Fabian had no idea where to go from here.
The sun peeked out from behind the clouds, the air immediately becoming a few degrees warmer. Fabian stepped across the hedge, stood in the gravel rectangle, and looked down at the three-centimetre-thick plate of glass that was suspended a few inches above the ground on four metal legs. Rune Schmeckel lay face up on the glass. He was naked; his arms and legs sprawled out to the four corners of the glass. His limbs were bound to the plate he was lying on.
The man he had been hunting for the past few days was right here — exposed, vulnerable, and scorched. He had no hair left and there were severe burns on his scalp. His skull was exposed in certain places. Fabian tried to gather his thoughts, to figure out what had happened, but each time he ended up bewildered. Long burns extended all over Schmeckel’s face and body, as if someone had tortured him with a welding torch, but the wounds were far too straight to have been made by hand.
Fabian felt dizzy and sick from all the thoughts that were buzzing in his head like flies around a cadaver. Sweat beaded on his forehead and ran into his eyes, which tingled with the salt. Why hadn’t he thought to bring some water? He tried to swallow the sticky feeling in his mouth, but that only made him more nauseous. He needed a drink. Maybe there was a well of water around here. He began looking for one when something started crackling right behind him. He smelled smoke and felt something get hotter and hotter. He turned around quickly, but he couldn’t see anything that might explain the smell. Could he really be dreaming after all? Was he at home, asleep in his bed? The crackling sound was now right behind his ear, which suddenly stung with a terrible, sharp pain. Only then did he realize he was on fire.
Part 2
July 7–July 11, 2010
“It’s not death itself that scares us when we are dying, but the risk of being forgotten.” — I. M.
January 8
As usual, everyone looked at me and laughed when I came into the schoolyard. I could feel them rubbing against my mitten. I wish I hadn’t been so nervous and afraid, but I was. I was afraid that they had thought up some new way to hurt me for the start of the semester. A really horrible trick that would make the rest of the idiots laugh.
But like usual, they shouted about me being gay and smelling like a urinal. I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t run either. I just turned around, walked up to one of them, and hit him in the face with the brass knuckles under my mitten. It hurt more than I thought it would, but I hit him again because I knew one time wasn’t enough. He tried to hit back, but he missed. I grabbed his hood, yanked him down to the ground, and started pounding his head on the pavement over and over again. I don’t remember if it was him or me screaming. I think it was both of us.
It was the most awesome thing I’ve ever done. Well, since the first time I went to Legoland. I could see the fear in his eyes and it just made me madder and madder, but I also felt stronger and stronger. He just lay there underneath me and took it. No one tried to stop me, not even his friend. I could have kept going until his skull cracked if I wanted to. I swear.
P. S. Laban was dead when I got home. I don’t know why, but I started crying.
45
FAREED CHERUKURI HAD BEEN thinking about it a lot, and now he was sure. He had, without a doubt, one of the most boring jobs in the world. If he had a choice, he would have rather helped clean up Chernobyl than sit here at TDC customer services and be forced to answer questions, each more stupid than the last. Why won’t my Internet work? Can you help me use Google?
Even though he was overqualified, he had accepted the position because he needed the money. When your last name was Cherukuri, finding a job was practically impossible in a country like Denmark. He had been promised the possibility of a promotion as soon as they had assessed his work ethic. There’s always a demand for good programmers, they had told him. Three years had gone by, and he was still sitting down here in the bunker, feeling the heavy weight of the headset. I dropped my phone in the toilet and now I can’t use it to make calls. Can you help me?
But today, for the first time, he had received a question that woke him from his boredom. Just a few moments into the conversation, he found himself sitting straight up. He was excited.
The woman introduced herself as Dunja Hougaard. She was a police officer with the crime squad in Copenhagen. She told him that she should have called TDC’s special division for cell phone searches, but the paperwork would take too long and she would prefer to avoid starting such a major process at this early stage in the investigation if at all possible.
His job was customer service, not wiretapping. Unless she was having a problem with her TDC subscription, he couldn’t help her. No matter how much he might want to, there was nothing in his power he could do to find the information she wanted. At least, according to his job description.
In fact he had spent all those years exercising his brain and programming skills by hacking into TDC’s systems, breaking through firewall after firewall, and even reaching the Holy Grail — calls, texts, and data traffic. For the past year he had been able to eavesdrop on any call that was connected through the TDC network: it didn’t matter if it was Queen Margrethe, Casper Christensen, or Søren Pind.
