by Lars Kepler
Joona walks across a door that’s lying on the floor and then to one still closed in its frame. He presses down the handle. Light shines for a second and then disappears. Only fire illuminates the smoky hallway and sparks are flying through open doors.
There’s roaring and sparking and banging and crackling as metal heats and begins to writhe.
Joona gestures Karl Mann to move back. He draws his pistol, opens the door a few more centimetres, moves aside, waits a moment, and then looks in.
There’s nothing but the black silhouettes of office furniture. The curtains are closed. But the eddy of air close to the floor makes Joona move away from a possible line of fire.
“Evacuate!” someone yells behind them.
Joona turns and sees four firemen who specialise in rescue work coming up through the hallway. They spread out and systematically search through the rooms.
Before Joona can give them any warning, one of the rescuers shines his strong flashlight into the room, and two eyes reflect back. A Labrador retriever begins to bark loudly.
“We’ll take it from here,” one of the men laughs. “Can you get out on your own?”
“There’s still one missing,” Karl Mann says.
“Be really careful.” Joona warns them as much as he can.
“Come on!” Karl Mann shouts urgently behind him.
“I need to get just one more thing.”
Joona, coughing heavily, runs once more into the men’s bathroom, noticing the pattern of blood on the floor and on the walls, and hurries to snatch up the black backpack.
85
hunting the hunter
Penelope’s legs shake. She clings to the fence surrounding the embassy and stares down at the black asphalt. She is fighting the impulse to vomit. The sight she’d seen in the men’s bathroom still vibrates before her eyes: the face blown to bits, teeth all over, blood.
The weight of the bulletproof vest seems to drag her down towards the ground. Noise around her forms a cacophony. Sirens warn of approaching ambulances. Police officers shout, even scream, at one another and into their radios. She watches medical personnel hurry over with a stretcher. It’s the man from the bathroom. Blood has soaked through the bandages covering his head.
Saga comes over to Penelope with a nurse in tow; she says that she’s worried Penelope is going into shock.
“It wasn’t him,” Penelope repeats as they wrap her in a blanket.
“A doctor will be here soon,” the nurse says soothingly. “Meanwhile do you need something to calm down? I can give you something if you’re in good health …” She hesitates. “No liver problems, for instance?”
Penelope shakes her head and the nurse gives her a blue capsule.
“Swallow it whole,” she explains. “It’s half a milligram of Xanax.”
“Xanax,” Penelope repeats dully as she looks at the capsule in her hand.
“It’s not dangerous and it’ll calm you down,” the nurse explains even as she hurries away.
“Let me get you some water,” Saga says, and goes to the police van.
Penelope’s fingers feel numb. She looks at the little blue capsule in her hand.
Joona Linna is still in the building. More people are stumbling outside. They’re smudged with soot and reek of smoke. The cluster of shocked diplomats is collecting by the fence that separates their grounds from those of the Japanese embassy. Everyone is waiting for transportation to Karolinska Hospital. A woman in a dark blue business suit sinks to the ground and weeps openly. A policeman comes up to her and puts his hand on her shoulders as he talks to her. One of the diplomats licks his lips and rubs his hands over and over with a handkerchief. An older man in a wrinkled suit is standing and talking on a mobile phone. His face is stiff. The military attaché, a middle-aged woman with hair that’s dyed red, has dried her tears and is trying to help the others, but she moves like a sleepwalker. She is asked to hold up a bag for an IV drip and she does so with no emotion at all. A man with burns on his hands has been huddled in a blanket, patiently sitting, his bandaged hands over his face. Now he gets up slowly, the blanket falling to the ground and he starts to walk quietly, almost dreamily, over the pavement towards the fence.
A military policeman holds on to a nearby flagpole. He is weeping.
The man with the burned hands walks gently in the bright morning sunshine beyond the fence. He turns the corner and heads down the right side of Gärdesgatan.
