Last Will
Page 15
Q fingered his mug.
“I didn’t think that was even technically possible,” Annika said, leaning back. “Keeping track of every conversation and text message?”
“Of course it is,” Q said. “How else could the networks get paid?”
Annika reflected for a few seconds, letting this information sink in.
“They get paid,” she said, “because they know who called who and for how long, but they don’t know what they said or what they wrote in their texts. That’s not possible. Those details aren’t stored.”
“Right,” Q said. “And what does that tell you?”
She thought for four seconds.
“You’ve found a phone.”
Q tilted his head to one side and smiled.
“Bravo! In a trash can at the bus stop outside the main entrance, right opposite the Serafen health center. No fingerprints, just traces of the soap used inside the City Hall. The SIM card was erased, but we’ve got guys down in a garage in Nacka who can reconstruct that sort of thing.”
“Like in Knutby?” Annika said.
“Like in Knutby. So what does the text message mean?”
Annika looked at Q and thought hard.
“An accomplice,” she said. “She had help, from inside the City Hall.”
Q nodded and drank the rest of his coffee.
“At least one, right, and at least one more outside: the person driving the boat. But we have no idea who these people were. We’ve got a list of suspects, but no conclusive evidence.”
Annika stared at Q, her head spinning.
“The phones were bought in August, you said? Three months ago?”
“The same time the getaway boat was stolen. Which suggests she knew exactly what she was doing.”
“So she didn’t shoot the wrong person? She didn’t miss Wiesel and just happened to hit von Behring by mistake?”
Q got up and walked over to the window, then turned back to face the room.
“Apparently not.”
Annika felt the information hit her in her chest.
“I knew it,” she said, looking into Caroline’s eyes once more. “I knew she was the target, and she knew it too.”
She looked at Q again.
“Had there been any threats made against Caroline? Anyone who wanted to get rid of her?”
“Nothing that’s come to light yet.”
“There has to be something,” Annika said keenly. “You need to dig deeper. Caroline wasn’t surprised when she died, I could see it in her eyes.”
Q turned around and looked at her thoughtfully.
“So you say,” he said. “Was there anything else you were wondering about?”
Annika looked past the detective inspector and out the window. So Caroline really was the killer’s target, someone really did want to get rid of her.
“What happened after the shots were fired?” she asked.
Q sat down again, looked into his coffee cup, saw it was empty, and threw it into the wastebasket.
“We’ve got more witnesses for that, but not as many as you might think. We know she made her way out using the elevator in a service passage leading to the Golden Hall. And from there it’s less than a hundred meters to the water.”
Q got up, pulled open one of the desk drawers, and took out a large, rolled-up map.
“Look at this,” he said. “After Liljeholmen there are no built-up areas along the shore of Lake Mälaren until you get to Södertälje, with the exception of this little road here, Pettersbergsvägen in Mälarhöjden. We’ve got a witness who saw two people get onto two small motorbikes in Gröndal. They could have made their way without being seen all the way from the center of Stockholm and out into the Baltic, if they wanted to. And that’s exactly what I think they did.”
“That’s impossible,” Annika said. “Wherever you go, there’s always someone.”
“Stockholm’s got a hell of a lot of green,” Q said. “Shore protection and the environment fascists have made sure of that. Do you have any idea how much coastline we’ve got in Sweden? Enough to go round the planet nine and a half times, and no one’s allowed to build on any of it.”
Annika tried to follow his argument.
“So who did it? Any particular group? What were they trying to achieve?”
The detective inspector sat down again and for once looked quite normal, serious.
“We have one suspect,” he said. “We’ve got an identity of one person that matches. It was your information that did it.”
Annika blinked.
“You’re kidding?”
“The eyes,” Q said. “Her golden yellow eyes. We got lucky with the CIA. She’s American, a professional assassin, expensive, and extremely damned talented.”
Annika felt her throat tighten; she was having trouble breathing.
“What’s her name?” she said, her voice sounding thin.
“She uses a whole list of identities and nationalities, but the CIA know her by her nickname. It comes from her eyes. She’s known as the Kitten.”
“Kitten?” Annika said.
“Yep, Kitten,” Q said, standing up. “And I’m only telling you so you understand why it was so important that you kept quiet.”
“About her eyes?” Annika said.
“That was the decisive detail for us,” Q said, “but as you’ve doubtless realized, that information mustn’t go beyond this room.”
“Why not?” Annika asked. “Large parts of this aren’t exactly controversial. And however much you try, it’ll leak out in the end.”
“Not this,” Q said.
“Yes it will,” Annika said. “Everything leaks. It’s just a matter of time.”
“If this gets out,” Q said, “it’ll be because you’ve talked. We’re keeping this within a damned restricted team, because this isn’t just about us and the Nobel killings.”
Annika let what he said settle into some sort of order in her head.
