by Kepler, Lars
In order to deceive Saga, Jurek had been keeping her dad in the same bunker where his brother kept the previous victims.
The location of Jurek’s real hiding place remains unknown.
The glare of the fluorescent light in the ceiling is falling across Saga’s face almost directly from above. There are dry pine-needles in her hair. Beads of sweat merge and trickle down her cheek.
A nurse comes in and introduces herself, asks Nathan to leave them alone, then tells Saga that she’s going to give her a sedative to help her sleep.
Nathan gets to his feet and gently squeezes her shoulder before he leaves.
While the nurse prepares the Stesolid Novum injection, Saga starts to think about eyelids again, and the fact that they’re transparent, that you never quite stop being aware.
‘I have to …’
She stops and slowly stands up from the chair, holding the nurse off with one hand as she makes her way out of the room.
With the blanket round her shoulders she leaves the Emergency Ward. She walks out into the chill morning air, through the huge buildings, and leaves the hospital precinct.
Saga knows what she has to do, what she ought to have done a long time ago.
She needs to fetch Pellerina, leave the country, and go into hiding somewhere.
Karlberg Palace shimmers bright white in the morning mist as she crosses the bridge over the railway line. The blanket falls off in front of the broad flight of steps leading to the palace but she doesn’t notice.
Her grey camouflage clothing is dark with blood on the arms and chest.
She sat with her dad in her arms, pressing his head to her chest until the paramedics arrived.
She crosses the narrow Ekelund Bridge to reach Stadshagen, then walks along Kungsholms strand until she gets to P O Hallmans gata.
She rings the doorbell but gets no answer. Just as she’s about to ring again, she changes her mind.
She no longer knows what she’s doing there.
Pellerina is safer inside the flat than outside.
She isn’t in danger.
Really Saga just wants to hug her, hear her wise words, feel her love.
Holding back tears, she takes out her pistol, checks the magazine and makes sure it’s working.
Then she starts to walk towards Police Headquarters.
She has one more task to complete, and it can’t wait. She needs to locate a new hardness inside herself, track Jurek down, and kill him.
66
Joona puts the night-sight down on the table and gazes out across the landscape. There are no lights on in the neighbouring farm in the distance, but the sky is starting to brighten slightly on the horizon. The haze in the air catches the light of the town.
It looks like the whole of Weert is in flames.
On the other side of the dimly lit room Rinus switches surveillance zones, pulls a chair over to the window and opens the hatch.
Lumi is standing in front of the monitor.
She hasn’t spoken to Joona properly for two days, isn’t looking at him, and only responds very curtly to direct questions.
Joona scans the grass in front of the old bus, the front wheels, headlights, windscreen and along the flat roof.
The starry sky looks like it’s covered in gauze.
Joona thinks back to their life in Nattavaara, the last time they were in hiding from Jurek. He trained his daughter so she’d be as prepared as possible if the worst happened.
They grew closer to each other.
He remembers the crystal-clear black sky, and how he taught her to navigate by the stars.
In the Northern Hemisphere you can always get your bearings from the North Star.
It’s always directly to the north, and doesn’t move in relation to the rotation of the Earth like other stars.
‘Can you still find the North Star?’ he asks.
She doesn’t answer.
‘Lumi?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s at the end of the Plough, you just have to—’
‘I don’t care,’ she says, cutting him off.
‘No,’ Joona says.
He raises the rifle’s night-sight again and checks his zone, piece by piece. They mustn’t let themselves get complacent, tell themselves that nothing’s going to happen.
Yesterday he read about a major police operation outside Stockholm in one of the papers, but there was no indication of what it had been about.
He’s lost track of the number of times he’s looked for a message from Nathan, with one of the evening papers reporting an unconfirmed rumour that a hitherto unknown serial killer has been killed during the course of a police operation.
But seeing as no one printed anything like that, Joona has to assume that Jurek Walter is still alive.
He has to protect Lumi, but if the Swedish police don’t manage to stop Jurek soon, they’ll cut back on Valeria’s protection.
The current situation isn’t sustainable for much longer.
Joona thinks about all the information about Jurek he’s looked through over the years. He even had all his father’s letters from Leninsk to his family in Novosibirsk translated.
Vadim Levanov was a rocket engineer, extremely interested in space exploration. Joona recalls one letter about George O. Abell, the American who discovered the Medusa Nebula.
It forms part of the constellation of Gemini.
Back then it was thought to be the remnants of a supernova, but it was actually a planetary nebula – gas that’s been expelled from a red giant right at the end of its existence.
Joona thinks about the fascination expressed in Vadim Levanov’s letter as he explained that the constellation of Gemini would soon change, seeing as a nebula of this type has such a short life – only a million years.
Joona moves to zone 3, opens the hatch and looks out at the telephone mast and clump of trees.
‘Dad, you probably did the right thing last time,’ Lumi says, and takes a deep breath. ‘Jurek had an accomplice … that’s why Samuel Mendel’s family went missing even though Jurek was being held in isolation. We know that now. And I understand that … that you probably saved my life, and Mum’s, by cutting all ties with us.’
