by Arne Dahl
“You’re the ones who called me,” Justine Lindberger said, as furious mental activity seemed to be going on in her brain.
“Where’s the computer equipment?” Hultin asked.
“What computer equipment?” said Herman Bengtsson. “What are you talking about?”
“How many more people are onboard?”
“None,” said Justine Lindberger, sighing. “The crew is coming in an hour.”
“And the guards? You can’t carry control devices for nuclear weapons without a guard.”
Justine Lindberger froze, thinking intensely. Then an idea seemed to strike her. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, and when she opened them, they were more resigned, almost mourning. As if she were before a platoon of executioners.
“We’re not smuggling nuclear weapons,” she said. “It’s the other way around.”
“Jorge, Viggo, Arto—run and search. Be careful.”
They disappeared, leaving Jan-Olov Hultin, Paul Hjelm, and Kerstin Holm in charge of Justine Lindberger, Herman Bengtsson, and three dark men with the marks of death on their faces.
Justine spoke, as though her life depended on getting the words right. “Herman and I belong to Orpheus Life Line, a secret human rights organization that is active in Iraq. We have to remain secret; our enemies are powerful. Eric was part of it, too. He died without revealing anything. He was stronger than we thought.”
Then she gestured toward the three men on the sofa.
“These three are high-ranking officers in the Iraqi army. They’ve deserted. They have extremely important information about the Gulf War, which neither Saddam nor the United States wants to get out. They are on their way to the United States, to be put under the protection of a large media organization. The information will be released from there; it won’t be possible to stop it. The American mass media are the only force that is strong enough to resist.”
Hultin looked at Hjelm, Hjelm looked at Holm, Holm looked at Hultin.
“You have to let us be,” said Justine Lindberger. “Someone has tricked you. Someone has used you.”
Hjelm saw Wayne Jennings in his mind’s eye and said, “You will never know.” He felt like he was going to vomit, but he had nothing left to throw up.
“In that case, they’re on your trail,” said Kerstin Holm. “We have to get you out of here.”
“Regardless, we can’t let the boat depart,” said Hultin. “It has to be thoroughly investigated. So we’ll take you with us now, quickly.”
“It’s your duty to protect us,” said Justine Lindberger, looking very tired. “You’ve led them here—now you have to protect us with your lives.”
Hultin looked at her with an expression of deep regret and backed out past the broken door. He slid aside. Holm came out. Then Herman Bengtsson, the three men, Justine, and Hjelm. They stood out on the deck. The wind howled. The rain poured down on them.
They moved toward the gangway.
Then it happened, as though an order had been given—as though they themselves had given it.
Herman Bengtsson’s head was torn off; a cascade of blood sent him down onto the deck. The three men were flung by cascades of bullets into the wall of the ship. Their down coats turned red, and down flew out. They collapsed as though their bodies had no joints. Kerstin threw herself over Justine; she didn’t think—she was a living wall. A bullet grazed her shoulder; she saw it drill into Justine’s right eye just four inches away. Justine vomited blood into Kerstin’s face—in one last exhalation.
Hultin was petrified. He stared up at the town of Visby, which rose like a distant, illuminated doomsday castle far away.
Hjelm’s pistol was raised. His body spun around, but he had nothing to aim at, nothing at all. He returned the pistol to his shoulder holster and suddenly realized what it was like to be raped. He placed his arms around Kerstin, who was sniffling quietly.
Bloody, rain-soaked down slowly covered the nightmarish scene in a blanket of oblivion.
Everything was quiet. Visby harbor was calm.
As though nothing had happened.
29
Gunnar Nyberg needed to pee. He had been sitting motionless in a chair in the basement of police headquarters for several hours. Not for a second had his attention flagged. The two guards had played blackjack for a few hours, and then they had been relieved, and now a new pair of guards were sitting there playing blackjack.
