The older man, with a distinct accent, rumbling at the end of each sentence. The younger man with well-articulated authority despite the low-key voice.
“The buyer is meeting us there at a quarter to two. As I said yesterday, he wants to be sure we can deliver.”
“One thing before you hang up, Leo.”
“Yeah?”
“I just want you to know—yes, I was unsure about your damn idea at first. But during the night I saw it before me. It is a good business. Everyone will gain from it. The whole family.”
“It’s great that you aren’t hesitating anymore, because I seriously need your help.”
A little was left of the recording. The conversation had begun at 09:12 according to the black timeline at the lower edge. Altogether, it lasted eighty-seven seconds. Then the silence—which now was all that was heard—wasn’t electronic. It was the father and son reflecting; they were going to sell the country’s largest private arsenal in a few hours.
“And, Dad? I’m sure I don’t need to say that it’s extremely important that you are standing out there on time, that you aren’t late—like last time.”
Broncks looked at the clock hanging on the wall over the television. Quarter to ten. Only four hours remaining until their meeting with the buyer.
The time to be able to understand Sam’s involvement was rapidly shrinking.
The time he needed to form the plan that would be implemented the very second Leo Dûvnjac received the payment.
Broncks yawned and straightened his back.
When he sat on this sofa again in the evening, he would know if he had lost the only remaining member of his family forever.
NOWHERE DOES TIME go so slowly as when you’re moving through the corridor of a hospital.
Elisa first counted seconds, then steps, then breaths.
Whatever the method, her movements were frozen. It felt just as impossible to ever reach the other end of the eternally long passage.
It could be because everything was so monochromatic. White walls succeeding each other, yellow linoleum floors growing together. It lacked focal points for your eyes. Or maybe it was about the internal focal points—the distance you have to walk to receive the news you fear. The helplessness it means to wait for information for which the likelihood of life and death is equal—the condition that once changed her forever and that she never wants to go through again.
So she went there anyway.
To the end of eternity’s corridor.
To the sliding doors, the entrance to the orthopedic department K83, according to the sign on the ceiling, and it projected a calm that was the opposite of the hospital ward she herself had lain in many years ago. Here you were mended. Here your quality of life was increased. A patient most often left in better condition than he or she arrived in. And already a little way down this much shorter, much more colorful and cozier corridor, the woman she sought was standing, involved in a conversation with one of her coworkers, both of them in white coats and shoes with soft, thick rubber soles that were just as white.
“Hello again, I apologize that I . . .”
Britt-Marie saw her immediately, heard her speaking, and stopped what she was engaged in. Elisa began walking to meet her.
“. . . came and bothered you here, Britt-Marie, but it’s the daytime address you gave us, and since you weren’t at home when I looked for you there and didn’t answer your phone . . .”
“I saw that you called. But I chose not to answer. Because I’m working now. And this is my free zone. My eldest son’s activities don’t reach here. I don’t intend to talk to any police here.”
“I have only one question. And—”
“Good. Then we can talk while I follow you out.”
They passed identical rooms, each with four beds on wheels and framed by metal railings, all of them flanked by a minor forest of wheelchairs and crutches. And as soon as Britt-Marie opened the sliding doors and they stood on the very first plastic mat of eternity’s corridor, she indicated with both her look and voice that the very short meeting must begin and end immediately.
“And what was it you wanted? Your only question?”
“Leo.”
“That is not a question.”
“I must get ahold of him. It’s important for me to do so. Otherwise I wouldn’t be standing here.”
Britt-Marie’s eyes—which were so determined—were suddenly tired.
“I don’t know where he is.”
“When did you see him last? After all, your address is on his release documents.”
“That was your second question.”
Elisa tried to understand her unwillingness. She understood her frustration at the direction her sons’ lives had taken. Her sorrow over preparing for detention hearings and prison visits instead of preparing for grandchildren. But she didn’t understand why her unwillingness to talk was even greater now than it had been when they trudged in unannounced and turned her home upside down during a house search.
“Britt-Marie, I’m conducting a police investigation. I therefore ask you to answer—when did you see him last?”
The middle-aged woman was drowning in fatigue.
“This morning.”
“This morning?”
“Yes. He came home right before I was going to drive here. And he left again then, at the same time I did.”
“Did I understand you correctly? He came to your home early this morning—but only for a few minutes? Where was he going then?”
And then her gaze glided away somewhere, as if it was seeking a place to fasten, something to rest on, exactly like Elisa in the never-ending corridor.
“Britt-Marie? Look at me. Do you know where he was going?”
“No. I don’t know. And I . . . perhaps this sounds strange but I think . . . I don’t think he’s coming back. It was a feeling I had. That he was saying farewell. He said it without saying it.”
White coat, white shoes, name tag on her chest: until this moment, her gestures, her charm had gone with the security her appearance conveyed. That wasn’t so any longer. She stood there, flushed, broken. Almost passionate.
