The Chosen

by Kristina Ohlsson

  He was shaken by the turn his visit to Stockholm had taken. It had sounded so simple, so uncomplicated. It had seemed like a welcome break from the usual intensity of his work, which mainly consisted of recruiting new sources and double agents for the Israeli military security service.

  Eden had been a failure. The project had taken two years and had produced nothing. Two years, two attempts. The first had been broken off for the simple reason that Eden had told him she was pregnant when Efraim first seduced her. He had made sure that she was well and truly hooked before he brought the first attempt to an end. And then, when she was back at work after her maternity leave, he had reappeared. It had gone well. Very well, in fact. But not well enough.

  No one within the organization had blamed him. Sometimes you succeeded, sometimes you didn’t. Efraim had many assets and was still regarded as one of their most skillful agents. Eden Lundell had been a high-risk project; they had known that from the start. And they had lost.

  Eden most of all.

  The film was indescribably boring. Efraim didn’t think he would have liked it even if he had been able to understand what they were saying. When it came to an end at long last, he had to make a real effort to stop himself from running out of the cinema.

  It had finally stopped snowing as he set off back to the hotel. The sky was dark and clear, studded with stars. It was a quarter to nine, and the inner city had a pulse that Efraim hadn’t noticed before. A Friday night phenomenon, no doubt. There were people everywhere even though it was so cold. In a country where it was apparently impossible to motivate men and women to train to bear arms, people were clearly happy to freeze to death for a couple of beers.

  It would have been easy to dump his Säpo shadows in the crowd, but Efraim let them stay with him. They were between fifteen and twenty yards behind him, all wearing black boots and woolly hats. If he had been their boss he would have turned around and asked them what the hell they were doing.

  The soles of his shoes were too thin to keep out the cold, so he increased his speed and went past the theater and the attractive little shops along the first section of Strandvägen. By the time he reached the warmth of the hotel, his cheeks and ears were glowing.

  He went up to his room, using the stairs rather than the elevator. There were no messages outside his door. Or inside. He opened up his laptop and plugged in the micro-camera that he had installed above the bathroom door in order to check whether anyone had come into his room. No one had been there since he left.

  He took off his coat and picked up his cell phone. He had gotten rid of the first pay-as-you-go card he had bought when he came to Sweden; he was trying to make himself as invisible as possible. Traceability equaled vulnerability.

  Peder Rydh answered almost immediately. When he realized who was calling, there was a brief silence.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” Efraim said.

  “No, not at all. How can I help?”

  You would have needed only half of Efraim’s experience to hear that Peder’s tone of voice had changed since they last spoke. It was strained, almost stressed. Possibly with a hint of fear and nervous anxiety. A clear indication that he wasn’t comfortable speaking to Efraim.

  “Have you spoken to the police?” Efraim said.

  “What? No, absolutely not, of course not, why would I do that?”

  The words came pouring out. With a certain amount of surprise, Efraim realized that he had been given more information than he had expected: Peder had definitely spoken to the police.

  About Efraim.

  “Why would you do that?” Efraim said rhetorically. “Perhaps because I asked you to?”

  Silence.

  Efraim pictured Peder cursing his own stupidity.

  “Oh, right, yes, of course,” he said, his voice a little steadier. “Yes, I have.”

  “In that case, let’s try again. Have you or have you not spoken to the police?”

  “I have spoken to the police.”

  “Okay. What about?”

  Efraim wished Peder were sitting in front of him; that would make things so much easier, both in terms of frightening him and reading his reactions.

  “About . . . about what you said.”

  “Which was?”

  What kind of fucking amateur had they appointed as head of security? Efraim had met children who were better liars than Peder Rydh.

  “The bag. You wanted to know more about the bag. So I asked.”

  “Who did you speak to?”

  “Alex Recht.”

  “Good. And what did you find out?”

  “He didn’t say anything about the paper bag.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me whether it was of any significance in the investigation; he said it was too early.”

  “But the police came and collected the bag, didn’t they?”

  Peder hesitated.

  “They did, yes.”

  “So Alex Recht wouldn’t tell you anything about the paper bag. Did he say anything else that might be of interest to me?”

  A longer hesitation this time.

  “Only what’s already in the news.”

  Efraim frowned. He hadn’t checked the news since he got back from the movie theater, and to be honest it was a fairly pointless exercise; he didn’t have a decent translation program to work with.

  “For obvious reasons I find it difficult to follow the Swedish news,” he said. “What exactly are you referring to?”

  “This business about the gun.”

  Efraim froze.

  “The gun?”

  There was a rushing noise inside his head, and his pulse rate had increased to an alarming level.

  “The boys were shot with the same gun as the teacher,” Peder said.

  Impossible.

  Impossible, impossible, impossible.

  He forced himself to answer Peder.

  “Oh yes, I knew about that.”

  Then he ended the conversation with a promise to call Peder again over the weekend.