In other words, the monotony was monumental. The architecture, without a doubt, contributed its share. The walls had been sloppily painted a light yellow, and the lights, covered by a faint layer of dust on top, shone a loathsome glare through the corridor. Now the urge to pee crept over him and struck in a dastardly ambush.
Food was delivered to Wayne Jennings. That was a worrying moment. The incongruous bowl of soup remained standing on the guards’ table for so long that the steam stopped rising from it. Their hand of blackjack seemed to be taking years. Isn’t blackjack a relatively quick game? his urge to pee said. Up to twenty-one in a few puny cards, and then you’re done?
The guards looked at him sternly. Then they picked up the tray with the soup bowl, the bread, and the mug of milk, and prepared to enter.
They went in. They locked the door behind them. Nyberg remained seated in the corridor. He took out his service weapon, took off the safety, and aimed it straight at the thick door with his healthy left hand. He feared what would come crawling out of there. He was sitting five yards from the door, and he would shoot to kill.
Time crept on. The guards were still gone. With every second, his conviction grew stronger. He pushed his urge to pee back into the wings.
The door slid open.
Wayne Jennings actually looked surprised when he saw Nyberg sitting there with the pistol aimed right at his heart.
“Gunnar Nyberg,” said Jennings courteously. “Nice to see you.”
Nyberg stood up. The chair fell with a clang that echoed through the corridor, echoing back and forth in this wild beast’s cave.
He held the weapon steady, aimed at his heart.
Jennings took a step forward.
Gunnar Nyberg shot. Two shots, right to the heart. Wayne Jennings was thrown backward through the corridor. He lay still.
Nyberg took a few steps toward him, keeping the pistol aimed straight at the body.
Then Wayne Jennings got up.
He smiled. His icy gaze did not smile.
Nyberg trembled. He was six feet away. He emptied the magazine into the Kentucky Killer’s body. It hurtled back again and lay on the floor.
Gunnar Nyberg was close now.
Wayne Jennings got up again. The bullet holes shone like black lights in his white shirt. He smiled.
Nyberg shot again. The pistol clicked. He threw it aside. Then he aimed an uppercut. This time Jennings would not get up.
He hit the air. There was no one there.
A terrible pain went through his large body. He had never imagined that his body could shake so violently. He lay on the floor; Jennings was pinching a point on the back of his neck. He stared up into Jennings’s serious face.
“Forget me now,” said Wayne Jennings. “You have to erase me from your consciousness. Otherwise you will never find peace.”
He released him. Nyberg tried to sit up, but he was still trembling.
The last thing he heard before everything went black was a voice that said:
“I am No One.”
30
The rain had not ceased. Some of Stockholm’s streets had been closed off due to flooding. A few historic buildings had been destroyed and had to be evacuated. It was worse in some suburbs. Entire neighborhoods were under water. The storm had taken out electricity and phone service in parts of Sweden. Now they were approaching a state of disaster.
Police headquarters, however, was still intact. But “Supreme Central Command” had reclaimed its quotation marks. They flapped like scoffing vampires through the room.
“I should ha
ve aimed for his head,” said Gunnar Nyberg. “I could have put a single shot in his head. Fuck, that was dumb.”
“You couldn’t have known that the guards were wearing bulletproof vests,” said Hultin, “or that he had taken one of them.”
“I should have stopped them from going in.”
“There’s a lot we should have done,” Hultin said somberly from his lectern. “And above all, there’s a lot we shouldn’t have done.”
Nyberg looked like hell. In addition to his nose cone and the cast on his hand, he now had a large bandage on the back of his neck. Of course, Gunnar Nyberg shouldn’t have been there; he should have been on sick leave, sleeping off his double concussion. But no one could get him to leave.
Hultin’s owl glasses were in place, but other than that he was hardly himself. His neutrality had been all but blown away. Age seemed to have caught up with him. He looked smaller than usual; the era of this Father of His People was at an end. Perhaps he would be able to pull himself together before he retired.
