Lazarus

by Kepler, Lars

  ‘No, I don’t honestly think you do,’ she says, looking at him from the side. ‘You’ve been waiting for this to happen, it’s almost as if you’ve been looking forward to it … I mean, all the preparations, all the sacrifices you’ve been forced to make suddenly mean something.’

  They drive straight through the German border town. It only takes a matter of minutes. Brown-brick buildings and an attractive church disappear behind them.

  In the distance a yellow tractor is rolling across a field. The sky reflects off a grain silo.

  There’s no border check between the countries. The narrow road simply carries on past a sign, into the Netherlands.

  ‘One thing I don’t understand, Dad … the way you just left everything, I mean, you’re the expert on Jurek, you know everything about him, but now that you think he’s back, you suddenly vanish and leave your colleagues to look for him.’

  ‘Even if I was still there, I wouldn’t be allowed to take part in the investigation,’ Joona explains. ‘But I’ve given Nathan Pollock my notes and background information, and he’ll be able to put together a large team along with Saga Bauer.’

  ‘While you’re hiding,’ she says quietly.

  ‘I’ll do whatever it takes not to lose you,’ he says honestly.

  ‘And Valeria?’

  ‘It would have been better if she’d come with me, but she’ll have protection and that’s the important thing, ten police officers, heavily armed,’ he says.

  ‘How can you live with that fear all the time?’

  ‘Lumi, I know practically every time you’ve seen me I’ve been frightened, like up in Nattavaara,’ Joona says, glancing at her quickly with a smile. ‘But the truth is that I’m very rarely frightened.’

  They’re driving through a straight avenue of bare trees, past the occasional dark-brick house, with more farms visible in the distance.

  ‘Mum told me you were the bravest man in the world,’ Lumi says after a while.

  ‘I’m not that, but I’m pretty good at what I do,’ Joona replies.

  As they drive up through the southern Dutch province of Limburg it starts to rain again.

  The mechanical sound of the windscreen-wipers fills the car.

  Rows of plastic-covered bales of silage lie on the black fields like shiny white fruit.

  ‘Have you and Saga Bauer ever got it together?’ Lumi asks.

  ‘No, never,’ he smiles. ‘She’s always been more like a sister.’

  Lumi looks at herself in the small mirror in the sunshade.

  ‘I’ve only met her once, when she came to say she’d found Jurek’s body … I don’t know, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her, she’s so ridiculously beautiful, perfect.’

  ‘You’re perfect,’ Joona says.

  Lumi looks out of the side window and sees a large crucifix by the side of the road surrounded by iron railings.

  ‘I don’t get why she joined the police when she could have been a supermodel, or anything else, really.’

  ‘Just like me,’ he jokes.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be in the police, you know that’s not what I mean, but it doesn’t suit everyone.’

  ‘As I understand it, Saga had a difficult childhood – her mum suffered from mental illness. She never talks about it, but I think her mum committed suicide … Whenever I’ve tried raising the subject, she tells me she doesn’t want to talk about it – that it’s one of her rules, seeing as thinking about her mum makes her unhappy. She’s very particular about that.’

  They drive past a petrol station with a red neon strip around the flat canopy above the pumps.

  ‘What was it like when your dad died?’ Lumi asks.

  ‘Dad,’ Joona says quietly.

  ‘I mean, I know you were only eleven,’ she says. ‘Do you remember him? Properly, I mean?’

  ‘I’ve been worried about forgetting … when I was younger I used to panic when I thought I couldn’t remember his face or his voice … but the memory works in other ways, I’ve realised … I still dream about him a lot, and then I can see him perfectly clearly.’

  The wiper blades are moving quickly across the windscreen, sweeping the rain away.

  ‘Do you dream about your mum?’ Joona asks after a while.

  ‘A lot,’ Lumi replies. ‘I miss her so much, every day.’

  ‘I miss her too,’ Joona says.

  Lumi lowers her face and quickly brushes her tears away with the back of her hand.

