After the Monsoon

Home > Thriller > After the Monsoon > Page 24
After the Monsoon Page 24

by Robert Karjel


  He sat. She stood. “Is everything okay?” she asked. In ten minutes, Grip had given her the whole story: the Bergenskjölds, the mobile phone, the voice who’d called him.

  “So, you would like me to leave for Mombasa tonight?” she filled in, before Grip had given her the last pieces of the puzzle.

  He fast-forwarded. “You know I’ve got something going with the police here. I can’t just let that slide. Not now.”

  “But an innocent family of hostages, that you can ignore.” She wasn’t upset, she was teasing him.

  “Two small children, you said, right?”

  Before Grip arranged the meeting, he’d thought Ayanna would give him a flat-out no. “One of them is sick,” he replied.

  “I am not surprised.”

  Grip saw it, how she said one thing and thought another. Considering the pros and cons. She twisted a strand of her hair. She was already made up and dressed, ready to do the first set at the piano bar in an hour. The Kempinski wasn’t the kind of place where you could walk in and ask for a few days off, without being punished.

  “I would like five thousand dollars, if I go.”

  All she wanted in life was not to play Gershwin in a bar.

  “You’ll get six,” he replied.

  “You will pay all expenses. Two nights. And I will choose the hotel.”

  “You’re familiar with Mombasa?”

  “Yes. I know my way around, and what is available.”

  “I see where this is leading.”

  “Just a nice place by the water. It is not you who will go eye to eye with my boss, ten minutes from now.”

  “I’m sorry. You should stay where you want.” He looked at her hand, still twisting the strand of hair. “I mean it.”

  “And where will I meet this . . .”

  “Probably, we’ll find out right before. That’s the way it usually works.”

  She nodded. For the first time during their meeting, Grip saw that Ayanna was not entirely at ease.

  “No big deal. You get coffee, you sit down, you listen to what he has to say. You will not react, and you will not disagree. You will not be carrying a proposal.”

  “I sit, like a good little girl?”

  “You’ll just tell me what he has to say.”

  She let go of her hair. “What can happen?”

  “In the best-case scenario, the hostages will go free.”

  “I mean, to me.”

  “Nothing will happen to you. He’s the one who wants something.”

  “Does it state anywhere that I actually represent Sweden?”

  “You will not go as a diplomat, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I have heard of people being held hostage for years in Somalia.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to avoid. Those two kids . . . the boy would not survive.”

  Ayanna’s gaze wandered thoughtfully around the room, then back to him again.

  “And if I had said that I wanted a visa to Europe?”

  “I would have told you it’s impossible.”

  She nodded, as if yielding to something. Then she said, “Certainly, you are paying me well. But this is really about Judy Drexler wanting me to help you. It is for her sake that I am taking on the job and skipping out of work like this.”

  “Let’s just say that I owe you one.”

  She didn’t reply to him, saying instead, “The hotel and the rest, you can reimburse me for that, but the flight, already tonight . . . ?”

  “Here,” Grip said, shifting so he could reach his back pocket, “is the booking confirmation. The flight leaves at six o’clock.”

  “It is already booked, under my name?”

  “I bought it a while ago. You will be back on Thursday.”

  She made a gesture, not of surprise, but as if he’d taken an improper liberty. “So from the moment you came in here . . . you expected this?”

  “Not at all. But I had no other way out.”

  Grip got a call on his new phone when Ayanna was already sitting in a taxi on the way to the airport. The man had no problem with someone coming to Mombasa in Grip’s place; he almost seemed to expect it. Just as Grip had expected that he’d get a text message about the exact time and place of the meeting about an hour beforehand. Details that Grip, in turn, would convey to Ayanna. It was a short conversation that the man ended with a demand: “Do not use this mobile phone except to contact me.”

  “I wouldn’t even think of it.”

  “Good. There are so many who would like to listen in.”