He spoke with a slow, thick, almost old-man’s voice. “Both Gunnar and the guards escaped without permanent injuries. Jennings used Gunnar’s police ID to get out of the building—it was found a few hours later in a garbage can at Arlanda. It was a little signal for us. A ‘thanks for the help,’ I suppose.”
He paused and paged slowly through his papers, then continued. “What we saw was the effects of at least three identical high-precision automatic weapons with exceedingly effective ammunition. We can assume that they followed us by helicopter to Visby, came to the harbor, and took up suitable positions in the city heights. It may have been a productive collaboration between the CIA and Saddam; we’ll never know. Nor will we ever know what the three deserting army officers had to reveal about the Gulf War.
“Above all, we have to forget this case. The corpses have been taken care of. As you know, we had to use Säpo—they’ll take the case from here.
“Nothing has reached the media, but even if we wanted to talk to the press, what would we say? The case will appear unsolvable; people will keep buying weapons and hiring security firms. And maybe they’re right to do so. And you all know what Fawzi Ulaywi said when we released him—I’ll never forget it: ‘Fucking murderers!’ He was right, of course. And now his identity has probably been revealed. Maybe he’ll go underground and avoid being assassinated, maybe not. He, Herman Bengtsson, and the Lindbergers were the Swedish branch of Orpheus Life Line. Now there’s nothing left of that branch.”
He fell silent. He appeared old and tired. They had solved the case, in all its aspects, but now he was going to be hung out to dry, like a failed Olof Palme–murder detective. The demands for his resignation could become loud. And they would be justified—but for completely different reasons.
“Is there anything else?” he said.
“Justine Lindberger’s bank account was emptied a few hours after her death,” said Arto Söderstedt. “We can only hope that the emptier was Orpheus Life Line, saving what was left of their capital. Otherwise it went toward Wayne Jennings’s salary. The Lindbergers’ large apartment will go to their already-rich family; Orpheus will lose its Swedish headquarters and central office, in addition to four of its most loyal members. And everything else.”
Söderstedt looked up at the ceiling. He, too, seemed very tired.
“I treated her like shit,” he said quietly, “and she turned out to be a hero.”
“Lagavulin was empty,” said Chavez, looking small and insignificant. “It contained no control devices for nuclear warheads. And LinkCoop is an ordinary, computer-oriented import-export company, totally legitimate. The CEO, Henrik Nilsson, was very sorry that its excellent chief of security Robert Mayer had disappeared. He took the opportunity to report it to the police.”
“Benny Lundberg died this morning,” said Kerstin Holm. “His father turned off the respirator. He’s been arrested—he’s one floor down.”
Gunnar Nyberg suddenly got up and bolted from the room. They watched him go. They hoped he wasn’t planning to go down and kill the unfortunate Lasse Lundberg.
Hjelm had nothing to say. He was thinking about the concept of “pain beyond words.”
“We know that Lamar Jennings shadowed his father for more than a week,” Hultin continued. “It can’t have been too hard for him to find Robert Mayer—he’s in the phone book. Lamar copied the key to the warehouse the day after he arrived in Sweden. He must have followed Wayne Jennings to LinkCoop; maybe Wayne had already committed a murder; maybe there are hordes of dead people we’ll never discover. Anyway, something caused Lamar to copy the key—and something enabled him to glean the information that his father would show up on that fateful night with Erik Lindberger in tow. We don’t know how—or why—Lindberger followed Jennings to Frihamnen after their meeting at Riche, and we don’t know why they met there. Maybe Lindberger thought it was about Orpheus; the members do remain secret, after all. In general, there’s a lot we don’t know.”
Hultin paused, then continued in a more intense tone. “The Cold War is over. What has replaced it almost feels worse, because we don’t understand what it is. The world is shrinking, and above all, we seem to be shrinking. We did fantastic police work—I suppose that can be of comfort among all the grief, but it’s not enough. We made political and psychological misjudgments that show that we’re not really up to par with the rest of the world. Violent crime of an international character is slipping through our fingers. This blind violence is a mirror of the goal-oriented crime. Lamar Jennings was a funhouse-mirror version of his father. ‘Bad blood always comes back around,’ as they say.”
