“She’s going to get treatment,” he said.
Jens began to close the door.
“When?”
“In ten, fifteen hours,” he said.
“That could be too late….”
Jens studied the doctor. She seemed genuinely concerned.
“We’re going to take her away from here, come what may,” he said.
“She mustn’t wake up for the next twelve hours,” Vibeke said, and began to take things off the shelves in the medicine storeroom, still talking as she read the labels and put the medication into an empty box.
“Make sure you keep her sedated the whole time. And she absolutely mustn’t lose any more blood. Keep her on a drip, and monitor her pulse.”
She went on giving him instructions about how to care for Sophie: what medication to give her, how often, and by what means. Jens picked up the box of medication and drip bags and walked out of the storeroom.
“Someone will come and let you out in a while,” Jens said, then shut the door on her, locking it with a loud click.
They rolled the bed through the corridor, following their preplanned route, toward the fire escape stairs, where they folded the wheels under the bed and carried it down two floors and rolled it out on to a loading dock in back of the hospital.
A Chevrolet Express was standing there with its back doors open. Lothar was waiting in the back of the van. Sophie was pushed inside. They locked the bed, fixed it to the floor and walls with cables, then drove off, quietly and carefully.
The back of the van rocked as Lothar and Jens worked to attach the drip, while Jens gave Lothar the information he had just been given inside the hospital by the doctor.
“I’ll manage,” Lothar said.
“Good,” Jens said. He stopped for a moment. “You’re a good kid,” he said, and patted Lothar on his shoulder.
Lothar didn’t reply, and arranged the medicines in a plastic tray on the floor.
Jens made his way to the front of the van and slipped into the seat next to Mikhail.
Ejnar Larsen was confused. His tied-up colleague had been found early that morning by his replacement. The female patient with no identity was missing. As was the bed she had been lying in.
None of the surveillance cameras had registered anything.
Ejnar was reading a computer printout from Sweden. The DNA hadn’t brought up any matches, and neither had the fingerprints. The woman was still anonymous.
He scratched his head, the way he sometimes did when he needed to think. And there was something else bothering him.
Ejnar went through the events of the past few days—the reports and investigations. He had seen something, noticed something in passing…recently…very recently.
Something about the Copenhagen Police working on a report from the Malmö Police on the other side of the Sound. They’d asked for help….
What the hell was it, again?
Ejnar searched his papers. The piles were large and unsorted. He cursed himself for being so untidy. But eventually he found what he was looking for.
He skimmed through the report. A remarkable gunfight at a multistory parking garage in Malmö. No witnesses to speak of, the Swedish police suspected the use of guns with silencers. It was all very sketchy….But it wasn’t the shootout itself that caught Ejnar Larsen’s interest. It was an occurrence at the hospital shortly afterward….
He searched his desk again and found a report of a man with a gunshot wound being admitted to the University Hospital in Malmö. The man, who hadn’t had any ID on him, was operated on, then was picked up by two men and disappeared.
Exactly what had happened here?…
He scratched his head again.
“Hello!”
Ejnar looked up from his desk. Vibeke Steen was standing in front of him. He made an attempt to stand up.
“Please, have a seat. Did you get on OK with the artist?”
She sat down.
“I don’t know. The memory cheats….But I hope the pictures will help you.”
Ejnar interviewed her. Vibeke told him about the men, how they had looked when she encountered them.
“They cared about the patient,” she said.
“Friends of hers?”
“Maybe.”
“Did they say anything?”
Vibeke thought.
“They said she’d be looked after in ten, fifteen hours.”
“Anything else?”
“The one who talked to me spoke Danish. But it felt a bit odd.”
“How?”
“You know when someone’s lived abroad for a long time, the way they speak…their mother tongue is a bit old-fashioned?”
Ejnar Larsen made a note on his pad.
“I’ve got one more question,” he said.
“Fire away.”
“Why would someone do that? Take someone from a hospital?”
“How do you mean?”
“Has it happened before? Someone doing this sort of thing?”
She almost laughed. “Yes, it’s the third time this week.”
He smiled at the joke.
“No, it hasn’t happened before,” she said.
But it had, only the other day, on the Swedish side of the Öresund. Exactly the same thing.
He said goodbye to Vibeke Steen, then sat down and continued thinking.
Why would anyone do that, and take such a risk?
Presumably if you were on the run, or if there was a warrant out for you.
A warrant…
Ejnar Larsen dug around on his computer. He couldn’t get into the Swedish system, so he started with the Danish one. That was fairly straightforward, because there weren’t that many women on it. But there was no one who looked like the missing patient. He moved on to Europol, then Interpol.
After scrolling down for a good half hour, staring at far too many pictures of women who had warrants out for them, he recognized her straightaway. The warrant had been issued by the French police, and was marked as low priority.