Penelope draws in a sudden breath. As if drenched in cold water, she’s jabbed with sudden insight. She’d never seen his face clearly, but she has seen his back. That man with the burned hands is her pursuer. He’s heading towards Gärdet, the large open field near the television tower. He’s heading away from the police and the ambulances. She doesn’t need to see his face; she’s seen his back when he sat on the boat beneath Skuru Sound Bridge. When Viola and Björn were still alive.
Penelope’s hand opens and the blue capsule falls to the ground.
Penelope begins to walk after him, her heart racing. She turns onto Gärdesgatan and lets the blanket fall away from her body just as he had done. She picks up speed. She starts to hurry faster as he makes his way between the trees, moving slowly. He looks tired and weak. Penelope remembers he might have been shot. That would explain it. She thinks triumphantly that he will not be able to run away from her. Some jackdaws lift from the trees and flap away. Penelope feels filled with power. She’s striding quickly over the meadow grass and sees him less than forty metres away. He’s staggering and he has to hold on to a tree trunk to stay upright. The bandages are unwinding from his fingers. She’s running now and watching him leave his cover in the small grove of trees to limp into the sunshine of the large, open field. Without pausing, Penelope reaches back for the pistol Joona Linna had so providentially secured to her back. She glances down long enough to release the safety as she goes on through the trees. She slows and aims at his leg with her arm straight out.
“Stop!” she whispers as she pulls the trigger.
The shot fires and the recoil jerks her arm and shoulder. The gunpowder burns across the back of her hand.
The bullet seems to disappear but Penelope sees him try to run faster.
You never should have touched my sister, she thinks.
The man is running along a path. He stops for a second, grabbing his arm, then he veers off across the grass.
Penelope runs into the open field and the sunshine. She’s getting closer. She crosses the pedestrian path and lifts the weapon again.
“Stop!” she yells.
She fires and she sees a furrow of grass ripped from the ground ten metres in front of the man. Penelope feels adrenaline shoot throughout her body but she’s clear-headed and focused. She aims at his leg and shoots again. She hears the bang again, feels the recoil, and sees the back of his knee punctured with debris blown around his leg from his kneecap. He screams in pain as he falls onto the grass, but he keeps trying to crawl away. She’s coming closer, striding forward while he tries to pull himself upright to lean against a birch tree.
Stop, Penelope thinks. She lifts the pistol again. You killed Viola. You drowned her and you killed Björn.
“You killed my baby sister!” she yells out loud. She shoots.
The bullet goes into his left foot and blood spatters over the grass.
As Penelope comes up to him, he slides down, completely still, his head hanging forward with his chin resting on his chest. He’s bleeding heavily and is panting like an animal.
She stops in front of him, the shadow of the birch tree covering them both. She aims the pistol again right at him.
“Why?” she asks. “Why is my sister dead? Why is …”
She falls silent, swallows, and gets on her knees to look directly into his face.
“I want you to look at me when I kill you.”
The man licks his lips and seems to try to raise his head. It’s too heavy. He can’t manage it. He’s about to lose consciousness. She aim
s the gun again, but she hesitates and pulls his head up with her other hand. She stares right into his face. She clenches her teeth as she sees again the tired features lit up by lightning over Kymmendö. Now she remembers every detail: his calm eyes after he killed people and the deep scar on his lip. He’s just as calm now. Penelope has hardly time to think how strange this is before he attacks. He is so very strong and unbelievably quick. He grabs her hair and pulls her towards him. There is so much power behind his move that she bangs her forehead against his chest. She cannot move fast enough to evade him when he shifts his grip to grab her wrist and wring the gun from her hand. With all her strength, Penelope pushes and kicks her way free, but he already has her gun. She looks up at him as he aims it at her and releases two quick shots.
