Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Copyright © Anders de la Motte 2014

Translation copyright © Neil Smith 2014

Lyrics from ‘Odds and Evens’ from The Sleep Tape © The Highwire 2010

Cove layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Cover photographs © Ingrid Michel / Arcangel Images (man in snow landscape); Shutterstock.com (all other images)

Anders de la Motte asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008101107

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2015 ISBN: 9780008101114

Version: 2015-10-23

Dedication

For Anette

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Saturday, November 23

Friday, October 18

Saturday, November 23

Friday, October 18

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Also by Anders de la Motte

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
Saturday, November 23

Blue lights … that’s his first lucid thought after he opens his eyes.

He can’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds, a tiny micropause in his head. But the world seems so strange, so unfamiliar. As if he weren’t quite awake yet.

Blue reflections are dancing around him. In the rearview mirror, bouncing off the concrete walls, the roof, the wet road surface, even off the shiny plastic details of the dashboard.

A car. He’s in the driver’s seat of a car, going through a long tunnel.

The pain catches up with him. He has a vague memory of it from before he blacked out. A brilliant, ice-blue welding arc cutting straight through the left-hand side of his skull and turning his thoughts into thick sludge.

He can even identify the way it smells.

Metal, plastic, electricity.

Something’s happening to his body, something serious, threatening his very existence, but weirdly he doesn’t feel particularly frightened. He tightens his grip on the steering wheel, feels the soft leather against the palms of his hands. A pleasant, reassuring sensation. For a moment he almost gives in to it and lets go, tracing those smooth molecules all the way back into unconsciousness.

Instead he squeezes the wheel as hard as he can and tries to get his aching head to explain what is happening to him.

‘David Sarac.’

‘Your name is David Sarac, and …’

And what?

The car is still driving through the tunnel, and one of the many incomprehensible instruments on the dashboard must be telling him that he’s going too fast, way too fast.

He tries to lift his foot from the accelerator pedal but his leg refuses to obey him. In fact he can’t actually feel his legs at all. The pain is growing increasingly intense, yet in an odd way simultaneously more remote. He realizes that his body is in the process of shutting down, abandoning any process that isn’t essential to life support until the meltdown in his head is under control.

‘Your name is David Sarac,’ he mutters to himself.

‘David Sarac.’

Various noises are crackling from the speakers: music, dialing tones, fractured, agitated voices talking over each other.

He looks in the rearview mirror. And for a moment he imagines he can see movement, a dark silhouette. Is there someone sitting in the backseat, someone who could help him?

He tries to open his mouth and sees the silhouette in the mirror do the same. He can see stubble, a tormented but familiar face. He realizes what that means. There’s no one else there, he’s all alone.

The light in the rearview mirror is blinding him, making his eyes water. The voices on the radio are still babbling, louder now – even more agitated.

The shutdown of his body is speeding up. It’s spreading from his legs and up toward his chest.

‘Police!’ one of the radio voices yells. The word forces its way in and soon fills the whole of his consciousness.

Police.

Police.

Police.

He looks away from the rearview mirror and laboriously turns his head a few centimetres. The effort makes him groan with pain.

‘Your name is David Sarac.’

And?

Some distance ahead he can see the rear lights of another car. Alongside them is a large warning sign, an obstruction of some sort, and an exit ramp. The rear lights are suddenly glowing bright red.

He ought to turn the wheel, follow the car ahead of him out of the tunnel. His every instinct tells him that would be the sensible thing to do. But the connection to his arms seems to be on the way to shutting down as well, because all he can manage is a brief, jerky movement.

The obstruction is getting closer, a large concrete barrier dividing the two tubes of the tunnel. The reflective signs are shimmering in the glare of the car’s headlights. He tries to look a few seconds into the future and work out whether he’s in danger of a collision. But his brain is no longer working the way it normally does.

The shutdown reaches his face, making his chin drop.

The distance to the barrier is still shrinking.

‘Police.’

The word is back, even more insistent this time, and suddenly he realises why. He’s the police; the blue lights are coming from his own car.

His name is David Sarac. He’s a police officer. And …?

The pain in his head eases long enough for him to be able to piece together a coherent chain of thought. What is he doing here? Who is he chasing? Or is he the one being chased?

The lights in the rearview mirror are getting closer and closer. Burning into his head.

Fear overwhelms him, sending his pulse racing. The ice-blue pain returns, even stronger this time. His eyelids flutter; all the noise around him fades away into the distance. He tries to remain conscious, fighting the shutdown process. But there’s no longer anything he can do.

A brief jolt shakes the car. But he hardly notices it. The shutdown process is almost complete and he is more or less unconscious again. Free from pain, fear, and confusion. All that remains is a stubborn, scarcely noticeable signal in his tortured brain. An electrical impulse passing between two nerve cells that refuses to let itself be shut down – not until it’s completed its task.

Just before his car crashes into the concrete barrier, the second before the vehicle goes from being an object with clearly defined parametres to a warped heap of scrap metal, the impulse finally reaches its target. In a single, crystal-clear moment he suddenly remembers everything.

Why he is in this car. What it’s all about.

Faces, names, places, amounts.

The reason why all of them, every last one of them, must die.

All because of him. Because of the secret …

An immense feeling of relief courses through his body. Followed by regret.

His name is David Sarac. He is a police officer.

And he’s done something unforgivable.

Friday, October 18

As a child, Jesper Stenberg sometimes got the feeling he could make time stop. It usually involved Christmas or birthdays. Special occasions he’d been particularly looking forward to. In the midst of everything, when things were at their height, it was as if time would slow down. Giving him the chance to suck every little nuance, every euphoric sensation out of the moment he had been looking forward to for so long, in peace and quiet.

He could still recall those occasions of being utterly in the moment, and could describe them in minute detail thirty years later: the colour of his mum’s dress, the smell of his dad’s aftershave, the way the shiny wrapping paper felt beneath his little fingers. It was all fresh in his memory, without the sad patina of pictures in a photograph album.

But the ability suddenly vanished during his early teenage years. For a long time he believed it was because of his parents’ divorce. Unless it was simply because he was growing up and losing his childish perception of time. Whatever the reason, special occasions were never the same after that. Graduation from high school, getting his law degree, his first criminal case, when he proposed to Karolina, even their extravagant wedding. It could all be summarized with just one word: disappointment.

He had worked so hard for those moments. Had longed for them, fantasized about how they would feel, taste, smell. Then, all too quickly, everything was over and all that was left were a few fuzzy memories and a nagging sense of dissatisfaction.

He would persuade himself that it would be different next time. If he could just aim a bit higher and pull the bow a bit tighter, he’d be able to feel more. When the children were born, his job in the Hague, membership in the Bar Association, the day when he was invited to become the youngest-ever partner in the prestigious law firm of Thorning & Partners.

But there was always the same feeling, the same inability to live in the moment. As if there were some sort of thin filter between him and reality.

He started to take photographs. Deluged his computer with scalpel-sharp digital images, devoting hours to putting together short films of holidays in the sun, gingham-cloth picnics and Astrid Lindgren moments with Karolina and the children. But no matter how good the resolution of the camera, or how many pixels on the screen, he still didn’t feel satisfied. It was as if he had missed something essential in those moments, some tiny, invisible nuance that could make all the difference.

But today everything was different. This was Stenberg’s greatest moment to date, the moment he had been waiting for for years, and he didn’t need to look down at the Patek Philippe watch on his wrist. He knew that the second hand of the precision-made Swiss watch had just stopped, and that this moment would be just as stylized and perfect as he had always dreamed it would be. All his hard work, all his sacrifices were finally about to pay off. The years of drudgery in the public prosecutors’ office: the fraudsters, wife beaters, petty criminals, thieves, and all the rest of the rabble. Then his time in the Hague, admittedly with bigger cases, but where a young prosecutor like him mostly got used as an errand boy. Then the move to Thorning & Partners. High-profile cases, excellent for a young, ambitious defense lawyer who wanted to make a name for himself.

But in spite of the money, the prestigious job, and the increasing media interest in him personally, in spite of the fact that John Thorning had chosen him as his protégé, he had hated being a lawyer. During his first six months there, the first thing he’d do when he got home from the office was have a shower. Changing out of the bespoke suits and expensive Italian shoes that made such an impeccable impression on television. Scrubbing his skin until it was bright red.

After that he got used to it and adopted a mask, just as Karolina had suggested. A sort of alter ego he could slip into and out of in a fraction of a second. Someone who looked and sounded like Jesper Stenberg, but with whose words and deeds he would prefer not to be associated.

That way he could go on playing the game and keep up appearances. He patiently bided his time, waiting for his moment. This moment. And that was why he intended to squeeze every last millisecond out of it. Fix it to his cerebral cortex so he could remember every single detail, every nuance, even in forty or fifty years when the expanse of time that had seemed so infinite to him as a child was approaching its end.

His senses were wide open, feeding him with details. The grain of the wood on the heavy, dark furniture around the conference table. The thick, red carpet under his shoes. The light from the chandeliers reflecting off the silver coffeepots in the middle of the table. The wafer-thin porcelain of the cup in front of him. Everything was just as he had imagined it. But the most enduring impression was still the way the room smelled. A heavy, sweet smell that overwhelmed him. Almost making him feel slightly aroused.

The smell of power.

At the top of the table sat the boss, in toadlike majesty. His subordinates, including Stenberg’s own father-in-law, crowded the long sides of the table. Suits, Botoxed foreheads and double chins. Friendly expressions on most of the faces, but naturally not all. After all, he was an outsider, an upstart who hadn’t followed the prescribed path. Someone who could disturb the balance of power.

The men and women around the table were all looking at Stenberg, awaiting his response. He checked his own expression. Humility, with a hint of surprise, he could manage that in his sleep. But an irritating little grin was lurking somewhere, he could feel it tugging at one corner of his mouth. Hardly surprising, really. He had just been asked the Question. His dreams – no, their dreams – were about to come true, and everything would be different from now on.

The moment he opened his mouth and transformed that little grin into his best television smile, he thought he could detect a tiny vibration from his watch. As if a new age had just begun.

Atif opened the cooler, dug about among the cans of soft drinks until he found one that was still more or less cold, and pressed it to the back of his neck. Sweat was running down his back; one of the many power cuts had brought the fan on his desk to a standstill more than an hour ago, and the air in the shabby little room was almost still.

He opened the can, drank greedily, and then went back to his lookout post at the dirty, half-covered window.

Outside, everything was going on pretty much as usual. A dozen parked trucks, all with their rear doors or covers open, between which various goods slowly circulated. Half of the vehicles were military green. Their uniformed drivers were standing by the little café, smoking while the workmen unloaded their trucks. A few scabby stray dogs were wandering about in the shadows between the vehicles. They kept their distance as they occasionally sniffed the air, as if to check whether any of the many crates being unloaded contained anything edible.

By now Atif was very familiar with everything that was going on in this dusty square. What brand of cigarettes the truck drivers preferred, the name of the café owner’s sullen daughter, which of the drivers smuggled hash, which one of the mangy animals was top dog. The one the others feared.

The cell phone in his breast pocket began to vibrate. Atif inserted the hands-free earpiece, then raised the binoculars. He zoomed in on the sentry box beside the only real entrance to the square. The man was leaning against a wall, smoking, his Kalashnikov nonchalantly slung over his shoulder.

His cell phone vibrated again and Atif pressed the Answer button.

‘Hello.’

‘It’s me. How’s it going?’

‘Pretty much the same as usual.’

‘Still no sign?’

‘This is where the trail brought me.’

‘And how long have you been sitting there now, Atif?’

‘Almost three weeks.’

‘Right. You don’t think it’s time to give up yet?’

‘He’ll be here.’

The line was silent for a few seconds. Atif scanned the rest of the square through the binoculars, then went back to the guard. The man was standing up straight now, stubbing his cigarette out on the red earth.

‘A woman called,’ the voice in his ear said. ‘From Sweden. Said she was your sister-in-law, she wanted you to call back as soon as you could. Something to do with your brother …’

‘Half brother,’ Atif muttered, without taking his eyes off the guard.

The man’s body language had suddenly changed. He had taken his gun off and was now holding it in both hands, and all of a sudden seemed to be taking his duties more seriously. The man let out a whistle and the sound brought all activity in the square to a halt.

A dark-coloured car with military registration plates and tinted windows was slowly approaching. The guard raised a hand to his forehead, in a sort of hybrid between a salute and a wave. The atmosphere in the square was transformed in a matter of seconds. The drivers dropped their cigarettes and stubbed them out, and exchanged nervous glances. The workmen quickened their pace.

Even the dogs seemed to realize that something was going on. They drew back further into the shadows as they warily followed the dark car with their eyes. It stopped and a man in uniform and dark glasses got out. Atif didn’t need to look through the binoculars; the reaction of the other people in the square was enough to tell him who it was.

The man he had been looking for.

The top dog.

Atif reached out his hand and picked up the pistol from the wobbly little table and tucked it into the back of his trousers. He tugged his shirt looser to make sure the gun couldn’t be seen.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he muttered into his cell.

‘Atif, wait,’ the voice said. ‘It sounded important. Properly important. You should probably call home.’

Saturday, November 23

The inner city seems to be full of blue lights. They bounce between the facades of the buildings, only slightly muted by the falling snow before reflecting off the dark water under the bridges. Some of the emergency vehicles have their sirens on, but most of them race through the night in silence.

The six students walking north along Skeppsbron are already bored of the commotion. They had stood for a while at a good vantage point up at Slussen, watching the circus down on the long highway bridge. Loads of ambulances, fire engines, marked and unmarked police cars, so whatever it was that had happened inside the tunnel had to be something serious.

A couple of the students had held their cell phones over the ice-cold railing in the hope of capturing some of the action. But when several minutes passed without anything much happening, they quickly lost interest. The intense cold and falling snow persuaded the group to carry on toward the city centre.

The snowball fight starts somewhere near halfway along Skeppsbron. One of the boys, it isn’t clear which one, stops and picks up an armful of snow from the windshield of a parked car. He quickly forms an uneven snowball and throws it at the backs of his friends, and then everything kicks off. All six of them are running along the sidewalk, dodging one another’s snowballs and stopping to make new ones.

The young woman in the red woolly hat is the one who makes the discovery.

‘Look, there’s someone sitting in here asleep,’ she cries, pointing at one of the parked cars, from whose windshield she’s just swept an armful of snow.

‘Hello, wake up! He looks like he’s passed out.’ She laughs as her boyfriend catches up with her. Through the black hole in the snow he can make out a large, fair-haired man. The man is sitting in the front passenger seat, with his head resting on the dashboard. It looks as if he’s asleep.

The young man on the sidewalk knocks on the windshield as well, and when there’s no reaction he starts clearing the snow that’s still obscuring the view. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, until at last almost the entire windshield is clear. He clears the side window as well. The man in the car still hasn’t moved.

In the distance they can hear the sound of motors and the pulsing roar of a helicopter approaching. Something makes the others stop their snowball fight and approach the car. Cautiously, as if they’re not really sure they want to see who or what is concealed inside the car. But the girl in the red woolly hat hasn’t noticed the change in mood.

‘Come on, leave it,’ she says, with laughter in her voice. ‘I’m freezing, let him sleep.’

She tugs at her boyfriend’s arm, trying to pull him with her. But the young man doesn’t move. As soon as the snow on the side window is gone he presses his nose to the glass.

‘Shit,’ he mutters.

‘What is it …?’ Suddenly the girl’s voice doesn’t sound so amused. More like scared. The noise of the helicopter’s rotor blades is getting louder.

‘Shit,’ the young man repeats, mostly to himself.

Frost on the inside of the glass is obscuring the view, and the inside of the car is dark. But the sleeping man is no more than an arm’s length away and the young man has no problem seeing enough details. The leather jacket, the embroidered logo on the back, the tribal tattoo curling up from the man’s collar like a snake, across his thick neck.

But it’s the dark patch at the back of the sleeping man’s head that catches the young man’s interest. A little hole, full of black ice crystals, each one just a millimetre across, forming a thin pattern of pearls over the stubble at the back of his neck.

The sound of the rotors is deafening, echoing between the buildings and rising to a howl as the helicopter passes straight over them.

‘Shit …’ the young man says, for the third time, without anyone hearing him. Then he takes a long step backward and starts to fumble for his cell phone.

David Sarac isn’t aware of any of the rescue effort going on around him. Not the agitated voices. Not the firemen drenching the car with foam and struggling intently with their hydraulic tools for almost a quarter of an hour before they manage to free him. Not the paramedics who use a curved piece of apparatus to force an oxygen tube into his throat and stop his lungs from collapsing at the last minute. Where Sarac is, there is no pain, no anxiety, no fear. Instead he feels an immense sense of peace.

His body is nothing more than a number of carefully bonded molecules, a temporary union that – like all other solid matter – is on its way toward its inevitable dissolution.

He can hear sounds around him, machines making warning signals, the focused discussions of the rescue team. An unpleasant gurgling sound that he gradually realizes is his own breathing.

But he isn’t scared. Not the slightest. Because he understands this is the universe’s plan. His time to be transformed. To reconnect with the universal stream.