  39

  Time had done its work. There at the house by the livestock port, down in the dungeon, with the thick walls that muffled the bellowing of the livestock, the rings in the floor, and the chains. Grip stood at the side of the room, with four police officers. One held a large bundle while another began pulling off Hansson’s pants.

  “What the fuck.” The hood came off. The exhaustion showed in his voice and his movements, yet still he kicked.

  “What is that?” When the other two policemen grabbed him, he resisted even harder. He writhed like a worm, but with chained arms, it was useless. The officer who’d been handling him before just stood and watched.

  They had a uniform for Hansson, who’d been wearing civilian clothes since they brought him in.

  “You’re going to sell me, you bastard!” Hansson shouted. They got him into the pants, then the jacket, by unchaining one arm at a time. Hansson did everything in his exhausted body’s power to stop them. As if the last thing he could stand was putting on an ordinary Swedish desert uniform, which he’d otherwise wear every day. He screamed, as if his skin burned from touching the fabric.

  Finally, he sat fully clothed, with his arms handcuffed behind his back and his head defiantly turned away from the police officers.

  “Would you like something to drink before we go? You have a long journey ahead of you.”

  At first, he answered only by breathing. Then: “How much are they paying for me?”

  “Now that we have you in your original packaging, they will pay more. The price is a matter between them and me.”

  “Let me make a call.”

  “We have already spoken about that.”

  “I can arrange the money.”

  “You did not seem very interested in cooperating before. Now, it is a whole new game.”

  “Don’t tell me . . .”

  “Would you like something to drink?” interrupted the police officer.

  “Khalid Delmar can offer ten percent of what he handles,” Hansson said instead.

  “Khalid?” Silence and then a quick sign from Grip, standing in the shadows. “The one you’re working for?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right now you are willing to offer us anything, and your word is worthless. Would you like something to drink or not?”

  It was like offering him a cigarette before the firing squad. Something broke in Hansson, something that didn’t have anything to do with him having sat for almost a week in chains on the stone floor. It was that thing, whatever it was, that had happened to him in Sudan. The thing he could never let happen again. That makes a man willing to sacrifice his own children. Grip saw it again, some movement in his body, the skin splitting to reveal an utterly naked soul.

  Hansson cleared his throat, hesitated for a moment, and then confessed.

  “Abdoul Ghermat figured out that I sent money, how I did it, and how often. He and the lieutenant were tight. They tried to blackmail me and get a piece of it. I had to do something.”

  “The lieutenant, the one who . . . ?”

  “Yes, the one who got the bullet at the shooting range. I tried to stop them, but they wouldn’t give in. In the end, Slunga threatened to reveal everything and send me home.”

  “Khalid, this Khalid. Is it worth so much to him, to have you here?”

  Hansson didn’t answer.

  “One shot, and the lieutenant was gone. And then you only had to point your finger, and
Abdoul Ghermat was out of the picture as well.”

  “It had to be done.”

  “Obviously, Khalid deals with big money, and here you are.”

  Silence again. Hansson was wrestling to fill it with something. He was exhausted, cornered, and terrified by the thought of people who wanted nothing more than to lay their hands on a man in a Western uniform.

  “I fired the shot,” he said at last.

  “We do not care about Ghermat,” said the police officer, “and we do not care about the Swedish lieutenant. We get nothing out of prosecuting you. Would you like something to drink, or not?”

  “In the hangar, there’s a hundred thousand dollars hidden—take it!”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Send someone to the hangar where we prepare the cargo loads for the plane. At the far end, there are stacks of used air filters from the Swedish ship, big ones. In the back row, by the wall, there’s a box marked with the number fifty-eight in yellow. You’ll find $142,000 inside, wrapped in waxed paper, like ammunition.”

  Silence again, but the mood had shifted.

  Hansson didn’t realize that both the police officer in charge and Grip had heard him.

  “The money’s there,” Hansson added, writhing on the floor. Swallowing, feeling the fear inside him, he forced the words out: “Al-Shabaab, or whoever wants me, they can’t offer you that kind of money.”

