Anger Mode

by Stefan Tegenfalk

  “De Brugge,” Jonna reminded him. “Officer Jonna de Brugge.”

  “As in the de Brugge family of shipowners?”

  Of course, the old seadog knows the de Brugge family, Jonna thought.

  “Yes,” she answered. “But the shipping business is not for me,” she added, to avoid the inevitable next question.

  The captain’s expression became more grave.

  “I understand completely your authority over this ship,” Jonna began diplomatically, changing her approach. What was previously an ocean of difference between them had become a canal of commonality. They were now two people in the shipping trade, not a captain and a landlubber.

  Jonna explained the situation to the now more receptive captain. Methodically, and without wasting time on details, she repeated her mission to the red-eared captain. She explained that they had boarded the wrong cruise ferry and that she needed to get onto the Cinderella quickly in order to prevent the loss of a life.

  The captain listened with mounting interest. After a while, he folded his hands behind his back and walked around his command chair. Finally, he picked up what looked like a handset and hailed the Cinderella, while ordering his own crew to take the ship back to port.

  Jonna felt the weight lift off her shoulders. She thanked the captain for his honourable course of action and promised to mention him in her report. She would also mention his name and his good deed at her next family gathering. The captain glowed. So much so that a few eyebrows were raised among the others on the bridge. He adjusted his captain’s cap, as if he was going to be photographed, escorted Jonna and Jörgen to the door, and wished them good luck with a firm handshake.

  When they came out of the terminal, Jonna and Jörgen threw themselves into her dented Porsche and drove the few kilometres to the city quay, where Cinderella stood, waiting. She should have sailed five minutes ago.

  Once again, Jonna parked directly outside the terminal entrance and ran up the gangway with Jörgen trudging behind her. There would not be any more emergency calls with Jonna behind the wheel, as far as he was concerned.

  This time, the captain and a few of the crew were waiting for them.

  “Police,” Jonna said, holding up her police ID.

  “So I gather,” the captain answered with a worried frown.

  “I must find a Tuva Sahlin,” Jonna said, out of breath. “And you cannot leave until I have located her.”

  The captain nodded. “You have fifteen minutes. Then we’ll have to depart unless it’s dangerous to do so,” he said, looking at his watch.

  “If I can locate Tuva Sahlin, then you can sail,” Jonna said.

  Jörgen nodded in agreement. He stood a little taller. He was actually beginning to feel like an undercover police officer. There was nothing like the power of a police badge. Maybe he should have a fake one made.

  “Yes, we have a Tuva Sahlin booked on board,” a uniformed woman said, looking at a list.

  “Does she have a cabin?” Jonna asked.

  “Yes, number 101,” the woman confirmed. “Follow me and I’ll show you where the cabin is. The key cards to the cabins have been handed out, so they should be there now.”

  They hurried down flights of stairs and into a corridor. After a dozen metres, they were outside cabin 101. True to form, Jörgen followed up behind, gasping for breath.

  Jonna knocked on the door. No one opened up.

  She knocked again, shouting this time that it was the police.

  Not a sound could be heard inside the cabin. All they could hear was Jörgen catching his breath.

  “Could you open the door?” Jonna asked, looking at the woman’s key card, which was hanging around her neck. She nodded and opened the door.

  Jonna pushed by, but found the cabin empty.

  “They’ve not been here yet,” the woman said. “Nothing has been touched.”

  “You must call her name over the Tannoy and ask her to come to reception,” Jonna said.

  The uniformed woman took up her walkie-talkie and asked the information-desk staff to broadcast the message for Tuva Sahlin. Meanwhile, they rushed back to the main deck and over to the information desk. Just as they arrived, Jonna’s mobile phone beeped twice. Waiting were two MMS images from an anonymous sender.