Not until someone lifts one of his eyelids, calls his name, and shines a light directly into his brain does he get scared. Not because of the bright light or the voice calling out to him. What frightens him is the shadowy figure in the corner of his eye. A dark, threatening silhouette on the edge of his field of vision. Sarac tries to keep track of it, but the silhouette keeps evading him. He manages to see a leather jacket, a pulled-up hood whose shadow transforms the silhouette’s face into a black hole.

‘… need to get out of here now. The helicopter’s just arrived,’ someone says, presumably one of the paramedics.

But the silhouette doesn’t move, it just hovers at the corner of Sarac’s eye. Somewhere a cell phone rings. Once, then again.

The sound only exacerbates his fear. It grips Sarac’s rib cage, making his heart race and setting off a painful fusillade of fireworks in his head. Then the paramedic lets his eyelid fall and he slips back into the merciful darkness.

Friday, October 18

Jesper Stenberg flushed the condom down the toilet, showered carefully, and then dried himself with one of the thick towels in the bathroom. He inspected his appearance briefly in the bathroom mirror, checking as he always did that there were no telltale signs on his body or face. Then he quickly put his clothes back on before returning to the main bedroom.

It was 9:32 p.m.; his parents-in-law were looking after the children and Karolina had gone out to dinner with her girlfriends. She had offered to postpone it, but he had persuaded her to go. They could celebrate properly tomorrow. His father-in-law had already arranged everything. Dinner at his favorite restaurant, champagne, cognac, expensive wine. And of course his father-in-law would foot the bill and would go on about the future, and the possibilities that lay ahead of them, as long as they played their cards right.

She wasn’t lying in bed as he had been expecting. Instead she had poured herself a drink and was sitting on the sofa in the living room. She was still naked, and he couldn’t help admiring her body. Small, firm breasts, long, lithe legs, porcelain-white skin, and a toned stomach that suggested diets and an exercise regime he could barely imagine. He was going to miss her body. And the things she let him do with it …

But times were changing. From now on everything was going to be different.

‘So, Jesper, you’ve been asked the question,’ she said.

He went over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a stiff whiskey in one of the heavy crystal glasses. He shouldn’t really have any more to drink if he was going to drive. But he needed a drink; he realized that the moment she opened her mouth.

For a moment he got it into his head that she had already realized. That this wasn’t going to be as hard as he imagined. But her tone of voice instantly dashed any hopes of that nature. Obviously he should have realized she wasn’t going to make it easy for him. Sophie Thorning never made things easy for anyone. In that respect she was just like her father.

‘Everyone’s got what they wanted. You’ve got your big chance, John gets to pull the strings, and your ambitious little wife and her power-crazed family have finally got themselves a new launchpad.’ She laughed, a low, mocking laugh that he didn’t like.

‘And now you want to break up with me, don’t you? Minimize the risks, re-establish control?’ She made a slight gesture toward the bedroom with her glass.

He still didn’t answer her, just turned away and looked out the window. Far below he could see the exit from the parking garage. In just a few minutes he would be down there. In the car, on his way home. Ready to put all this behind him.

‘Everyone’s got what they wanted. Everyone except me,’ Sophie went on. ‘I’m just expected to back down and act like the last few years never happened. Is that what you’re thinking, Jeppe?’

He turned around slowly. She knew he hated that nickname.

‘Jeppe on the mountain, like the old story.’ She leered. ‘An idiot who thinks he’s something special. That he’s suddenly someone to be reckoned with. But in actual fact he’s just a marionette, a puppet who jumps whenever anyone pulls his strings. Does that sound familiar?’

He opened his mouth to tell her to shut up, but stopped himself at the last moment. Sophie knew precisely which buttons to press. He mustn’t let himself be provoked.

‘Ooh, did that make you cross?’ She smiled. ‘You know what they say – the truth hurts. But you like pain, don’t you, Jeppe? Just like me. You get a real kick out of forbidden pleasures.’

She twisted around and crossed her long legs, slowly enough for him to get a good view of her hairless genitals.

‘I think we should go back to the bedroom to celebrate your success properly. I’ve got a few ideas that I’m sure you’d enjoy, things Karolina would never agree to.’

Stenberg emptied his glass and put it down slowly on the island unit between the living room and kitchen.

‘No, Sophie,’ he said. ‘This was the last time. I’m leaving now. From now on we’ll only see each other in the office, and any interaction between us will be strictly professional.’

He held up his hand before she had time to say anything.

‘No, no, I know how the game works. This is when you pull out your trump card, and threaten to tell Karolina or your dad. Maybe even both of them?’

She turned her head slightly and her face cracked into a mocking grimace.

‘But you don’t seem to have realized that the game has changed,’ he went on. ‘You’re quite right, other people have helped elevate me. I accepted that a long time ago, and realized it was the only way to get where I wanted to be. And now I’m there.’ He paused for a moment, collecting himself.

‘Sophie,’ he began, adjusting his tone of voice to show a hint of regret. ‘A few months ago you really could have spoiled everything. You could have ruined my life. But your trump card lost all its value the moment I was asked the Question.’

He gestured toward the telephone on the table.

‘Call Karolina if you want. She’d never leave me now, just as my father-in-law would never advise her to.’

Sophie’s smile had stiffened somewhat, but she still didn’t seem to have quite understood.

‘John,’ she said, ‘Daddy would—’

‘Come on, Sophie.’ His tone was perfect now, a cocktail made up of equal parts concern and condescension. ‘Do you seriously believe that John would sacrifice me for your sake? Now that his investment is finally about to pay off?’

He nodded toward the phone.

‘Please, call Daddy and cry on the phone to him. Tell him everything, be my guest.’ He smiled, copying her mocking grimace.

Sophie glanced at the phone. She licked her lips, once, then several more times. Then she looked down. Stenberg breathed out. The match was over, he had won. All of a sudden he felt almost sorry for her.

‘Smart decision, Sophie,’ he said. ‘It would have been a shame if you’d had to spend Christmas in the clinic again.’

He regretted saying it the moment he heard the words leave his mouth. Bloody hell! The glass missed his head by a whisker, hitting the wall behind him and sending a shower of crystal shards across the oak floor.

‘You fucking bastard!’ She took a couple of quick strides toward him, her fingernails reaching toward his face. Her knee missed his crotch by a matter of centimetres.

‘For God’s sake, Sophie.’ Stenberg twisted aside and grabbed hold of her wrists.

She went on trying to kick him, wriggling frantically in an effort to break free. He dumped her on the sofa, but Sophie bounced up instantly and attacked him again. She was growling like a dog, and her eyes were black. Her lips were pulled back, as if she were planning to bite him.

The blow was a purely instinctive reaction. Right-handed, with an open palm, but still hard enough to make her head snap back and her body crumple onto the sofa. Shit, he’d never hit a woman before. Not like that, anyway.

Sophie lay motionless on the sofa. Her arms and legs were hanging limp. Something wet was running down one of Stenberg’s earlobes and he felt his ear without really thinking about it. Not blood, as he suspected, but a golden-brown drop of whiskey that must have flown out of the glass.

‘Sophie,’ he said in a tremulous voice. She still wasn’t moving.

In the oppressive silence he could hear his own pulse thundering on his eardrums. He glanced quickly toward the elevator, then at the inert body. Sophie’s eyelids fluttered a couple of times and Stenberg breathed out.

He turned around and was about to go into the kitchen to get some water. But the floor was covered with broken glass. So he went to the bathroom instead and moistened a towel. On the way back he picked up her white toweling dressing gown from the floor.

She was sitting up when he got back, and he passed her both the towel and the dressing gown.

‘Sophie, I’m—’

‘Get out!’ She snatched the towel and pressed it to her cheek. He stood motionless for a few seconds, unsure of what to do. ‘Didn’t you hear me, get the fuck out of here!’ Sophie hissed, covering herself with the dressing gown.

He backed away a couple of steps and tried to think of something to say.

‘Sophie, I mean—’

Sudden pain interrupted him. A sliver of glass had cut into his left heel and he swore as he hopped on the other leg and tried to pull it out.

Her laughter was shrill and far too loud.

‘God, you’re so fucking pathetic, Jesper, can’t you see it? Pathetic …’

He straightened up, tossing the sliver of glass toward the sink. He gave her one last glance before limping toward the elevator, without saying another word.

‘I’ll do it!’ she screamed after him. ‘I’ll kill myself!’

He pressed the elevator button, resisting the impulse to turn around.

‘I’ll go to the media, do you hear me, little Jeppe!’ She carried on yelling as the elevator doors opened. ‘I’ll tell them everything! Everything, yeah? You’re finished, you’re whole fucking family’s finished! I’m going to—’

Her voice rose to a falsetto as the doors cut her off mid-sentence. He heard running footsteps, then the sound of her fists on the elevator doors. He pressed the button for the garage several times, but it wouldn’t light up. The hammering went on, growing louder and echoing off the metal walls of the elevator.

Boom, boom, boom, boom …

He kept jabbing at the button, until eventually the little light behind it came on. Then he covered his ears with his hands and the elevator slowly nudged its way down toward the basement.

Atif took a deep breath and then looked up. The night sky was so different here compared to Sweden. Higher, clearer somehow. Yet at the same time it also felt strangely closer. But of course that wasn’t true. Obviously the sky and the stars were exactly the same, it was just that he was looking at them from a different place. A distance of three and a half thousand kilometres had simply given him a different perspective on things. And now he was going to have to switch perspective again.

‘Something’s happened, Mum,’ he said, without looking away.

She didn’t answer; she hardly ever did. She just sat still in her wheelchair with a blanket over her thin legs as she looked at the stars. But Atif knew she was listening. She really ought to have gone to bed a long time ago. But on starry nights like this the nurses let her stay up. They knew it made her calmer.

He took a deep breath. Time to spit it out.

‘I have to go back to Sweden. It’s to do with Adnan,’ he went on. He tried to force his mouth to form the words. But to his surprise his mother spoke instead.

‘A-Adnan …’ Her voice was weak, thin, almost like a child’s. ‘Adnan isn’t home from school yet.’

Atif opened his mouth again. Say it, get it over and done with. Tell her what’s happened. But he hesitated a few seconds too long. One of the nurses was heading toward them across the cracked paving.

‘Adnan’s a good boy,’ his mother went on. ‘He’s got a good head for learning, he could be anything he likes. An engineer, or a doctor. You must help him, make sure he doesn’t end up like, like …’ She fell silent and looked up at the night sky. Atif bit his lip.

‘It’s time for bed now, Mum.’ He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’ll call you from Sweden. Khalti will come and see you the day after tomorrow. She says she’ll bring some of those dates you like.’

His mother nodded distantly. Her gaze was fixed on the stars again. Atif straightened up and began to walk away. He’d tell her when he got back. That would have to do.

‘You’ve got a good son, to come and see you so often, Dalia,’ she heard the nurse say. ‘You must be very proud of him.’

Atif quickened his pace. And tried to convince himself that it was the distance that meant he couldn’t hear her reply.

Jesper Stenberg limped toward his car, got in, and then sat behind the wheel for a few moments. His hands were shaking, and his left shoe felt warm and wet.

Fucking psycho bitch. Why the hell hadn’t he stuck to the plan, said what he had to say and then left? Fucking her and then dumping her wasn’t a very smart thing to do. Not to mention that stupid remark about the private clinic in Switzerland, a subject he should have avoided at all costs. But, as usual, Sophie had managed to unsettle him. To get beneath the skin of his bespoke self-confident image.

Stenberg took a few deep breaths as he tried to pull himself together. It was only just ten o’clock. Karolina wouldn’t be home before two. Plenty of time to go home, patch himself up, then settle back on the sofa with a whiskey and do his best to forget this sordid little episode. He was pretty good at that. Forgetting, leaving things behind, and setting off toward new goals.

He started the engine and slid the car out of its parking space. The pain in his left foot had turned into a dull throb. At the exit he stopped at the barrier. His pass card was in one of the inside pockets of his wallet, an anonymous white plastic card, obviously not issued in his name. He put the gearshift in neutral and opened the window. The Eco-Drive function instantly shut off the big engine and everything went silent. In the distance he could hear the garage’s ventilation system. A dull, ominous sound that made him feel badly ill at ease. The feeling came out of nowhere, and for a few seconds it took over his whole being and made his hands shake.

He had to get out of there, right away!

Stenberg touched his wallet to the card reader. The machine made a vague clicking sound. But the barrier didn’t move.

Cannot read card.

He swore silently to himself and tried again. ‘Come on, come on …’

He thought he could hear a noise, something that sounded like a distant scream, and glanced quickly in the rearview mirror. Everything seemed okay behind him. The sound must have come from out in the street.

The barrier started to move, slowly and jerkily. Just a few centimetres at a time, as if it didn’t really want to let him go.

Stenberg turned the stereo on and tried to find something to lift his mood. The intro kicked in and the stereo began to count the seconds.

0.01.

0.02.

0.03.

As soon as the gap under the barrier was big enough he set the car rolling. Relief radiated through his body. He slowed down just before the ramp reached street level. His hands were still shaking, making it hard for him to fasten his seat belt.

The music stopped abruptly, making Stenberg raise his head. The timer had stopped but the play symbol was still illuminated. Odd. Something white fluttered at the corner of his eye, hovering in the air just above the hood of the car.

A plastic bag, he found himself thinking. But the object was far too large. The stereo was still silent, the time on the display static. And all of a sudden Stenberg realized what was happening. He realized where the car was, and what the large, white, fluttering object in the air actually was.

He shut his eyes, clutched the steering wheel, and felt an icy chill spread from his stomach and up through his chest. The timer on the stereo suddenly came back to life and the music carried on. It was only drowned out by the sound of Sophie Thorning’s body as it thudded into the hood of the car.

1

Atif leaned back in the uncomfortable chair. In spite of the snow and cold outside, the air in the windowless little room felt stuffy. The smell of burned coffee, various bodily excretions, and general hopelessness was very familiar. You could probably find the same thing in police stations all over the world.

He was hungry, and his neck and shoulders were stiff after the long journey. He hated flying, hated putting his life in other people’s hands.

‘Name?’ the policeman sitting opposite him asked.

‘It says in there.’ Atif nodded toward the red passport on the table between them. The policeman, a fleshy little man in his sixties with thinning hair, who had introduced himself as Bengtsson, didn’t reply. In fact he didn’t even look up, just went on leafing through the folder he had in his lap.

Atif sighed.

‘Atif Mohammed Kassab,’ he said.

‘Age?’

‘I’m forty-six, born June nineteenth. Midsummer’s Eve …’ He wasn’t really sure why he added this last remark. But the policeman looked up at last.

‘What?’

‘June nineteenth,’ Atif said. It had been several years since he had last spoken Swedish. The words felt clumsy, his pronunciation seemed out of synch, like all the dubbed films on television back home. ‘Once every seven years it’s Midsummer’s Eve.’

The policeman stared at him through his small reading glasses. The smell of polyester, sweat, and coffee breath was slowly creeping across the table. Atif sighed again.

‘Okay, Bengtsson, it’s been over an hour since you stopped me at passport control. I flew in from Iraq so you suspect my passport is fake, or that it’s genuine but not mine.’

He paused, thinking how much he’d like a hamburger right now. The look on the policeman’s face remained impassive.

‘I’m tired and hungry, so maybe we could do the quick version?’ Atif went on. His voice felt less out of synch already, the words coming more easily.

‘My name is Atif Kassab, and I was born in Iraq. My dad died when I was little and my mum brought me to Sweden. She got married again, to a relative. When I was twelve he went off to the USA, leaving me, Mum, and my newborn younger brother. But by then at least we were Swedish citizens so we didn’t get thrown out.’

‘So you say.’ The policeman was looking down at his file again. ‘According to the National ID database, Atif Mohammed Kassab has emigrated.’

‘That’s right. About seven years ago,’ Atif said.

‘And since then you’ve been living …?’ Bengtsson raised his eyebrows slightly.

‘In Iraq.’

‘Where in Iraq?’

Atif frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

The policeman slowly raised one hand and took off his glasses.

‘Because the Atif Mohammed Kassab who you claim to be has a pretty impressive criminal record.’ He gestured toward the file with his glasses.

‘And?’ Atif shrugged his shoulders.

‘Well, if you really are Atif Mohammed Kassab, it’s in the interests of the police to find out a bit more about you. Where you’ve been living, what you’ve been doing, whom you’ve spent time with.’

‘I’ve got a Swedish passport, I’m a Swedish citizen. I’m not obliged to say a fu—’ Atif interrupted himself midsentence and pinched the top of his nose. It was almost eleven o’clock in the evening now. Almost ten hours since he last had any proper food.

‘If we suspect that there’s anything funny going on, we can put you on the next plane back to Iraq. There’s a flight first thing tomorrow morning.’

The fat little policeman clasped his hands together behind his neck and slowly stretched. The sweat stains under his arms were clearly visible on his shirt.

‘Or we could lock you in a cell for a few days,’ he went on. ‘While we compare your fingerprints with the database. That sort of thing can take a while, obviously.’ The policeman grinned.

Atif was on the point of saying something but thought better of it. That last threat was probably a bluff. Even if the fat little cop still doubted that his passport was genuine, he must have realized by now that Atif wasn’t trying to sneak into the country illegally. But, on the other hand, he had no wish to end up in a cell. Besides, he had an appointment to keep.