  “What do you know about them?”

  “They are the kind of people Khalid makes his money from, and he knows how much they have to spend and what they pay in other situations. I just send the payments along, but I hear a fair bit. No blacks in the Horn of Africa have that kind of money. Around here, you can’t get more than thirty thousand dollars in ransom, not even for the most beloved person, one who is badly missed.”

  “But you are not black,” said the police officer. “You are white. In addition, you are wearing a uniform.”

  “But it’s still someone black who will buy me. And you types never have anything to give, at least not $142,000 . . .”

  A short burst of bravado. The police looked at him with a mixture of disgust and wonder, but Hansson’s gaze didn’t match his words; it was broken. He looked despairingly back at the police.

  Ernst Grip closed his eyes tight and only opened them again when he got out of the building. That’s enough, he thought. If Fredrik Hansson was going to confess anything else, it would only be once he was cleaned up and in a normal place.

  On the stone floor, Hansson would soon have spent his seventh day. The knife that had cut Stark’s back was in Grip’s pocket, its blade closed. In another pocket was a notebook that said: “Khalid?” After seven days, he’d gotten an identity and a name. And a gaze that said Hansson wouldn’t be hiring anyone with a knife for a long time to come. Grip crossed out the question mark after the name and added: “Delmar.”

  Khalid Delmar, who had a white Passat sitting in Fredrik Hansson’s parking space in a garage in Kungsholmen. Who’d worked for Swiftclean. The one Hansson wanted to call, when everything fell apart, on a stone floor in a room in Djibouti.

  Did Khalid Delmar make money working for Al-Shabaab or whatever it was? He had no time to formulate the questions, not now. Other things were more urgent.

  Grip was focused on the hangar; that was his top priority. He didn’t completely trust the hired cops. The French would never let them in to poke around on the base, but there was always someone willing to look the other way. So far, Hansson was probably right: that kind of money could trump all types of contracts and loyalties.

  Grip held up his card, slipped past the guard, and headed down to the airplane hangars. The gates to the Swedish buildings were closed. One, however, had a small door in the middle, with a Swedish flag. Grip parked in front, then got out and tried the handle. Just as he expected, it was unlocked. He looked over toward the MovCon barracks—there were two cars parked outside but no sign of activity—and went inside.

  From the blazing lights of the airport, he entered absolute darkness. His eyes had to adjust; for a few seconds, it was like being in a coal mine. Then the trucks, pallets, and shelves began to emerge. He saw the huge air filters from the Sveaborg that Hansson had talked about and, in the back row, small boxes made of familiar military-green plywood. He found the number fifty-eight, marked in yellow. Grip had to break the seals. There was nothing written on the packets inside, which looked like three bricks wrapped in waxed paper. In the heat, the wax stuck to his hands. Grip opened his jackknife and cut through the paper, the smell reminding him vaguely of gingerbread. There was a thin layer of cardboard inside the paper, and then the bills. He riffled his thumb along the edge, all hundred-dollar bills. He did a rough count; it seemed right.

  Something vague was becoming concrete. He was the police officer, and now he stood with the knife that had stabbed Stark in one hand, and the money that the assassin’s deed was meant to protect in the other. But oddly enough, he felt no sense of satisfaction.

  40

  The police in Djibouti held Fredrik Hansson one more day and then left the exhausted Swede on a rocky field a few kilometers outside of town. They’d left it to him to take off the hood. He’d completely lost track of time; when he pulled his head free, he found himself under the stars. There were city lights on one side, and on the other, the taillights of the truck that had dumped him, disappearing down a lonely road.

  It took him a while to understand that nothing more would happen. That it had all been a bluff. And that he should start walking.

  When he passed through the lobby of the Sheraton six hours later, people turned around, terrified by both his ravaged appearance and his smell. Some soldiers on their way down to breakfast recognized him and spread the alert.