  He stood there with his cell phone in his hand. This was worse than he had thought. If the children had been shot with the same gun as the teacher, then that ought to mean that they had been killed by the same perpetrator.

  But they hadn’t.

  Because Efraim Kiel knew who had shot the boys, and that person had had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of the teacher.

  CONCLUSION

  FRAGMENT IV

  The snow is falling heavily, desperate to bury all evil beneath its blanket of white. The inspector leaves the apartment with the woman who has lost the love of her life and one of her children.

  “I was never meant to have it all,” she says when they are standing on the pavement.

  He has no idea what to say. He knows nothing about her past and her personal life apart from what he has heard from others.

  He does know that her story contains elements of darkness that she does not wish to share with anyone else. Soon she will have to be interviewed about what has happened, to fill in the gaps for the investigators. Because, somewhere in Stockholm, there is a killer on the loose.

  “I thought we’d gotten him,” the inspector says eventually.

  The snow chills his face, and he feels like crying out there in the street.

  Because he doesn’t understand what went wrong.

  When she doesn’t respond, he says:

  “I can’t make any sense of this. When you feel up to telling us what you know—”

  He breaks off as she turns her back on him and walks away.

  “Wait a minute!”

  He hurries to catch up with her, places a hand on her shoulder, and almost slips in the snow.

  “Let go of me.”

  Her voice is calm, but there is no misunderstanding the steel in her tone. He has the feeling that if he doesn’t let go, he will die.

  “Listen to me,” he says.

  Begs.

  Pleads
.

  Because in a world where all is chaos, only pleading remains.

  “You must realize that I can’t simply let you walk away.”

  He glances back at his colleagues waiting by the door. Like him, they are in shock at what they have seen and experienced. If necessary, he will not hesitate to ask for their help.

  Because the woman who has lost almost everything cannot be left alone.

  The risk that she will declare war on her opponent is too great. She will not rest until she has her revenge.

  “Who has done this?” the inspector says, his voice betraying a higher level of frustration than he would wish. “Who was it?”

  “Me,” she says, beginning to weep. “I did this.”

  EARLIER

  The Fourth Day

  Saturday, January 28, 2012

  So many loose ends, so many roads that led nowhere. Alex Recht couldn’t settle down. Not at night, not during the day.

  “Are you going in to work?” Diana had said when he slipped out of bed and started to get dressed.

  Alex had always worn pajamas during his marriage to Lena; with Diana he slept naked, except when the grandchildren stayed over. Then he dug out an old pair of ugly pj’s, as his son put it.

  “I’ve got a few things to take care of,” Alex had replied.

  Diana had looked disappointed. She had thought they could take their cross-country skis and drive up to Nacka, which wasn’t a bad idea. The weather had once again changed from foul to fantastic; the sun was shining with every scrap of its winter strength, and the snow looked like stiffly whipped meringue.

  But Alex couldn’t bring himself to take the day off and go skiing, because in that same stiffly whipped meringue they had found two murdered children just days earlier. So work had to come first, particularly as Fredrika Bergman was flying out to Israel the very next day. Alex had to get in touch with his Israeli colleagues and set up a collaborative process that Fredrika could tap into.

  He had spoken to the National Crime Unit the previous evening; they already had a network of contacts with Israel and had set the ball rolling. The prosecutor liked the direction the investigation was taking. He had great confidence in what he referred to as “the Israeli lead” and thought Fredrika would solve the whole thing in just a couple of days. Alex was rather more doubtful. The case had started to look like a jigsaw puzzle, with far too many of those involved claiming too great a share of the pieces available.

  For example, Abraham and Simon’s parents were withholding information that Alex needed, which was why Fredrika was going all the way to Israel. But Alex had no intention of giving in so easily. He called Gideon and Carmen Eisenberg and asked them to stay at home for the next few hours.

  “I’m coming over; I need answers to one or two additional questions.”

  “Have you made a breakthrough in the case?” Gideon wanted to know.

  His voice was strained and weary; it belonged to a man going through hell, and Alex’s call had clearly ignited a spark of hope.

  “We’ll talk about that when I see you,” Alex said.

  He wasn’t prepared to have that kind of conversation over the phone. When he had finished speaking to Gideon Eisenberg, he called Fredrika.

  “I’m going to show the parents the pictures of the boys when we found them,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “We have to find out the significance of those paper bags over their heads.”

  “Are you going to tell them about the bag that was sent to the school as well?”

  “No. They might hear about it anyway through the Solomon Community, but as far as I’m concerned, the most important thing is to see if those damned bags mean something to the parents.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Fredrika asked.

  “Thanks, but no—there’s no need.”

  Then he changed his mind.

  “Actually, yes, if you’ve got time. It might be useful for you to talk to the Eisenbergs before you go off tomorrow.”