86
the white trunk of the birch tree
Only when Joona has left the stairwell and is hurrying through the main floor of the German embassy does he realise how his lungs are heaving and how much his eyes sting. He has to get out for some clear air. He coughs heavily and remains close to the wall as he jogs on. He can hear new explosions above him, and a ceiling lamp falls to the ground. He can hear many sirens. He walks out through the main entrance of the embassy with relief. Six German military policemen are deployed on the asphalt outside the door. They make up the provisional security team. Joona draws fresh, clean air into his lungs, coughing and looking around. Two fire trucks have set up ladders against the wall of the embassy. Outside the fence, there are crowds of police officers and ambulance personnel. Karl Mann lies on the grass and a doctor is leaning over him listening to his lungs. Penelope Fernandez is walking along the fence that separates this building from the Japanese embassy. Her shoulders are covered by a blanket.
At the last minute, Joona had gone back into the men’s bathroom to retrieve this battered backpack. It was an impulse. He couldn’t understand why the hit man had wanted to hide an empty backpack with the pistol and magazine in full sight in the sink.
He has a fit of coughing again. He opens the black nylon and looks inside. The backpack is not empty. It contains three different passports and a short attack knife with fresh blood on the blade.
Who did you cut? Joona wonders.
He peers closely at the knife blade. The blood is just starting to coagulate. He looks out over the busy people and ambulances on the other side of the gate. The woman with the burned dress is now bundled in a blanket and is being helped into an ambulance. She holds another woman’s hand. An older man with a soot streak on his forehead is talking on the phone. His expression is empty.
Joona realises his mistake. He drops the backpack and the bloody knife to the ground and runs to the fence to yell at the guard to let him out.
He rushes past police and other personnel, jumps the plastic tape barricade, and forces his way past journalists who seem to have sprung up out of the ground like weeds. He stands on the road, blocking a yellow ambulance just ready to leave.
“What wound does he have on his arm?” Joona yells as he holds up his ID.
“What?” the ambulance driver asks in surprise.
“The man injured by the bomb—he has a wound on his forearm and I need—”
“Considering his condition, it’s not that important.”
“I have to see his injury!” Joona yells.
The ambulance driver wants to protest further, but something in Joona’s voice makes him change his mind and he does what Joona asks.
Joona climbs into the back of the ambulance. The man lying on the stretcher has a face totally covered in bandages with only an area free to allow an oxygen mask and an oxygen lead to his nose. A suction tip is hanging from his mouth. One of the ambulance attendants cuts the jacket and shirt wider open. The wound is temporarily bandaged.
But it’s not a bullet wound. It’s a knife cut and it’s deep.
Joona jumps out of the ambulance and looks around the area until he sees Saga. She’s carrying a plastic cup with water, but as soon as she sees his expression, she throws it to the ground and comes running.
He’s getting away again, Joona thinks. We can’t let him get away!
Joona pans the scene, remembering he’d seen Penelope with a blanket over her shoulders heading along the fence between the embassies and turning onto Gärdesgatan.
“Bring a gun!” he yells at Saga as he starts running along the fence. He turns to the right but can’t spot Penelope or the hit man anywhere.
As if in their own little world, a woman is watching two beautiful Dalmatians play freely on the grassy lawn of the Italian Cultural Institute.
Joona races past its shining white façade, already pulling his pistol out of its holster. He realises that the hit man had merged with the stream of people stumbling from the burning building.
Saga is yelling something behind him, but he doesn’t listen. His heart is pounding too loud and there’s a rushing sound in his head.
He runs faster towards a small grove of trees the killer might see as cover. He hears a sudden pistol shot. He stumbles down the slope of a dike and then up the other side, up a hill, and between the trunks of trees in the grove.
More pistol shots. The explosions are short and sharp.
