The Tunnel

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  Then suddenly the pressure lessened; the skipping rope had fallen to the floor. She looked up.

  Hoffman was in a totally different world. He had aged; suddenly he was an old man. It had happened in just a few seconds, like Dorian Gray. His hair looked white. He walked to the desk. Picked up the pistol. Stuck the barrel in his mouth.

  His eyes were like two empty wells as he seemed to count down the seconds. He gagged as the barrel touched his soft palate.

  Do it, she thought. Just do it.

  But she knew he was too much of a coward.

  If Katz understood Alexandru correctly, his sister had been in the house on at least one occasion before she disappeared. Jennifer Roslund had met her on the street. Maybe they had sold themselves together.

  What more did he know? Not much.

  He knew the place belonged to a police officer who was an acquaintance of Magnus Wiksten’s. And that Ramón and Jennifer had delivered women to a sex ring that often met there. They did it so they could get money to buy a large amount of heroin; they had fantasies of moving up in the world and becoming drug lords. But something had happened along the way, and now they were likely both dead.

  There was a place with famous art nearby, Alexandru had said. And you could get there by boat from Stockholm.

  People made of plants . . .

  Skokloster Castle. Its famous art collection—was that what the boy meant? The Italian baroque painter Arcimboldo’s portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II was part of the castle’s collection. Vertumnus. At first, when Katz found it on the castle’s website, it looked like a regular old oil portrait, but if you looked more closely it became clear that his face was made up of many kinds of plants. His eyes were mulberries. His beard was made of chestnuts . . .

  He called up Google Earth. He searched in expanding circles around the castle until he had scanned all the buildings within a ten-kilometer radius. Roads wound like snakes through the sleepy Uppland countryside. Meadows, bogs, and cultivated forests. Farms dotted among fields. It was a Falured Astrid Lindgren idyll. Summer cottages. Lake Mälaren like liquid metal, steely gray.

  Then he found it: the estate. It was isolated, on a peninsula, several kilometers from the closest neighbor. There was a boathouse and a large villa further up the hill. The aerial image grew grainier the more he enlarged it. But it was unmistakable. This was the house he’d seen in the pictures on Ramón’s iCloud.

  Five minutes later, he had looked up the property records.

  It was called Stensjiö Gård. It was a farm under leasehold. Two hundred hectares of forest and water in the municipality of Håbo. The parcel of land had once belonged to Skokloster. The property was owned by one Karl Mattson . . . the letter M in Ramón’s address book?

  The flashlight was still lying on the floor, but the light was growing dimmer as the battery drained. He felt like he was floating alone in a globe of faint light, surrounded by empty space.

  The gleam of metal pipes running across the ceiling. Condensation had gathered there. A drop of water fell and landed on his foot. His feet were bare; why hadn’t he noticed that before?

  His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

  He heard the sound again, a faint whimper.

  “Is someone there?” he asked.

  A moment passed before she answered. Her voice was so faint that he could barely hear it.

  “Yes . . . me, Mariella,” she answered in English.

  He strained his vision until he could see the gleam of her eyes. He could make out the contours of the cage across the room. She was crouching inside it. Like an animal. A monkey.

  “Do you know where we are, Mariella?” he asked.

  “In a house . . . in the country. They put me in a cage. Many months now. Women die here . . .”

  He turned in the other direction. A workbench. Tools hung from hooks. Hammers, files, socket wrenches, soldering tongs. Parts from dismantled radio equipment. The steel wire had softened up around his wrists.

  “Where is the door?”

  “Behind you. But it’s locked. You not come out alive. And if you scream, nobody hear you.”

  The woman began mumbling in a foreign language; he thought it was a prayer—she was praying to God.

  “How many people are there in the house?”

  “Mostly just the fat man, but sometimes more—ten or fifteen. Sometimes nobody for a week . . . then they leave food and water for me.”

  The handler’s boss, he thought. The fat one. This was his place.

  “When new girls come they get rid of first girls. Or send them to other people in the tunnel.”

  That word again: tunnel. Leyla had mentioned it in connection with the women Zoran had freed.

  He stretched his foot toward the flashlight, resisting the urge to stop when the steel wire cut into his throat, and he managed to stick his toe out one more centimeter and move the flashlight so it was aiming at the woman. She was lying down now, curling into a fetal position, and her eyes were closed. She was only half conscious. He wondered how long she had left to live.

  A few hours passed in which nothing happened. He tried to talk to her, but she didn’t answer. His hearing had recalibrated itself until he could hear even the faintest sound. The vibrations of a car driving up to the house. The muffled voices of men in the distance. A car door slammed, and then there was a female voice . . . a different woman; she was shouting in panic on the floor above.

  The steel wire had softened even more. He could rotate his right forearm around its own axis. But he couldn’t get it loose; his hand was still stuck in the wire. Whoever tied him up knew what he was doing.

  He gave a start as the door behind him made a noise. A key turned in it. The lights on the ceiling came on.

  It was the blond man this time. He walked around Jorma, pulled up the chair, and took the Colt from his pocket. He wore a prosthesis over the stump of his little finger, and it looked surprisingly natural with its plastic nail.