“You’re waiting for other security services,” she said. “You’re working with foreign police on other crimes, other murders. Where?”
Q looked faintly amused.
“The USA, Colombia, and France, among others.”
“You’ve got something else as well,” Annika said. “What?”
“We’ve managed to link her fingerprints to the identification, and this is the first time anyone has managed that.”
“How?” Annika asked breathlessly.
Q couldn’t help smiling.
“She dropped one of her shoes on the steps down to the water,” he said. “Can you believe it?”
“Cinderella of Death,” Annika said.
“I presume you can see the headline in front of you,” Q said.
He rolled up the map and put it back in his desk drawer.
“So when can I use it?”
“All in good time,” Q said, heading toward the door. “If you’ve eaten enough of my marzipan cake, maybe you can do the washing-up out in the kitchen, because I’ve got to load my great big gun with some dumdum bullets and catch some baddies. I don’t want to end up in the two-thirds that never do anything, after all.”
He stopped in the doorway.
“And we’re not just letting the CIA lead us on this one,” he said. “We’ve still got problems to deal with here at home.”
“Because you don’t know who hired her,” Annika said.
“Correct.”
She got up and pulled on her jacket, hoisted her bag onto her shoulder, and left the room. She stopped and turned back to him.
“A qualified guess?”
He closed the door behind them.
“Well, it certainly wasn’t Neue Jihad.”
PART 2
May
SATURDAY, MAY 22
Johan Isaksson swiped his card through the electronic reader. He waited for the click to let him know the door was unlocked, then pulled the heavy outer door open.
Inside the laboratory corridor he glanced q
uickly to the right to check his pigeonhole. He paused and stopped for a moment, looking up at the bulletin board above the table where the mail got sorted:
ID cards must be visible at all times on FBF premises and
Use color-coded envelopes for external mail! as well as
In case of faulty equipment, call …
No new notices. Most of them had been there since he took up his postgraduate post in the department four years before. The absence of news made him feel a bit safer.
With some trepidation he went over to the individual pigeonholes.
His contained two circulars about new summer opening hours in the café and a reminder that carbon dioxide cylinders could only be exchanged between 8:00 and 9:00 AM, Monday to Friday. He quickly looked through the papers in several of his colleagues’ boxes; they had received the same sheets.
He breathed out.
No general offers, no odd invitations to make some quick money, nothing that looked like it could be meant for everyone but was actually meant just for him.
No Serving at the Nobel Banquet! Want to earn some extra money? Help us with our practical joke and save money! Ring …
He had rung. In fact he had practically thrown himself at the phone. When he got the job he had been delighted, had assumed there had been a lot of them fighting for the job. Afterward he had realized that the photocopied note hadn’t been generally circulated. The message had been directed specifically at him.
How did they know that he could be a waiter?
And how did they know he needed money?
He rubbed his chin, realized he had broken into a sweat.
Now he was here, on a Saturday evening, instead of at Agnes’s party. It felt pretty good. He had neglected his research, but that was at an end now. The decision to explain everything in an anonymous letter to the police had made him feel a whole lot better.
He headed toward his cramped office. It was dark and there was a sour smell in the corridor, like old E. coli bacteria.
I ought to let in some air, he thought.
He passed the equipment room with its DNA-sequencing and measuring machines, and the centrifuge room on his right, and the bacteria lab to his left, all of them abandoned and deserted. He stopped at the storeroom behind the photocopier and pulled out a tray of petri dishes and a load of retorts. He hesitated in front of the shelf holding the ten-millimeter test tubes, then remembered that he’d already gotten some. Then he went and got a tray of sterilized needles. He tapped in the code to unlock his office and put down his equipment, then waited by the door, listening.
An alarm was ringing somewhere. It sounded like the carbon dioxide alarm, which went off whenever the percentage of the gas sank too low in the incubator and you had to switch from the A-cylinder to the B-cylinder. The whole lab had had trouble with mold and cell death throughout the spring, and now some poor bastard’s cells were going to suffocate unless someone saved them.
He let the door swing shut behind him and headed toward the sound. The alarm got louder as he reached the corridor at the far end. A slender girl with a ponytail, wearing a lab coat, was standing at the air lock to one of the cell labs, looking bewildered.
“Do you need any help?” he asked and the girl jumped.
“Oh shit!” she yelled in English, staring at him in horror. “You scared the hell out of me. Can you turn this thing off?”
She was evidently American.
“It’s the carbon dioxide alarm,” he replied, also in English. “Have you tried changing the cylinder?”
“Are there more than two of them?” she asked, opening the door to let him into the air lock.
He went over to the equipment to the right of the door of the lab and checked the pressure gauge. Both cylinders were empty—someone had forgotten to change the reserve tube. He shook his head.
“The gas is empty. You can only call to get the cylinders changed between eight and nine in the morning. It’s a nightmare. Sorry.”