Atif took a deep breath. This whole contest in who could piss farthest was actually pretty pointless. He had nothing to lose by cooperating. Being awkward was mostly just a reflex. But things were different now. He was older, wiser. Besides, he really wanted that hamburger. A supersize meal with loads of fries and a large Coke with ice.

‘Najaf,’ he said. ‘It’s in western Iraq. That’s where my family’s from. Mum got sick and wanted to move back home. I went as well, to help her, and then I stayed on.’ He shrugged slightly and decided to stop at that. The policeman nodded almost imperceptibly and jotted something down in his file.

‘And what has someone like you been doing with his time down there …?’

Atif paused a couple of seconds, thought about lying but changed his mind. Someone like you … He put his hand in the inside pocket of his jacket and waited until the policeman looked up.

‘I’m a police officer,’ he said as he opened the leather wallet containing his ID card and little metal badge and put it on the table.

For once, Detective Inspector Kenneth Bengtsson wasn’t sure what to think. His colleague at the passport desk had sounded one hundred percent certain when he handed the case over. A fake passport, well made, probably a real one with the photograph replaced. The fact that the passport’s original owner turned out to be a real troublemaker seemed to support the theory. A genuine Swedish passport was worth several thousand kronor if you had the right contacts. And all the information they had indicated that Atif Kassab had plenty of the right contacts.

But the man claiming to be Kassab wasn’t a typical illegal immigrant with the usual staccato sentences learned by rote. This man’s Swedish was as good as his. A bit rusty, maybe, as if he hadn’t used it for a while, but still.

The only picture they had of Atif Kassab in their files was more than ten years old and hadn’t been improved by being sent by fax. Kassab’s DNA and fingerprints were obviously on file, but Bengtsson had no great desire to grapple with the ink roller to get prints for a comparison. He often couldn’t help laughing when the cops in a television show did a bit of tapping at a computer and managed to bring up fingerprints, addresses, pictures of friends, shoe sizes, and anything else that might be remotely useful. In Bengtsson’s world, ink, paper, and manual comparisons with a magnifying glass were still the order of the day. Unless you wanted to wait for forensics to get around to it.

So he preferred to rely on his own personal judgment when trying to identify people. The information in the database was seldom as exhaustive as it was in this case. He had the printouts in the folder on his lap. He had already ticked off three things.

Age: 46.

Height: 195 cm.

Eye colour: brown.

But next to the information about build and hair colour he had put little question marks. The man in the grainy photograph who was staring arrogantly into the camera had long, slicked-back hair and a little goatee beard that did nothing to hide a serious double chin. He looked just like the troublemaker his police record suggested he was, even down to the thick gold chain around his neck.

But the man sitting opposite Bengtsson had military-style cropped hair, and the little that could be seen was going grey. But the stubble on his cheeks was still dark, so, after some hesitation, Bengtsson changed one of the question marks to another tick.

And this man wasn’t fat, not remotely. He was big, certainly, probably weighed in at around a hundred kilos. But the word stocky didn’t really fit. Bengtsson wrote very fit in the margin, then changed his mind. The words made him think of the gym-pumped look that yobs who’d just finished their national service usually had. Bengtsson wrote in very good shape instead and found himself smiling at the description. The man’s posture was good, the look in his eyes alert, and even if Bengtsson had eventually managed to wind him up, he had been smart enough to calm himself down.

Bengtsson had noticed that the man’s left ear was slightly deformed. A bit of cartilage was missing from the back, and he had a scar stretching from his jaw down to his neck that was almost bare of stubble. The description he had in his lap said nothing about injuries or scars. But, on the other hand, it wasn’t difficult to imagine how they might have come about.

Bengtsson inspected the wallet containing the metal badge from all angles. Looked at the ID card with its picture of the man wearing a uniform.

Sgt. Atif M. Kassab.

6th Army div.

MP. Bat.

It was similar to Bengtsson’s own official ID, but the shiny metal badge in the shape of a shield was clearly modelled on the American version. It seemed genuine, but obviously he couldn’t be sure.

‘Military police, you say …’ Bengtsson said, putting the leather folder down. He couldn’t help smiling to himself. Talk about setting the wolf to watch the sheep.

‘And how did you end up in that job, if you don’t mind my asking? I mean, with your background?’

‘A relative recommended me. The army needed people,’ Atif said.

‘No, no, I get that bit,’ Bengtsson said. ‘What I’m wondering is why you chose to take the job? Change sides?’ The policeman put his file on the table and leaned forward.

Atif shrugged. He could say that it was his mum’s fault. That she refused to let him pay for her little room in the nursing home unless the money had been earned honestly. And what could be more honorable than being a police officer? Besides, he liked his job, he was good at it. But Atif had already revealed more than he had expected to, so this fat little cop would have to go on wondering about his motives.

Silence fell in the room. Atif took a few sips of water from the little plastic cup on the table. Bengtsson went on staring at him for a good while.

‘Okay, I believe you,’ the policeman said, throwing his hands out. ‘Let’s go and get your bag, then I’ll take you through to the arrivals hall. Welcome home to Sweden.’

He made a short note in the file, closed it, and stood up. Atif got quickly to his feet. He was thinking of the hamburger restaurant between the terminals. He hoped it was open all night.

‘Just one last thing,’ Bengtsson said.

‘Sure.’

‘Why have you come back? To Sweden, I mean. Why now?’

Atif paused a few seconds before replying. It would be easiest to lie. His former self would have done just that without blinking. Maybe that was why he chose not to.

‘I’m here to bury my younger brother,’ he said.

‘Sorry to hear that,’ Bengtsson said.

Atif made a slight move toward the door, hoping the policeman would do the same. And not ask the logical follow-up question. But he could see from the man’s eyes that it was already on its way.

‘How did he die?’ Bengtsson said. ‘Your younger brother, I mean. You said you were twelve when he was born, and you’re forty-six now, so your brother can’t have even been thirty-five?’

Atif stopped. He wished he’d followed his instincts and kept his mouth shut. He bowed his head and looked up at the policeman.

‘Adnan was murdered,’ he said.

2

David Sarac is still floating. Sometimes he thinks he’s dead, at times he’s actually completely convinced that he is. It doesn’t bother him. If this is death, then I daresay I can live with it, he thinks. But before he has time to laugh at his little joke, the feeling is gone. Vanished into part of his brain to which he no longer has access.

His body is lying in a bed; he gradually realizes this. But he doesn’t manage to make sense of much more than that. Beyond the fact that his name is David Sarac, that he’s a police officer, and that he’s been in some sort of accident.

Various people come and go in the room, mostly white coats that poke and pull him about, which ought to mean he isn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. But sometimes he notices the presence of other people, faceless figures that keep their distance. White shirts and blue uniforms with gold insignia, interspersed with a few dark suits. Most of them are sombre and seem a bit lost. As if they’re not quite sure what’s expected of them.

But the others feel all the more troubling. Their vigour frightens him, but he still can’t help looking at them more closely. It was from one of them that he heard the name.

‘Do we know anything more about – Janus …?’

Janus.

The name floats in his consciousness, making it impossible for him to rest properly. But no matter how hard he tries to remember, the answer is beyond reach.

‘Need to get this fucking mess cleared up,’ a faceless figure whispered at one point, and, oddly enough, that particular memory hasn’t faded. Maybe the remark was addressed directly at him? Is that why his body doesn’t want to give up, because he hasn’t finished his mission? Because there are still some loose ends?

Things that need to be … cleared up?

Atif woke up to find someone prodding him. It took him a few moments to realize where he was. On the sofa in Adnan’s apartment. Or, to be more accurate, Cassandra and Tindra’s apartment, seeing as Adnan was lying in cold storage at the undertaker’s.

He had gone out like a light the moment his head hit the pillow, which was pretty unusual. Someone prodded Atif again and he rolled over.

‘What’s that?’ Tindra asked, pointing at a large scar on Atif’s right shoulder. A patch of scar tissue the size of a hand, wrinkled and slightly discoloured.

‘An old tattoo,’ Atif said.

‘Like the one Daddy’s got?’ Tindra tilted her little blonde head to one side and looked at him.

‘Something like that,’ he replied. ‘Is your mum up yet?’

Tindra shook her head.

‘Not yet.’

‘But you’re already up, all on your own?’

She shook her head again and looked serious for a moment.

‘We’re both awake, Amu.’ She laughed. She used the Arabic word for uncle, and Atif realized he liked it. He pushed the covers back and sat up.

‘So you know who I am?’ he said.

This time she nodded.

‘Of course I know. Daddy’s got a picture of you in his phone. And me … but lots more of me,’ she added.

‘Of course he has,’ Atif said. ‘A pretty girl like you.’

Tindra looked different in real life, far more animated than in the digital prints with which he had lined his mother’s little room at the nursing home. The girl was wearing a washed-out nightdress with a picture of some cartoon character he didn’t recognize. It looked as if she’d tied her hair up in two untidy ponytails herself. You’ve got your mum’s skin, Atif thought. But your dad’s eyes.

‘Amu, can you make pancakes? Daddy always makes pancakes when he’s home. With jam and sugar.’

Atif got up from the sofa and stroked her cheek. He liked the way she frowned slightly when she asked for something. Adnan had done the same thing when he was little.

‘Of course I can, sweetheart. I taught your dad everything he knows.’ Atif regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.

Tindra had already eaten three whole pancakes by the time Cassandra appeared at the door of the kitchen.

‘Good morning,’ Atif said.

‘Mmm …’ She bent over and kissed Tindra on the head. Atif glanced at her. He had known Cassandra before she and Adnan started dating. Back then her name had been Malin, someone’s plain little sister, slaving away in the city’s bars to earn enough money for a pair of silicone breasts and a few other physical enhancements.

Then she had changed her name, appeared in a couple of episodes of some forgotten reality show, and picked up some work as a glamour model. Car shows, VIP events, nightclub appearances, and a bit of associated activity. In those days she had been very attractive, if you liked nightclub blondes. Adnan evidently did. He had been a bouncer at a few fashionable clubs, where he helped fend off drunk blokes who got too keen. He was good-looking, and every so often had plenty of money. And he was funny. He could entertain a whole room when he was in the mood.

Having a girlfriend whom other men would drool over suited Adnan, and when Tindra was born his world must have looked pretty much perfect. But that was several years ago now, and Cassandra’s glitzy glamour had started to fade. Wrinkles at the corners of her mouth from smoking, sallow skin, tired eyes. One of the rectangular false nails on her left hand was missing and the dark roots were clearly visible in her blond hair.

‘Sorry we can’t offer you anything better than the sofa.’

Cassandra came and stood beside him at the stove as she fiddled with a pack of cigarettes.

‘No problem. Like I said, I could always check into a hotel instead,’ Atif replied.

She shook her head, lit a Marlboro, and blew the smoke toward the stove hood.

‘Tindra really wanted to meet her uncle.’

‘How’s she taking it?’ Atif said, nodding toward the table, where the little girl was setting about her fourth pancake.

‘She’s only six.’ Cassandra shrugged. ‘How much do you remember from when you were six?’

More than I’d like to, Atif thought to himself.

‘By the way, I’ve got a job this evening. Don’t suppose you’d be able to babysit for a few hours?’

‘Of course,’ Atif replied. ‘No problem at all,’ he added. ‘Are you managing okay?’

‘Money, you mean? Well, what do you think?’ Cassandra shrugged again. ‘Did Adnan ever tell you about the gym he wanted to open up, over in Gläntan? Or the fact that he was plowing all our savings into it?’

Atif slowly shook his head.

‘It’s been a long time since I spoke to Adnan.’

‘Well, as usual, he managed to make a mess of it,’ Cassandra said. ‘He got impatient that the building work was going so slowly, and borrowed money to speed things up. The gym turned out brilliantly in the end, but by then Adnan had already been bought out. You know what he was like, charming as hell, sociable, but patience was never one of his strong points.’ She pulled a face that looked almost like a smile.

‘Adnan was full of great ideas that never quite happened,’ she went on. ‘Always on his way toward something, without ever really getting anywhere, if you know what I mean?’ Her voice was hard, or at least harder than it needed to be. ‘But I’ve got my own income, and we’ve got friends who can help us, so we’re okay.’

‘I see. Are there many people coming tomorrow?’

‘Of course, that’s what I was going to tell you.’ Cassandra dropped her cigarette in a half-full cup of coffee on the draining board, in which other yellow butts were already floating. ‘We had to push the funeral back a couple of days. To begin with the cops didn’t want to release the body. Then the undertaker had other bookings and it clashed with my work. I did try calling you, I spoke to that bloke Faisal again, your boss. But you’d already left.

‘You’re welcome to stay,’ she went on. ‘But it’s okay if you need to get back. Like I said, we’re managing.’ She pulled out another cigarette and offered him the pack. Atif shook his head.

‘You’ve given up?’ she said.

Atif didn’t answer. He was thinking of his return ticket, the job he’d been forced to leave unfinished, his neat little house, and the starry sky above his small garden.

Tindra was humming a song as she struggled to finish the last of the pancake. Atif looked at Cassandra again, thinking that he didn’t like her tone of voice when she talked about Adnan. The way she said the body. He wondered what sort of friends were helping her.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I can always change my ticket.’

Atif was on his way back to the building when he saw it. A big, dark-coloured Audi, parked a bit farther up the street, but it set his alarm bells ringing straightaway. He hadn’t been out long, ten minutes max. He’d locked the front door securely and hadn’t even bothered to put his jacket on.

He had tucked Tindra up in bed about an hour ago, kissing her forehead gently before switching on the old CD player and pressing Play for her favourite story, just as he had been instructed to do. Then he had settled down in the living room and zapped through a number of television channels, full of commercials, before realizing that the bag of paperbacks was still in the rental car over in the parking garage. He didn’t think it would take more than five minutes to fetch it. Tindra was fast asleep, and Cassandra wouldn’t be home before midnight.

The cold was biting into him, making him hurry even more. But when he saw the dark Audi parked there he slowed down and almost stopped. The car hadn’t been around when he came out, he was quite sure of that. There was no way he would have missed it.

It could be a surveillance car, but both the model and the shiny, outsized wheel trims made him doubt that. This car was too expensive and too ostentatious to be a cop car. But it was still parked in a perfect position for someone to keep watch over the entrance to their building. The engine was switched off but there was someone sitting inside, probably more than one person, to judge by the steamed-up windows.

He really ought to ignore it. Jog back across the street, just as he had planned, lock the door behind him, and settle down with his books. There must be fifty apartments in the block, so it was hardly likely that whoever was in the car was interested in him. Even so, he still couldn’t help going closer.

He stuck to the far edge of the sidewalk, setting one foot down in the snow on the grass to stay out of the cones of lights beneath the streetlamps as best he could.

When he was ten metres away he heard a noise. An electric whirring sound followed by a little click, as one of the windows was opened slightly. He didn’t stop, just looked down at the sidewalk and carried on. He could make out movement inside the car now. The outline of someone sitting in the driver’s seat, then someone else who seemed to be moving between the front seats. Five metres, four, three …

He passed the car and glanced cautiously inside it. He heard someone groan through the gap in the window and realized all of a sudden that this was something quite different from what he had thought at first. He carried on toward the door, almost grinning to himself.

But then he realized that the woman in the car seemed familiar. The jacket, tight leather trousers, the long, platinum-blonde hair that could do with having its dark roots bleached.

Suddenly he wished he hadn’t been so damn curious.

3

Sarac could see the white-coated woman’s mouth moving. He could make out the occasional word and realized that he was nodding in agreement, as if they had been talking for a while. His head felt strange, as if it had been filled with sludge. Heavy heartbeats in his chest. Fear. Who was this woman? Where the hell was he? This last question was easily answered. Grey plastic floor, textured yellow wallpaper, speckled plaster tiles on the ceiling. The distinctive smell of hospital, impossible to disguise, no matter how hard anyone tried.

‘We’ve met several times now, David. Do you remember?’ the woman in the coat said.

Sarac’s head went on moving up and down. He stared at the woman, trying to focus. High forehead, long, greying hair, dark-framed glasses, a tiny scar on her upper lip. Probably about fifty years old. Her appearance looked familiar, but he couldn’t locate a memory to match it against. His thoughts were still sluggish, as if he had been fast asleep and had just opened his eyes.

‘Do you remember my name, David?’ the woman asked.

‘N-no, sorry,’ he said.

The words sounded clumsy, as if he were sounding out each letter instead of joining them together.

‘My name is Jill. Jill Vestman, and I’m a senior consultant in the neurology department here. Do you remember why you’re here?’

‘Er … no.’

His body was still out of reach, but he managed to perform a brief check. His rib cage ached; his left arm was hanging limply in a sling. His chest and stomach felt tight, as if they had been strapped or sewn up. And then there was the headache. A rumbling, pulsing headache, the like of which he had never experienced before. It was making his thoughts fuzzy.

Dr Vestman pulled a stool over and sat down beside the bed. She took a small notebook out of one of her top pockets.

‘You suffered a minor stroke almost two weeks ago now, David. A hemorrhage in the left side of your brain. You were driving at the time and lost consciousness. You had a crash, in the Söderleden Tunnel.’