  The first message was a photograph of a woman with the message heading “Tuva Sahlin”. The image showed a woman with short hair, large eyes and full lips. She had a slight smile. Jonna studied the image. Merely the fact that she had received the image meant that Walter had succeeded in persuading Åsa Julén. Maybe he was even back on the force, despite being in hospital. But that also meant that he, or someone else, had managed to get Internal Affairs and David Lilja to withdraw their complaints, which was quite exceptional.

  Or perhaps it was not so exceptional. When the police investigate the police, there is a high ceiling. Sometimes as high as a cathedral. She wanted to call Walter and catch up on the situation, but she did not have time right now.

  Jonna selected the second MMS. She shivered when the name “Leo Brageler” appeared on her display. The image showed a late-middle-aged man. Nordic, but with short, dark hair and innocent, bluish-grey eyes. The passport photo did not reveal any more than that.

  Jonna could not easily reconcile herself to the knowledge that the man in the photograph had caused so much suffering for so many individuals. He looked completely normal. Not like a crackpot with a psychotic stare.

  If it was really him who was behind everything.

  A glimmer of doubt suddenly swept over Jonna. What if she and Walter were wrong?

  CHAPTER 30

  MARTIN BORG SCANNED the room as he entered. Despite his mere one-eighty-metre height, he had to bend not to touch the ceiling with his head. Tor was at least twenty centimetres taller, but had still chosen to live in a hut built for a dwarf.

  Martin constantly kept his hand on the butt of the gun in his pocket. He had, of course, checked that Tor did not have any weapons on him when they met in the car. Even though he was not an immediate risk, you could never be too careful.

  Martin sat on an old kitchen sofa covered with moss-green fabric. The sofa stood beneath one of the room’s two windows. He did not like sitting with his back exposed. That the Albanians were after Tor, he knew already, and he had promised to help Tor with that afterwards. But there could be other jokers hidden in the deck that could suddenly turn up on the card table. Perhaps an old score to be settled by some trigger-happy thugs. It wouldn’t be the first time that the wrong person had been gunned down.

  Around them lay heaps of old junk. Probably stolen goods and other stuff that the lanky git had acquired. Martin could not understand how he could live surrounded by rubbish or even why he would choose to live a life such as his. He himself had once been close to sliding into a life of drugs and crime. But he had chosen another path. He had his brother to thank for that.

  Martin heard Tor searching in a wardrobe. The open door partly obscured him. In theory, he could have a weapon hidden among the clothes.

  Martin took out his gun and let it rest on his knee, cocked and ready to unleash its deadly force, in case the clown behind the wardrobe door tried a repeat performance of the Gnesta drama. This one was dumb enough to start playing with fire even after he had already been burnt.

  Martin was forced to have a certain degree of patience with Headcase. The most important thing was that he did not make trouble for himself or Martin. Especially now that Martin’s future did not look that good. Martin had perhaps misjudged the situation and underestimated the significance of the internal investigation. Perhaps he had not been thinking with a clear head when he made that decision, but now he needed all the help he could get.

  He was hoping that Omar’s hard drive would, to a certain degree, help solve his predicament. If he could get hold of the journalist who was holding the evidence on Uddestad, then his problems would be over. No internal investigation could stop him. He would become a puppet master at Kung
sholmen. Say a few careful words in Uddestad’s ear – or the ear of any other name that was on Omar’s hard drive – then, abracadabra, and they would be rolling out the red carpet for him.

  Tor had changed to clothes that were, if not identical, very similar to the ones he had previously been wearing, except that they were in one piece and clean. Brown corduroys and a mustard-yellow shirt with a Saturday Night Fever collar.

  No weapon appeared from the wardrobe. Probably because he did not have one stashed there. Instead, Tor took out a laptop from one of the kitchen drawers.

  “Will this do?” he asked, showing the laptop to Martin.

  “I suppose,” Martin answered and examined the presumably stolen computer. It was not the latest model, and the battery was probably dead. Luckily enough, Tor had the power adaptor in the same drawer. There was, after all, some sense of order in this scrap yard.

  “Why don’t you use your own computer?” Tor asked.