  Joona slows down at a junction on the outskirts of Weert. The red traffic light reflects off the wet tarmac. A crow lands heavily in the crown of a bare tree.

  ‘I remember once when Mum and I … We’d been watching a large fire,’ Lumi said. ‘A warehouse at the station was burning. I think it was the same day we sat and had ice-cream on the steps of the cathedral, and she told me about my wonderful dad who was no longer around.’

  The light turns green and they start moving again.

  ‘Do you remember anything about life in Sweden?’ Joona asks.

  ‘Mum told me I used to have a little toy cooker,’ Lumi says. ‘And that you used to play with me when you got home.’

  ‘I used to have to be your child, or a yappy dog, or I had to lie on the floor while you fed me … you were always very patient … I used to fall asleep after a while, and then you’d cover me with plates and cutlery.’

  ‘What for?’ she smiles.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe I was a table?’

  They overtake a truck close to a grubby-looking chapel. Water cascades over the windscreen and the slipstream makes the car judder.

  ‘This might be something I’ve dreamed,’ Lumi says slowly, ‘but I think it’s a real memory: us saying goodnight to a grey cat.’

  ‘We did,’ he says. ‘I read you stories every night I was home … and before you fell asleep we used to wave to the neighbour’s cat.’

  39

  It stops raining as they slow to a halt on Rijksweg, which runs almost parallel to the E25. They’re not far from the industrial zone on the outskirts of Maarheeze.

  There are about thirty sheep standing in a field, all facing the same way in the wind. On the other side of the motorway is the grey surface of a large dam.

  They turn off onto a narrow tarmac road, where badly dented signs indicate that it’s a dead end, and that the area is private property.

  Tall grass brushes against the sides of the car.

  Joona pulls up in front of a rusty boom, goes out into the cold air and removes a spike that’s been stuck in the chain in place of a padlock.

  At the end of the road is a cluster of derelict buildings, with a wide view stretching out in all directions.

  The place is perfect, carefully chosen.

  No one can approach without being seen from a distance, and it’s only seventy kilometres to the Belgian border.

  They drive into the yard and Joona parks behind the main building. The windows are covered with plywood and the door is nailed shut.

  A gravel track, dotted with water-filled potholes, loops round a meadow to the old workshop. It’s a large building with white tin walls. Part of one end seems to be hanging off, swaying slowly in the wind.

  They take a shortcut across the meadow and step over an abandoned electric fence. The wires are missing and several of the posts are lying in puddles with their porcelain insulators.

  ‘It isn’t mined?’ Lumi asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because that would give the hiding place away,’ she says to herself.

  They follow a heavily rutted tractor track through patches of ground elder and reach the gravel drive. The remains of a threshing machine are lying in the weeds beside the workshop.

  Joona draws his pistol and holds it close to his body as they walk round the workshop. The windows upstairs are shuttered. Red-brown rust has run from the studs in the dirty white tin façade. The end of the building consists of two doors that are big enough to drive a h
eavy loader through. One of the doors is hanging loose and is moving back and forth in the wind.

  The whole workshop looks like it’s been abandoned for years.

  An empty plastic oil-bottle is rolling in the wind at the bottom of the cracked concrete ramp.

  Joona stops and looks back quickly across the meadow, the narrow track, and the car parked outside the main house.

  He opens the door, looks inside the gloomy workshop and sees a concrete floor covered with old oil-stains, a box of tin nails, and some rolls of industrial plastic.

  The paint has been scraped off the pillar closest to the door, the result of years of mechanical wear and tear.

  ‘I think he’s got a surprise for us,’ Joona says, and steps inside.

  Lumi follows him with nagging anxiety in the pit of her stomach. Dry autumn leaves have blown in across the floor.

  Instinctively she sticks close to her dad.

  The large workshop is almost completely empty.

  The wind lifts the door behind them for a moment, then it swings shut with a creak, leaving them in almost total darkness.