Sarac tried to straighten up but his body refused to obey him. What the hell was she saying? A stroke? No, no. Strokes happened to old men. Christ, he was only … only? His headache got worse, muddying his already hazy thoughts. The doctor seemed to note his reaction.

‘The impact was severe,’ she said. ‘You’d probably have been killed if you hadn’t been wearing a bulletproof vest and weren’t already unconscious.’

‘Drunk driving,’ Sarac said out of nowhere, without really knowing why.

‘What do you mean, David?’

He had to stop for a few seconds to think. He tried to trace the train of thought back from his mouth and up into his foggy brain.

‘Drunk drivers almost always survive,’ he said slowly, tasting each word. His voice still sounded odd. As if it weren’t really his. Dr Vestman nodded.

‘That’s right, relaxed muscles don’t get damaged the same way tense ones do. It’s interesting that you remember that.’ She made a note in her book.

‘H-how?’ Sarac muttered. ‘I mean, when …?’

Things ought to be getting clearer now, but instead everything seemed to be going the wrong way. He was feeling sick, and his headache was getting worse too. And he was starting to feel frightened.

A stroke – a brain haemorrhage.

‘Like I said, it was almost two weeks ago,’ Dr Vestman said, but stopped when Sarac tried to say something. Then she went on when he didn’t actually speak.

‘When you came in you were in a very bad way, David. We kept you sedated for over a week to stabilize your condition. To start with we concentrated on the most acute problems, releasing the blood and easing the pressure inside your head. Then we dealt with your other injuries. You’ve broken your left collarbone and ruptured your spleen. Several of your ribs are cracked and you’ve got severe bruising. But, considering how bad the impact was, you’ve actually been extremely fortunate.’

She paused and looked down at her notebook, as if to give Sarac a few seconds to digest the information.

‘On Monday we performed another operation on your head,’ she went on. ‘We removed the remaining blood clots. You and I had our first conversation the day before yesterday.’ She smiled at him, a gentle, sympathetic smile that she probably learned when she was training and had been refining ever since.

What the hell was she talking about? Awake, for three fucking days! He shook his head, harder this time, as if to shake that irritating smile out of it. His anger came out of nowhere.

‘No way,’ he snarled, and tried to sit up again. A fierce, burning pain made him put his hand to his head instinctively. His pulse was pounding in his temples. His right hand slid about, unwilling to do what he wanted it to. A double layer of gauze bandage, tightly wrapped around his skull. His hair! They’d shaved off all his hair. He must look terrible.

‘The swelling in your brain is slowly subsiding, David,’ the doctor said. ‘But it’s likely to affect your short-term memory for a while. That’s why you don’t remember the last few days. It’s not unusual, and in all likelihood it will improve.’ Dr Vestman fell silent and opened her notebook again, as if to let him take in what she’d just said.

He had questions, so many questions. An infinite number of questions. Like, for instance … Fuck, fuck, fuck! He had to try to calm down and get a grip on his brain before his headache succeeded in crushing it against his skull.

‘I was thinking of asking a few questions, mostly to see where we are in the healing process. Don’t worry if you can’t answer some of them at the moment,’ the doctor went on.

Sarac still couldn’t manage to say anything. He nodded instead, as he tried to slow his pulse down. It seemed to be working, at least partially.

‘Do you know what month it is, David?

‘How about what time of year?’ the doctor added when he didn’t answer.

He was trying but couldn’t find the words. Instead he tried to conjure up images in his head. A calendar, the date on a newspaper, the screen on his cell phone. Snow, he suddenly remembered. Heavy, wet flakes covering the tarmac, settling like a blanket on the car windshield. Headlights reflecting off the snow. Blinding him, sticking into his head like knives.

‘W-winter,’ he said.

‘Well done, David, that’s right.’

Sarac leaned his head back on the pillow. He felt suddenly relieved. At least he wasn’t completely gone. If he could just calm down a bit, if only this bastard headache could let up a bit, everything would become clear.

‘Do you know what year it is, David?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘2011.’

Doctor Vestman said nothing, just made a small note. But something in her body language had changed.

‘No, no, sorry! 2012. Obviously, I meant 2012,’ he quickly corrected himself.

She looked up. Smiled again, the same irritating, sympathetic smile as before.

‘It’s December 2013, David.’

‘W-what?’

‘It’s Thursday, December twelfth, 2013.’

‘Impossible. I mean …’ Sarac struggled once more to sit up, trying to push back against the mattress with his feeble right hand and almost losing his balance. He slumped back against the pillow instead. His headache shifted up a gear, then another. He screwed his eyes shut a few times. Then he slowly opened them. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling were flaring.

‘Can you tell me about your last memory, from the time before the crash, David?’

‘Of course,’ he muttered. ‘No problem,’ he added after thinking for a couple of seconds. But it wasn’t true. It didn’t even come close.

The time before the crash … His heart was suddenly galloping in his chest.

A stroke.

Car crash.

The time before …

December 2013.

The time before the crash …

December.

20 … 13!!

Fucking hell!!!

‘It doesn’t matter, David,’ Dr Vestman said, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘Let’s rewind a bit,’ she went on. ‘That often helps. Try telling me what your name is.’

‘David Georg Sarac,’ he said quickly. The words helped ease his panic slightly.

‘And how old are you, David?’

‘Thirty-five!’ He breathed a short sigh of relief. It worked when he didn’t try to think. If he just let the answers come out automatically.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Birkastan. Rörstrandsgatan, number 26. Third floor.’

‘Family?’

‘Mum and Dad are dead. My twin sister, Elisabeth, lives in Canada.’ He paused.

‘Ontario,’ he added, and suddenly felt much calmer. He wasn’t some fucking vegetable, as he’d begun to suspect. His brain was sluggish, sure, but he wasn’t completely gone. All this would soon be over, and everything would fall back into place.

‘A number of your friends and colleagues have been to see you. A lot of people care about you, David. Could you tell me something about your work?’

‘I’m a police officer,’ he said.

‘What sort of police officer, David?’

‘The Intelligence Unit. I handle informants …’ He suddenly broke off. New feelings were suddenly running through him. It took him a few seconds to identify them. Discomfort, shame. A growing sense of danger.

His headache instantly redoubled its efforts, forcing him to close his eyes. For a few seconds he thought he was going to be sick. The words broke free and bounced around inside his head.

What.

Sort.

Of.

Police.

Officer?

‘And what does that involve?’ the doctor asked. ‘Handling informants, I mean.’ Her voice sounded very distant all of a sudden. What was her name again? Dr …?

You’ve had a stroke, you crashed your car in the Söderleden Tunnel, and you’re in the hospital. Today is Thursday, December 12, and the doctor’s name is … something beginning with V. He suddenly felt incredibly tired, could hardly keep his eyes open.

‘It’s okay, David, there’s no rush. You’ve already made very good progress. Get some rest and we’ll carry on tomorrow.’

He heard the stool scrape as the doctor stood up. He could feel himself slowly slipping into sleep.

‘Secrets,’ he muttered when she was almost at the door. ‘I collect secrets.’

4

The young man groaned cautiously, but the sound from the cinema screen drowned him out. That the young blonde woman had tied a scarf around his eyes a short while before meant he was missing the film. But to judge by the expression on his face, he didn’t seem to mind.

Natalie Aden, who was sitting in the row in front, turned around and leaned over the back of the seat, zooming in on the man’s face with the camera on her cell phone. She made sure the blindfold was clearly visible and waited until she could get a picture where he didn’t look quite so happy before pressing the button. Satisfied with the result, she silently got up. The blonde looked up from the man’s lap, not that that meant interrupting what she was doing, and Natalie gave her a curt nod. On her way out of the cinema she glanced at the time. Quarter past three in the afternoon, an hour and twenty minutes left of the film. Plenty of time. Hötorget was full of market traders and people aimlessly wandering about. It took her a while to reach the café, where she ordered a latte and settled down at one of the window tables. She got her laptop out of her rucksack, plugged in her cell phone, and transferred the picture she had taken in the cinema. She had written the message in advance, so attaching the image and sending the whole thing off took less than thirty seconds.

An hour and eight minutes left until the film was over, and around about … now, the message ought to have reached its recipient. Her chat status was green, so she was sitting in front of her computer at her pretend job. Her long lunch with her girlfriends would have ended an hour ago, the wine buzz would be fading, and it was still a bit too early to head home. Regardless of the money, Natalie couldn’t understand how anyone could bear to live that sort of fake life.

She opened another tab on her browser and logged into a Western Union account. The balance was showing as zero, but that would soon change. She reached for her latte and leaned back in her chair, wondering about getting something to eat. She knew she shouldn’t. She had already exceeded her ration of points for the week. Maybe time to try the 5:2 diet instead?

Her phone buzzed. A cellular number she didn’t recognize. She inserted her hands-free earpiece.

‘Hello,’ she said in a clipped tone of voice.

‘Hi, Natalie!’

The man on the other end of the line sounded amused, as if she had already said something funny. Telesales manual, page one, heading ‘customer contact.’ She was about to hang up.

‘How did you catch him? Facebook? Instagram? Some other social network for the young and rich?’ the man said.

‘What?’ Natalie was taken aback.

‘Hans Wilhelm Sverre Wettergren-Dufwa, or Wippe to his family and friends.’

Her brain locked for a couple of seconds, then her pulse started to race.

‘Side parting, Canada Goose jacket, Burberry scarf, final year at Östra Real high school,’ the man on the phone went on. ‘Registered as living at the family’s simple four-room pied-à-terre at Karlaplan. Daddy good for a few hundred million. And right now, little Wippe’s got his cock in your friend Elita Brogren’s mouth, over at Filmstaden.’

Natalie leaped up from her chair and closed her laptop. She had to warn Elita, tell her to get out of there at once.

‘How much were you hoping to take Wippe’s mum for?’ the man said in her ear. ‘Two hundred, two hundred and fifty thousand? Or have you raised the rate?’

Natalie grabbed her jacket and felt along the hands-free cord for the disconnect button.

‘Sit down, Natalie!’ The voice in her ear was suddenly very stern.

She stopped and looked around quickly. The man was watching her from somewhere nearby. Maybe he was even inside the café. A cop, a private detective, maybe even a victim out for revenge? Whoever the man was, he liked playing games. Her heart was pumping like mad in her chest. She glanced at the exit.

‘Please, sit down, Natalie,’ the man said, somewhat more gently. ‘If I’d wanted to harm you, I’d hardly call to warn you in advance. All you have to do is listen.’

Natalie hesitated. The most rational thing she could do was get out of there. But there was something in the man’s voice that told her she wouldn’t get very far. She pulled her chair out and sat down.

‘Good,’ the man went on. ‘The fact is, we’re impressed by you, Natalie. This whole idea is brilliant. You track down rich people’s children through social media, and use a fake profile to insinuate yourself into their network. Then you can just take your pick. You google the parents and have a word with your little admirer in the Tax Office until you find a suitable victim.’

The amused tone was back in the man’s voice again. Natalie looked around cautiously, trying to figure out where he might be. And what the whole of this little game was about.

‘Rich but absent father, overprotective mother with too much time on her hands. Ideally the victim should be an only child, or at least the youngest. Mommy’s little darling, isn’t that right?’

Natalie didn’t answer, just pressed the hands-free earpiece tighter into her ear as she tried to focus on the other people in the café. A man at the far end seemed to be talking on his cell phone.

‘You’re very careful with your choices,’ the man went on. ‘No celebrities or politicians, no Wallenbergs, H&M heirs, or anyone else who might be too rich and powerful. No, you focus on the ones just beneath them. Once you’ve identified the right victim, you get sexy Elita to pick him up. Hormones raging, the young man skips school to go off to the cinema one afternoon. After a bit of preliminary petting, Elita says she wants to spice things up a bit. She blindfolds him, and by this point the poor guy is practically bursting out of his Calvin Kleins, so he’s hardly going to protest. While he’s pulling faces in the dark with the blindfold on, you take a few pictures of his face.’

Natalie looked around, but the man she had seen seemed to have hung up.

‘And while the lad’s dreams are all coming true in the cinema, you e-mail his mother. You tell her that her darling has been kidnapped, attaching a grainy picture of the crown prince wearing a blindfold, and tell her she’s got one hour. Pay up, or he gets hurt. Don’t call the police, we’re watching your every move, and all the other kidnap nonsense she’s familiar with from cop shows on television.’

The man sounded amused, but Natalie wasn’t having any difficulty not laughing. Where was he, who was he, and how the hell could he know? She glanced toward the door again and wondered what would happen if she got up and left anyway. But the man seemed to know all about her. Trying to run might buy her a bit of time, but what could she do with it?

‘Obviously Mommy calls her little darling,’ the man went on. ‘But of course he doesn’t answer, because Elita’s made sure he’s switched his cell phone off. Then Mommy calls the school and finds out that junior isn’t there. She’s starting to panic now, and she calls her husband, but he’s away on business and probably isn’t the sort who answers when his wife calls. Time is running out, the deadline is approaching, and panic has really set in now.’ The man paused for a moment and Natalie realized she was holding her breath.

‘Then, all of a sudden, Mommy realizes that the amount you’re asking for isn’t actually that much. That she can buy her way out of this unpleasant situation in one go. The sort of people you pick on are, after all, used to solving all manner of problems with their wallets. And what’s a few hundred thousand on the Amex card when the crown prince’s life is at risk? So, within an hour, Mommy transfers the money to an anonymous Western Union account whose number you’ve given her. And after she’s sat there biting her nails for a good long while, the film ends and finally her little darling replies to one of her many anxious messages. She’s beside herself with relief. It takes her quite a time before her emotions settle down and she realizes that she’s actually paid for her naughty little boy’s very expensive afternoon blow job.’ The man chuckled again. ‘No one wants to make a fool of themselves in public, so after Daddy and the family lawyer have had a talk, everyone agrees to leave this unfortunate little incident behind them. No report to the police, no publicity, nothing.’ The line fell silent.

‘What do you want?’ Natalie’s voice wasn’t anywhere near as calm as she had been hoping it would be.

‘Open your laptop,’ the man said.

‘No way!’

‘Just do as I say, Natalie.’

She hesitated at first, then reluctantly did as he asked.

‘What now?’

‘Check your inbox!’

The icon for a new e-mail was lit up. No message, just a link to a web page.

‘Click the link,’ the man said.

She did as she was asked. The page loaded. A dull grey background, covered by black text and a 1970s-style logo. It took her a few moments to realize what she was looking at.

GENERAL POLICE REGISTER

CRIMINAL RECORD

Name: Natalie Aden

Date of birth / ID number: 19850531-2335

Eye colour: brown

Hair colour: red

Height: 163 cm

Build: large

Distinguishing features: tattoo, left calf – butterfly

09-19-2010 – minor drugs offense (fined)

02-02-2011 – theft, minor drugs offense (conditional sentence)

10-12-2012 – fraud (dropped)

07-14-2013 – fraud (dropped)

‘Not very pleasant reading, is it, Natalie? You’re on your way to becoming a doctor, then you get picked up in a car with the wrong crowd and a joint you’d forgotten about in your pocket. You might have got away with that, but then you were stupid enough to steal from the pharmacy at the hospital where you were doing your training, and that was that. Little Natalie with her lovely grades, who was going to be a doctor just like Daddy. And unlike him you’d have a Swedish degree so you wouldn’t have to clean floors. But with two separate entries in your criminal record, that opportunity has gone. So instead you make a living from fraud, like this one. You put a bit of money into your Mum’s account every now and then, in an attempt to ease your conscience. I’m guessing you and Daddy haven’t spoken for a while. You must have been such a disappointment to him.’

She opened her mouth and yelled at him to shut up and shove his criminal records up his ass. Then she hung up and stormed out of the café. Well, that was what she ought to have done. Instead, she sat there paralyzed, not saying a word as he went on.

‘Your boyfriend admitted responsibility for everything. Very good of him, I must say. He did that so you’d get off with a conditional sentence.’ The man lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘But both you and I know that the pills weren’t for him. It’s tough having to carry the weight of everyone’s expectations on your shoulders. Mommy and Daddy’s, and your family’s, and – not least – your own. It’s hard to unwind. Hard to get your head to relax, isn’t it, Natalie?’

Natalie swallowed the lump in her throat.

‘What do you actually want with me?’ she muttered.

‘I want to employ you. A task that would be a perfect match for your training, your intelligence, and your … special abilities.’

‘What do I get in return?’ she said.

‘What do you say about a fresh start? A chance to begin again?’

Natalie thought for a moment. A police officer, the man had to be a police officer. How else could he know so many details about her?

‘And if I refuse? Will you arrest me?’ she said.

The man laughed quietly. Outside the café a large black car with tinted windows pulled up. And stopped right outside her window. One of the rear doors opened but no one got out.

‘Get in and we’ll discuss it,’ the man said. ‘I’m confident we can find a solution that will satisfy both of us. By the way, you can call me Rickard.’

5

‘We now commit Adnan Kassab’s remains to eternal rest.’

The funeral director knelt on the mat surrounding the little hole and carefully placed the urn inside it. Down there threads of roots stuck out here and there, like narrow hairy fingers groping out of the earth and reaching toward the weak winter light.

