MemoRandom: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  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 Evens,” 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 pen. 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 it wasn'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 most common 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.

  I owe everything

  Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.

  “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 in 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. Something in the song’s title . . .

  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.

  His phone started to ring, interrupting his thoughts. It made him think of Tindra and Cassandra. He rushed over to the door and dug his phone out from his jacket pocket. The pain was making his temples throb. But the screen was dark.

  There was a second ring, and he realized that the sound wasn’t coming from his phone but Pitbull’s. He found the right pocket, opened the phone, and pressed Answer. Number withheld.

  “Hello?” he said.

  But the person at the other end had already hung up.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Freddie’s typing the numbers in now.” Natalie held her hand over the phone as she turned toward Sarac.

  The code was actually childishly simple. Deduct the line number from all the digits on even lines and add it to the digits on odd lines. And hey, presto, the numbers turned into ID numbers. People born between 1968 and 1981.

  “Okay, are you ready, here comes the first result,” Natalie said in a tense voice. “Brian Hansen, born 1975 in Bromma. Details
confidential.”

  She wrote the name down, her pen scratching on the cheap paper. The scraping sound made him think of falling snow. Sarac’s eyes flashed. A face, a thickset man with cropped hair, a snake tattoo. A voice that was surprisingly high-pitched.

  I was thinking of suggesting a deal.

  The man in the snow-covered car. Brian Hansen! He felt his heart pound, pumping adrenaline faster and faster through his body.

  “What exactly does ‘details confidential’ mean?” Natalie said into the phone. “That your records aren’t shown in public registers,” she repeated, looking at Sarac.

  “Can anyone have that?” she asked.

  There was a short pause while the man on the other end answered.

  “On appeal, if there’s a clear threat. Abused women, politicians, some police officers,” Natalie summarized. “But most people whose records are confidential are—”

  “Criminals,” Sarac said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “That’s right.” Natalie looked at him. She was frowning slightly.

  “So that’s all? We can’t get anything but his name?” she said to the man on the other end. He said something that made her expression change. She looked much more serious. “Ah, okay. No. We won’t get much further there, then.”

  “Why not?” Sarac said.

  Natalie held the phone away from her mouth and looked at him before she replied.

  “Because Brian Hansen’s dead. He died on November twenty-third. The same night you—”

  “Crashed,” Sarac said. He shut his eyes again.

  “Does it say how he died? He was only, what? Not quite forty,” Natalie said into the phone.

  Sarac thought he knew the answer, but obviously he couldn’t say anything. Nor, apparently, could the Tax Office computer.

  “Oh well, forget him then,” Natalie said impatiently. “Try the next number instead. Selim Markovic, born 1978 in Spånga.” She made a note of the name, giving Sarac a quick sideways glance.

  He took a deep breath, then leaned his head in his hands. He could see a thick yellow padded jacket in front of him, and inside it a twitchy little man with a downy mustache, talking on a phone. The man from his dream.