The Nightmare

by Lars Kepler

  The car door opens and Roland Eriksson slides in carrying a bag of marshmallow banana candy and a can of Coca-Cola.

  “Damn, I’m jittery. I’ll shoot the second I see a gun,” Roland says, and they can hear the stress in his voice. “Things can go so fast and the only chance you have is to shoot them first—”

  “We will follow my plan,” Göran Stone says firmly. “But if shooting breaks out, you don’t have to aim for the legs.”

  “Shove it right into their mouths,” Roland yells.

  “Take it easy,” Göran says.

  “My brother’s face—”

  “We know all about it, Roland, shut the fuck up,” Anders says. He’s also very nervous.

  “A firebomb right to the face!” Roland repeats in a loud voice. “Eleven operations later and he can—”

  “Can you handle this?” Göran asks sharply.

  “Sure, what the fuck!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m fine,” Roland answers quickly. He looks out of the window and scrapes his thumbnail sharply over the lid of his tin of snuff.

  Saga Bauer opens the door slightly to let some air into the van. She accepts this is the right time for a raid and there’s no reason to wait. Even so, she still wants to understand the connection to Penelope Fernandez. What was her role in the Brigade? And why was her sister killed? Too much was still not clear. She desperately wants to talk with Daniel Marklund again, look him right in the eye and ask a few direct questions. She’d tried to bring this up with her boss. She wants answers before they go in on this raid. Especially if there is a question about who will be alive afterward.

  This is still my investigation! she thinks angrily as she climbs out of the van into the suffocating heat of the sidewalk.

  “The SWAT team will go in here and here.” Göran Stone stabs his finger on an architectural drawing of the building. “We’re here and maybe we’ll have to get in through this theater—”

  “Where the hell did Saga Bauer go?” Roland asks.

  “Maybe she got her period and needed a Tampax!” Anders says with a smirk.

  30

  the pain

  Joona Linna and Nathan Pollock park on Hornsgatan and quickly scan a bad printout of the picture of Daniel Marklund. Then they get out, make their way through the heavy traffic on the street, and enter the door of a small theater. The Tribunal Theater is an independent theater group—with income-pegged ticket prices. Plays from Oresteia to The Communist Manifesto have been performed within its walls.

  Joona and Nathan continue swiftly down the wide staircase and over to the combined bar and box office. A woman with a silver ring in her nose and straight hair dyed black smiles at them. They nod in a friendly way but walk right past her without a word.

  “You guys looking for someone?” she yells as they start walking up a metal staircase.

  “Yes,” Pollock says, but his voice is low.

  They enter a messy office crowded with a copier, a desk, and a bulletin board from which newspaper clippings hang down. A thin man with matted hair and an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth sits in front of a computer.

  “Hi there, Richard,” Pollock says.

  “Who are you?” asks the man absentmindedly as he returns his gaze to his screen.

  They continue past the actors’ dressing rooms—past racks of carefully hung costumes and makeup stations. A bouquet of roses droops on one of the tables.

  Pollock takes a quick look around and then points. They walk up to a steel door with a stenciled sign: ELECTRICAL ROOM.

  “It’s supposed to be in here,” Pollock says.

  “In the electrical room of a theater?”

  Pollock doesn’t answer but picks the lock as fast as he can. They look inside a cramped space with an electrical meter, a cupboard for props, and stacks of boxes. The ceiling light doesn’t work. Joona clambers over paper bags filled with old clothes. There is a new door behind some extension cords hung across the ceiling. Joona pushes it open and finds a hall with bare cement walls. Nathan Pollock follows him. The air is stagnant and it smells like garbage and damp dirt. In the distance, they can hear the faint backbeat of music. On the floor, there’s a flyer featuring Che Guevara with a lit fuse at the top of his head.

  “The Brigade’s been hiding out here several years now,” Pollock says softly.

  “I should have brought some cake for our little visit,” Joona replies.