Listening to people’s phone calls had brightened his days for a few months, but soon he had sunk back into a brain-dead haze. He had been hoping to find out about some juicy scandals, but he hadn’t discovered anything outrageous. It was like everyone knew someone was listening. But today was different.
The policewoman asked whether a specific number in Sweden had called a specific number in Denmark sometime during the evening of Friday, July 2. He asked whose numbers they were, but she wouldn’t tell him. He promised to see what he could do and to call her back as soon as possible.
He immediately discovered that the Swedish number belonged to an Astrid Tuvesson, chief of the crime unit in Helsingborg, and that the Danish number belonged to Kim Sleizner, the head of
the Danish police. Now he knew why she didn’t want to put this inquiry on the record.
This just kept getting better and better. Sleizner was something of a celebrity. Anytime the police had to make a statement, the responsibility fell to Kim Sleizner. Fareed had no trouble with the search, and he’d been able to call Dunja Hougaard back after only a few minutes.
“The Swedish number called the Danish number at 5:33 p.m. last Friday.”
“Did the Danish number answer?”
“No, but a message was left on the voicemail. Do you want me to play it?” Fareed could hear the policewoman’s hesitation, which he understood. What right did she have to go in and listen to her boss’s messages?
“Okay.”
Fareed Cherukuri pressed play.
“This is Astrid Tuvesson with the Helsingborg police. We have an emergency situation in your jurisdiction. There is an extremely dangerous criminal at a gas station in Lellinge, and we are afraid that he may have taken one of the employees hostage. He is behind at least two murders in Sweden, and he must be stopped before he commits any more. Call as soon as you get this message. In the meantime I am going to contact the station in Køge.”
It had happened just as Fabian Risk claimed it had.
“Did the Danish number call the Swedish number back?”
“No. He didn’t listen to the message until the next day, after which he erased it.”
“Erased it?”
“Yes, but we keep the sound files for a year.”
He said “he,” Dunja thought. She knew immediately that he had looked up the name of the Danish subscriber, but she had no intention of commenting on it. She had the answer to her question. Now she just needed to figure out how to proceed.
“I found something else,” he said, just as she was about to thank him for his help and hang up.
“Oh?”
“I know the geographic location of the phone when the voicemail picked up the call.”
“Okay?”
“He was at the corner of Lille Istedgade and Halmtorvet.”
Dunja knew the address very well. It was famous for being a corner frequented by prostitutes. “I’m sure it’s just a coincidence,” she replied, thanking him for his help and hanging up.
46
THE WHITE-HOT BEAM OF sunlight hit the man’s bare stomach just below his navel. A thin column of smoke rose from the point of contact and there was a faint bubbling sound, as if someone were frying a tiny egg. It was already past six in the evening, but the sun was still shining like it was midday. The air vibrated. It smelled burnt.
So this is what burning human skin smells like, Fabian thought, glancing up at the roof-mounted lens. It’s closer to fried pork than burning hair. He had smelled that earlier, too, when his jacket and then his hair had caught fire.
Several precious seconds had passed before he’d realized that his body was on fire. He had thrown himself to the ground in an attempt to smother the flames, but they refused to go out. He nearly panicked when the hair on the back of his neck wouldn’t stop burning. Now that it was over, the stench was nearly as unbearable as the pain; the fire hadn’t gone out until he’d managed to pull his jacket up over his head.
Nearly an hour had gone by since then. Fabian noticed that the same ray had burned a centimetre of Rune Schmeckel’s abdomen. He wondered if he should move the body, but the pain in his back made it almost impossible for him to move. He also didn’t want to touch anything until Molander and the others arrived. He didn’t want to give Lilja more reason to suspect him. Instead, he ignored the pain, stepped back over the hedge, took off his shoes and socks, and gingerly lay down on the grass.
The silence was nearly unreal. He couldn’t hear any distant birds or the wind in the trees. It seemed as if this whole place was holding its breath, and he was the only thing still alive. He couldn’t keep his eyes open a moment longer, and finally gave in to sleep, which surrounded him, pulling him deeper and deeper into a dreamless black hole.
47
DUNJA HOUGAARD STEPPED INTO the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor. Her back was still tender from her half-hour on the acupressure mat. She had decided to sit on the information she had received from the man at TDC. For once, she was going to avoid acting rashly. Before she did anything, she wanted to be sure that all the information was accurate.