They must have used a digger to break through the frozen ground, Atif thought. One single scoop in the ground, that was all it would have taken. Adnan had hardly been of a religious persuasion, so using a priest or an imam would have felt strange. Better like this. Cremation, a short ceremony, and then down with the urn. He glanced toward Cassandra, who was standing next to him. She hadn’t wanted Tindra to attend the funeral, said she was too young. A six-year-old shouldn’t have to confront death, at least not yet. There hadn’t been much he could say to that. But one thing he definitely didn’t agree with was the large wreath on the other side of the grave. An overblown affair, presumably the largest you could order, and it made all the others look insignificant.

Never forgive, never forget written in ornate golden letters on the silk ribbon. The men who had in all likelihood sent the wreath were all standing in the group just behind Atif. A couple of dozen people, almost all men. Most of them were wearing sunglasses even though the sun had barely risen above the pine trees. Several of the men had nodded to Atif as he and Cassandra hurried past in the chapel. There were a few familiar faces, but most of them were unknown. In Adnan’s world, friendship was often a perishable commodity.

In a short while he would have no choice but to talk to them. Shake their hands, accept their condolences. He wondered whether any of them drove a large Audi with shiny wheel trim. But that was really none of his business. Cassandra wasn’t the sort who liked living alone; she needed a benefactor. Someone to take care of her. Her and Tindra, he corrected himself. The thought of the little girl made him feel slightly brighter. But the feeling vanished when he looked down into the grave again.

He was hardly in any position to stand in judgement over Cassandra. If it hadn’t been for him, Adnan might have stood a chance. Might not have ended up as a couple of kilos of ash in a cheap urn before he had even turned thirty-five.

Money, respect, recognition – that was what it was all about. Adnan had followed in Atif’s footsteps, the way he used to in winter when he was little. Adnan had followed the path marked out for him, not reflecting on where it was going to take him. Or on the fact that he was actually walking around in a large circle and would end up back where he started sooner or later. Atif had tried to make his little brother understand – at least that was what he tried to tell himself afterward. Had tried to persuade him that the only way to get anywhere in life was to dare to take a step into unknown territory. But clearly he hadn’t sounded convincing enough.

After the move to Iraq they only spoke a few times a year. Christmas and birthdays, little more than that. They had mostly talked about Tindra or their mother, never about work – his own or Adnan’s. But Atif had still got the impression that Adnan knew he had changed sides. Maybe their mother had mentioned it, before she disappeared into her own memories. She and Adnan had always been close. He was the youngest, Mommy’s little boy.

During the early years there had been vague talk of Adnan moving down to join them. They talked about setting up their own business, a security firm, something like that. When their mother got worse Atif even bought a plane ticket for his brother. But a week before he was due to leave, Adnan was arrested for taking part in the robbery of a security van and locked up for two months. The trip was never mentioned again after that. It had never been more than idle talk, Atif thought. Adnan would never have left Tindra. The same would have applied to him if it had been his daughter.

Atif looked around at the rows of snow-covered gravestones. He hated Swedish cemeteries. He hated the smell of box hedging, which even the snow was unable to hide. The day after tomorrow he would be leaving and going back to the heat, to his house and garden. Leaving all this behind him, for good.

A gust of wind caught the dark pines, making a dull, rumbling sound that drowned out the funeral director’s concluding words. Beside Atif, Cassandra shivered and pulled her coat tighter.

Sleep well, little brother, Atif thought.

‘So, how are you feeling, David?’

Sarac gave a little shrug. ‘Bruised, sore, a bit confused. Apart from that, not bad.’ He was clutching the piece of paper in one hand, keeping it under the covers, out of sight of the thin-haired man in the visitor’s chair.

‘The doctor said something about gaps in your memory?’

Sarac tried to force a smile, then glanced down at the note that the nurse had written for him.

You’ve had a mild stroke.

You were involved in a car accident in the Söderleden Tunnel on November 23, 2013.

Your doctor’s name is Jill Vestman.

The gaps in your memory are …

‘Temporary,’ he said quickly. ‘That’ll improve as soon as the swelling goes down a bit.’

At least Sarac had no trouble remembering Kjell Bergh. He had recognized his balding, overweight boss the moment he walked through the door. Bergh was the sort of man who could never be taken for anything but a police officer, even though he didn’t wear a uniform. There was something about the way he held himself and his weary but watchful eyes. Almost forty years in the force had left their mark.

‘So how much do you remember?’ Bergh adjusted the vase of flowers he had just put on the bedside table. There was a note of tension in his voice.

‘The accident and the days leading up to it are a bit of a jumble,’ Sarac said. ‘The weeks before too. But all that’s only—’

‘Temporary.’ Bergh nodded. ‘Yes, you said.’

‘The car accident. Can you tell me what happened?’ Sarac said.

Bergh shrugged his shoulders and pushed his thin glasses up onto his forehead.

‘You drove straight into one of the concrete barriers in the Söderleden Tunnel. Next to the exit for Skanstull. Head-on, no rubber on the road to suggest that you braked, according to the traffic unit. Molnar’s group got there just after the accident and managed to put the fire out. I heard that a couple of the guys were in tears, it looked so bad.’

Sarac nodded and gulped.

Bergh leaned closer to the bed. Sarac suddenly noticed the dark patches under the man’s eyes.

‘We had to open the safe,’ Bergh said in a low voice. ‘It’s standard procedure when a handler … I mean, we weren’t sure if you were going to make it.’

Sarac nodded, trying to work out why he didn’t want to tell his boss the truth about the gaps in his memory. His sense of unease began to grow again. It made him clutch the piece of paper even tighter.

‘Kollander was there, as head of Regional Crime. He and I used our codes, all according to protocol,’ Bergh went on, pulling a face. Sarac’s heart immediately began to beat faster. ‘Your envelope was empty, David.’ Bergh’s voice was so low now that it was almost a whisper. ‘No backup list, no names, nothing.’

Sarac slowly shook his head. He could feel the headache gathering strength in his temples. Suddenly there was the sound of voices out in the corridor and Bergh glanced quickly over his shoulder. Then he leaned even closer to Sarac, so close that it was possible to smell the garlic on his breath.

‘I managed to get the head of Regional Crime to hold back on filing an official complaint. Or at least wait a few days, until we’d had a chance to talk to you. None of us want Dreyer and the Internal Investigation team snooping about the department again.’ Bergh licked his lips. ‘Kollander’s wetting himself. Says we might have a mole in the department. Someone selling information. It’s only a matter of time before he goes running to the district commissioner, and you know what that would lead to.’

Sarac gulped again and tried to moisten his lips. But his tongue felt as if it were glued to the roof of his mouth.

‘Forty years in the force, only three left to retirement. None of that would count for anything when it comes to Operation Clean Threshold. Just look at what they did with the Duke. The district commissioner has set her sights on becoming the next national police chief, and nothing’s allowed to spoil her pitch. Nothing!’ Bergh’s face was now bright red, and his tired eyes looked worried. Almost frightened.

‘Well, I, er …’ Sarac tried to say something but his voice cracked. He cleared his throat, once, then several more times. He suddenly noticed that his right hand was cramping. He slowly forced it open and glanced down at the crumpled piece of paper.

‘I trusted you, David,’ Bergh said. ‘I didn’t ask any questions, I let you run your own race.’ A little drop of saliva flew out of his mouth and landed in front of Sarac. ‘Up to now the results have been fantastic, but now you’ve got to explain what’s going on. The missing list, and your crash. That can’t be a coincidence. Someone’s after you, David. And after your informant.’

Sarac swallowed again, trying in vain to moisten his mouth and lips.

‘Do you remember what job you were working on?’ Bergh hissed. ‘Was it weapons, drugs? What instructions had you given your informant? Who was he targeting? For Christ sake, you must remember something!’

More voices in the corridor, closer this time. Bergh spun around toward the door.

The scrap of paper in Sarac’s hand gradually unfurled. He could see some of the writing. But it wasn’t the nurse’s even handwriting he could see. There was something written on the back of the paper. Jagged capitals that looked as if they had been written with a lot of effort.

EVERYONE IS LYING

DON’T TRUST ANYONE!

Bergh turned back to Sarac, who quickly slid his hand back under the covers. The voices in the corridor were clearly audible now. One of them belonged to Dr Vestman.

‘You have to hand him over, David,’ Bergh hissed in his ear. ‘I can protect him, you – the whole department. But you have to give me Janus!’

6

The smell of perfume lay heavy in the little entrance hall to the chapel. About fifty people in total, Atif estimated. Considerably more than he had thought at first. A seventy-thirty split between men and women. Almost all of them were younger than he was; a few of them didn’t look like they were even twenty-five. More than half the men had gym-pumped bodies and a swaggering walk. They were also relatively smart and well turned out. There were a couple in tracksuits and a few more in jeans and hoodies, with T-shirts underneath with gang symbols on them. But most of them were, like him, dressed in cheap black suits from Dressman. Diamond earrings, gold necklaces and bracelets – all the predictable gangster accessories. Atif didn’t recognize any of the men, but he still knew exactly who they were. Or rather, who they were trying to be.

Did I used to be like that? Did you, Adnan? Silly question …

They had all shaken his hand, fixing their eyes on him and giving it a good squeeze. To show that they didn’t back down for anything, never showed any cowardice. But at least half of them had had sweaty palms and not even their overwhelming aftershave could hide the smell of fear. The first of them had made the mistake of attempting some sort of ghetto hug. But Atif had been prepared, locked his lower arm, and stopped the man halfway. He had given him a quick look, which the man had been smart enough to pick up. The rest of them figured out the rules, even the women.

It was different with Cassandra; she hugged them all and took her time over it. She let them kiss her on both cheeks and seemed to enjoy being the centre of attention in her role as the grieving widow.

He had exchanged a few words with Cassandra’s parents and some of the older guests. Naturally they had all said nice things about Adnan. How pleasant and considerate he was, how much he loved his family. Atif had listened, knowing full well that they weren’t just the usual funeral clichés. Adnan had been an easy person to like, he always had been. Open, cheerful, funny, loyal. He could think of a whole heap of adjectives.

Atif slid over to the coffee machine in one corner of the hall, put in a ten-kronor coin, and waited as the machine set to work. He tried to force his mind to change track. Soon he would be sitting on the plane.

A plastic mug slid out, then the machine squeezed out a thin brown trickle. The mug filled slowly, as if the huge machine were really doing its best to produce some liquid.

‘Atif, my friend.’

With the plastic mug in his hand he turned around. He had identified the hoarse, rasping voice before he saw the familiar face. He couldn’t help smiling.

‘Abu Hamsa!’

He leaned forward and let the fat little man kiss him on both cheeks. Abu Hamsa was an old friend. Atif’s mother had worked in one of his bars a long time ago. Atif, and later Adnan, used to hang out there after school. Running small errands in exchange for the occasional bar of chocolate or can of cola. Hamsa was one of the old guard. He owned a couple of neighbourhood bars, a few exchange bureaus, and loaned out money – no champagne orgies or luxury villas, no overblown signs of success. Nothing to attract the attention of the police, or anyone else, for that matter.

‘Envy, boys …’ he used to say in his hoarse but simultaneously slightly shrill voice. ‘Envy is fatal. If you make too much of a show of success, people will want to take it from you!’

Hamsa was content with what he had, the status quo suited him, calmness and balance. For that reason he was also a popular mediator, someone everyone trusted. He must be close to seventy now, yet there wasn’t a single grey hair on his head. He probably dyed both his hair and his little mustache. The rug on his head looked suspiciously thick: Abu Hamsa had always been rather vain.

‘I’m truly sorry for your loss, my friend,’ he hissed in Arabic. ‘Your brother was a fine young man. He deserved a far better fate than this.’

‘Thank you, Abu Hamsa,’ Atif said as he blew on the scalding-hot coffee.

‘How long are you staying, my friend?’

‘I’m going back the day after tomorrow.’

‘Ah, so you’re not looking for work?’ Abu Hamsa smiled.

Atif shook his head, which seemed to make the little man’s smile even wider.

‘Wise decision. Things aren’t what they used to be. The consultants are taking over, even in our business. Everything is being opened up to competition, there’s no honour anymore, no loyalty. High time for people like me to get out. Let younger talents take over, inshallah.’

Abu Hamsa made a small gesture toward the ceiling. Atif couldn’t help looking over at the young men who were still flocking around Cassandra. A couple of them were glaring in his direction. He drank some coffee without looking away.

‘You can hardly blame them.’ Abu Hamsa seemed to have read his mind.

‘How so?’

‘You still have a certain … reputation, my friend. There was a lot of talk when you left. Some people really weren’t happy, and even suggested that you were letting everyone down.’

‘Like I said, I’m going back first thing next week,’ Atif said, still without looking away from the young men. ‘And whatever a load of snotty kids think about that, well—’ He broke off, realizing that his tone of voice was getting harder. ‘You must forgive me, I didn’t mean to sound unpleasant,’ he said, and looked back at the little man.

‘No problem, my friend. I understand. Not an easy situation, this. Your brother, his little girl. What’s her name again? I’m starting to get old, I was at her naming ceremony and everything …’

‘Tindra,’ Atif said, noting how his voice softened as he said it.

‘Little Tindra, yes, that was it. Losing your father so young, in that way …’ Something in Abu Hamsa’s voice made Atif frown, and the little man noticed. ‘I … I assume you know what happened?’

Atif nodded. ‘Cassandra told me.’

‘And you know the details?’

‘The boys were unlucky,’ Atif said. ‘An unmarked cop car saw them driving away from the security van. Evidently one of them hadn’t taken his balaclava off in time, so the cops followed them and called in backup. The rapid response unit went in just as they were changing cars, and shots were fired. Adnan and Juha were killed, and Tommy was left a vegetable.’

‘Sadly that’s all true.’ Abu Hamsa nodded. ‘I just wanted to be sure that you knew all the details. Sometimes stories take on a life of their own, people talk so much. You know how it is.’ The little man held out his hands. ‘By the way, you don’t have to worry about Adnan’s family.’ Hamsa tilted his head toward Cassandra. ‘There are a lot of people supporting them, people who are angry with the police. Perhaps you heard that the rapid response unit was cleared of any suspicion of using excessive force, and that the whole thing was regarded as self-defense seeing as Adnan fired first? Things looked very unsettled for a while afterward. Cars set on fire, stone throwing, all the usual.’

Atif nodded slowly and drank his cooling coffee.

‘And I myself will keep an eye on Tindra and her mother. For the sake of old friendship,’ Abu Hamsa added. The little man glanced at Atif, evidently expecting some sort of reaction.

‘Thank you, Abu Hamsa. I know Adnan would have appreciated that,’ Atif said.

Abu Hamsa went on looking at him, then broke into a smile.

‘You seem different, my friend. Calmer, nowhere near as angry as you were before. You look much healthier, and your Arabic is much improved. You did the right thing in leaving. If your brother had done the same, or me too, for that matter, who knows how things might have turned out? But it takes great courage to do what you did, leaving everything behind. Starting again from scratch. Courage that most of us don’t have.’ Abu Hamsa gestured toward the ceiling again.

‘Well, my friend, I shall let you finish your coffee,’ he said. ‘It was lovely to see you again, even if the circumstances could obviously have been better. Please, convey my condolences to your mother. How is Dalia, by the way?’

‘Alzheimer’s,’ Atif said quietly. ‘She’s living in a nursing home. But I promise I’ll tell her. She remembers things from the past fairly well. The present is more of a problem.’

‘I understand.’ Abu Hamsa nodded. ‘I myself have come to the painful conclusion that I have forgotten considerably more things than I remember. My doctor says that it’s all there in my head, and that I’ve just forgotten how to find it. Like a path in the forest getting overgrown. Maybe she’s right, unless she’s just saying that to cheer me up.’ The little man patted Atif on the shoulder. Tenderly, almost cautiously, in a way that made Atif smile slightly without knowing he was doing it.

‘Farewell, dear friend. Now I must convey my condolences to the beautiful young widow,’ Abu Hamsa said. ‘But if there’s anything you need, I hope you’ll be in touch. Cassandra has my number, you only have to call. No matter what.’ Abu Hamsa gave him an emphatic wink.

‘Really, I thought you were going to retire?’ Atif said.

‘Inshallah!’ the little man said, bursting into a hoarse laugh. ‘If it is God’s will. Have a safe journey home, my friend!’

7

He had to make sense of things. Get his weak, pathetic body out of this damn hospital bed and force his head to make the right connections. Try to work out what was going on. Why he had lied to his boss about the gaps in his memory, why he was scribbling cryptic warnings to himself, and why that name made his pulse race out of control.

Janus. Clearly a code name for an informant, and a very important one, to judge by Bergh’s questions and paranoid behavior. The problem was that he couldn’t remember any code names, he couldn’t actually remember a bloody thing. Well, that wasn’t quite true, he wasn’t Jason Bourne. He could remember loads of things, just nothing that could help him make sense of what had happened. It was as if the stroke had sliced through his brain, cutting off all connections to the part where events of the past few years were kept. The only thing that seemed to bridge the gap was an indefinable, creeping sense of unease. Something was wrong, considerably more wrong than just a weak body trying to recover from an accident, or even a gash in his brain and migraines from hell. What was it Bergh had said about his crash? The words hadn’t wanted to fall into place properly.