  “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “The only thing I worry about is whether Daniel Marklund will be here.”

  “He’ll be here. He’s almost always here.”

  “Thanks for your help, Nathan.”

  “Maybe I should go in with you anyway?” Pollock asks. “You’ll have only a few minutes before Säpo storms the place. It could get dangerous.”

  Joona’s gray eyes narrow. “I’m just dropping in for a little chat.”

  Nathan starts heading back to the theater and coughs as he closes the steel door behind him. Joona stands alone in the empty hallway for a moment. He draws his pistol and checks that the magazine is full before he slides it back in his holster. He starts to walk toward another steel door at the other end of the hall.

  He loses a few precious seconds as he picks the lock.

  Someone has scratched “The Brigade” in tiny letters, not more than two centimeters high, into the blue paint on the door.

  Joona presses down the handle and the door slowly opens. He’s met by loud, screeching music; it sounds like an electronically reprocessed version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun.” The shrieking guitars have a dreamlike, surging beat. They drown out everything.

  Joona closes the door behind him and keeps going, half running, into a space filled with junk. Mounds of books and magazines reach the ceiling. Although it’s dark in the room, Joona can tell the heaps of books are not just random but have been created as a kind of labyrinth leading to other doors. He quickly makes his way through it to a dimly lit area. The path forks there and he keeps going to the right, but swiftly backtracks. He thinks he saw hasty movement out of the corner of his eye. He’s not sure, though.

  Joona walks on, squinting to see something more. A bare bulb sways at the end of its ceiling cord. Over the music, Joona suddenly hears a roar. Someone is screaming behind walls that dampen the sound. Joona stops, walks back, and looks into a thin passage where a stack of magazines have slid down and now are scattered across the floor.

  Joona’s head is starting to hurt. He thinks he should have had something to eat. He should have taken something with him. A few pieces of dark chocolate would have been enough.

  He steps over the magazines and reaches a spiral staircase leading down to the floor below. He can smell sweet smoke in the air. Holding tightly to the rail, he tries to sneak down as quietly as possible, but he cannot silence his shoes on the metal steps. On the lowest rung, he stops before a velvet curtain that has been drawn shut. He puts his hand on his holstered pistol.

  The music is fainter here.

  A plastic clown lamp with a red bulb for a nose is in the corner, and more red light leaks through a gap in the curtain. Joona tries to get a glimpse through it, but the gap is too small. He hesitates, then steps quickly through the curtain and into the room. His pulse thuds and his headache pounds as he sweeps the space with his eyes. On the cement floor, there’s a double-barreled shotgun and an open box of cartridges. The shells have lead slugs, the kind that would leave considerable damage. Sitting on an office chair is a young, naked man, smoking; his eyes are shut. This can’t be Daniel Marklund, Joona thinks. A blond girl with bare breasts lounges on a mattress, leaning back against the wall, an army blanket around her hips. She meets Joona’s gaze, blows him a kiss, and then, unconcerned, takes a sip of beer from a can.

  From behind the only open door comes another scream.

  Joona keeps his eye on the two as he picks up the shotgun, points the opening of the barrels down, and then steps hard on the b
arrels until they’re bent.

  The woman puts down her beer can and scratches her armpit absentmindedly.

  Joona gently lays the shotgun back on the floor. He continues past the woman and into a hallway with a low ceiling of chicken wire and fiberglass. Heavy cigar smoke hangs in the air. Intense lamplight shines right in his face, and he shields his eyes with his hand. The end of the hallway is obscured by strips of white industrial plastic. Blinded, Joona can’t see what’s going on. He can glimpse movement and he can hear an echoing voice filled with fear and terror. Someone close at hand suddenly screams loudly. It’s a deep-throated scream followed by rapid gasps. Joona makes it past the blinding lamp and now can see into the room behind the thick plastic.