  The sound of their steps echoes off the walls.

  ‘This doesn’t feel good,’ she whispers.

  White light from the sky reaches in as the wind pulls the door open again. The pale light moves across the floor like a scorch-mark, stops at an internal wall, then retreats again.

  The room is spacious, but not quite large enough to fill the entire building.

  Lumi tries to pull Joona towards the entrance. There’s a strange sucking sound, and a moment later a hydraulic steel door crashes down behind them.

  It hits the floor and locks into place. The exit is completely blocked now, from floor to ceiling.

  ‘Dad,’ Lumi says, with fear in her voice.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he replies.

  The lights go on and they see that the smooth walls are made of rough steel, welded at the corners.

  Four metres up there are surveillance cameras and firing slots.

  There’s nothing to hide behind, nothing to climb up.

  They see themselves reflected like two grey shadows in the reinforced wall in front of them.

  Lumi is breathing fast, and Joona puts a hand on her arm to stop her reaching for her pistol.

  A steel door opens in the wall and a shortish man in black jogging bottoms and a knitted black top comes limping into the room. His face is badly scarred, he has close-cropped white hair, and is holding a pistol in his hand.

  ‘I’m very unhappy with you,’ he says in deadpan English, gesturing towards Joona with the pistol.

  ‘Sorry to hear—’

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ the man interrupts, raising his voice.

  ‘Yes, Lieutenant.’

  The man walks round Joona, inspecting him and shoving him in the back, forcing him to take a step forward to keep his balance.

  ‘How does it feel to lie on the floor in your own blood?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘But I could have shot you – couldn’t I?’

  ‘No one’s going to come in here unless you repaint the pillar.’

  ‘The pillar?’

  ‘The paint’s been worn off it the whole way up, and if you look up to the roof you can see the whole mechanism,’ Joona says.

  The man holds back a contented smile and turns towards Lumi for the first time.

  ‘My name is Rinus,’ he says, shaking her hand.

  ‘Thanks for letting us come,’ she says.

  ‘I tried to knock some sense into your dad once upon a time,’ he explains.

  ‘So he’s said,’ Lumi says.

  ‘What’s he told you?’

  ‘That it was like being on holiday,’ she replies with a smile.

  ‘I knew I was too easy on him,’ Rinus laughs.

  Rinus tells them how he bought the property thirty years ago with the aim of running the farm himself, but that never happened. When he left the military he was instead recruited by the AIVD, the Dutch national intelligence service.

  Although the AIVD were directly subordinate to the Interior Ministry, Rinus became aware that a situation could arise that would require him to go into hiding for a long period of time.

  ‘The intelligence service’s own safe-houses aren’t safe enough, and you can’t always trust your own team completely,’ he says, as if that was obvious. ‘I was leading an extremely sensitive secret investigation that appeared to point at parts of our own organisation, and that was when I felt it was time to make sure I was prepared.’

  The property consists of four hectares of land, and is close to Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and France, in case he ever has to leave the country in a hurry and seek asylum elsewhere.

  The main building is merely a front in case anyone gets curious; an abandoned, boarded-up house that he never uses.

  The real living quarters are hidden inside the old workshop.

  Rinus shows them past the kitchen on the upper storey into a passageway with doors leading to four bedrooms, each one containing two bunk-beds.

  At the end of the corridor is a sealed emergency exit. Rinus has scrawled ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the door, seeing as he’s removed the escape ladder and taken it to the tip.

  The only way in is through the workshop, but there’s a hidden underground escape tunnel that runs two hundred metres to a patch of woodland in the field behind the building.

  Joona lays the table for three as he heats up frozen lasagne in the microwave. He fills three glasses with water and tells Lumi about his training under Rinus. Once he was dropped into the sea five kilometres from the coast with his legs tied together and his hands cuffed behind his back.

  ‘A beach holiday,’ Rinus smiles as he comes into the kitchen after moving their car to the hidden garage.