Sarac snorted and tried to hold his breath for a moment to stifle a sob. The mood swings were hard to get used to. He was being tossed between anger, grief, and fear, and occasionally a euphoric sensation that felt almost like happiness. The whole process made it much harder to make sense of everything.

Damn it! He grabbed a couple of tissues from the bedside table and blew his nose. It would get better, it had to get better.

One of the nurses put her head around the door.

‘Can you handle another visitor, David? It’s the man with the beard,’ she whispered with a smile.

‘Hmm.’ Sarac tried to sound as if he knew who she was talking about, but didn’t succeed.

‘About forty, one metre ninety, suntanned, very fit. He’s been to see you most days.’

‘Sure.’ Sarac nodded, feeling relieved. He recognized the description and his mood improved at once.

The nurse walked into his room, followed by the man with the neatly trimmed beard.

‘Hi, David!’ The man smiled broadly as he pressed Sarac’s hand between both of his. He went on holding it in a way that made a lump start to grow in Sarac’s chest. ‘Good to see you looking brighter today.’

Sarac nodded, then held his breath for a few seconds to get this new surge of emotion under control. Peter Molnar was one of his best friends, and also something of a mentor to him, but bursting into tears the moment he saw him was definitely not Sarac’s usual reaction. What the hell was happening to him? He swallowed a couple of times and managed to force a smile.

‘Fucking good to see you, Peter,’ he muttered. Then suddenly wondered when he had started to swear so damn much.

The nurse’s description of Molnar was pretty accurate. The only thing she had left out was his short, blond hair, with a slightly raised side part, and the chewing gum that was constantly on the go between his square, white teeth, spreading a smell of mint around the room.

‘I brought some roasted nuts from that place you like on Södermalm.’ Molnar tossed a ziplock bag, filled to bursting, onto the bedside table.

‘I mean, he is allowed nuts, isn’t he, nurse? There aren’t any rules about that, are there?’ He winked at the nurse, who was adjusting Sarac’s drip, and rounded it off with a dazzling smile.

‘You don’t seem the type to be too bothered about rules.’ She smiled back. ‘Ten minutes, maximum, or you’ll have me to deal with.’

The nurse left the room, slowly pulling the door shut behind her as she gave Molnar one last look. The man pulled up a chair, sat on it the wrong way around, and rested his arms on the back.

‘Nice!’ He grinned, nodding toward the door. ‘I can see why you’d want to lie here and get looked after while the rest of us work our backsides off. We did a raid in that heroin case last night – more than a kilo. Your information was correct, as usual.’ Molnar was still smiling, and Sarac realized that he was doing the same, almost without noticing.

‘Like I said, good to see you, Peter,’ he said, trying to match his relaxed tone, but mainly just sounding a bit maudlin. The happiness he had felt just now was gone. He couldn’t remember the case Molnar was talking about, couldn’t actually remember a single case they had worked on. And this strong, suntanned man in front of him only emphasized his own wretched condition. His collarbone and the bandages around his head and stomach. The mood swings, not to mention the lack of energy. He must have lost at least five or six kilos of muscle while he’d been lying there, if not more. Molnar seemed to notice the change in his mood, because he hurried to break the silence.

‘The boys say hello. They wanted to come as well, but I told them to wait a bit. Thought you probably needed a chance to recover first. After everything you’ve been through.’ He pulled a face.

Sarac nodded and unconsciously put a hand to his head.

‘I bumped into Bergh. He said you had a few gaps in your memory,’ Molnar said.

Sarac took a deep breath, trying to muster his thoughts, but the headache kept getting in the way.

‘Well …’ he said. He cleared his throat to make his voice sound more steady. ‘It’s not like it is in films. I know who I am, where I live, what my parents’ names were, where I went to school, how to tie my shoelaces, all that sort of thing.’ He waved one hand, trying to find the right words. ‘But everything feels so distant, it’s like I’m not really … present. Like I’m looking on from the sidelines, if you see what I mean?’

Molnar nodded slowly. His clear blue eyes were looking straight at Sarac, as if he were saying something incredibly interesting. Peter was good at making people feel that they were being noticed, appreciated.

‘What about the crash, do you remember anything about that?’ Molnar said in a low voice.

Sarac shook his head and decided to tell the truth. ‘To be honest, I can hardly remember anything about the past couple of years. After 2011, all I’ve got are random fragments floating about in my head.

‘But that’ll pass,’ he added quickly. ‘The doctor’s sure that things will become clearer as soon as the swelling has gone down. It’s just a matter of time.’

This last bit wasn’t entirely true. Dr Vestman was far too cautious to promise anything like that. But no matter. Sarac had made up his mind. He was going to get better, completely better, in both mind and body, and in record time.

His headache was on the move, gradually unfurling its spidery legs.

‘So when precisely do your memories stop? You started in the Intelligence Unit early in 2011. I was the one who recruited you,’ Molnar said.

Sarac nodded. ‘Yes, I remember that, no problem.’

‘Do you remember any specifics about what you were working on?’ Molnar leaned forward slightly.

‘Of course. I recruit and handle informers. Tip-offs, secret sources, people who might be useful to us.’

Sarac put his hand to his forehead. The spider’s legs were all around his head, laying siege to his brain. A faint buzzing sound that he thought at first came from the fluorescent lights in the ceiling started to fill his head, making Molnar’s words indistinct.

‘And you’re very good at it, David. In fact you’re the best handler I’ve ever come across. Myself included. Professional, ambitious, loyal, always reliable. And you know exactly how to read people. It’s actually a bit uncanny. You seem to have a sixth sense for how to find a way in, how to get people to trust you with their deepest—’

Secrets.

Something suddenly flashed into Sarac’s head. A brief glimpse of a parked car. A dark colour, a BMW, or possibly a Mercedes?

‘I left the Intelligence Unit in early 2012 when I was offered the job of being in charge of Special Operations. But you and I carried on working together closely. You did my old job better than I ever did. Your informants were the best, and there’s no question that they gave us the best information.’

Molnar’s words were blurring together. The image in Sarac’s head suddenly got clearer. He’s sitting inside the car, at the wheel, or possibly in the backseat? His perspective keeps switching, seems to change the whole time. A thickset man with a shaved head gets into the front passenger seat. He brings a smell of cigarette smoke with him into the car, and something else as well. The smell of fear.

‘It was after that operation that Bergh and, indirectly, Kollander, basically gave you carte blanche to do as you liked. You really don’t remember any of this? It was all over the papers, Kollander and the district commissioner even appeared on television to bask in the glory.’

Sarac didn’t answer. All he could manage was a little shake of the head.

‘Then you started work on a top-secret project. With one particular informant.’

‘Janus …’ Sarac mumbled.

Molnar didn’t respond, unless Sarac’s headache had affected his hearing. Suddenly everything was completely quiet, a perfect, dry absence of sound, with the exception of his own heartbeat. He tried to conjure up the image of the man in the car. Tried to see his face. But the only thing that appeared was a pattern, a snake in black ink, curling up from beneath a collar. A faint sound, growing louder. The car’s chassis buckling, protesting in torment. Then a sudden collision.

Sarac jerked and woke up. ‘T-the accident,’ he muttered. ‘Tell me …’

Molnar was silent for a few moments. Ran his tongue over his even front teeth.

‘Please, Peter. I need to know.’ Sarac put his hand on Molnar’s arm. Molnar bit his bottom lip and seemed to be thinking.

‘You called me from your cell,’ he began. ‘Your speech was slurred and you weren’t making much sense. You wouldn’t tell me what was going on, just that something bad had happened and that you were in trouble. We dropped everything and set out to meet you. But when we got to the meeting place, all we could see were the taillights of your car.’

Molnar’s voice drifted off again.

‘… impossible to catch up. You were driving like you had the devil himself in the back of the car.’

Sarac was back in the parked car. The ink snake on the man’s neck suddenly came to life, moving in time with the man’s voice. ‘I was thinking of suggesting a deal.’ His hands are rough but his voice surprisingly high. Almost like a child’s.

‘Your secrets in exchange for mine.’ The man grins, trying to sound tough even though he reeks of fear. His leather jacket creaks as he turns his body. ‘Well, what do you say? Have you got a deal?’

Outside it’s started to snow. Heavy snowflakes, falling thickly. Settling on the windows like a dense white blanket until the buildings of Gamla stan are hidden from view. Suddenly Sarac gets the impression that there’s another person in the car. Someone hiding in the darkness of the backseat. He catches a glimpse of a familiar pair of eyes in the rearview mirror, stubble, and a raised hood that shades the face. The devil himself.

A sweet, chemical smell fills the car. The smell is very familiar, it’s easily recognizable. Gun grease.

He catches sight of the pistol, sees it raised to the back of the man’s head, where the snake is still slithering. He holds his breath as …

The bang made Sarac open his eyes. Molnar was leaning over him, his hands just centimetres in front of Sarac’s face.

‘David, can you hear me?’ He clapped his hands in front of Sarac’s nose, forcing him to blink. Sarac opened his mouth and swallowed a mixture of saliva and air. He coughed and gasped for air as his heart raced in panic. A machine was bleeping close by, and there was the sound of running in the corridor.

‘You blacked out.’ Molnar’s voice sounded shaky. ‘Your face went all blue, you scared the shit out of me, David.’ He put his hand on Sarac’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.

‘You’re not thinking of dying on me, are you? Not after all the work we did cutting you out of the wreckage.’ Molnar’s tone was joking, but there was a hint of anxiety there too.

Sarac grabbed hold of his hand. ‘J-Janus,’ he stammered. ‘Everything’s fucked.’ The lights in the ceiling flickered. He gasped for air again. Terror was clutching at his chest, and the spider’s legs had hold of his head. ‘We’ve got to find him, Peter,’ he panted. ‘It’s all my fault …’

The hospital staff came storming in, three or four white coats. Maybe more. Sarac felt Molnar being pushed aside, then an oxygen mask was placed over his nose and mouth. Everything started to blur and the room became a mass of pain and colours.

‘… a severe migraine attack, but we can’t rule out a further hemorrhage,’ Dr Vestman’s voice said. ‘We need to get him back to Intensive Care.’

The bed started to roll, a peculiar feeling. Various figures hovered above him, slipping in and out of his clouded field of vision. White coats, green ones. Faces covered by masks. He thought he could hear a voice. A whisper, close to his right ear, so faint he could hardly hear it.

Protect the secret, David. You promised!

The voice blurred into the background. And fell silent.

After that …

Nothing.

8

It’s all about attitude, Jesper Stenberg thinks. If you just have the right attitude and focus on the right things, you can get through pretty much any challenge.

He had a framed quotation by Robert Kennedy on the wall. A moving-in gift that Karolina had persuaded the caretakers to put up immediately above the huge desk, just in time for his first day at the department.

No society can function without a democratically controlled, fair, measured, and powerful justice system. Bobby Kennedy hadn’t hesitated to do what was required of him. He didn’t let himself get distracted by political intrigues. Instead he focused on doing as much good as he could for society. He had aimed at a higher goal.

Stenberg thought he had made a similar choice. Either he was someone who had driven his fragile lover to suicide, or he was someone who was no longer subjected to the warped whims of a demonstrably sick person. Someone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sophie’s suicide had been unavoidable. If it hadn’t been for the happy pills, it would probably have happened a long time ago, without affecting him. But instead she had chosen to kill herself in a fiendishly calculated way, literally trying to take him down with her. A frontal attack on him, his family, and their shared future. The measures he had taken were therefore no more than a form of self-defense. Sophie had tried to destroy him, but he had withstood the attack, even if it had taken almost all of his strength of will.

He had reversed back down into the garage with Sophie’s body on the hood of his car. He had done his utmost not to meet her gaze on the other side of the shattered windshield. He parked in the darkest corner of the garage and covered the hood with a tarpaulin he took off a sports car that had been covered up for the winter. Then he had forced himself to leave the scene calmly, resisting the temptation to run for his life.

He had made the call half an hour later. It took him three attempts before his fingers managed to find the right number in the phone book. Then he had followed instructions, getting a taxi home and disposing of all his clothes, before downing half a bottle of whiskey and falling asleep on the sofa.

During the days that followed he had felt okay, but the nights were worse. As soon as he shut his eyes Sophie’s shattered face appeared in his head. Staring at him with an accusing look in her eyes, making him wake up with a scream. He had blamed everything on his new job, and the tension of recent weeks. As usual, Karolina was a rock. She listened and comforted him, made him chamomile tea and left her self-help magazines on the kitchen table. It was in one of them he had read that the more the brain got stuck in a particular track, the harder it was to break out of. In other words, you had to make a conscious choice about how you wanted to think about things, and what thoughts you no longer wanted to entertain. And, just a couple of days later, once the shock had subsided, he had decided what thoughts he wanted to have. After that, the nightmares had almost disappeared altogether.

The police investigation had actually made him stronger. He had read every last line but skipped the photographs of the scene of the accident and the autopsy. Everything was basically true, none of the essential facts was missing. At least nothing that had any effect on the end result.

In the end she had been found by someone delivering papers. Her body had gone through the windshield of a Volvo that had been parked illegally below the window of her study. Her iPad was on her desk, containing her suicide note. Just a couple of lines about how she couldn’t bear it anymore, that she didn’t want to go back to the clinic. The note had been sent to her father’s work e-mail that same night, just minutes before she was found. Her penthouse apartment also contained plenty of pharmaceuticals, prescribed by doctors both in Sweden and abroad. A chair was found next to the open window, and the front door was locked. The autopsy more or less confirmed what was already clear: death caused by massive trauma, her stomach full of a mixture of pills and alcohol.

Naturally, Stenberg had called John Thorning to convey his condolences. He had practised for hours so that the words came out right, in a calm tone of voice, before he dialed the number with trembling hands. But the whole thing had been a huge anticlimax. The call was forwarded to John’s secretary, who told him that Sophie’s father wasn’t taking any calls, even from him. He felt extremely relieved, and almost burst out laughing. After that, his letter of condolence practically wrote itself.

Our deepest sympathies on your tragic loss …

The funeral had been a quiet affair, with only the closest family present. Suicide wasn’t something that the Thorning family wanted to make a public show of.

Karolina had naturally organized a tasteful wreath. Lilies to symbolize innocence, white narcissi for friendship and closure. An almost perfect choice.

And, as always after something ended, new opportunities presented themselves. His plan was already in motion. The need for it was obvious, and discussions were already under way. All they were waiting for was for someone to take the initiative. Someone who had the courage, will, and energy to dare to lead the way.

The judicial system was hopelessly old-fashioned, a product of the 1950s that had been patched up as time went on, and which stood no chance of meeting the challenges and threats posed by the twenty-first century. You had to look at the situation as a whole and deploy your resources where they could give the greatest reward, instead of spreading them thinly. It was a matter of getting in sync with reality and delivering concrete results that the general public could understand and accept.

The first move was already made. He had brought in his old colleague Oscar Wallin. He had recruited him and a few hand-picked officers from National Crime to conduct a ‘special investigation for the Ministry of Justice.’ Wallin and Stenberg had worked together in the Hague and were comfortable with each other. They shared the same goals.

In actual fact, Wallin’s task was simple: Identify the best working practices in the country and bring in the most competent officers. Find out what works in a new, modernized organization, and which people are happy to go along with it. And which ones aren’t.

He would make enemies, he was perfectly aware of that. The judicial system was full of desk jockeys and filing clerks. Police officers, prosecutors, and judges with smart titles, expense accounts, and large mortgages, but whose contribution to the system was questionable, to say the least. Plenty of them would see an abrupt end to their career paths and would find themselves out in the cold.

Attitude, he thought once more. It was all about attitude. Seeing the whole picture beyond the details, and not hesitating to make unpleasant decisions.

The phone on his desk rang. Calls usually went via his secretary, but this was his direct line. It must be Karolina.

‘Stenberg.’

‘Good afternoon, Mr Stenberg,’ the dry voice said.

Stenberg stood up sharply, glancing quickly at the door.

‘Y-you mustn’t call me here. All calls are logged.’

‘Don’t worry, this call can’t be traced, I can assure you of that,’ the man on the other end of the line said.

Stenberg gulped and tried to gather his thoughts. ‘What do you want?’

‘To start with, I’d like to congratulate you on your new job, Minister of Justice. According to the media, your future prospects look very bright.’

Stenberg didn’t respond.

‘I thought it might be time to discuss recompense for our services. I presume everything was to your satisfaction, Minister? The case has been closed, after all. A lonely, unhappy woman who chose to end her own life.’

Stenberg took a deep breath. He had been worrying about this call since the week after Sophie’s death, but when a month passed without a word he had almost convinced himself that it wasn’t going to come. Stupid, of course. The man on the other end made his living from providing services of this nature, after all. Stenberg sharpened his voice, trying to sound calm.

‘How much?’ he said.

‘Oh, we’re not after money, Minister.’

Stenberg waited, closing his eyes for a few seconds. Sophie’s shattered face was back in his mind, and he quickly opened his eyes again. He had to get this out of the way, as soon as possible. Otherwise he would never be able to move on.

‘So what do you want?’ he said.

‘Oh, nothing much. Just something that the country’s Minister of Justice, the head of the entire Swedish police system, would surely find simple to achieve.’