Joona lets her speak as he watches the clump of woodland where the hatch from the hidden tunnel is concealed. A plastic bag has blown in and caught on some brambles.
‘But it was still a high price to pay,’ Lumi goes on. ‘Mum got used to it, to grieving … her life was put on pause … I was just a child, I adapted, forgot about you.’
Joona checks the edge of the patch of trees. The front scoop of a large digger is lying on the ground. He always spends a long time looking at it, because it would be a good position for a sniper.
‘Are you listening?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ he replies, lowering the night-sight.
He closes the hatch, turns and meets her blank gaze in the gloomy room. When her brown hair is hanging over her forehead, she’s the spitting image of Summa.
‘Sometimes I got teased for not having a dad,’ she says. ‘It sounds so old-fashioned, but single mums really weren’t that common back then … and we didn’t have a single picture of you. How was I supposed to explain that?’
‘It had to be done,’ Joona replies.
‘According to you,’ she points out.
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t you try to understand how this feels for me? You call me and tell me to drop everything and … oh, forget it, there’s no point going on about it,’ she says. ‘But all this, because you’ve got it into your head that Jurek isn’t dead. Maybe you’re right this time too – we don’t know – but the situation is very different now, because I’m an adult, and I make my own decisions.’
‘That’s right,’ he says in a low voice.
She leaves the monitor and walks over to him. She stands there with her arms wrapped around her, takes a deep breath, then carries on.
‘I mean, life isn’t all about surviving, it’s abou
t living,’ she says. ‘Even if I’ve said lots of things because I’ve been angry, I know you’re worried about me, that you’re doing this for my sake, and I’m not ungrateful, I’m really not, even if I’m not as convinced as you are that Jurek has come back from the dead.’
‘He has,’ Joona says.
‘OK, but apart from that … at some point you have to make a decision – how am I going to respond to fear?’
‘What if you die? What if he takes you?’
‘Then that’s just the way it is,’ she says, meeting his gaze.
‘I can’t accept that.’
She sighs and goes back to the monitor.
Rinus is sitting perfectly still, looking out at his zone through his binoculars. Even if he doesn’t understand Swedish, he knows enough to stay out of this.
Joona opens the hatch for zone 2 and looks out across the fields towards Eindhoven. The greenhouse is so far away it looks like a pin-prick of light. He picks up the night-sight and looks at it. A luminous golden mirage. He’s got the focus adjusted as far as it will go, but even so, he can’t tell if the dark outlines behind the glass are plants or if there’s someone standing there.
He knows he can’t force Lumi to stay here. He can try to persuade her, but when it comes down to it, it’s her choice.
She’ll end up going back to Paris soon, no matter what he says. And before that, someone has to stop Jurek Walter.
Once, when he was child, Joona was on the island of Oxkangar in the Finnish archipelago, and the water in the inlet was perfectly smooth.
He was walking along the shore as usual, looking for bottles with messages in them.
A duck was floating maybe twenty metres out, a mallard, a brown female with five little ducklings in a nervous little row.
He doesn’t know why he’s never forgotten that.
One of the ducklings fell behind and was attacked by a seagull. The mother returned to the lone chick and chased the larger bird away. But then another gull attacked the rest of the ducklings.
Joona yelled and tried to scare the gulls away.
The mother flapped back to the four ducklings, but then the first gull attacked the lone duckling and snatched it up in its beak.
The duck rushed back and the gull dropped the duckling. Its neck was bleeding, and it was squeaking in its high voice.
Joona grabbed some stones and tried to throw them at the gulls, but couldn’t reach.
The mother was getting desperate. The second gull was attacking the four ducklings again, pecking at them and trying to catch one. The mother had to give up. She left the lone duckling to save the other four. The first gull turned sharply in the air, dived at the injured duckling, pecked at it, caught it by one tiny wing and flew away with it.
That’s precisely the tactic that Jurek uses.
Joona moves on, opens the hatch of zone 1 and looks out at the old house and narrow track. Before he has time to raise the night-sight he spots lights, bouncing up and down.
‘A vehicle,’ he says.
Rinus starts systematically checking the other zones while, without a word, Lumi feeds five cartridges into the sniper rifle and passes it to Joona.
He quickly mounts the sight on it, rests it on the window and watches the car as it comes closer along the narrow track. The headlamps bounce in time with the potholes in the tarmac. He can see at least two people through the windscreen.
‘Two people,’ he says. They stop in front of the barrier.
The beam of the headlamps lights up most of the track leading to the main house. One door opens and a woman gets out of the car. She looks around, climbs over the ditch and takes a few steps into the meadow. She unbuttons her jeans, pushes them and her underwear down around her ankles, then crouches with her legs apart.
‘Just stopped to pee,’ Joona says, lowering his rifle and removing the sight again, without taking his eyes off the two people.
The second person is still in the car. The glow from the dashboard lights up the end of a nose and a pair of eyebrows.
The woman gets up and fastens her jeans, then goes back to the car, leaving a piece of tissue on the ground.
