“Minister?” He moved forward, shaking hands, nodding amiably at passing faces. He threw in one of his patented Stenberg smiles, but without making the slightest move to stop. The trick was to keep moving the whole time, and not get bogged down in nonsense discussions that didn’t lead anywhere.
Wallin ought to be here somewhere. The embassy usually invited people who had served at the War Crimes Tribunal to its New Year cocktail party. Stenberg looked around and thought he could see a glimpse of a familiar profile in one corner. But just as he started to move in that direction someone took hold of his elbow.
“Jesper!” It was John Thorning.
“John, good to see you. Are you on your own?”
“Margareta stayed at home. She wasn’t feeling very well. This sort of thing”—he indicated the overcrowded room—“tires her out.”
And evidently not just her, Stenberg thought. John Thorning looked worn-out. The bags under his eyes were even bigger than last time, and his face now had a couple of red patches on it.
“I understand, do give her my very best, John. I’m afraid I must . . .” He released his grip of Thorning’s hand, but the old man kept hold of his.
“How are you getting on, Jesper?”
“How do you mean?” Stenberg glanced around quickly for Karolina.
“With the investigation. It’s been over two weeks now. You said—”
“I said you’d hear more after the holidays. But probably not until someway into January.”
“But you must have heard something?!” John Thorning was still clutching his hand. His voice was a little too loud, making the people around them look in their direction. Jesper went on smiling as he smelled the alcohol on the other man’s breath.
“This isn’t the right place for this sort of discussion, John.”
“Please, Jesper!”
More and more faces were turning toward them. Far too many for comfort.
“Come with me to the bar, John, and I’ll tell you.” He pulled the older man after him, and after a couple of paces Thorning finally let go of Stenberg’s hand. The old man padded obediently after him like a puppy, and the expression on his face was just like their little dog, Tubbe, when it wasn’t allowed out with them. Old John certainly wasn’t his usual self. Stenberg had to say something, anything, just to get rid of him.
Stenberg stopped and waited until everyone else turned away. He took a deep breath. John Thorning looked as if he might collapse at any moment. He had to give him some crumb of comfort, something that at least sounded encouraging.
“It’s like this, John,” he said close to the man’s ear. “We’ve found certain . . . things. The sort of thing that requires a closer look. I mean, nothing conclusive,” he added quickly when he saw the man’s reaction. “But we’re doing what we can. Wallin has put one of his best . . .” Stenberg bit his tongue. Fuck! He should have kept Wallin’s name out of this. “Like I said before, John, you’ll get a better idea early in January. We’ll speak then.”
John Thorning nodded eagerly. “Of course, Jesper, I understand! I really do appreciate . . .”
Stenberg smiled his sufficiently modest smile.
“Don’t mention it, John. And remember, we’re just taking a closer look at a couple of things. That sort of thing happens all the time, it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything wrong.”
John Thorning didn’t seem to be listening and was squeezing Stenberg’s arm instead. The expression on his face suddenly looked almost happy.
“Thanks, Jesper, thanks a million. You’ve no idea.”
When Stenberg glanced over his old mentor’s shoulder he noticed his wife looking at them curiously.
• • •
Sarac noticed the smell on the stairs. Cigarette smoke. He had slept soundly, dreaming an awful lot of things, none of which he could remember when he woke up. The only exception was that song.
I owe everything,
Debts I can’t escape till the day I die . . .
“Odds and Eevens,” he thought it was called. He’d have to google the lyrics when he got a chance.
He came down into the hall, followed the smell into the living room and out into the glazed veranda. Natalie was standing just outside the door. The cigarette smoke was swirling around her head, seeping back into the house through the drafty windows. Sarac realized he was pleased to see her.
He tapped gently on the glass. She turned and smiled at him, then took a last drag before flicking the butt out across the snow-covered lawn.
“Have you been here long?” he said as Natalie closed the glass door behind her.
“About an hour. I really do like this place. How far does the plot extend?” She gestured down toward the forest.
“All the way down to the water on the other side of the hill,” he said.
“Nice. Is there a jetty?”
“A jetty and a boathouse, but they’re both pretty run-down. Like the rest of the place.” Sarac threw his hand out. “I was planning to do it up, but a few other things seem to have got in the way.”
Natalie nodded, pulled her ChapStick from her pocket, and ran it over her lips.
“Yes, I saw the tarpaulins and building materials upstairs. So you’re the DIY type, David?”
“Not really.” Sarac shrugged. “But the alternative is selling up. Getting builders in would cost too much. Neither my sister nor I have got the money.”
Natalie pulled a face that was hard to interpret.
“By the way, there was something I wanted to ask you,” Sarac said. “When you cleaned up my apartment, did you notice if there was anything written on the bedroom wall?”
“Like what?”
“Well . . .” Sarac looked for the right words. “Some sort of message. Something about a secret?”
Natalie shook her head. “It looked like a war zone. But the walls were okay. Why?”
Sarac nodded, then looked out toward the orchard. “Oh, it was just something I got into my head. I must have imagined it. Maybe I dreamed it.”
Natalie was studying him and looked as if she wanted to ask something.
