Ask No Mercy

by Martin Österdahl

  No, he could hear it ticking.

  It was five minutes to two in the afternoon. Max left the library and walked toward the Department of Economics. He wanted to talk with Mishin; maybe he would be able to explain some of what Max had read in Pashie’s book.

  24

  David Julin jerked when the computer pinged. It was as though he knew who had sent him the new e-mail before he turned to the computer.

  Ray.

  David brushed his hair back, pinched the bridge of his nose. Suddenly his mouth was much too dry. I’ve done what you asked me to. Leave me alone.

  Did this man understand what David had done? Did he understand that David had given him the ability to repeat the attack if he wanted to? At least until the programmers at Telia discovered the bug and fixed it.

  And this man wanted more from him?

  David wasn’t going to be able to keep an army of programmers at bay for very long. He wouldn’t be able to cover his tracks forever.

  The e-mail’s subject line said, The south parking lot at 1 PM. Or at your home at 8 PM. You choose.

  David looked around. Outside his office, people sat leaning over their computers in Telia’s open-plan offices in Kista, north of Stockholm. David had insisted on separate rooms for himself and the senior consultants of SwitchCom. There was nothing in the world he despised more than open-plan offices.

  He checked his watch. Almost twelve thirty. He knew where the south parking lot was. But he had already given the man what he had asked for. Why couldn’t he leave David in peace?

  He had exposed himself to enormous risk by cooperating with Ray. It had been clear from the beginning that he was not a man you would want to have anything to do with. Particularly not if you were an ordinary highly educated man, an entrepreneur who was married and had three young children.

  David had thought he would be able to control Ray by being smarter, just as he controlled other people in his life.

  All he wanted was to make everything right, to have everything return to how it had been before, without anyone, especially Gabbi, noticing how bad things had gotten.

  He closed his eyes, remembered the treacherous words from that trainer at the track: Abbey Road was a sure winner. Supposedly, the favorite, Astrakhan, had been given emergency treatment for an injured left leg, and there was no chance she would be able to win the heat.

  David had trembled with relief and excitement. This was what would save him from disaster.

  He had achieved his goals at the age of thirty-three. Won the woman he loved, created a family with her. But a poison had begun to spread in his body, deforming him. Every evening, when Gabbi and the children had fallen asleep, he had sat by himself in the big house on a street for millionaires in Danderyd. Felt how darkness had fallen around him.

  Was this all there was?

  His fine, orderly home became a prison. His inner calm was transformed into restlessness. Everything had been achieved, and life suddenly felt meaningless. There was nothing more to do, nothing more to build.

  Gambling had become his lover, the kick he so desperately needed. It was just as addictive as the extreme sports in which he had engaged in his youth. And he went further and further. He lost more and more.

  Finally he’d had to liquidate the bonds he’d given the children for Christmas. He’d had them issued in the children’s names. “This is a magic piece of paper,” he had said, when the children were sitting next to him on the floor next to the Christmas tree. He would never forget that moment, how their eyes had lit up with love and expectation.

  “One day you will be able to turn it into whatever you want,” he’d said. “A car. A motorcycle. Even a house of your own.”

  But the magic paper had been turned into nothing.

  David died a little bit every time he thought about that look in the children’s eyes. He had sworn that he would replace the children’s bonds; even if everything else went to hell, he wouldn’t betray his own children. Until then, he was forced to experience the feeling that he had stolen from them, every day. From his own flesh and blood.

  And then came the tip about Abbey Road.

  David had played the horses enough to know that there was no such thing as a sure winner, but this tip had sounded so well founded, so much surer than any other quick solution he could come up with to solve the problem.

  All he needed was a big win. He would use the money wisely and build up his wealth again step by step.

  A man David’s age had walked among the well-known high rollers, talked to the jockeys and the trainers, even chatted with the equestrian-sports journalists. He had moved around with confidence, behaved as if he belonged there. He had come up to David and given him an intense look, as though he could see right through him.

  “Are you betting on Abbey Road?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “Do you need help?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Ray.”

  “David.”

  The strength in the handshake had surprised David. Ray could tear David’s arm off, and he wanted David to know it.

  After the race started, David looked for Ray among the spectators. It wasn’t until the race was half over that he caught sight of him. The man looked satisfied despite the fact that Abbey Road was behind. As the horses approached the finish line, Ray slowly moved closer to David, and when Astrakhan defied all the rumors and beat Abbey Road by a coal-black neck, Ray leaned over toward David’s ear and said in a calm and controlled voice that he would be seeing David in two days so David could pay his debt.

  Then he had strolled on, leaving David alone in the stands. People got up and left, but David remained seated. As if sedated.

  There was no way he could pay his debt in cash. He had emptied all his accounts and liquidated the family’s assets; everything had gone up in smoke. He had even managed to sell his future dividends to the American company that had bought his business. The house was fully mortgaged, and his monthly salary barely covered the family’s living expenses.

  His debt had grown every day that had passed.

  Now, his fingertips rested on the keys of his laptop computer; the cursor on the screen touched Ray’s e-mail.

  The gambling devil controlled every decision of his day-to-day life, and it had laid out the path that had led to this e-mail from Ray. The only man who could loan him more money.

  David opened the e-mail. It contained no text at all, only a link. He tried to interpret the letters and numbers in the address field, but they were incomprehensible. The address consisted of Latin letters mixed with symbols that were unknown to him. He double-clicked on the link. A video player appeared, and the content started buffering: 15%, 35%, 65%, 80%, 100%.

  First everything was black; then text began scrolling across the screen.

  Systema, it said.