Lumi mutters something and goes off to the kitchen as Joona watches the car reverse out of sight.
When the lights have disappeared he takes the cartridges out of the rifle and puts the gun back.
Joona walks across the room, pushes the curtain aside, opens the door and goes into the kitchen. Lumi is standing in front of the whirring microwave. There’s a ping, then it falls silent. She opens the door, takes out a plastic mug full of steaming hot noodles and puts it on the table.
‘You’re right,’ Joona says. ‘I’m scared of Jurek, I’m scared of losing you, and that’s exactly what he’s exploiting … I’ve been so certain that the only way to protect you was to disappear, hide … you know, all this.’
‘Dad, I’m only saying that this won’t work long-term,’ she says, sitting down at the table.
‘I know, and I understand that, of course I do, but if you agree to stay here for a bit longer, I’ll go back to Sweden and meet Jurek.’
‘Why are you saying that?’ she asks, trying to swallow her tears.
‘This has turned out wrong, I have to admit that, I thought Saga and Nathan would be able to track Jurek down fairly quickly … I mean, he’s in one of his active phases, and they’ve got all the material, plenty of resources, but … I have no idea why things haven’t gone the way I hoped.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know, but I’ve realised I can’t run away from this, it’s down to me to stop Jurek.’
‘No.’
He looks at her face for a while, her lowered gaze, the sad set of her mouth.
‘It’ll be OK,’ he says almost silently, then goes back through the curtain to the surveillance room.
Rinus has moved his chair to zone 3. He lowers his binoculars and listens as Joona explains his new plan.
‘I trained you, so you’ll do a good job,’ Rinus says in his terse way.
‘If I’m still welcome after all this, I’d love to come and visit you and Patrick in the spring.’
‘As long as you can put up with him calling you Tom of Finland,’ Rinus says, and for the first time in several days a trace of a smile crosses his scarred face.
It’s dawn by the time Lumi walks to the car with Joona. The barrier has been opened and the narrow tarmac track lies like a thread of silver through the damp meadow.
They look over towards the main road.
Thin veils of mist are hanging over the fields.
Joona’s plan is to drive back to the South of France, then catch the first available flight to Stockholm, as quickly as he can, without giving away their hiding place.
They’re both aware that it’s high time he got going. Lumi’s cheeks are pale and the tip of her nose is red.
‘Dad, I’m sorry I’ve been so awful,’ she says.
‘You haven’t been,’ he smiled.
‘Yes, I have.’
‘You were right, it’s good that you didn’t back down,’ he says.
‘I didn’t mean you should set off at once, though. We could stay here a bit longer, that wouldn’t be a problem, would it?’ she says, and swallows hard.
He wipes the tears from her cheeks.
‘Don’t be upset, it’s going to be OK.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Lumi.’
‘Let’s stay, please, Dad. We …’
Her voice breaks and the words turn into hacking sobs. Joona hugs her and she holds him tightly.
‘I can’t bear it,’ she says.
‘Lumi,’ he whispers to her head. ‘I love you more than anything, I’m so proud of who you are, and there’s nothing I want more than to be part of your life, but I have to do this.’
He holds her until she runs out of tears and starts to breathe more calmly.
‘I love you, Dad,’ she says between sniffs.
When they finally let go of each other, remorseless reality kicks in again: the narrow track, the waiting car.
Lumi blows her nose and tucks her handkerchief in her pocket. She smiles and does her best to pull herself together. Their breath clouds in the cold air.
‘Remember, none of this is your fault, not in any way whatsoever. If it goes wrong,’ Joona says, ‘it isn’t your responsibility. This is my choice, and I’m doing this because I believe it’s the right thing to do.’
She nods and he walks round the car and opens the door.
‘Come back to me,’ she says in a low voice.
He looks her in the eye, then gets in the car.
The engine starts and the rear lights colour the track beneath her feet red.
Lumi stands with her hand over her mouth and watches him leave.
The car disappears from sight.
When she can no longer see him she closes the barrier, pegging it with the rusty bolt, then walks back to the workshop.
67
Sabrina Sjöwall knows her job, and is aware of the situation, but she hasn’t been told why the Personal Protection Unit has decided that the threat against Pellerina Bauer is so serious that only the highest level of security measures would be sufficient.
Unquestionably, the most important aspect of witness protection is keeping the address secret.
The girl’s location isn’t mentioned in any lists or reports. Only those directly involved within the police are aware of the address.
The flat is on the ninth floor, and consists of five rooms and a kitchen. Unnecessarily large for a single child, of course, but sometimes whole families are protected here.
The front door looks the same as all the others in the stairwell, but this one should in theory be able to withstand an attack from a rocket launcher.
Life is supposed to feel as normal as possible. The furnishings are simple but pleasant, with brown leather sofas, throws, wooden floors and soft rugs.
It all seems normal, even if the world takes on an oddly soft shimmer thanks to the thermoplastic windows.
Sabrina is dressed in civilian clothing, but she’s got her Sig Sauer P226 Legion by her hip, and has her portable radio unit slung over the left shoulder of her jacket.