“Do you want something to eat?” she said instead. “I can make you some bacon and eggs.”
“Sure.”
He stayed on the veranda while Natalie went into the kitchen. He peered down toward the fruit trees again and for a brief moment thought he could see movement down among the trees. But then he realized that it was just the wind, making the shadows down there move.
“Debts I can’t escape till the day I die,” the voice in his head sang. The song was back again, and all of a sudden he remembered the group’s name. The High Wire.
“David, I found this in the hall. Are you keeping a diary or something?”
“Er, what?”
Natalie was standing in the doorway. She was holding his notebook in her hand.
Damn!
“Oh, i-it’s nothing special,” he said, taking a few quick steps toward her. “Just a few things I jotted down.”
He held out his hand. He had left the book in his bedroom, he was sure of that. He’d put it under . . . under . . . ? Fuck!
Natalie handed him the notebook.
“Did your friend Peter bring it? Has it got something to do with your work in the police? Secret sources?”
Sarac clenched his jaw. Natalie noticed his reaction.
“Don’t worry. I don’t want to pry. It was he who told me.”
“Who, Peter?”
Natalie nodded.
“He bummed a cigarette off me the other evening before he left. Nice guy, maybe a bit too self-aware for my taste. Besides, I don’t really like men who have those neat little goatees. Anyway, he told me what line of work you were both in. No details, nothing like that, just that it was important that you got your memory back soon. Very important, even.”
She smiled, and once again that uncomfortable feeling crept up on Sarac. That nothing was the way it seemed.
• • •
/> The man down in the orchard was barely moving. He stood still as he watched the house through his binoculars. He saw the man and woman talk for a while out on the veranda, then she went back inside the house. For a moment he thought the man had seen him, that their eyes had met in spite of the distance and the shadows hiding him. But obviously that was just paranoia. He was a phantom, a figment of the imagination, impossible to see.
The man lowered the binoculars, took a half-smoked cigar from one of his jacket pockets, and turned away as he lit it. Then he held it inside his cupped hand to hide the angry red glow at its tip. He ought to stop, he knew that. Just not quite yet. Not until he knew that the secret was safe. That he was safe . . .
He looked up. The man had gone back inside the house. He took another puff on the cigar. Then turned around, slid back out between the two snow-covered old gateposts, and vanished into the forest.
THIRTY-ONE
Five sets of numbers, spread out across the page. Four of them written in the same black felt-tip. But the top one had been scribbled using what looked like a fairly useless standard-issue ballpoint. Molnar was right, only one of the numbers worked as a possible ID number. The rest were clearly something different.
He had at least worked out that there were two distinct sections in the notebook. The majority of it was full of what looked a bit like a diary. Dates followed by code names, and a code that presumably indicated a location. The first date was almost two years old, the most recent dated October 3, involving a CI named Bacchus. None of it meant anything to him.
There was nothing about any meetings with Janus, so how and when they had met must be documented some other way. Unless they weren’t documented at all. But the page with the five numbers under the Janus symbol was the one that felt most interesting. His first impression had been that they were ID numbers. In which case he must have encrypted them somehow. And, if they were ID numbers, and related to five different sources, why had he listed them without giving their code names? Maybe the answers had been on the pages that had been torn out. The glue had come loose in places, and he could see traces of paper both before and after the page containing the list and the Janus symbol. There was nothing about any meetings after October 3. Why not? What was he trying to hide?
He thought about Janus again, wondering where he could be. What he was doing right now. There was a knock on his bedroom door and Natalie popped her head in. “I was just wondering if you’d like some coffee? Food’s going to be a while yet.”
“Yes, thanks, I’ll be right down,” he replied, and realized he was smiling in a way he didn’t quite recognize. Then it dawned on him that it was because of Natalie.
The smell of tobacco on her clothes made its way across the room, making Sarac think of the man up in the hospital. Did he actually exist, or was he just a product of his imagination? A hallucination brought on by his migraine, like the ones he’d had the other day? He had hoped that was the case, but sadly it probably wasn’t. The man felt real, as did the talk of an agreement.
• • •
“You look wiped out,” Natalie said when Sarac came into the kitchen. “Can I ask what your job involves, or is it a state secret?” She smiled and raised her pale eyebrows slightly.
“I have a confession to make,” she said, nodding toward Sarac’s notebook. “The book was lying open on the floor when I found it. I couldn’t help looking.”
Sarac opened his mouth.
“You don’t have to say anything.” Natalie held up a hand. “I know it was wrong of me, but in my defense, I had no way of knowing that there’d be secret police stuff in it.”
Sarac swallowed, feeling his attack of anger subside. The fact was that she was right, it was actually his fault for not taking better care of his things. Fucking stupid shitty brain!
“It’s okay,” he said. “I need to learn to look after things better.”
Natalie shrugged her shoulders.
“Well, if it’s any consolation, confusion is one of the commonest side effects of a stroke,” she said.
“H-have you had many patients like me? People of my age who’ve suffered a stroke, I mean?”
She looked at him and nodded. “A couple.”