  “I told you earlier,” Martin answered, irritated. “I can’t leave any traces that might lead to this hard drive, nor to anything else for that matter.”

  Tor nodded. Computers were not his strong suit. He could, at the most, surf the internet.

  After twenty minutes, Martin had installed Omar’s hard drive and logged in with the password that Jerry Salminen had managed to discover. That idiot Omar had even put all his encryption keys on his mobile phone. How could he be so fucking stupid? And he had called himself the “godfather of secret information”, or something to that effect.

  Two woodentops had managed to decipher Omar’s entire net of contacts in less time than it took for Martin to switch on the hard drive on his computer. It was just as well that Omar had gone to meet his maker ahead of time. Who knows? It could have been someone else instead of Martin sifting after information that could be used for different purposes. Then they would have had Martin’s name. And God knows what he would have been forced to do.

  With mounting astonishment, Martin opened file after file, email exchanges and other documents that made his pulse race.

  An hour later, he pushed the laptop away. He looked curiously at Tor, who had been sitting quietly on a chair facing him the whole time. What Tor had said really was the truth.

  Omar had been more than just a former intelligence officer. He had been unusually active for a has-been in the intelligence world. He hadn’t been just a semi-criminal go-between or contract broker, as he had called himself. He had had money too. A considerable amount. The smarty-pants had also saved statements from various bank accounts on the hard drive, as well as lists with account numbers and their passwords. Just give the password and withdraw the cash. Data viruses seemed not to exist in his world. He didn’t even seem to have updated his antivirus software. It was almost too good to be true. Or maybe it was. What if this was fake? What if it was the same as carrying two wallets? One that the mugger gets and one that is the real one? Imagine if everything on the hard drive was a trap. If Martin tried to contact someone on the list, then it would trigger an alarm, an alarm that would have counter-measures against whoever triggered it …

  “What did you find?” Tor interrupted Martin’s meditation. “Is there anything we can use? Jerry thought so.”

  “Some of this we can use,” Martin lied. “But right now, we need to focus on the journalist queer and the evidence on Folke Uddestad. Omar wrote in one of the documents that Uddestad probably had a relationship with that Jörgen Blad, and that Omar hired you and Jerry on Uddestad’s behalf to retrieve some multimedia evidence.”

  “Yes,” Tor said and felt mounting anger when he began to think about the fat journalist and the events outside his home. How the sneaky Albanians set an ambush and how fucking difficult it was to hit anything with his Desert Eagle when it was set to automatic mode. It was that ball of lard who was the cause of all Tor’s problems. He was the root of all the evil that had happened to him recently. It was his fault that Tor was now forced to sit at home with a psychopath in his kitchen so that the psycho could poke around in Omar’s hard drive.

  Fuck that Omar! It was his fault too. He sold him and Jerry out to Haxhi. Probably for pennies, as well.

  And then there was that Uddenstad, or whatever his name was. The bloke who really kicked off this shit. That was how it was. Uggelstad was the pig who had had the biggest part in Jerry’s death and Tor’s tricky situation, to put it mildly. The maniac on the other side of the table had indeed promised Tor greener grass, but he could just as easily end up on a rubbish tip. Dirty cops had dumped people on the tip with a bullet in the head before. They faked gang killings and then investigated the hits themselves. It was a possibility. The guy in front of him was not all there. He could do anything.

  Tor felt ambivalent. Well, that was what you called it when you were not sure about what you thought or what you wanted. Your thoughts were splintered. One half of your brain wanted to go right and the other left. Why could there not be just one complete brain?

  His head was starting to hurt from all his pondering.

  As long as he did not have a weapon, he was stuck. He could try to grab one of the knives he had stashed. He could surprise the cop. But there was a risk that he knew karate or some martial art. Some cops were trained in that kung fu and could kill you with their bare hands. Not like the regular cops or the riot police, who pumped iron at the cop gym and moved like rusty robots.