The girl looked like she was going to burst into tears.
“But,” she said, “what’s going to happen to my cells? I got a new batch last week, and with all the problems with mold and everything I’m running out of chances. The carbon dioxide in the incubator is already down to 1.1 percent—they won’t last till Monday. What am I going to do?”
She looked so wretched in her big wooden sandals and clumsy glasses that he felt obliged to stay and help.
“Have you checked to see if there’s any extra gas in one of the other labs?” he asked.
She looked even more horrified.
“But surely you’re not allowed to do that?” she said.
He smiled and suppressed an impulse to put a hand on her shoulder.
“Well,” he said, “you can borrow the reserve cylinder from my lab. I’m in the next corridor on the right.”
“No kidding?” she said, taking off her glasses, and now he could see that she was actually very pretty. She had a red scar at the top of her right cheek—it was shaped like a little bird.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll help you carry it. Can you pass that to me?”
He gestured to the large wrench that was lying on the radiator behind the gas cylinders, left there for precisely this eventuality.
She followed close on his heels as they went down the corridor, and watched wide-eyed as he closed the valve and unscrewed one of the gas cylinders from its place in his own lab and put it onto a small hand truck.
“They’re really heavy,” he said, slightly apologetically, as he set off with the cylinder.
Putting it in position in her lab took less than three minutes.
Good job I used to do so much work on my moped, he thought, putting the wrench back on the radiator.
She was practically crying with joy as the carbon dioxide levels in the incubator rose far enough to make the alarm shut off.
“How can I thank you?” she asked. “Can I offer you dinner?”
Johan Isaksson laughed, rather embarrassed.
“I have to work tonight,” he said. “Sorry.”
“What about one beer, then?” she said. “Please, I’m practically done here, have just one little cerveza with me?”
She tilted her head and fluttered her eyelashes.
He laughed again, more relaxed now.
“I suppose one little beer won’t do any harm,” he said.
She clapped her hands and jumped up and down a couple of times, making her ponytail bounce.
“Great! Hang on, I’ll go and get them …”
She disappeared inside her lab and emerged with two bottles of Budweiser.
“I hope you like Yankee beer,” she said, pulling off her lab coat. She handed him the bottles as she kicked off her sandals and pulled on a pair of high-heeled leather boots.
“Cilla,” he said, reading the name from the sandals as she put them by the airlock. “Is that you?”
She took the beers from him and smiled.
“Shit, no,” she said, then held out her hand. “I’m Janet.”
He took her hand and smiled back.
“Johan,” he said. “Where do you want to sit?”
She went over to the table at the end of the corridor, and he noticed that she was limping slightly with her left leg. Over at the table she opened both bottles and passed him one.
“Para mi héroe,” she said, raising her bottle.
Taking his beer, he drank in careful sips. The beer was bitter, slightly sour, and he couldn’t help pulling a face.
“What is it?” she said, looking worried. “Don’t you like it?”
He cleared his throat.
“It’s good,” he said. “I’m just not used to it … So you speak Spanish?”
She shrugged her shoulders awkwardly and laughed.
“My family is from Mexico,” she said. “I’m the first person in our family to go to university—it’s a big deal for them.”
He nodded sympathetically—she must be a smart girl.
His eyes opened wide. Some people really had been through a lot.
“I got caught on some barbed wire they’d put up to stop people like us from reaching the American dream,” she said, pointing to her cheek and her left leg. “I never really recovered.”
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
She looked rather sad.
“Only in here,” she said, putting her hand on her heart.
“Do you miss your family?”
She nodded, smiling sadly.
“So I just have to drown my sorrows.”
She knocked her bottle of beer against his.
“Bottoms up,” she said, and downed her beer in one.
He took a deep breath and followed her example, gulping hard several times. He didn’t really like beer, and this one was particularly awful.
“Do you want another one?” she asked, and he hurried to raise his hand to stop her.
She tilted her head again.
“There’s just one little thing I could use some help with,” she said. “My samples, they’re on the top shelf inside the freeze room, and I can’t reach them even if I stand on a stool. Could you give me a hand?”
He smiled—she really was very sweet.
“You know,” he said, “you’ve got really beautiful eyes.”
She smiled, and dimples appeared in her cheeks.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’re pretty cute yourself.”
He downed the last of the beer with a grimace.
“My samples …” she said, gesturing toward the door of the freeze room.
He went over to the control panel to the right of the door, switched on the light inside, and checked the thermostat: minus 27 degrees Celsius.
“Where are they?” he asked.
“Right at the back, on the top shelf,” she said, opening the door for him.
He walked in and shivered at once in the cold. It really was freezing in there.
The space between the shelves was narrow and cramped. Boxes of slides, crates of samples, long rows of frozen cellular tissue. He looked along the labels, feeling a bit peculiar.
“What did you say it said on the samples?” he asked behind him, and at that moment the door closed.