The woman was Sophie Brinkmann, and she was Swedish, registered in Stockholm.
Ejnar picked up his phone and dialed the number of the detective in charge of the case, Gustave Peltier at the Police Nationale in Nice.
Dressed in a black Benedictine habit, Hector was sitting on a bench under a cypress tree, looking out at the world in front of him.
The monastery was on a plateau. The view from the garden was immense: rolling landscape, forests, villages, farms, mountains, the horizon.
Next to him was a small patch of garden, where two monks were working, pulling out dried-up plants and turning the soil.
Aron walked toward him; he had a bag in his hand, a black sports bag. He sat down beside Hector.
“How did you manage to pull this off?” he asked.
“Roberto, a cousin of Dad’s,” Hector said.
“It is secure?”
Hector looked around at the tranquil scene.
“This is the safest place right now.”
He turned toward Aron. “Where have you been?”
“Denmark.”
“Did you find them?”
“Sort of,” Aron replied.
“Lothar?”
“I don’t know, he wasn’t there when I got there,” Aron said.
“What happened?”
A breeze blew through the trees around them.
“Sophie’s dead,” he said.
Hector flinched, albeit slightly.
“I found her on the floor inside the house. They’d been attacked.”
“Lothar?” he asked again.
“No one else there. It was empty.”
Hector was trying not to feel anything, but somewhere in his chest…
“Apart from…” Aron began.
“Apart from what?”
“Another body, a woman.”
“Who?”
“I’m not sure, but I think it was the detective who was investigating the Trasten case;
we read about her in the papers, if you remember?”
Hector thought, and remembered.
“Yes. Miller?”
“Mm-hm. Antonia Miller.”
“What was she doing there?”
Aron passed the bag to Hector.
“Look through this.”
Hector glanced warily at Aron, then opened the bag.
What he read gave him an indistinct impression that Sophie had been in contact with the police ever since their first meeting, that she had been supplying them with information.
“She betrayed us very early on,” Aron said. “She betrayed us, Hector. And she continued to betray us, right to the end.”
Hector leafed quickly through the photographs and notes, but couldn’t deal with it and handed the bag back to Aron.
“Who was at the house, who killed Sophie and Miller?”
“Difficult to say. Jens, Mikhail, and Lothar were gone. I don’t know.”
Hector looked at Aron. He had fought tirelessly for their survival, but there was something odd about him, something different. The conviction in his eyes was gone. As if he were hiding something. As if he were trying to hide that fact too, by keeping his eyes steady, not blinking, overemphasizing that he was exactly the same as usual. But on the other hand, he was exhausted, just like everyone else.
“Thanks, Aron,” Hector said.
“What for?”
“For everything.”
Some church bells started to ring a short distance away. Hector stood up and walked toward the monastery. The two monks in the garden were already on their way. More were approaching from other directions.
Aron remained seated and watched him go.
—
Hector walked into the chapel and sat down on a wooden bench. The monks started to sing. It was beautiful—melancholic.
Sophie was dead. He was seized by longing and despair, a sense of incredible loss and loneliness.
The monks’ singing echoed around the cool stone vaults of the chapel.
Hector could see her clearly in his mind, as if she were right in front of him, and he dared to let himself hold on to that.
One thing grew clearer to him. A dream, almost unconscious, but a dream that had grown inside him since the very first time he met her. That she was the woman, his salvation, his life, that she was the one who would bring to pass everything he hadn’t managed to achieve on his own. Finding happiness, and sharing it.
A sob escaped from his throat. He clamped his hand over his mouth. He could feel the wracked sobbing that was on its way, could feel despair welling up and threatening to turn everything upside down. But Hector fought against it, struggling to hold the tears and anguish at bay.
It worked. After a while he was able to remove his hand from his mouth.
She betrayed us. Aron’s words came back to him. Yes, she had. But had she betrayed him? Did he really care, when it came down to it?
She was dead.
Gone.
And he would never see her again.
The monks’ singing rolled back and forth through the room.
If he had believed in what they believed in, he would have prayed for her soul. But Hector didn’t know how.
The only thing he had in common with the men in front of him was that he, like them, was penniless, didn’t even own the clothes he was wearing. But the men singing had made an active choice to become penniless. Hector had made an active choice to be the exact opposite.
Alongside his grief was rage. It had carried him through life, deeply embedded in a black little world he had kept hidden ever since he was a child. And it took hold of him now. Oddly enough, the rage kept him calm, fended off his grief, helped him to think and make decisions. And that’s what he did. He made the decision that he was going to find his son Lothar, that he was going to take back what was his, with interest, and that he’d kill all the fuckers who had had the nerve to fuck with him.
But most of all he planned what he was going to do to the person who had killed Sophie. And thereby also his dream.
Sophie opened her eyes; the room was white, the curtains thin. The ceiling was high. She remembered the trip in the ambulance, she remembered Jens sitting beside her. He was sitting there now, on a chair beside her bed.