  He was pampered all morning: a shower and then a bath, a medical examination, a breakfast he declined, and so on, until Mickels’s kindness toward the victim was replaced by: “What the hell is this supposed to mean, anyway?” People said Hansson had been sitting in Mickels’s office, dressed in a new uniform, drinking bottle after bottle of cold water from the refrigerator, without saying a word. Nothing more than, “I don’t remember.”

  “But where the hell have you been? Obviously, you got here from somewhere?”

  He shrugged in response and kept looking at the clock on the wall. “Can I go now?” His watch had gotten lost.

  “We organized one hell of a manhunt here. We thought someone had kidnapped you. Did you just take off?”

  “Can I go now?”

  The angry MP had set up another appointment for the next morning, and he shouted so loudly about MovCon and gangs of robbers that people heard far beyond the white walls of the barracks after Hansson was escorted out.

  The day went by, and that night, Hansson was back at the Sheraton with the rest of MovCon. Crisis management would be kept within the group, as someone in Human Resources had advised. Still, no one knew the slightest thing about what had happened; they could only guess based on how he looked and smelled. In any case, Mickels had been proactive and said that Hansson wasn’t allowed to leave the Sheraton without being accompanied by two others from the group. Obviously, no one in MovCon would dare to challenge Hansson if he decided otherwise—that’s the way Ernst Grip saw it. So he’d had a little talk with Philippa Ekman.

  The sun had set when she called. “He just took off in one of our cars.”

  Grip was sitting alone in the café on the French base. It wasn’t much more than a metal roof supported by poles, where people went to have a coffee after lunch or, at this hour, to sit a little longer with something cold, now that the sun was down and the people could actually be outdoors. Grip left a tip on a cocktail napkin and headed out. He drove down to the hangars and sat there to wait, with his windows open.

  Not even ten minutes later, Hansson appeared. He parked outside the MovCon barracks and walked toward the hangar. Grip had parked among a bunch of other vehicles. Hansson didn’t even look in his direction, just headed
toward the small door in the gate, whose knob Grip himself had turned the day before. Now it was all about tying up loose ends, moving beyond what Grip knew but couldn’t use—and building a nice, clean airtight case against Hansson. Saying good-bye to the accidental shot, giving Radovanović his life back, and serving up Hansson on a silver platter. On his side, Grip had the Customs findings from the Hercules in Uppsala, Philippa Ekman’s testimony about the laser pointer, and the surgeon’s report about shot angles that didn’t add up. Solid stuff that pointed away from Radovanović, but not enough hard evidence for a prosecutor to charge Hansson. Grip needed a confession. He’d already heard one, but now he needed one without the rattling chains. Not least, so he could face himself in the mirror.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about the look in Fredrik Hansson’s eyes as he finished confessing to the police chief, while Grip stood in the shadows, watching. The way he looked totally exposed. There weren’t many like Hansson, who could withstand that type of treatment. He could have died from the heat and stress, in that agonizing position on the stone floor, but he held up. It was his old fear of being bound up for sacrifice by religious fanatics that made him crack. His gaze in that moment revealed not what he’d endured but what he needed to be saved from.

  Confronted with his worst terror, only his reptilian instincts remained, and all he could do was protect himself. Only then did he crumble and spill his guts. Once Grip had used the trick of conjuring fundamentalists’ spinning swords, he couldn’t try it again, not to induce a clean confession. Faced with the thought of having his throat slit like an animal, Hansson had still managed to control himself. He didn’t give up everything. He’d confessed to the murder he committed, but he continued to hide his motive. He hadn’t shot the lieutenant or hired someone to stab Simon Stark in order to protect the deliveries of cash. He might even have thought so himself, but in truth he’d acted out of a primal fear of abandonment. This made him the most dangerous type, afraid of losing something larger than himself. He’d been released from his chains, but he didn’t feel free. He was still vulnerable, and very dangerous. It didn’t bother him that people in his way might have to die.

 

‹ Prev