“And what happened to them? Did they ever become themselves again? The people they had been before?”
She tilted her head and bit her lip slightly.
“No. They didn’t,” she eventually said.
Sarac gulped and felt his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth.
“But, on the other hand, they got something that plenty of other people would like,” Natalie said.
“W-what?”
“A new chance,” she said. “A chance to become the people they wanted to be.”
Sarac sat in silence, then he nodded slowly.
“Can I help at all, David? I’ve got my laptop if there’s anything you want to check.” She nodded toward the notebook on the table.
Sarac thought for a moment. Then he suddenly remembered something Natalie had said the first time she had shown up.
“Didn’t you say you knew someone who worked in the Tax Office?”
• • •
“Okay, thanks for your help, Freddie!” Natalie ended the call and turned to Sarac. “What your friend Molnar said was right. The only ID number on the list belongs to a woman in Umeå. Kristina Svensson, she lives on Fältvägen.”
Sarac frowned unhappily.
“The rest of the numbers don’t work, but we already knew that.”
Sarac looked down at the floor. Tried to focus. Maybe Molnar was right after all, and the numbers really were bank accounts. But for some reason that didn’t feel right. The numbers seemed to be connected to people, he was pretty sure about that.
“Listen . . .” Natalie began.
He looked up and saw that Natalie was studying the first page of his notebook. He thought he should probably close it. But what difference did it really make? The numbers meant even less to her than they did to him. He saw her frown; she seemed to be thinking.
“Okay, I’ve got some numbers in my computer that I’d rather keep a bit confidential. My hard disk is encrypted, but I’m still a bit worried someone could get hold of it and get into it. If that happened, I could end up with serious problems.”
Sarac said nothing and tried to imagine what serious problems could mean for a care assistant, or why she had any use for a contact in the Tax Office. He didn’t succeed terribly well.
“So I checked out the whole business of codes and ciphers,” Natalie went on. “I realized that if it was going to work for me, I’d have to be able to decode things quickly and simply.”
“And?” Sarac straightened up.
“I use a simple Excel spreadsheet. A few lines between the numbers, to make it nice and easy to read. But there’s another reason. Between the lines, so to speak.”
Something clicked inside Sarac’s head. That piece of music was suddenly back. It started slowly, like a whisper, then grew quickly louder.
Got to start from somewhere
So I’ll start from the grave
We’ll count the steps along the way
“Take a look at this!” Natalie pointed at the open notebook. “The first number, 9728444477, starts on the second line. The next one on the third line. One line between them. Nice and neat. But look at the third number, it’s suddenly two lines below, and the gap before the fourth one is even bigger, do you see?”
Sarac nodded. The music in his head was getting louder.
“In my Excel spreadsheet I add the number of the row to each number,” Natalie went on. “So if the number one thousand is in row five, the real number is actually one thousand five. If you used a similar system, then the first number would be the figure on the second line, plus two.”
She took out a pen and wrote the numbers down on the back of an old newspaper. She left a space and added two to the number.
“No, that isn’t right. That only changes the last digit i
n the number. Or possibly the last two, but the rest stay the same; 9728444479 still isn’t a proper ID number. Shit!”
She stared at the paper.
“Okay, I know. What if you add two to every digit, like this: 9728444477—nine plus two is eleven, so, one. Seven plus two is nine, two plus two is four.”
She wrote all the numbers down. Then stared at the result.
194066-6699
“Er . . .” Natalie said, and rubbed the back of her neck. “Well, it would be a very old person, born on the sixty-sixth day of the fortieth month in 1919. Crap!”
She crumbled the sheet of paper up.
“Forget it, I thought I’d come up with something clever.”
Sarac closed his eyes. The music was echoing in his head, almost drowning out his thoughts.
Odds for a christening
And evens, a wedding day
He picked up the pen and wrote the numbers down again.
9728444477
“Odd lines minus. Even lines plus,” he muttered, almost without thinking about it.
He deducted the number of the row from each digit, then leaned back.
750622-2255
“Shit,” Natalie said. “I’ll give Freddie another call right away.”
Atif carefully wound the bandage around his left hand, pulling it as tight as he could. His index and ring fingers had swollen up like sausages, and his wrist and lower arm were bluish-yellow and stiff. He probably had a hairline fracture in the bone, or possibly, in the worst case, had actually broken it. At least the dog bite looked a bit better, although that was scant consolation in the circumstances. The left side of his chest was blue as well, and hurt like fuck when he took deep breaths. He guessed that one or more ribs were broken. He also had the headache from hell, which not even four acetaminophen seemed able to touch. All in all, a pain level of a strong five. An irritating nuisance, but at least it was surmountable. He was planning to rest for a couple of days and lie low over the New Year.
Besides, he needed to do some thinking and figure out his next move. Maybe it was time to accept Hunter’s proposal after all? At least that way he’d avoid any further undesirable incidents. No one would dare touch him. Or he could give up on the whole thing and just go home. Put all this behind him. But he knew that wasn’t going to happen. He’d never let anyone get away with anything before, and he wasn’t about to start now. Above all, definitely not Janus.
MemoRandom Page 21