“And now I have a question for you that I demand you answer. Is this, your coming here, about the same thing as your colleague’s visit was to my home late last night? Is that why you keep showing up all the time?”
“My colleague’s visit?”
“Yes. Has something happened? If so, tell me about it.”
“Britt-Marie—who was at your house?”
“Broncks. He worked on the bank robberies. Has something happened?”
Elisa was silent.
“Answer me!”
John Broncks. Again? Without informing me?
“Britt-Marie, what did he want?”
“Now I’m the one questioning you!”
“Help me now, Britt-Marie—what did he want?”
The confused mother was calming down a little. At least, the red in her cheeks seemed to fade.
“To be honest, I never really grasped what. The only thing that was fairly clear was that he was looking for contact with Leo. And the whole matter was that I should pass on the contact information. Why don’t you ask him yourself? He works with you!”
Elisa’s surprise that John Broncks suddenly found his way into their conversation began to turn into irritation, the sort that in turn becomes anger.
Broncks. What the hell are you doing?
“Okay, Britt-Marie, I’m sorry. I can’t explain why, but you have to help me here a little anyway. I must get something I can use to look into this further. What I now know is that Leo was at your home this morning. But how did he get there? How did he leave?”
“By car.”
“What car?”
“I don’t know. A . . . car. Probably not his own. Someone drove him.”
“Drove him?”
“A man. A friend—he said that. Sam something.”
Anger was no longer sufficient to describe it.
/>
Fury.
And it started deep, deep in her chest.
A friend. A friend named Sam something. She had pulled out the list of four names they should map out more closely, four candidates that shared prison time with Leo Dûvnjac and were now released. One of them was named Sam Larsen. One of two that Broncks insisted that he would investigate himself.
“Britt-Marie?”
Elisa had a link in her phone to the current documents of the investigation. She found the right photo and held up the display in front of Britt-Marie.
“I want you to look at this.”
A portrait photo out of the correctional system’s register. The most recent she had access to.
“Was it him?”
Britt-Marie’s red reading glasses were hanging on a cord on her chest. Now she raised them to her face.
“Was it him, Britt-Marie? The friend in the car?”
She nodded.
“Yes. He looked like that.”
As Elisa returned through eternity’s corridor, it went much faster than on the way in. She had other matters to think of than white walls and yellow plastic rugs—she had just gotten access to three new facts.
That her colleague was continuing to withhold information.
That a farewell to a mother heralded a big change.
And since she was convinced these two men were linked and together they formed a new truth:
That it was now her task to put everything else aside and find out what all this means.
THE TRUNK’S BARK was rough as he leaned his cheek against it. Pine. Next to birch, spruce, and an occasional oak. John Broncks moved cautiously through dense, unkempt forest the one-hundred-and-fifty-yard distance to a deserted farm and a house on the west side of the plot, a dilapidated barn on the east side and a beautiful little grove of fruit trees between them.
From there he had a perfect view without being seen himself, just as on his previous visit.
He had parked his car on a secluded forest road about a half a mile away, moved the last stretch on foot, and made the decision that he could only call Sam every ten minutes while he was waiting. Every new attempt was met with an electronic voice monotonously announcing that the recipient couldn’t be reached. He called Sam’s neighbor on the island five times, who explained that he hadn’t seen him and that the house seemed empty when he had peeked into it at John’s urgent request. And he called the ferryman three times, who in the end was just as anxious as he was himself, and with an increasingly quieter voice reiterated that Sam had traveled neither there nor back to the mainland during the last twenty-four hours.
He must keep looking.
He must keep trying to make contact.
It wouldn’t be too long before Leo Dûvnjac arrived to conduct his business.
The skin of his cheek began to get irritated and he moved slightly, leaning his shoulder on the next tree instead. And he looked around. The surroundings seemed so different in daylight. The desolation was even more evident. A place just a dozen miles or so from the city, yet ideal for someone who wanted to operate without any disturbance.
While he was waiting, he made yet another call.
To the head of the National Task Force, a man he met more than seven years earlier in connection with the arrest of father and son Dûvnjac in a vacation cottage abandoned in the winter.
Broncks inquired about the availability of support for an operation that could be considered for that same afternoon, and got confirmation that it would be possible to dispatch the whole force in the current situation and that it could be in place within half an hour after the alarm, while regular police set up roadblocks.
He rested his gaze on the farm, on the poorly painted barn, which probably was once full of cattle, of life, and now contained a truck filled with death. Nearly two hundred automatic weapons. But also an explosive device, a remote-controlled bomb constructed to detonate via a pulse from a cell phone.
Broncks checked the time again.
The people he was waiting for should soon be at the entrance, according to the intercepted conversation.
One more call—the last one.