  He sits down and tells Lumi that he’s lived in Amsterdam for years, though his family comes from Sint Geertruid in the south of the Netherlands, not far from Maastricht.

  ‘People down here tend to be Catholic, far more religious than on the other side of the rivers,’ he explains as he starts to serve the food.

  ‘What does Patrik say about you disappearing like this?’ Joona asks.

  ‘I hope he’ll have time to miss me, but I suspect he’s actually relieved to be shot of me for a while.’

  ‘I thought you made him breakfast in bed every morning,’ Joona smiles.

  ‘Well, if I’m already up anyway,’ Rinus says with a shrug.

  He looks at Lumi, who’s blowing on a forkful of steaming hot lasagne.

  ‘So, Police Academy after art school?’

  ‘No way,’ she replies with a short laugh.

  ‘Your dad’s artistic too,’ he says, glancing at Joona.

  ‘I’m not,’ he protests.

  ‘You drew a—’

  ‘Let’s forget all about that, shall we?’ Joona interrupts.

  Rinus chuckles silently to himself as he looks down at his plate. The deep scars across his cheeks and one corner of his mouth are as pale as lines drawn in chalk.

  After the meal Rinus leads them downstairs, through a curtain and into a dimly lit room with shutters over the windows.

  One wall is lined with wooden boxes of weapons – pistols, semi-automatics and sniper rifles.

  Rinus goes through the tactical plan and order of command in case of attack, and shows them the monitor and alarm system.

  Taking the location of the shutters upstairs as the starting point, they divide the surroundings into different surveillance areas and draw up a rota of duties.

  Joona stands with a pair of binoculars and watches the approach road and the barrier across the track while Rinus shows Lumi how the Russian detonators work, in case they have to mine the workshop.

  ‘Electric detonators are better, but these mechanical ones are more reliable … even if they’ve been lying in their boxes for thirty years,’ he says, putting one down on the table in front of her.

  The detonator lo
oks a lot like a ballpoint pen, with a small fuse and a pin at one end.

  ‘I assume that’s where you attach the line,’ she says, pointing at the large ring.

  ‘Yes, but first you stick the point about five centimetres into the explosive charge, then prime it with a line to the pin, like you say … then release the catch.’

  ‘And if someone walks into the line, the pin is pulled out.’

  ‘And the hammer hits the cap, which triggers the detonator,’ Rinus says. ‘The cap’s no worse than the cap in a toy gun, but if the detonator explodes you lose your hand, and obviously if the explosives get set off, you’re dead.’

  40

  Saga and Nathan Pollock don’t take the ferry from Solö like the Beaver did, but drive as far as they can across the bridges linking the islands to catch the regular cable ferry from Svartnö.

  Her dad still hadn’t got home when she dropped Pellerina off at school. The school was closed for teacher training, but the out-of-school club is open all day and Pellerina’s special needs assistant is on duty.

  Saga’s been trying not to worry, telling herself that her dad’s phone might be broken, or that he’s gone straight to work the morning after his date.

  But when she called the Karolinska he wasn’t there.

  She’s now called all the hospitals in Stockholm, and spoken to the police.

  She feels like the parent of a teenager.

  All she can do is hope that he’s fallen so head over heels in love that he’s forgotten about everything else.

  That wouldn’t be like him, but she’d be simultaneously relieved and extremely angry.

  Nathan brakes and turns off highway 278, onto a gravel track that leads off through a pine forest to the right of the road.

  They’re heading out to Högmarsö to try to talk to the churchwarden, to find out if the Beaver really did stay in the chapel for a while.

  If they’re lucky, they’ll soon know the Beaver’s real name. The churchwarden may even be forwarding his post to a new address if he’s left his contact details.

  But Saga knows it isn’t going to be easy.

  Erland Lind has been suffering from dementia for several years, and any communication with him up to now has been hopeless.

  They stop in front of the boom blocking the way to the quay. This is where you have to queue until it’s time to board the ferry.