  He could hear the sound of children’s voices in the background and felt guilty; why hadn’t he told her to stay at home? However, he needed her—more than ever. The team must be expanded as soon as possible, with permanent members; they couldn’t carry on like this.

  “No problem,” Fredrika said. “I’ll meet you in the parking garage.”

  Alex threw down his cell phone. They had three key questions for the parents: Did they know who the Lion was? Had their sons met him? And could they explain the background to the paper bags?

  He hoped to come away with at least an embryonic lead.

  As far as the Lion was concerned, Alex was surprised they had found so little to go on. The boys’ email accounts and their conversations on Super Troopers had been checked, and it appeared that Simon and Abraham had never communicated with one another about the Lion—not once. That didn’t mean they hadn’t spoken about him in school or over the phone, of course, but there was nothing at all in their online messages.

  To be on the safe side, he went through the material one more time. The Lion had contacted the boys about three weeks ago. He wanted to meet them to discuss their sporting ambitions and his tennis academy. Grants for short training courses at international schools had also been mentioned.

  Surely the boys’ parents must have known about that?

  He went through the latest material and established that the analysis of the traffic on the boys’ cell phones had also failed to generate anything useful. There wasn’t a single call to or from an unknown individual. Every person on the list was a friend from school or the tennis center, a parent, or another relative.

  Fuck.

  He made a note to pass on a list of Simon’s and Abraham’s school friends to the technicians who were analyzing the telephone traffic; it was worth checking whether the Lion had contacted anyone else. Maybe they could track his communication, if that was possible. But now that he was no longer active on the forum, perhaps that information was no longer available.

  The phone on his desk rang just as he was about to go down to the garage. It was a colleague from the National Crime Unit.

  “I thought you’d be in today, somehow.”

  “Hard to avoid it under the circumstances,” Alex said, thinking briefly of Diana. He pictured her gliding along on her skis and wished he was by her side. With a bit of luck the snow would linger and they would be able to go another day.

  “I’m calling about the murder of the schoolteacher,” his colleague said.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s about the tracks on the roof where we think the sniper was lying.”

  “You mean the tracks that had almost been blown away or covered in snow by the time we got there?”

  The weather had definitely not been on their side.

  “Exactly. The footprints were useless; the weather had more or less destroyed them. The only thing CSI would say with any certainty was that the large imprint must have been left by the perpetrator’s body. Indentations in the snow showed where the knees and elbows had been placed.”

  Alex already knew this, but he assumed there was more to come.

  “You found some footprints out at Drottningholm as well, I believe. Size 91/2 shoes, if my information is correct.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And this is where things get weird,” his colleague said. “Because, even taking into account the fact that the imprint on the roof had been affected by the wind and the fresh fall of snow, we have been able to establish that the person in question can’t possibly have been any taller than five foot six.”

  This was unexpected.

  “You mean that someone of that height wouldn’t be wearing size 91/2 shoes?”

  “I mean it seems highly unlikely,” his colleague said. “And the footprints we found support that view.”

  “I thought you said they were no use?”

  “It was impossible to secure a cast of the sole, for example. However, CSI were abl
e to get a rough idea of the size.”

  Alex pressed the receiver to his ear.

  “And?”

  The tension in his voice was clear.

  “There is no possibility whatsoever that those prints were made by someone wearing a size 91/2. According to CSI’s calculations, the maximum length of the shoe was 10 inches. Which means that the perpetrator’s feet were a half-inch or so shorter than that. Which means that the person who lay on the roof and fired the gun was wearing shoes somewhere between size 51/2 and 7.”

  Alex sat motionless in his chair.

  He thought about the killer who had settled down on the roof and shot his victim through the falling snow. A killer who was no more than five feet six inches tall, and whose feet were small enough to fit into a pair of size 7 shoes.

  A killer who could be a woman.

  The toboggans crunched in the snow as they walked through Vasa Park, heading for the hill behind the playground. Eden Lundell was towing one toboggan, her husband the other, a little girl riding on each one. Mikael was holding her hand, and she hadn’t pulled it away. It was his day today. The weather had been kind to him, and he deserved to go out and pretend everything is fine.

  In Stockholm the sun was shining, but in London they had sleet and high winds. All flights had been postponed, and Eden wouldn’t be able to get away before evening at the earliest.

  “There you go,” Mikael had said when she told him. “Sometimes things just resolved themselves.”

  Eden had no idea what he thought had resolved itself; she wasn’t going to be home any sooner just because her flight was delayed.

  However, it was too nice a day to argue, so she didn’t object when Mikael suggested an outing to the park. Instead she packed sausages and rolls and drinks in a backpack and pulled on her thermal tights. The food was Mikael’s idea; he claimed there were big outdoor barbecues in the park for public use. Eden knew nothing about that kind of stuff.

  The backpack bounced against her back as they walked along. So at last the day had come: Eden was going to Vasa Park. She almost thought it might be fun.