Joona bats aside tree branches and then comes out onto the sunny lawn. He sees Penelope three hundred metres away. She’s underneath a birch tree. A man is sitting against the tree with his head hanging down. Penelope is on the ground in front of him when suddenly she’s pulled forward and then falls back. The man is aiming a gun right at her. While running, Joona throws a shot at the man, but the distance is too great. He stops to take a steady stance and hold his gun in both hands. At that same moment the hit man fires two shots into Penelope’s chest. She flies onto her back. The hit man looks exhausted, but lifts his gun again. Joona shoots and misses. He runs closer and watches Penelope kick at the man to get away. The hit man looks up to see Joona coming but then looks back down at Penelope. He is looking her in the eyes as he aims the gun at her face. A shot is fired … but Joona hears the sound from behind. It whines past his right ear and within the same second a cascade of blood squirts from behind the hit man’s back to cover the white tree trunk. The full metal jacket bullet has torn through his breastbone, into his heart, and on out of his back to bury itself in the tree behind him. Even as Joona keeps running with his gun still aimed, another shot rings out. The already dead body whirls under the impact, the bullet’s entry point just centimetres away from the first one. Joona lowers his gun and turns to see Saga standing in the grove of trees with a high-calibre rifle at her shoulder. Her long hair is dappled by the sunlight breaking through the leaves and her expression is still one of deadly concentration as she slowly lowers the rifle.
Penelope scrambles back, coughing, into the sunlight. She gets up to stare down at the dead man. Joona walks over to the body, kicks away the pistol, and kneels to put his finger against the man’s throat. He wants to make absolutely sure this man is dead.
Penelope unlatches the bulletproof vest and lets it fall to the ground. Joona gets up and comes to her as she walks towards him, staggering, as if she is about to faint. He catches her exhausted body as her face falls to rest against his chest.
87
the red herring
The man with the mutilated face died one hour after his trip from the German embassy to the hospital. He was identified as Dieter Gramma, the cultural attaché’s secretary. During the autopsy investigation, the chief medical officer, Nils Åhlén, found the remains of tape on his clothing and abrasions and wounds on his wrists and neck, which indicated that he’d been tied up at the time of the explosion. When the initial crime-scene investigation was completed and tapes from the security cameras were analysed, a reconstruction of events could be made: after arriving at his office on the second floor of the building, Dieter Gramma logged on to his computer and read some e-mail messages. He didn’t answer any but flagged three of them. Then he went to the lunchroom and turned on the espresso machi
ne before going to the men’s bathroom. He was just about to enter one of the stalls when a man turned away from the mirror over the sink. His face was covered by a ski mask. The man, dressed in black, was the wounded hit man who had got into the German embassy with his German passport. He’d just escaped police pursuit and had blocked surveillance of the men’s bathroom by taping over the security camera.
The hit man estimated Dieter Gramma’s body proportions through the mirror. Dieter Gramma probably didn’t have time to say much before the hit man pressed a gun to his chest and forced him to his knees to tape his mouth shut. The hit man switched his black jacket with Dieter Gramma’s suit coat, and then tied him in a squatting position to a water pipe with his back to the security camera and plunged the double-edged knife through the bullet hole of the leather jacket.
Probably Dieter Gramma was so confused by the pain, fear, and release of endorphins that he couldn’t comprehend much of what was happening. The hit man fashioned a piece of wire around Dieter Gramma’s throat with a loop at the back. Through this loop, he threaded a long wire, took out a hand grenade, a Spräng 2000, and attached one end of the wire to the grenade, pulled the pin, but kept the handle down. If he’d let go of the handle, the grenade would have exploded within three seconds. Instead, he taped the grenade to Dieter Gramma’s chest with its handle pressed down. Next, he pulled the end of the wire through a loop around Dieter Gramma’s neck, wrapped it around the sink trap, and stretched it across the floor to become a trip wire.
Of course, he meant to have someone enter the bathroom, release the grenade to mutilate Dieter Gramma, and in all the chaos Gramma’s mutilated body would be identified as his. Then he could just walk away.
The hit man was probably slowed by his wound and blood loss, but the priming of the trap wouldn’t have taken more than four minutes from the moment Dieter Gramma entered the bathroom to the moment when the hit man dumped his gun and magazines into the sink, left his backpack with the bloody knife in a stall, peeled the tape off the security camera, stepped over the trip wire, and left the room.