It was clear beyond all doubt that the Swedes had called Kim Sleizner, but Dunja wasn’t sure if Sleizner really had been at the corner of Lille Istedgade and Halmtorvet at the time of the call — and if he was, she didn’t know what he had been doing there. It wouldn’t surprise her at all to find out that the Sleazeball visited prostitutes. But if it turned out that he did it during business hours, all hell would break loose.
The elevator doors opened and she walked into the traffic enforcement unit, although that wasn’t where she was headed. She was going to the IT department, way back in the far corner. There was one last thing she wanted to check on before she went home.
“Hey sexy! You look like you sold yourself and lost the drugs,” hollered Mikael Rønning, whose outfit of the day consisted of tight white jeans and a very low-cut T-shirt with shiny silver appliqué.
“Well, I’d say that’s about how I feel.”
“What is it this time? Did your computer catch herpes again from all that porn you’ve been watching?”
“In a manner of speaking.” She leaned toward his desk. If Mikael were straight, his language would have definitely pissed her off. For some unknown reason, she had so much more patience for gay guys. Mikael could say more or less whatever he wanted to her and she didn’t mind — a fact he always liked to make the most of. He always found something wrong with her: if it wasn’t her clothes, it was her hair, or her breath. Did you forget to brush your teeth again? How many times do I have to tell you, you always have to brush after a blow job. You know they swim in and get stuck between...
“I need a printout of the personnel log for July second.”
“Last Friday?”
Dunja nodded with an expression that indicated she didn’t want to say any more.
“May I ask why?”
“Ask away, but don’t expect me to answer.”
Mikael muttered something unintelligible, sat down at his computer, and entered a few commands. Soon after, the printer started spitting out page after page of logins and logouts for every employee in the building. Dunja took the pages before they even had time to cool off, and glanced through them as quickly as the machine could print them.
She found Sleizner’s clock-in on the fourth page. At 11:43 a.m. he had swiped his key card and entered his code at the south employee entrance from the parking lot. From there he went up to the crime unit, where he logged into his computer. She didn’t see anything until 10:46 p.m., when he logged out and left the building.
According to the TDC guy, Sleizner had been on Lille Istedgade, not far from the police station, at 5:33 p.m. But according to the log, he had never left the building. Either she’d been given false information, or Sleizner had managed to leave the building without having to log in and out.
“I’m taking this home with me,” she said, hurrying off.
“You owe me!” Mikael Rønning shouted at her.
“You can get me into bed whenever you want! Just say the word!” She slapped her own ass before vanishing out the door. Mikael laughed, thinking that if he were ever going to do something as hopelessly stupid as crawling back into the closet, it would be with Dunja.
48
HE WAS SITTING IN “The Heart,” his control room. “The Brain” would have been a more fitting name, but he preferred the former; he thought it sounded cosier. The Heart was just one of several rooms he had spent several years secretly excavating under his one-storey house, two and a half metres below ground. He had spent the past couple of months turning this subterranean space into his permanent abode, and only occasionally did he go up into the house. He could live underground and survi
ve for more than a year if he had to.
He had a small kitchen with running water and a pantry that was well stocked with canned and dried food. There was a warmed waterbed in the bedroom that was even more comfortable than his regular bed. Since there were no windows, he’d spent a lot of time working on the lighting before he was satisfied. When he was finished he could brag that on a cloudy day, he had more daylight underground than there was outside.
His biggest problem had been the ventilation. The easiest solution would have been to put the inlet and outlet somewhere in the yard, but the noise from the fans would have been too obvious. Instead, he’d attempted to channel the air up through the house and out of a new chimney, but no matter how much insulation he used, the humming sound broke through, revealing that there was more than just a one-storey house there. He ended up staging a little bit of roadwork outside the house to “repair a water leak,” so that he could move the ventilation system all the way over to the corner of the plot next to the electrical box. Yes, it had been complicated, but it was well worth the effort.
He was still the most pleased with The Heart. It was the shape of a hemisphere, just over two metres in diameter. It functioned like a cockpit, with everything he needed within an arm’s reach. He had painted the concrete walls red, and used gold spray paint on the semicircle of the control panel and his chair. A recessed cabinet to his right held three custom-built computers. They made the most expensive computers on the market look about as advanced as a Commodore 64. He also had two NAS servers that held eight terabytes each. Everything was cooled and soundproofed. Each computer had a dedicated connection of one hundred megabytes per second in both directions. When he was online he used several proxy servers so that no one could trace his actual IP addresses.
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