“Where are we?” she whispered.
“We’re in Prague,” Jens said.
“Why?”
“We’re hiding here.”
“Albert?”
“No…nothing new.”
A large closet in front of her, open. Her clothes were hung up inside.
“Mikhail unpacked your case,” Jens said.
On the bedside table were neat rows of medicine, cotton balls, and antiseptics.
“Lothar…” Jens said. “He’s taken on the responsibility of being your nurse. He gave you your medication during the journey, kept you sedated.”
“How did we get here?”
“By road from Denmark. You were operated on in the hospital there. But the police started to take an interest in you and we were forced to act quickly.”
“Whose apartment is this?”
“Miles has organized everything, even a doctor who’s been keeping an eye on you.”
Lothar peered through the door. He was overjoyed to see her, as if her awakening was a miracle, a resurrection.
She found his positive energy infectious.
“Thank you for looking after me, Lothar,” she whispered weakly.
“Is there anything you need?” he asked.
“No, thanks. Is it OK, being here?” she went on.
“I’ve looked at a map. We live in the center. If you go down the street you come to a square, and then the Charles Bridge over the river. That’s where the Old Town is. In the other direction”—he pointed behind him—“there’s a big park with an observatory.”
“Then one day we’ll walk there,” she whispered. All the talking and listening had worn her out.
“We will,” Lothar said, then let go of the door frame and disappeared.
Jens waited until Lothar was gone, then said, “He’s happy. He’s changed; he’s been looking after you the whole time, giving you your medication. He’s proud of being part of your survival. He couldn’t have handled it if you’d died. That was obvious when you got hurt. Lothar’s very fond of you. He’s drawn to you, sees you as someone he can rely on….”
“Stop it, Jens,” she said.
“Can’t you allow yourself to let him in?”
“I am,” she said.
“No one knows what’s going to happen tomorrow,” he said.
“I can’t,” she said. “I mustn’t.”
“Says who?”
“Please, not now…”
She shifted slightly in the bed and pain from the knife wound cut through her.
Miles had been working tirelessly for four days, almost around the clock. Searching, investigating, analyzing. He had become a police officer again.
An embassy was as good as being an espionage center, with close connections to the Swedish Intelligence Service.
In years gone by, during the Cold War, all eyes had been on the East, toward the Russians. Now it was mostly about promoting Swedish companies in the country where the embassy was based—in other words, primarily industrial espionage. It all happened in a nice, incognito way, and only a few people in the embassy were involved. In Prague, that meant Kennet Wessman.
He knocked on the doorpost.
“What have you found?” Miles asked.
Kennet stepped in with a bundle of papers in his hand.
To get hold of the information Miles was after, Kennet and Miles had concocted a case involving questions from the telecom company Ericsson. Whenever Ericsson was involved, the Intelligence Service was always very obliging. Kennet had spoken to the intelligence agents himself. He told them their client wanted information about some German competitors regarding what meetings they had, what their travel arrangements were, as well as when and where.
The Intelligence Service was in a position to help; that sort of thing was routine for them.
Kennet Wessman waved the documents, then handed them to Miles.
“Hanke LLC owns a number of planes, and has several more on long leases. This is a list of most of them, as well as what routes they’ve flown over the past few weeks.”
Miles took the papers.
“Passengers?”
“We can never get those lists.”
“How about regular flights?”
“No, they’d have to dig much deeper for those. This is what we’ve got to go on.”
“OK. Thanks, Kennet,” Miles said, and started to go through the documents, crossing some flights out and circling others.
There were plenty of trips, in all directions. But one stood out immediately from the others.
—
Miles Ingmarsson ran out of the embassy and down the cobbled street toward the apartment. He had a cigarette in his mouth and the bundle of papers under his arm. He almost slipped several times.
Mikhail opened the door for him.
Miles was out of breath. He walked in past Mikhail.
“Jens!” he called out.
Jens looked out of Sophie’s room. He waved Miles to him, and Miles headed past the kitchen, where Lothar was sitting at the table with two piles of playing cards.
“Hi, Lothar.”
Lothar raised his hand.
Sophie was awake when he entered the room.
“Welcome to Prague,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said weakly.
He passed the sheaf of papers to Jens, who immediately began to scan through them, top to bottom, before moving on to the next one.
“Have you found something?” Sophie asked.
“Maybe,” he replied.
“What?”
He pointed at the documents Jens was working his way through.
“Information about where the Hankes have flown to recently.”
She waited for more.
“It could be a long shot. But a private plane belonging to one of the Hankes’ daughter companies took off from Augsburg, a small airport west of Munich, and flew to Colombia, Cartago, a military airfield.”
“When?” she asked.
“Within the time frame I’m looking at.”
The Other Son Page 33