‘And what might that be?’ Stenberg found he was holding his breath.

‘A name,’ the man on the other end of the line said. His voice sounded almost amused. ‘The name of the person concealed behind the code name Janus.’

9

Atif had said his good-byes. He had dutifully kissed Cassandra on the cheek before handing her the envelope full of dollar bills. The cost of his mother’s nursing home ate up most of his salary, so it wasn’t much. And from the look on Cassandra’s face he could tell that she certainly didn’t think it was enough, regardless.

He had hugged Tindra for so long that her little knuckles had left marks around his neck. He realized that he didn’t actually want to let go.

‘Why do you have to go, Amu?’

He had struggled to find a good answer and failed. Cassandra had come to his rescue.

‘Your uncle has to go, darling. He has to go home and look after Grandma. But you can e-mail him if you like. And you can send him one of the lovely drawings you do on your iPad.’

The thought of the drawings seemed to help, because Tindra had let go of his neck. Then she stood in the window and waved until he was out of sight.

He realized he was going to miss her. The intense look in her eyes, the way she put her little hand in his. The way she tilted her head when she disagreed with something. Just like her dad had done at her age. Maybe he should have offered to stay for longer. To spend more time with Tindra. But what sort of example could he be to her? He was pretty sure Cassandra could help him provide an answer to that question. The same example he had been to Tindra’s father. An example that vanished when he was needed most.

The gym looked pretty smart. It was on the edge of an industrial estate just ten minutes from the suburban station. Judging by the thirty or so cars in the parking lot, it also seemed to have plenty of members. Mostly 4×4s, Honda CR-Vs, various models of Volvo XC, and a few other fairly pricey cars. Almost all of them were typical mum cars, presumably from the well-to-do residential areas just a kilometre or so away. Much smarter than targeting the young lads in the suburbs who couldn’t afford the membership fees. And much less trouble too, of course. Nice and peaceful, a steady income, that was presumably what Adnan had been thinking.

Atif didn’t really know why he had decided to come this way. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. Even if it wasn’t particularly far to the cemetery, he had no desire to go back there again, so this would have to do as his final farewell to Adnan. The dream his brother never managed to achieve. In some ways it was a fitting place for a good-bye.

He steered the rental car into the lot. He tried to look through the big panoramic windows, but the sun filters meant he couldn’t see much. It didn’t really matter. He parked in a vacant space, switched off the engine, and looked at the time. He sat there for a minute or so, forcing himself to think about Adnan.

He tried to persuade himself that he’d done all he could. Adnan had lived his own life, made his own decisions, and paid the price for them. Besides, they were very different, not just in age but in all manner of other ways. Unlike him, Adnan had been good at school, was liked by everyone, the favorite child. He had had opportunities that Atif had never had. Atif was grieving for his little brother, of course he was. But there were clearly also more emotions than grief alone. Guilt, that one was easy to identify. Anger too. He was also able to put his finger on a vague desire for revenge, even if he was keeping that under control. But there was another feeling there as well, one he was ashamed of, and would prefer not to put a name to, even in his thoughts.

He started the engine and did a circuit of the building. At the back, next to the Dumpsters, was parked a row of expensive cars. One of them was a familiar Audi with shiny wheel trims. Atif drove around the next corner and found himself close to the exit from the parking lot. He paused for a few seconds and looked at the time. Three hours and thirty-five minutes left until the plane took off. Plenty of time. The question was, what for? Why not just head out to the airport right away? Leave all this behind him, the way he had planned?

The reception area had a black slate floor and had to be at least five metres high. Rhythmic bass music was pumping from the far end of the building, and behind a frosted glass window he could see bodies moving.

To the left, behind another glass panel, there were rows of gleaming machines. A pair of gym-pumped guys were doing bench presses in there, but they were concentrating so hard on what they were doing that they didn’t even look in his direction. There was no one at the reception desk, but a large arrow marked with the word Café was pointing toward a closed door in the far corner of the atrium.

Atif strolled toward the closed door. On the way he noticed the security cameras. Expensive ones, with night vision, not the sort of thing you usually found in gyms. He didn’t really know why he’d come in, it had mostly been an impulse. The gym, the Audi, and its owner, Cassandra – none of them was anything to do with him. Besides, he already had a fair idea of who owned the car. But he still hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to come in and get proof of whether he was right.

Next to the café door was a solitary folding chair, and on top of it a half-full plastic bottle containing something pink. The sign on the door said closed, but Atif could still see movement behind the frosted glass panel. He could hear Abu Hamsa’s familiar voice and reached out for the door handle, but an unknown voice made him hesitate. Had he heard wrong? Atif stood there for a few seconds, listening for more sounds from inside the room.

‘You’ve got nothing to worry about, my friend, nothing at all,’ Abu Hamsa was saying. ‘I’ve known him since he was a boy.’

The other voice grunted indistinctly: ‘… cause problems?’

‘No, no, he swallowed the official version,’ Abu Hamsa replied. ‘Adnan Kassab is dead and buried, and no matter how much our opinions may differ, we have to stay focussed on getting hold of the traitor before he costs us everything we’ve built up.’

Atif felt his heart beat faster. He took a cautious step closer to the door to hear better.

‘… going with the inside man?’ another voice said.

‘The lawyer’s working on it,’ Abu Hamsa said. ‘But apparently there’s some sort of problem. Crispin is convinced it’s only temporary, then we’ll soon be back on track.’

‘We’d better bloody hope so, after what we’ve paid,’ a voice said in a singsong Eastern European accent.

‘That’s hardly fair, Crispin’s insider has been a huge help, which means we’ve been able to compensate at least in part for all the damage the traitor’s caused. The fact is that without the insider, we wouldn’t even know that Janus really existed,’ Abu Hamsa said.

A sudden hush fell inside the room, an uncomfortable silence that went on far too long. Atif realized immediately what had caused it. The name that Abu Hamsa had just mentioned: Janus.

‘Allow me to point out once again,’ a dry voice said, ‘that according to the instructions you have been given, Janus is to be handed over to me at once. Alive, and unharmed. No one is to talk to him until I do.’

‘Not a problem for me,’ the indistinct voice grunted again. ‘There’s no way he’s one of my boys. We don’t have a rodent problem here.’

‘Big words, Lund. It would be a shame if you had to take them back,’ someone said.

Atif started. He had heard correctly a short while before, no doubt about it. That voice belonged to another old friend. Although friend probably wasn’t the right word. The last time they had met, the man had held a pistol to his head and sworn to kill him.

‘The fact is that the rat bastard could be sitting in this room right now. With the exception of the consultant here, we’re all equal suspects, aren’t we?’ the familiar voice said. ‘Everyone in here could be Janus.’

‘That’s why you should leave the cat-and-mouse stuff to me and my team!’ The dry voice again, clipped, almost military in tone. Presumably it belonged to the man who had been called the consultant.

Atif remembered that Abu Hamsa had said something about consultants at the funeral. He must have had this man in mind.

‘We’re experts in investigations of this sort, and we don’t have to pay attention to anything that might spoil our concentration. Finding and eliminating Janus is our job, our only priority, and the best thing you can do is stay out of the way,’ the dry voice went on.

Once again, mention of the name brought conversation to a halt. As if none of them wanted to be the first to speak after the name had been uttered.

The sound of a toilet flushing just a few metres away made Atif jump. He turned his head and saw that the dial above the lock on one of the doors was showing red. Someone was moving about in there and was likely to open the door at any moment. But there was another door, this side of the toilet. He took two long strides and tugged at the handle. The door was unlocked and led to a small cleaning cupboard. Atif slipped inside and closed the door behind him just as the toilet door swung open.

He peered through the crack in the door. A gorilla-like man lumbered past, picked up the bottle, and sat down on the folding chair next to the door, just a couple of metres from Atif. The man was shorter than he was and had dark cropped hair and a diamond ring in one ear. His chest muscles were so pumped up that his arms stuck out at an odd angle. A tattoo stretched out from one sleeve of his T-shirt, covering his skin all the way down to the wrist. Atif recognized him at once: it was one of the men from the funeral. Dino, something like that.

The man gulped down the rest of the protein drink, then belched loudly. He took out his cell phone and started fiddling with it. It took a few seconds for Atif to realize that Dino was sitting there for a reason. It was his job to make sure that the men in there could talk undisturbed. Not that he was a particularly attentive guard.

Atif looked at his watch. Three hours and twenty-five minutes left, still no real hurry. He looked cautiously around the little room. The floor was only a couple of metres square, and obviously there was no window. The smell of ammonia and disinfectant was already making his eyes water.

Dino belched again, then came a groan and the sound of a long, wet fart. Atif peered through the crack in the door and saw the man squirm in his chair. Suddenly he flew up and took a couple of quick steps, reaching out his hand toward Atif. But before Atif had time to react, the man disappeared from view and a moment later the toilet door slammed shut again. He heard the toilet lid being lifted, then a loud splash followed by a groan of relief.

Atif slipped silently out of the cleaning cupboard, hurried across the reception area, and left the premises the same way he had come.

He found a good lookout post on a neighboring plot. In the middle of a row of parked trucks, with a wire-mesh fence that didn’t really impede his view but would make his car almost invisible. Three hours and nineteen minutes until his plane left. The drive to Arlanda would take an hour, so he still had plenty of time. He leaned his seat back and tried to stretch out as best he could. He wished he had his army binoculars with him.

His window of time had shrunk by another twenty-five minutes before anything happened. Abu Hamsa emerged first, lit a fat cigar, then jumped into the Audi. Atif had guessed right. The tone of voice the old man had used when he spoke about Cassandra had given him away. His promise to look after the family and the fact that Cassandra had his cell number only made things clearer. The only question was how long the old man had waited after Adnan’s death before taking on the role of Cassandra’s protector. Or had he already done so before Adnan was killed? But Atif reminded himself once again that it was none of his business. Cassandra made her own decisions, and maybe having an affair with Abu Hamsa was a cheap price to pay for having her family looked after.

The bowlegged man who emerged after Abu Hamsa was big, and considerably more lardy than gym-pumped. Leather waistcoat, long goatee, blond hair in a plait down his back. Swedish biker thug, model 1A. Atif recognized him as Micke Lund: seven years ago he had just been appointed sergeant at arms in the Hells Angels. By now Lund must be close to fifty. A padded jacket hid most of his leather waistcoat, but Atif could made out red lettering on a red background. Still with the Hells Angels, then.

The lard-ass stopped to insert a dose of chewing tobacco, waiting for the man following him out. Another biker, one who evidently didn’t feel the cold, wearing a waistcoat in the yellow and red of the Bandidos. Short hair, younger, fitter than Micke Lund, and far less the blond, blue-eyed stereotype. But the two men no longer seemed to have anything against each other. They stood and chatted for a few minutes as two more men came out to join them. They were wearing tracksuits and had closely cropped hair, with broad foreheads and defined cheekbones. Typical Eastern Europeans, probably Russian.

The two tracksuits lit cigarettes and offered one to the Bandidos biker, while Micke Lund made do with his chewing tobacco. The men stood and talked for a few minutes, stamping in the snow. When another man with a face like a death’s head emerged from the door the four of them exchanged glances, then quickly shook hands with one another and slid away to their respective cars.

The death’s head stood still as he lit a cigar. The man gave a suitably mocking wave to the others’ cars, then strolled over to a big Porsche Cayenne. Atif studied the man and concluded that he had heard correctly inside the gym. His appearance – bald head, hook nose, and sunken eyes – was unmistakable. It was his old friend and colleague Sasha. A war hero from the Balkans, capable of anything, a man with no inhibitions. On their first job together Sasha had cut off a man’s fingers with a pair of garden shears. He carried on until only the forefingers were left, even though the man had long since crumbled and told them what they wanted to know. Violence was one thing, but Sasha was a full-blown sadist, and eventually Atif had asked not to work with him any longer. Evidently this information had found its way back to Sasha, and as thanks he had held a gun to Atif’s head in the middle of a nightclub. He had told him that the next time they met he was going to pull the trigger, no matter how many witnesses there might be. Shortly after that Atif’s mother had fallen ill. And once Atif accompanied her back to Iraq, the matter had seemed irrelevant. But to judge by the conversation in there, and the looks the bikers and Russians had exchanged out in the parking lot, Atif wasn’t the only one who had a problem with Sasha. His presence at the meeting, his suit, and the expensive car clearly suggested that he had risen through the ranks. And was now someone to be reckoned with.

Two different biker gangs, some Eastern Europeans, Abu Hamsa, and Sasha. The discussion he had overheard had been a top-level meeting. The gangster version of Who’s Who.

The last man didn’t emerge until after Sasha had left. About thirty-five, suit, overcoat, short, dark hair, and a wary look in his eyes. It was impossible to see more from a distance. The man moved smoothly and exuded more genuine self-confidence than the others, more control. He was also considerably calmer than the men who had come out before him. Considerably less nervous.

In all likelihood, this was the consultant Abu Hamsa had talked about. Although the man actually looked as if he was in the military. Or the police.

The consultant stopped outside the back door for a moment and put on a pair of aviator sunglasses. Then he walked slowly toward a dark Range Rover as he let his eyes roam across the surroundings. The man stopped beside his car and for a few moments Atif was sure he was staring straight at him. But then the gym door opened again and Dino, or whatever the lunk was called, came out. He said something that made the consultant turn around and waved his short arms excitedly in a way that looked almost comical. The consultant said something in reply, then the two men hurried back inside the building.

Atif wondered about the security cameras in the gym, and how easy it was to rewind the recording just a matter of minutes. A couple of mouse clicks and he’d be there on the screen.

He turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear. Just less than three hours before his plane took off.

10

When Sarac woke up he noticed two things immediately. First: it was pitch black. Not even a tiny light on a monitor, nothing to focus on. So he wasn’t in his usual room. Second: there was someone else there in the darkness. He could sense movement of some sort, and then someone taking a deep breath.

‘Can you hear me, Sarac?’ a low male voice asked.

He turned his head toward the voice as he searched his memory for something to match to the hoarse voice. A name, a place, anything at all. But he couldn’t find anything.

‘You’re not an easy person to get a little chat with, Sarac. There are lots of people keeping an eye on you. A lot of people worried about what you might reveal.’

Sarac tried to raise himself to a sitting position, but got tangled in the tubes sticking out of his body.

‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ the man said.

‘N-no …’ Sarac said. But that wasn’t entirely true. They had met, he was almost certain of that. He just couldn’t remember where and when. His eyes were gradually getting used to the darkness, and the man began to appear as a dark shadow just a few metres away from him.

‘We had an agreement, you and me, remember?’ the man said.

Sarac shook his head, once again without really managing to convince himself. Was this all a dream, a hallucination playing out in his head? He clenched his hands tightly under the covers. He felt the back of one hand touch something. A plastic object connected to a cable. The alarm button.

The man came closer and stopped right next to the bed. He smelled strongly of tobacco. Sarac could make out a furrowed face, the mouth a black hole in which a gold tooth glinted. His sense of unease slid into fear, making Sarac’s heart race. He fumbled for the alarm, but his hand slipped off it.

‘An agreement is an agreement. You know what the consequences will be if you break it,’ the man said.

Sarac shut his eyes, screwing them shut as hard as he could, and pressed the alarm button. Once, twice, again …

‘Get out!’ he roared. ‘Go to hell!’

There were voices in the distance. Then steps as someone approached along the corridor. Any moment now the door would open.

‘You can’t hide forever,’ the man hissed in his ear. ‘You’re going to stick to our agreement, do you hear?’

Sarac went on shouting, yelling out loud until the door opened and the light was switched on. He blinked against the sudden glare and saw the woman in white who was gently shaking his arm.

‘David, how are you feeling?’ she asked.

He blinked again, then rubbed his eyes in an effort to see better. Apart from the nurse, the room was empty. But in one corner was an empty chair. Its padded seat looked slightly compressed, as if someone heavy had recently been sitting on it.

The plane took off on time, at 8:35 p.m. It climbed a couple of hundred metres before retracting its landing gear and starting a long bank toward the east.

Atif leaned back in his seat and shut his eyes. He tried to fit the pieces together as best he could.

1. Adnan and his gang rob a security van.

2.By coincidence, they happen to encounter an unmarked police car.

3. The cops follow them and call in the rapid response unit, which strikes when the gang are switching cars. Shots are fired. Adnan and Juha are killed. The third bloke, Tommy, is left a vegetable.

A perfectly consistent story. No matter how thorough your preparations, the odds weren’t always on your side. Adnan had been lucky up to then. This time the pendulum swung the other way.

Atif had made a conscious choice and accepted the chain of events exactly as it was explained to him before he had arrived in Sweden. He had decided not to ask any unnecessary questions. Not to find out any more than he had to. But he couldn’t shake off Abu Hamsa’s words:

Envy is fatal, boys …

Even though Adnan made his living the way he did, and even though his little brother had a remarkable ability to turn gold into shit, Atif had envied him. Envied him all the qualities that he himself didn’t have. His charm, his family, and their mother’s unconditional love.

Could someone else in Adnan’s vicinity have felt the same? And have wanted to take something or someone from Adnan? Was this about Cassandra? Atif seriously doubted it. No matter what the motive was, someone had ratted on Adnan and indirectly caused his death. Possibly the same person whom the gangsters in the gym were now terrified of.