  Tor needed money, enough money to buy another Desert Eagle or, at worst, some other shooter, just as long as it worked. Then he could take down the psycho cop and get out from under him.

  He scratched his neck with his intact hand.

  But then he thought of Haxhi. Before punching the cop’s lights out, he needed to watch his back by sending Haxhi home to Albania in a wooden box. And he could not do that by himself. The cop had promised to put Haxhi on the to-do list as soon as they grabbed the faggot and shook him down for the evidence on Uggenstag. That was the agreement.

  But what were his plans for the future after that? What would he live off, now that both Omar and Jerry were gone? If he snuffed out the cop, then even that source of income went up in smoke. Or would it be him who was smoked if he continued to work for the cop?

  Tough questions. To start housebreaking again did not seem exciting. A lot of work for little money. He would, once again, be back at the bottom of the criminal ladder. To claw his way back a second time would be a fucking pain, almost impossible to do.

  How close they had been with of the Original Fuckers. One filthy hair’s breadth from success. To go from top to rock bottom in a few days sucked like crazy. So fucking crazy.

  He would play the game despite everything. If he could not borrow one from the weekend-soldier who sold him the Desert Eagle. He would take out the cop once Haxhi was out of the way. Then he would use the information on Omar’s hard drive. For what, he had no idea, but it would sort itself out later. There must have something good on it because the cop had sat for a long time staring at the screen. Everything can be sold as long as the price is right. That was what Jerry used to say.

  THREE MINUTES AFTER the first name call, Jonna saw a slightly tense woman approach the information desk.

  “Tuva Sahlin?” Jonna asked and walked up to the woman.

  “Ye-es,” the woman hesitated.

  “Jonna de Brugge, police,” Jonna introduced herself.

  “I see,” the woman said, uncertainly. “What’s this about?”

  “First of all, nothing has happened to your family. I’m here to fetch you.”

  “Fetch me?”

  “Yes, I want you to leave the ship together with us,” Jonna said, pointing to Jörgen, as if that would reassure her more.

  “Why?” the woman asked suspiciously. “Am I being ar rested?”

  “No, absolutely not,” Jonna reassured her.

  “We’re here to protect your family from you actually,” Jörgen added, finding the situation a little comical. She did not look the least bit dangerous.<
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  “Protect? I don’t understand,” she said, confused.

  Jonna warned Jörgen with a sharp look.

  “Does it concern my work with the district court?” A trace of fear appeared in her eyes.

  “You could say that,” Jonna began. “And I’ll tell you more in the car. But first, I’d like to know if you have eaten or drunk anything on the ship since you boarded.”

  Tuva stared at Jonna with surprise. “Why do you want to know that?”

  “Have you?” Jonna repeated.

  “Yes, a welcome drink at the bar over there,” she said, pointing to one of the bars.

  “I was bought a drink by an insistent man as soon as we arrived. Actually, he bought us all drinks. I’m travelling with some girlfriends.”

  “Was it, by any chance, this man?” Jonna asked, showing the photograph of Leo Brageler that she had on her mobile phone.

  “I’m not sure,” she hesitated at first. “The man at the bar had a beard and intense eyes. But, yes, that’s him. Take away the beard and add some intensity to the eyes, and that’s him,” she answered decisively.

  Jörgen felt his pulse race. Now they were close. The killer, or whatever he was to be called, was here on board the ship. It could only have been him who had bought drinks for five women. Normally, you only bought a drink for one at a time. Not even the men from the women-free town of Haparanda would be that desperate if they had just got on board the Baltic Sea’s number-one singles booze cruise.

  “Show me the man who bought your drinks,” Jonna said, taking Tuva with her. “But from a distance. I want you to point him out to me.”

  “He was sitting at our table when you called me, so it shouldn’t be a problem,” she said, as they walked towards the bar.

  They pushed past the row of passengers that had formed around the bar. The chair where the man had been sitting was empty. Instead, one of Tuva’s friends was using the chair as a place to rest some shopping bags.