  Veils of smoke swirl through the air. A short, muscular woman in black jeans and a hoodie stands before a man dressed only in underwear and socks. His head is shaved, and on his forehead, there’s a White Power tattoo. He’s bitten his tongue and blood runs down his chin, throat, and thick stomach. “Please,” he begs.

  The woman raises a smoking cigar overhead, then brings it down, pressing its glowing end right onto the tattoo. The man screams. His thick stomach and hanging breasts shake. He’s pissing himself. A dark spot spreads over his blue underwear and the urine runs down his naked legs.

  Behind the curtain of protected plastic, Joona has pulled out his gun. He tries to spot if anyone else is in the room but he can’t see. He’s about to yell … then his gun falls from his hand to the floor.

  It clatters against the concrete and slides to a stop next to the plastic. Joona looks down at his own hand, seeing it shake, and in the next moment, feeling the horrendous pain flood in. He loses all sight and feels only a heavy, breaking movement inside his forehead. He throws out a hand against the wall in an attempt to stay upright. He fears he’s about to lose consciousness. Still, he can hear the voices behind the curtain.

  “Just admit what the fuck you did!” the woman with the cigar is yelling.

  “I don’t remember,” the neo-Nazi cries.

  “What did you do?”

  “I bullied some guy.”

  “Confess exactly what you did!”

  “I burned his eye out.”

  “That’s right! You used a cigarette to burn out the eye of a ten-year-old boy!”

  “Yes, but I—”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “We followed him from the synagogue and down to …”

  Joona doesn’t notice that what he’s grabbed is a fire extinguisher, a big one, and it’s coming down with him. He no longer has any sense of time or of where he is. The pain in his head and a fierce ringing in his ears is all he knows.

  31

  the message

  Behind the dark veils of pain, Joona can feel her hand on his back.

  “What’s going on?” asks Saga Bauer in a low voice. “Are you hurt?”

  He tries to shake his head but is in too much pain to speak. It feels as if a hook is being drawn through his brain: down through the skin, the cranium, the brain membranes, and the heavy, floating brain fluid.

  He drops to his knees.

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” says Saga.

  He feels her lifting his face but he can’t see anything. His entire body is bathed in pearls of sweat that pour from his armpits, his neck, his back.

  Saga is hunting through his clothes. She thinks he’s having an epileptic fit and is trying to find some kind of medicine in his pockets. Joona realizes she’s opening his wallet and looking for the sign of a flame, the symbol for epileptics.

  The pain starts to recede. Joona wets his mouth with his tongue. He looks up. His jaws are tense and his whole body aches from the migraine attack.

  “You guys can’t go in there yet,” he whispers. “I have to—”

  “What the hell happened here?”

  “Nothing.” Joona picks his gun up from the floor.

  He gets to his feet and staggers as fast as he can through the plastic curtains and into the room. It’s empty. An emergency exit sign is lit on the other side. Saga has followed him and she questions him with a look. Joona opens the emergency door and sees a steep half set of stairs leading to a steel door at street level.

  “Perkele,” he swears in Finnish.

  “Talk to me!” Saga says angrily.

  Joona always pushes the direct cause of his illness as far from his consciousness as possible. There was an incident many years ago … it keeps giving him this pulsing pain, this pain so severe that he almost passes out. But he refuses to think about the incident.

  What the doctor says is that this is an extreme form of migraine with a physical cause. The antiepileptic drug Topiramate is the only medicine that seems to help. Joona is supposed to take it daily, but when he’s working and needs a clear head, he stops. Not only does it make him tired, it dulls his mind. He knows he’s playing a game of roulette. Without the medication, he might manage for weeks without a migraine, yet another time he’ll be hit by one after only a few days.

  “They were torturing a guy … a neo-Nazi, I think, but—”

  “Torturing?”

  “With a cigar,” he answers as he turns around and heads back into the hallway.

  “What happened?”