  “Lost it in the line of duty,” he said as he noticed Jorma’s gaze. “It was bitten off.”

  He sat down.

  “Shall we continue?”

  Jorma felt the muzzle of the revolver against his cheek this time. He closed his eyes. He was panting through his nose like an animal.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Who you are and what you know.”

  “You first.”

  The handler laughed, a short, yelping noise.

  “What can I say? We got lucky. What were the chances that I would be the one to pick up the phone when Abramović called? Much worse than your odds right now.”

  He cocked the gun.

  “A father calls to say that he owes five million kronor to people we know. Ready to spill everything he knew if we could arrange a new identity. We had to get rid of him. But then he went underground.”

  The puzzle pieces came together before him; the man was putting it all together for him, telling him how Zoran had tried to work out a deal, confirming what Jorma had suspected—Zoran had been unlucky enough to turn to police officers who were personally involved in human trafficking. When they couldn’t get at him in any other way, they made sure he committed a robbery. They killed him, using the task force team as a cover. What about Leyla? he thought. They knew she would keep quiet; they would hurt the children if she talked.

  “And the security guy . . . Jocke?”

  “He solved our problem for us. He thought he was going to go down for the robbery after it failed. He hanged himself.”

  “And Hillerström?”

  The blond man shrugged. He stood up. The woman upstairs screamed again. Her voice was shrill, filled with mortal fear.

  “My boss likes to have fun. And he has like-minded friends. Now it’s my turn to ask questions . . .”

  He didn’t see the point in talking. They weren’t going to let him live anyway. Not after the things he had seen and heard.

  “I simply want to know what you know. And
whether you’ve told anyone about this.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Who have you seen since the robbery? I want names for all of them.”

  Jorma snorted up snot and spat it at the man. The man said nothing. He let the saliva run down his cheek. He walked around to stand behind Jorma and grabbed his middle finger.

  His finger broke with the sound of a dry stick cracking in two. It was bent 180 degrees back against his hand. At first Jorma didn’t feel a thing. His body was in a state of shock.

  The handler took hold of the next finger but rapidly let go of it again.

  There was a muted report in the house. It sounded like shots being fired. Someone screamed for help and ran across the floor above with heavy steps.

  His whole wrist was crushed, limp, pliant, like heated plastic. He still couldn’t feel the pain. Jorma pulled his hand up and to the side and found that it slid out of its steel-wire binding. The handler was gone; he’d left the door open in his rush.

  His legs would hardly carry him as he walked over to the workbench. He looked around among the objects. He picked up the nail gun hanging from one of the hooks. With his left hand. His right was useless.

  Katz drove through a green tunnel of pine forest, and then the scenery opened up and he could see for miles. The scattered deciduous trees were bursting with autumn color. He startled a hare out of a ditch and watched it zig and zag down the road before executing an amazingly sharp turn and vanishing into a field.

  He stopped the car on an old logging road and checked the contents of his backpack before getting out.

  There was no breeze. It smelled like pitch and earth. The hot car engine gave off metallic pops.

  The house was two kilometers from where he had stopped. The only road to it was private and followed the water’s edge. He would be discovered if he approached that way.

  The main building was surrounded by nature and had a view of the road. Mattson had inherited the house twenty years earlier. He had bought out his older sister’s share and increased the acreage by leasing an adjacent forested lot.

  A narrow path led into the woods. If he wanted to approach undetected, this was the best way. According to the map, it was wooded all the way up to the house.

  The terrain was more difficult than he expected. Steep rock hills. Thick vegetation. A brook wound between the trees. Katz followed it until he reached a wildlife fence. He no longer knew where he was, or even if he was heading in the right direction.

  He followed a narrow path to another rocky hill. He climbed up it and looked around. He saw a dilapidated hunting stand in a clearing. A mowed swathe for high-voltage power lines ran in the other direction. Then he spotted another trail that wound its way down to the lake.

  Five minutes later he had arrived. He retreated into the tree line to avoid being seen. He crouched down and took out his binoculars.

  The road ended fifty meters away at a wooden boom with a sign that read “Private Property.”

  The sauna and the jetty where Wiksten had been photographed with a towel around his hips were on a spit of land that jutted into the lake. There were water lilies growing there, just as the boy had said.

  A Land Rover and a gray hire car stood in the driveway. The curtains were drawn in the house. It was quiet . . . uncannily quiet.

  A movement at the edge of the water caught Katz’s attention. A tall man with blond hair stepped out of a boathouse. He looked around as if he sensed that he were under surveillance. Then he shook his head, walked toward the house, and vanished from sight.

  Katz moved on, walking up a mound until he came to the short side of the building. He wiggled out of his backpack and took two metal thermoses from it; they contained explosive charges made of plain old ammonium-based cleaning agents. Rickard Julin, of all people, had taught him how to make them.

  He heard a car engine in the distance. A van with tinted windows was approaching from the road. The driver stopped. A guard opened the gate, but Katz could only see his back. The vehicle drove up to the front of the house.

  The dark-haired man who stepped out was of a similar age to him. He walked around and opened the rear doors. He yanked a woman from the back, holding her by the hair at the back of her head as he dragged her up to the house.