And it felt, somehow, like the same call he made to his big brother the summer between middle school and high school, when he made Sam listen to a terrified and desperate little brother pleading for urgent help. Then, the conversation led to disaster. But now, if he got ahold of him, the outcome could be the opposite—to prevent disaster from being repeated.
He dialed the number, waited while the signal searched there somewhere in the air, and held his breath until he encountered the voice again, which explained mechanically that the subscriber couldn’t be reached. Then it was as if his body began to tremble, as if he were very cold, the kind of shaking that can only be quietly waited out.
He knew then that he couldn’t do anything more.
Other than to hope.
To hope that when Leo Dûvnjac and his father arrived and set off the alarm to the National Task Force, Sam would not be found there, by their side, and not be proved as involved as everything indicated.
COURTROOM 12, DIVISION 2. Leo leaned back on an uncomfortable wooden bench in a small and unassuming courtroom, so different compared with the high-security courtroom he and his brothers had sat in for many months, indicted for the country’s most comprehensive series of bank robberies. He only realized now that he had never experienced a trial from this side of the railing. From the spectator seats.
And he was doing it in a police uniform.
The trial was that of a poor teenager who stole a number of randomly selected cars and was in a fucking bad position. According to the witness testimony of a forensic technician, the amateur had spread his fingerprints in every vehicle—fingerprints registered in the database since his previous indictment, when he’d also spread them in about the same number of cars.
Heavy walls paneled in dark oak. Big windows facing Scheele Street. Acoustics that amplified every scraping of feet and every nervous clearing of the throat. The perfect place for waiting.
Because it was here in this building, Stockholm’s courthouse, that everything would begin.
From here, in three minutes and thirty seconds, he was going to initiate the final phase of a year’s planning.
His cell phone lay on the wooden bench, very close to his right thigh. In the last few hours, he had monitored the location of the false lead and observed that camera A, mounted on the fence at the head of the gravel road and now in daylight, registered a private car passing by with Broncks in the driver’s seat. That was good, exactly according to plan. However, it was not according to plan that he was still acting alone. Not one elite police force had come to assist him. Elite cops should be standing behind every bush around the barn, ready to arrest someone who didn’t have any intention at all of showing up there this afternoon. He didn’t understand why. But he couldn’t wait any longer. He must begin now in order to reach what didn’t exist as late as possible without arousing suspicions, but at the same time early enough to have time to finish the entire loading before the regular transport arrived at 14:00.
Leo got up just as the prosecutor, in his closing arguments, asked for a sentence of twelve months in prison for the teenager who had stolen cars and left his fingerprints in them. He walked out into the stone corridor, which echoed power and subservience, and he continued down the wide staircase to the ground floor and on to the basement and the plate-metal door he had passed the day before, when for the first time he walked through the underground passage of the police station without handcuffs.
BRONCKS’S OFFICE WAS empty. And it was just as well: it was still too early to pose a few questions directly to him. First she would look for the link between a policeman and a former criminal; between John Broncks, who should have been sitting there, and the man just identified as Leo Dûvnjac’s friend, Sam Larsen.
Elisa continued to her own office, so impatient that she turned on the computer and sat down on her chai
r, the bag with the big sandwich still in one hand and a container with freshly squeezed orange juice in the other. Ordinarily she ate her lunches at the little café across Bergs Street with its view of the police station but also with a sort of distance, which for a brief time brought perspective and prevented her from being devoured. But today there wasn’t time. She never endured going around with unsubstantiated feelings. And now, with such a strong feeling that one of the station’s most respected colleagues was withholding information, she must investigate, delve, and turn the feeling into facts. Circle a motive that made Broncks’s damn discord comprehensible. Like . . . like when you have a boyfriend you suspect of being unfaithful and to be able to confront him, first you have to get evidence—a hotel bill, a list of phone calls, a credit card statement. (The bastard had been so stupid that he bought lingerie from Victoria’s Secret and denied it when she faced him in their shared kitchen with the Visa statement in her hand.)
Never defeated by a lie.
When she confronted John Broncks, she would not act emotionally as she did then with the idiot who showered his mistress in lace underwear. This idiot, Broncks, would be unmasked more quietly and professionally, but of course he wouldn’t get away with a well-formulated lie either.
Half of the cheese sandwich, half of the freshly squeezed orange juice.
Now, finally, the slow computer had opened the window to the police authority’s criminal records and she entered Sam Larsen’s ten-digit personal identity number.
And waited.
The computer continued to be painfully slow. Until it woke up and she leaned closer.
There, in the middle of the screen. The only hit for Sam Larsen in the criminal records.
MURDER—CHAP 1 § 3 THE PENAL CODE
IMPRISONMENT LIFE.
IMPLEMENTATION STARTED.
A crime.
An entire adult life.
COMMUTATION TO FIXED TERM SENTENCE 34 YEARS AND 6 MONTHS.
PAROLED.
REMAINING SENTENCE 11 YEARS AND 6 MONTHS.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 30