  “I … couldn’t …”

  “But Joona,” Saga says tentatively. “Maybe … if you’ve got a physical problem, you shouldn’t be working … operatively, that is …”

  She puts her hand to her face.

  “What a shitty situation,” she whispers.

  Joona walks toward the room with the clown lamp and hears Saga’s footsteps behind him.

  “And why in the hell are you even here?” she asks to his back. “Säpo’s SWAT team is going to raid this place any moment. If they see that weapon in your hand, they’ll shoot first and ask questions later … it’ll be dark, there’ll be tear gas—”

  “I have to speak to Daniel Marklund,” Joona says stubbornly.

  “You’re not supposed to even know about him!” she exclaims as she follows him up the spiral staircase. “Who told you about him?”

  Joona starts down another hallway, but stops when he sees Saga gesture a different way. He follows her, but pulls out his gun when she starts to run. They both turn a corner, and Joona hears her yell something.

  Saga has come to a halt in a room with five computers. In one corner stands a man with dirty hair and a beard. He matches the picture of Daniel Marklund in Joona’s mind. His lips look dry. He’s licking them. He holds out a Russian bayonet knife in one of his fists.

  “Police,” Saga says, flashing her ID. “Put down the knife.”

  The young man shakes his head and waves the knife in the air in front of him, flashing the blade in different directions.

  “We just need to speak with you,” Joona says as he holsters his gun.

  “So speak.”

  Joona walks closer, looking into the young man’s frightened eyes, totally ignoring the knife being waved directly at him. He ignores its sharpened point.

  “Daniel, you’re really not good at this,” he says with a smile.

  Joona can smell the scent of gun grease on the blade.

  Daniel is waving the bayonet knife in faster circles and wears a look of concentration. He growls, “Don’t think only Finns are good at—”

  Lightning fast, Joona grabs the young man’s wrist, twists it, and takes away the knife. He gently puts it down on the table.

  The room is silent. The men look at each other, and then Daniel Marklund shrugs.

  “Usually I only deal with the computers,” he says apologetically.

  “They’re going to raid us any moment,” Joona says urgently. “Tell us why you went to Penelope Fernandez’s place.”

  “Just dropping by to say hi.”

  “Daniel,” Joona says darkly. “This knife business could lead you to a prison term. But right now I have more important things on my plate. Don’t waste my time.”

  “D
oes Penelope belong to the Brigade?” Saga asks quickly.

  “Penelope Fernandez?” Daniel Marklund smiles. “She’s against us. She’s made that perfectly clear.”

  “So what’s the connection?” Joona asks.

  “What do you mean, she’s against you?” Saga puts in. “Is there a power struggle going on?”

  “Doesn’t Säpo know anything?” asks Daniel with a tired smile. “Penelope Fernandez is a complete pacifist. She’s a firm believer in democracy. So she doesn’t like our methods—but we like her.”

  He sits down on a chair in front of two computers.

  “Like her?”

  “We respect her.”

  “Why?” asks Saga. “Why should you—”

  “You guys really don’t know how much some people hate her, do you? Why don’t you just Google her name? People have said some really brutal things about her, and there are always people who go too far.”

  “What do you mean, ‘go too far’?”

  Daniel gives them a testing look. “You do know she’s disappeared, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Saga replies.

  “That’s good,” he says. “Though I really don’t expect the police to make much effort to find her. That’s why I went over to her place. I wanted to check her computer to see who might be behind this. I mean, there was a group, the Swedish Resistance, who sent a message to their members this past April telling them to kidnap ‘the communist whore Penelope Fernandez’ and make her into a sex slave for the movement. But take a look at this.”

  Daniel Marklund clicks a few keys on one of his computers and turns the screen to Joona.

  “This one is connected to the Aryan Brotherhood.”

  Joona takes a quick glance through a vulgar chat page about Aryan penises and how they are supposed to execute Penelope.

  “But I don’t think these groups are involved,” Joona says.