Janus. The Roman god with two faces. The lord of beginnings, transitions, and conclusions, the god who started all wars and made sure that they all ended. Associated with doorways, gates, doors, time, and, not least, journeys.

Atif opened his eyes and looked up. The plane had become a tiny point of light that was slowly disappearing into the dark evening sky. In a minute or so it would be gone. He turned the key in the ignition, put the car in gear, and pulled out of the airport parking lot.

11

Peter Molnar looked out the window, down at the meticulously gritted yard of Police Headquarters. He put a piece of chewing gum in his mouth, then glanced at his expensive diver’s watch. Five minutes late, as usual. That asshole Kollander was five minutes late, as usual. The head of Regional Crime’s little power games were as predictable as they were irritating. He ought to do what Bergh did and take care always to arrive late himself, just to even things out. And stick a discreet finger up at Kollander.

‘You can go in now, Peter,’ Kollander’s secretary said, and at that moment the head of the Intelligence Unit appeared in the doorway.

‘Morning, Peter!’ Bergh exclaimed as he pushed his glasses up onto his forehead. ‘Do we know why?’ Bergh said in a low voice as he nodded toward their boss’s door. Molnar shook his head.

‘Not exactly, but I saw Oscar Wallin in the corridor a little while ago.’

‘Oh shit,’ Bergh muttered.

‘Well, it was only a matter of time before golden boy showed up. Shall we find out what’s on his mind?’

As if we didn’t already know, Molnar thought. Bergh knocked on the door and opened it without waiting. Staffan Kollander was seated behind his very large desk. As usual, he was impeccably dressed in a smart, well-pressed white shirt with heavy cuff links that matched the gold of his epaulets.

Molnar and Bergh exchanged a discreet glance. Neither of them was in uniform, nor was the fourth person in the room. A fair-haired man with a boyish face, who was leaning with just the right amount of nonchalance against a low filing cabinet over by one wall.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Kollander said. ‘You both know Deputy Police Commissioner Wallin, don’t you?’

‘Of course, absolutely. Hello, Oscar!’ Both Molnar and Bergh nodded to Wallin.

Wet-combed hair, clean-shaven, wearing a three-piece suit, Molnar noted. A bit of a difference since they worked on patrol together. But that was, what, ten, twelve years ago? Shit, he was starting to get old. If he wasn’t careful he’d end up like Bergh, grey and overweight, with a beer belly so big he could hardly see his cock when he went for a piss. Molnar straightened up unconsciously and tensed his taut chest muscles. Well, there was no immediate danger.

Oscar Wallin had made good use of the intervening years. He had been through senior-officer training and had done some extra courses at university. Then a stint at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, before ending up in the Intelligence Unit of National Crime. It was hardly surprising that Minister of Justice Stenberg had handpicked him; they were cut from the same cloth. Ambitious high achievers, media-savvy, and sufficiently ruthless to get wherever they wanted.

Molnar already had an idea why Wallin was honouring them with his presence.

What goes around comes around …

‘Sit yourselves down.’ Kollander gestured to the armchairs opposite him. ‘Deputy Commissioner Wallin and I have been having a very rewarding discussion. His investigative task sounds very interesting, and I’ve told him that we here at Regional Crime in Stockholm are naturally looking forward to a fruitful collaboration.’

Kollander turned to Wallin, who was still leaning against the filing cabinet.

‘Oscar, would you like to say a little more?’

‘Of course, Staffan.’

Wallin straightened up, took a couple of steps forward, and then sat down on the corner of Kollander’s desk. The head of Regional Crime’s upper lip twitched, a fleeting microsecond of disapproval. Molnar had to make a real effort not to grin.

‘Minister of Justice Stenberg has given me a very clear task,’ Wallin began. ‘The idea is to gather all manner of key competencies under one shared roof. A national knowledge centre where resources are exploited fully rather than being spread out around the country. We can’t afford to have several parallel organizations doing their own thing.’

‘And what do you want from us, Wallin?’ Bergh interrupted.

For the second time in less than a minute Molnar came close to breaking into a smile. Fucking Bergh! He may be a desk jockey these days, but every now and then the street cop in him still shone through. Bergh had been a tough bastard in his day. Seriously tough.

Wallin gathered his thoughts quickly.

‘Intelligence management,’ he said curtly. ‘You are doubtless aware that other departments in the county have their own informants. Cityspan, the licenced premises division, the narcotics squad, and plenty more besides. Not to mention my own former workplace, the Intelligence Unit of National Crime.’

Wallin smiled toward Bergh, but the look in his eyes was icy. The older man squirmed slightly but was wise enough not to respond.

‘Sometimes the same informant reports to a number of different handlers, without their being aware that this is the case. This means that erroneous information from one informant risks being accorded far too much attention because the information is confirmed by several different police units, when their source is actually one and the same. And our intelligence material becomes less reliable as a result, as I’m sure you would agree, Bergh?’ Wallin went on staring at Bergh for another couple of seconds, waiting until he gave a curt nod before turning toward Molnar.

‘Apart from this, it sometimes happens that certain handlers withhold valuable informants. Some of whom could be exploited more efficiently.’

This time it was Molnar’s turn to try to appear unconcerned. He adopted a different strategy than Bergh and met Wallin’s gaze head-on. Without giving any sign that he would back down.

‘Two of my co-workers will be coming over tomorrow,’ Wallin continued. ‘They have the highest security clearance and I expect you to cooperate fully with them. We need the names and contact details of all of your informants, without any nonsense. All of them. I hope I’ve expressed myself sufficiently clearly?’

He paused and seemed to be waiting for a response from Molnar, who still didn’t move a muscle. Instead it was Kollander who interjected.

‘Of course,’ the head of Regional Crime said, and cleared his throat before going on. ‘As I said earlier, we’re all looking forward to our coming collaboration, Oscar.’

‘Well, that was that,’ Kollander said when Wallin had left the room. ‘What do you both make of all this?’

‘Well,’ Bergh said, casting a quick glance at Molnar. ‘We had a feeling that something like this was in the offing. Our work with our informants is second to none, and our results speak for themselves. As you no doubt remember, Wallin tried to muscle in when he was up at National Crime. Now he’s got enough influence to demand things instead of having to beg for them, cap in hand.’

‘Mmm, I was thinking roughly the same. Our new Minister of Justice appears to have a lot of new ideas. We’ll have to see how things develop in the future.’ Kollander straightened up slightly. ‘District Commissioner Swensk and I agree that the best strategy for the time being is to cooperate. But we don’t have to give them everything on a plate. In advance of a big holiday like this, perhaps now might be a good time to take a look at which members of staff have put in too much overtime, and give those who need it a few weeks off?’ Kollander gave the two other men a pointed grimace.

Bergh nodded.

‘I’ve got a few guys who need to go on a course. Ethics and Equality, the district commissioner’s favorite subject. What do we think?’

‘Authorized,’ Kollander said. ‘Get the papers sorted at once and backdate them a week or two and I’ll sign them.’ He drummed his fingers on his blotter. ‘Now, on to our next subject: David Sarac. Have we heard anything from the hospital?’

‘I spoke to his doctor this morning,’ Molnar said. ‘Things are progressing, he’s up and moving about. But he still has big gaps in his memory. He doesn’t remember anything about the crash or what he’s been working on recently.’

‘I see. Well, that’s unfortunate, to put it mildly.’ Kollander laced his fingers together in front of him. ‘What does the doctor say?’

‘That Sarac will certainly get better, but that there are no guarantees about how much better. Some memory gaps might well turn out to be permanent.’ Molnar cast a quick glance at Bergh.

‘And the informant? Janus?’ Kollander turned to Bergh, who shook his head.

‘We haven’t heard anything from him since the accident. He’s probably lying low seeing as he can’t contact Sarac. Waiting for someone to get in touch via the usual channels. Those are certainly the instructions Sarac ought to have given him.’

‘I understand.’ Kollander drummed his fingers on the desk again. ‘So we don’t appear to know why Sarac’s envelope in the safe was empty? Nor why we have no information at all about the true identities of his informants, either Janus or anyone else?’

‘No, I’m afraid we don’t,’ Bergh said.

Kollander went on tapping. ‘Then we don’t have much choice. We shall have to make a formal report and hand the matter over to Internal Investigations. I daresay Dreyer will want to take charge of this case himself. But before we do that I have to inform the district commissioner about what’s happened.’

As if you haven’t already done that, Molnar thought. Operation Clean Threshold was probably already on the starting blocks.

‘Well, we’ll have to be prepared to be questioned about what we know about Sarac and his working methods,’ Kollander added. ‘Which is, of course, very little in my case. The way I see it, Sarac appears to have ignored a large number of the rules governing our work. And chose to see his successful results as some sort of carte blanche to do pretty much as he liked. Perhaps we’ve already given some thought as to his suitability and future here at Regional Crime? Documentation that might support a discussion of that nature?’

Kollander looked at Bergh. Molnar noticed that the older man’s eyes seemed slightly unsteady. Shit, he had been wrong. Operation Clean Threshold was actually already under way, and Sarac was going to be its first victim.

‘Well then, gentlemen!’ The head of Regional Crime patted his desk gently a couple of times to indicate that the meeting was over. Molnar took a deep breath, then straightened up and made an effort to appear as calm as possible.

‘There’s one other possible explanation for why we can’t get hold of Janus. A scenario that we certainly ought to consider,’ he said.

‘And what’s that, Peter?’ Kollander leaned across his desk.

‘Janus hasn’t heard from Sarac for three weeks, so he must have realized something’s happened. He may even have pieced things together after reading in the papers about a police officer being badly injured in a car crash. Either way, he’ll have worked out what’s going on by now.’

‘I’m not sure I follow, Peter,’ Kollander said. ‘Worked what out?’

‘That there’s no backup. Sarac’s his only contact in the police. The only person who knows his secrets.’ Molnar ran his tongue over his perfect teeth. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘Janus is high up in the criminal hierarchy, we know that much. The information he’s given us has led to the biggest seizures we’ve made in the last ten years, which have done serious damage to organized crime. In other words, there are plenty of people who’d like to see him dead. Everyone around him, basically.’ He paused for a couple of seconds to let what he was saying sink in.

‘I know from experience that you don’t recruit that sort of informant with the crap money the force will pay, so the only way Sarac could have recruited him is by getting some sort of hold over him. A secret that Janus would do anything to hide. Something that means he’d rather risk his life as an informant for the police than have the secret revealed.’

A light lit up on Kollander’s desk telephone, but he didn’t seem to notice.

‘But whatever Janus’s secret is, Sarac has kept it to himself,’ Molnar went on. ‘He hasn’t shared it with anyone, hasn’t even written it down anywhere. Not as far as we know, anyway. I think Janus might have worked that out, and has decided to exploit the situation. Maybe he was doing just that before Sarac’s car crash.’

‘You mean …?’ Kollander frowned.

Molnar nodded, and Bergh joined in.

‘We have to consider the possibility that Janus simply doesn’t want to be found. That he’s prepared to go to great lengths to protect his secret. He might even be prepared to walk over dead bodies.’

12

Sarac opened the door cautiously. The guard was hanging around by the reception desk over by the elevators, at the other end of the corridor. He was talking to one of the nurses, saying something that made her laugh. Grey-green uniform, a Securitas beret on his head. Radio, baton, and handcuffs in his belt. Presumably there to protect him. But, if so, from what? From whom?

He unfolded the crumpled note again and read the new message on the back.

YOU’RE NOT SAFE HERE!!!

Just as with the earlier message, he couldn’t remember writing it. The past few days were hazy; he had been slipping in and out of consciousness. He had vague memories of being out of bed to go to the toilet, and of someone giving him an injection. But the rest was foggy.

He had dreamed about the snow-covered car again, and the man with the snake tattoo. He had felt the man’s fear, heard his voice and then seen him die, over and over again as the bullet hit the back of his head. But no new details had emerged, nothing that could help him understand what the hell was happening. Or who the man with the pistol was. The devil in the backseat.

Was it the same man who had been sitting in his darkened room, whispering about agreements and smelling of tobacco? Had that even actually happened, or was it just a migraine-fueled hallucination? He was inclined to think it was, but he couldn’t be sure. Not here.

Sarac looked at the note again. His migraine attack, absurdly, seemed to have helped a bit. He felt better, his head clearer than before. He had taken off the sling and freed his left arm. His shoulder was still tender but usable. His right leg, on the other hand, slid about of its own accord, and he couldn’t rely a hundred percent on his right arm either. But at least he could move about with the help of the aluminium crutch someone had left beside his bed.

He opened the tall, narrow wardrobe and pulled on the clothes he found inside. The jeans had been washed, no sign of the accident. The same with his socks and boots. There was no sign of his top or jacket, and he guessed the paramedics had been forced to cut them to shreds, so he had to keep the white hospital shirt on. He tucked it into his trousers in an effort to make himself look less like an escaped patient.

His keys and wallet were on the little shelf at the top, but not his police ID. One of his colleagues was probably looking after it for him – Bergh, perhaps? That seemed logical.

He couldn’t find his cell phone either, which actually troubled him more than his police ID. His phone contained all his contacts. Information that could help him remember. He would have to ask Molnar about it, call him as soon as he got home and had safely locked the door behind him.

Sarac heard the elevator ping and looked out into the corridor again. Two men in dark suits got out, and one of them started talking to the guard.

Somber faces, neither of them remotely familiar, but he still guessed they were talking about him. Sure enough, the guard pointed toward his door. Sarac felt his pulse quicken. He didn’t know who the men were, for whom they worked, or what they wanted with him. Nor why their appearance should make his heart race.

The only thing he knew for certain, the only clarity that had emerged from the wretched haze of the past few days, was that somewhere inside his ravaged brain lay the answers to all his questions. Why he was here, what had happened in the hours leading up to the accident, and the reason for the ever-more-tangible feeling that he was in danger. Imminent danger.

I collect secrets … The question is, whose secrets?

The men in suits started walking straight toward his door, with the guard right behind them. Sarac took a deep breath. The message on the note had been right, he needed to get out of there, immediately!

He looked around the room, then stared at the window. There was a fire escape outside, he’d already spotted that. Six storeys down on steep, snow-covered metal steps and frozen railings, leading down to a narrow alleyway.

He could hear the voices getting closer in the corridor. Realized he had to make a decision. He grabbed one of the sheets from the bed and opened the window. Ice-cold night air hit his face, making him gasp with shock. He glanced down quickly into the darkness. It was just about possible. It had to be possible!

The door flew open and the two suited men walked into the room, closely followed by the uniformed guard. The men looked around, saw the empty bed, then the wide-open window.

‘Shit!’ the shorter one hissed. ‘He’s got out.’

The man ran over to the window and stuck his head out. Far below he could see something white flapping in the darkness.

‘The fire escape,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘I’ll go this way. Cut him off down in the alley!’

He swung his leg over the windowsill and climbed out as the guard and the other man spun around and started to run toward the elevators.

A minute or so later Sarac carefully opened the wardrobe door and laboriously slid out. He stifled a groan as his body protested. He grabbed the crutch, forcing the fingers of his right hand to grasp the plastic handle, then peered cautiously out into the corridor.

Empty, apart from one nurse at the far end by the reception desk. She had her back to him and seemed to be busy on the phone.

He crept out slowly and set off toward a glass door farther along the corridor.

Ward temporarily closed, a handwritten sign announced.

Sarac felt the door: unlocked – probably in case of an emergency evacuation. Thank God for Swedish health and safety regulations! He slipped quickly inside and limped along a narrow passageway that led to another, similar glass door.

The next ward looked much like his own, with the only difference that the lights were all switched off. The only light in the corridor leaked in through the windows or came from the emergency exit signs. It was also completely quiet. No voices, no telephones ringing, no machines humming, no alarms ringing. Just a ghostly silence that was broken a few seconds later by an ambulance siren. He needed to hurry; by now the men must have found the sheet on the fire escape and realized he’d tricked them.

Sarac limped off toward the elevators as fast as he could, struggling to get his body to cooperate. Sweat was already pouring down his back. Strange how something as easy as walking in a straight line could suddenly become so fucking difficult.

When he was just a few metres from the elevators one of them pinged. The up arrow on the wall lit up and a narrow strip of light rose up between the doors. Someone was about to get out. Someone who would wonder what he was doing there, who would probably ask questions he couldn’t answer. Sarac looked around, saw the nurses’ little reception desk, and ducked down behind it. He pulled the crutch closer and tried to ignore his body’s protests. On the floor of the corridor just a metre or so away he saw a rapidly growing rectangle of light as the elevator doors opened. In the middle of the patch of light was the dark silhouette of a man.

Sarac held his breath and waited.

The man got out of the elevator and stood still for a few seconds, as if to get his bearings. His shadow covered most of the rectangle of light from the elevator, making him look enormous. Sarac felt a stab of pain and his pulse rocketed. He pushed back against the reception desk. His body ached, his head was thudding. A memory flickered past and vanished before he could grab it. Flashing blue lights, shadows playing on a tunnel wall.

He heard footsteps as the man went past. Sarac caught a glimpse of a green operating gown and a pair of broad shoulders. Most of the man’s head was obscured by a little green cap and a breathing mask.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

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