The Tunnel
Page 27
He didn’t have any jobs awaiting him, so he avoided the office, didn’t bother to check his email, and didn’t accept any calls, although he listened to the messages of the ones he’d missed.
Eva Westin asked if he wanted to celebrate Christmas with her. Her children would be going up to the mountains with their dad. Jorma Hedlund sent a rival offer. Katz was welcome to come to his sister Leena and her son Kevin’s place if he liked.
He didn’t respond. He just kept going in the same circles: sleep, food, workout, sleep.
One evening he took the metro into the city. He got off at T-Centralen and took the escalators up to Sergels Torg. It was the last few hours of the Christmas rush, the twenty-third of December. Harried people were weighed down by bags of wrapped presents. The scents of glögg and roasted almonds floated in the air; Christmas music poured out of shop speakers. A Peruvian orchestra in traditional clothes was playing pan flute music on Plattan.
Katz stopped at one of the advertising columns. He took in what others didn’t or wouldn’t see: the homeless, the junkies, the drug trafficking that went on day and night, since misery didn’t exactly have set business hours. People in irritated withdrawal, talking shit with each other. Toothless junkies nervously checking their phones. Prostitutes washing up in the public toilets . . . Katz took a mental lift back to the time when Sergels Torg had been the center of his world, the place his life revolved around. He looked over at the glass vestibule, where two plainclothes cops tried and failed to blend in with their surroundings, the bathroom where he had cooked junk and shot up more times than he could recall, the discreet door into the search-and-seizure room where the cops had taken him again and again, to stick a gloved index finger into his anus, searching for drugs.
He kept moving to avoid attracting attention, going up to Åhléns; he made a round through the lowest floor of the department store before returning to Plattan and doing what he’d come there to do.
He didn’t bother to work out on Christmas Eve. A new snow had fallen during the night. The sun was peeking out. The day was fairy-tale beautiful.
Katz stayed in bed for a while before getting up, taking a shower, and going down to his office.
For the first time in a month, he started up his computer. He went to the Blue Dreams website and found that it had been made with an old version of Adobe Dreamweaver. It took him fewer than ten minutes to get past the firewalls and trace the server. It was somewhere in Russia. It seemed to specialize in offering services to the porn industry; a hundred or so companies used it.
Not long after this, he was engrossed in the source code of a DDoS program. He updated the style of the code so it would better suit his purposes, and he eliminated a few bugs. The average computer user would never notice that the hard drive had been recruited for an attack. It would just run a little slower than usual when the botnet program started up.
Katz typed in the last few commands. It would take several hours for the traffic to increase and for the program to take full effect. He pictured thousands of porn surfers sitting at their computers . . . the shock on their faces when the sites they were using went black under the massive pressure of a DDoS attack.
He stayed at the office until lunchtime. He vacuumed and sorted through papers and office materials. Last of all, he checked his email.
He had fifty unread messages in his inbox. Most of them were work-related; some were Christmas greetings. The only thing that captured his interest had arrived that very day. A Canadian Hushmail.
The sender’s address was randomly generated.
Katz clicked on it. There was no text or attached files. The message field was blank, aside from a stamp-sized photo of a lynx.
Lynx, he thought. What had the man said on the only occasion they had met, in the dark, on a luxury yacht in Santo Domingo? That he had a friend who was about to wind up in trouble?
Had he meant Jorma? Or Ramón?
But it had been too cryptic at the time; the whole situation had been too chaotic . . . There was no guarantee that there was any connection between the events.
And yet he knew: this was a greeting.
He turned off his computer, opened the safe, and took out what he needed.
The sun had vanished by the time he returned to his apartment. Snow was falling once more over western Stockholm. There was no traffic on the streets. The Christmas celebrations had begun.
At three in the afternoon, Katz sat down on the floor of his bedroom. Before him, on a towel, lay everything he needed. The spoon. The lighter. The pack of five-milliliter syringes he’d bought at Plattan. The little pack he’d taken from the safe.
He shook the powder into the spoon and mixed it with water; a third of a bag, a tenth of a gram, tops. When he was using, he had burned through five grams in two days, a pack per dose.
The veins in his arms constricted as the scent of warming junk spread through the room. His body remembered what was coming. Time would stop at last, expanding horizontally instead. The emptiness would fill with meaning.
The phone rang from his nightstand. Eva Westin, he saw on the screen as he placed the cotton ball in the spoon and sucked the solution into the syringe.
He let it ring. He pulled the scarf tight around his upper arm, tapped away the last few air bubbles, and pressed the plunger against the dose.
Snow was falling outside the window. He heard music somewhere in the building: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.
His years on the run would soon be over.
He aimed the needle at his arm, at a twenty-degree angle, toward his heart—always toward the heart. The correct angle. Not too sharp, otherwise there was the risk of going through the vein.
That tiny, rubbery resistance before the tip penetrated the skin. He was sweating and freezing in turns.
Katz hesitated with the needle a centimeter into his arm, mechanically pulling back the plunger to see if he could get a flash.
The snow was falling harder. Like a dance outside. White crystals in the dark of Christmas.
A ding from his phone, where Eva had just left a message.
The blood was dark red; it flowed slowly into the syringe. He pulled off the tourniquet with his teeth and injected.