Paul Hjelm laughed, filled with scorn for himself. He hadn’t even got the saying right. Wayne Jennings had corrected him. “It’s ‘what goes around comes around,’ ” he said, drying his tears.
They only seemed like tears of laughter.
The others looked at him for a moment. They understood how he felt, and at the same time they understood how impossible it was to ever understand even the tiniest thing about another person.
“Do any of you have anything to add?” said Hultin.
“Well, at least the United States has one less serial killer,” Kerstin Holm said, smiling bitterly. “He was serial-killed by another serial killer. Once again Wayne Jennings shows us he’s the good guy.”
“It’s the result that counts,” said Hjelm. None of his words were his own any longer. Nothing was his own. Everything had been occupied. He was a little model train going around in a circle.
“Well then.” Jan-Olov Hultin rose to his feet. “I have to go take a piss. We can only hope that God stops all of this soon.”
They didn’t really want to disperse. It was as though they needed to be close to one another. But at last they were dismissed out into the world, as alone as they had come into it and as alone as they would leave it.
Hjelm and Holm were last to go. Paul stopped Kerstin just inside the door.
“I have something of yours.” He dug in his wallet, found the photo of the old pastor, and handed it to her. When she looked at him, he couldn’t tell what she was thinking—sorrow, pain, and a strength that pushed through the darkness.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Wipe it off,” he said. “He has Wayne Jennings’s fingerprints on his nose.”
“Yalm & Halm.” She smiled. “In another world we could have been a real comedy duo.”
He bent forward and kissed her on the forehead.
“We are in this one,” he said.
31
Gunnar Nyberg came out of “Supreme Central Command” steaming with rage—he didn’t know how he was supposed to get rid of it. Three times a filicidal murderer had inflicted bodily injury on him. Now here was another father who had murdered his son. Lasse Lundberg was now in the cell from which Jennings had escaped. Nyberg went down there. His first impulse was to let Benny’s dad have everything he had failed to give Lamar’s. He shook off the guards’ protests an
d entered the corridor with the cells. He arrived at Lundberg’s and peered in through the small window. Lasse Lundberg was hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, shaking uncontrollably. Nyberg watched him for a moment, then did an about-face, reminded of a certain other father’s sins.
He set out for Östhammar, two hours north of Stockholm, in his Renault. He had a lot of time to think as he drove, but his thoughts were wrapped in the after-effects of a double concussion. This case was supposed to have been calm and easy as he awaited retirement. No personal engagement, no risk taking, no excessive overtime. Cutting back, some time for peaceful vegetating. And what the hell had happened instead?
The road he took, Norrtäljevägen, was flooded. The roadbed seemed more liquid than solid. Even when he was driving uphill, he met masses of water; driving downhill, he sloshed through water. It felt ridiculous.
He passed Norrtälje. He passed the exit for Hallstavik and Grisslehamn, and then he was in Östhammar, a small, peaceful, depopulated village. The Stockholmers who vacationed there were back in the city now, so Östhammar was once again identifiable as the little farming village it was.
With the help of the extremely detailed police map, he drove far out into the countryside. The rain fell incessantly. The roads were nearly impassable—his tires dug into the mud. At one point the Renault’s left rear wheel got stuck in a veritable crater. He got out, enraged, and lifted up the fucking car.
Sometime later the farm appeared over the crown of a hill. Small as the incline was, it seemed hard to conquer. He stepped on the gas and pushed ahead. He barely made it but finally turned the car onto the grounds.
Next to the barn he saw a tractor—its enormous back tire was half sunk in the mud. A large man with a gold-and-green cap, muddy overalls, and green size-eighteen boots was crouching next to it. His back was to Nyberg, who stepped out of the car and trudged over to him in the pelting rain. The man pounded the tractor with his large fist, whereupon it sank further into the mud. Fuming, the man yelled, “Fucking tractor!”