  Katz was shocked when he saw who it was: Eva Westin.

  He left his current position and moved rapidly along the edge of the woods. He stopped when he was level with the back of the house. He felt to make sure that his pistol was still in his pocket.

  A cold sweat had broken out on his forehead. Saliva streamed incessantly into his mouth. If something happened to her, he would never forgive himself.

  The fabric curtain was drawn aside in one of the ground-floor windows. A fat man rested his head against the glass and peered out. Mattson.

  Katz had taken the time to learn more about him. The man had created one of the county task force teams, among other things, and he had previously been in charge of the vice and narcotic squads. These days he was one of two directors at the county police.

  He took out the binoculars and tried to spot Eva. But all he could see was the dark-haired man, who had forced her into the house. He was on the phone with someone.

  Wiksten was sitting on a sofa along the wall. He didn’t have any wounds on his face as far as Katz could tell. But he seemed nervous somehow. Or excited.

  The curtain fell back again.

  Squat juniper bushes dotted the mound where Katz was standing. The lawn began two meters below. He would jump down and run over to the side of the house. Start by locating the guard.

  He sank to his knees below the closest of the dark windows. He breathed deeply to slow his heartbeat. He moved along the facade, aiming the pistol ahead. He stopped at a rain barrel and peeked out.

  There was a man by the boom gate. A bodybuilder type. Probably a cop.

  Katz approached a side entrance. A stairway led up to a door with a round window.

  He heard screaming from inside the house. A woman was bawling in panic. The darkness rose up in Katz. Pure hatred.

  Then he heard an engine again. Another car was coming up the drive. More guests, he thought. The “party” was about to start. The man who was keeping watch took his post beside the boom.

  Katz couldn’t wait any longer. He crawled in under the stairs and taped the first bomb to the foundation, the explosive strength aimed out. It would be a violent blast, but it wouldn’t cause great material destruction. He had once been trained in this sort of thing—handling extreme situations all on his own. The element of surprise was key. The goal was to create chaos and panic. Fear could paralyze people.

  He attached the wire to the blasting cap and twisted the egg timer. He had three minutes.

  The car had stopped at the gate. The window rolled down. The guard leaned over. Then there was a dull bang, and the man’s legs went out from beneath him.

  Katz was bewildered. He left the stairs and ran, stooping, back outside. He crouched down behind the Land Rover and attached the second bomb to its undercarriage. Then he headed for a low stone wall further on.

  The gate was open, he discovered when he turned around. The guard was lying at the side of the road with the blood pumping out of a bullet wound in his head. His legs were jerking epileptically.

  The car came up the gravel driveway and stopped in front of the front door. A masked person stepped out, left the door open, and walked calmly up the stairs.

  Katz looked at his watch. One minute until the bombs would detonate.

  He heard shots fired inside the house. More shouting, men’s voices, someone swearing. Shit, shit, shit . . .

  Thirty seconds passed before the masked figure appeared again, just as calm as when it arrived. No license plates, Katz noticed as the car started and drove off. But there was another person inside the car; he could see a figure in the back seat.

  The explosions that followed deafened him in both ears. Seabirds rose from the water and flew out over t
he bay. Katz’s ears were still ringing as he walked up to the house, aiming his pistol in front of him.

  Two violent explosions, one right after the other. Where had they come from? The shouting from the floor above had ceased; all he could hear was a quiet mewling.

  “I’ll be back,” he said to the woman in the cage.

  There was no reaction.

  He still couldn’t feel his hand. It was as if he had become disconnected from his own body.

  He held the nail gun in his left hand as he walked up the stairs.

  The door was half open, as the handler had left it. It was a soundproof door with several layers of foam mounted on the inside.

  He found himself in a rustically decorated hall. He cautiously rounded a corner and opened a door into a windowless room. There was an empty cage on the floor, just like the one in the cellar, but its door was open. A woman was chained to a hook in the wall by her hands. There was a dog collar around her neck. A food bowl stood on the floor in front of her. She had been blindfolded with a piece of black fabric. He pulled it off. A blonde junkie chick was staring at him in terror. At least she was alive . . . He would have to take care of her later.

  His tunnel vision took over. He went into another room. A male body lay on a sofa—a younger, bearded guy. Shot in the head . . . Next to him, in a pool of fresh blood on the floor, lay the handler, with a large hole in his chest.

  The fat boss cop was lying in the doorway to the next room. His intestines were protruding from the bullet wound in his stomach. He was trying to crawl, trying to say something, but his voice didn’t work.

  Jorma entered yet another room. Black plastic bags covered the windows. Tube lighting cast a bluish glow. There were strange tools on the floor. Two barbed wire nooses. Something that looked like an iron collar or a garrote. Flecks of dried blood on the floor. A torture chamber, he thought. Fear had eaten into the walls. A rope noose hung from the ceiling.

  His legs gave way and he sank to the floor. His vision went black for an instant, and he dropped the nail gun and fumbled for it in the darkness. He was dizzy from forty-eight hours without food or water. He heard approaching footsteps.