  David saw a muddy forest road with coniferous trees growing on both sides. Grass grew tall between tractor tracks. The road led to a clearing in the forest. The sound of a helicopter’s rotor blades became louder and louder as the camera was pointed at a gray, overcast sky. A black helicopter approached at high speed. It swung and flew halfway around the perimeter of the glade, hovered directly above the camera, and descended in a slow and controlled manner to land in the open, grassy area.

  The engine was switched off, the rotor blades stopped spinning, and the trees that the draft had bent straightened. A single man climbed out of the helicopter and approached the camera. He was slender and fit and dressed in camouflage overalls. Suddenly he stopped and drew something from behind his back, as if drawing an arrow from a quiver.

  The man looked familiar—not only his face but also his body, proportions, and way of moving. There was no doubt that it was Ray, but a younger version of him; he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old.

  Ray began to swing the object in front of him and move forward, spinning halfway around and then completely around. He combined his movements with blows and
low kicks directed against an imagined opponent between him and the camera. He moved faster and faster; it was as though a helicopter were moving toward the camera at high speed. Ray’s movements were so forceful that it looked as though the object he held would slice through anything that got in its way. While his body executed this flowing, deadly dance, his facial expression was completely neutral; there was no movement in the muscles of his face, no sign of aggression or feelings.

  The weapon was a little spade he held sometimes in one hand and sometimes in both hands. The spade had a black metal blade and a handle of black wood.

  Ray paused, and soon he could be seen in close-up. He was an entirely ordinary young man when he stood still, with a long, narrow face and ice-blue eyes; a long, thin nose; a little depression in his upper lip that looked like a mild form of cleft lip; and short bangs combed to the left.

  An explosive movement of his right arm sent the spade through the air. In slow motion, the video showed the spade rotating around and around as it traveled through the air a good ten meters. Finally it reached its goal, a white mannequin that was leaning against a tree. The spade split the mannequin’s head, sending fragments of hard white plastic to the ground, and continued on its path until it buried itself deep in a tree trunk. Only the handle stuck out.

  David held his head in his hands, massaged his temples and eyebrows. What the hell had he done?

  The Solvalla racetrack’s south parking lot was half an hour away. He looked at his watch again. He could still get there in time. But why were they supposed to meet?

  “Or at your home at 8 PM. You choose.”

  David got up and walked to the door. He turned around and looked at the desk, at the photo of Gabbi and the children. His family. Then he walked out into the buzzing noise of the open-plan office. Hurried toward the elevators.

  25

  The loud ticking of the cuckoo clock was having an almost meditative effect on Vladislav. He sat up in the chair and wiped his mouth with his hand, felt saliva wetting the back of it. Had he fallen asleep?

  He looked at the cuckoo clock. It was two o’clock, or it would be in about half a minute. It wouldn’t be appropriate for Max to find him here when he came in to work. Vladislav collected his books and got up. Before he walked to the door, he took a last look at the clock.

  It had fallen silent. Was that why he had woken up? Katya had said it was very important to avoid breaking it.

  Vladislav set his books down on the desk and reached for the clock.

  Max hurried around the corner and soon reached the university’s main building. At the library he had felt tired, but the fast walk in the clear air had refreshed him. Then he abruptly broke stride; it was as though his body was telling him something was wrong.

  When the explosion came, the ground around him shook, and the blast wave nearly knocked him flat.

  Max crouched down, closed his eyes. Felt something strike his shoulders, realized it was probably masonry from the adjacent building. He recognized this kind of sound, a sound that shatters the calm and the silence like sudden lightning from a clear sky. As in Bosnia three years ago. When he really shouldn’t have been there. When Jonas Karlsson had died.

  For a few seconds, his own breathing and heartbeat were all he heard. Then came the screams.

  Max opened his eyes, and in the next second he rushed forward, toward the main building.

  People came running down the stairs from the main entrance. A young woman staggered out, fell to her knees on the hard asphalt. When she sank to the ground, Max saw that a shard of glass was embedded in her neck. Blood was pumping out in pulses like water from a broken pipe. The binders she had been carrying fell to the ground. Her white blouse turned red.

  The carotid artery. There was nothing he could do for her; she was already dead.

  Max’s body was shaking when he looked up the facade and saw three windows with their glass blown out. He hurried toward the entrance, against the flood of people trying to get out of the building, some alert and quick on their feet, some moving as if they were sleepwalkers.

  He shoved past people without provoking any reaction, made his way past the abandoned metal detectors.

  I know which windows those are.

  He tried to push aside the thought and moved farther into the building. In the eyes of everyone he met, there was panic, the fear of more explosions. Papers, clothing, scarves, and gloves whirled in the stairwell. Scraps of food and fragments of masonry lay on the steps and landings and in the window niches.

  When Max approached the Department of Economics, he saw bloody tracks on the granite floor. The entrance door was gone; the frame in which it had hung had been shattered; the hinges were deformed. What was left of the door was spread out against the wall on the other side of the stairwell.

  Max took a few steps toward the opening. The corridor was filled with smoke; deeper inside the room, a fire was burning. He went in slowly; he held his arm in front of his mouth but had to cough nevertheless. In the department’s entrance hall, two bodies lay on the floor. He grasped the feet of the one nearest him and pulled it out into the stairwell. It was one of the women who worked for Mishin. Her face was torn up; the skin was burned off, and the exposed flesh had been punctured by hundreds of small shards of glass and metal. Max checked her pulse. She was still alive.

  The other body was that of a man Max hadn’t seen before, perhaps a visitor who had happened to be present. His arm had been dislocated, and he was unconscious, but he was in better shape than the woman. Max laid him on his side, in the recovery position.

  Max called to the people rushing by in the corridor, but everyone ignored him and simply ran toward the stairs. He blocked the path of two older men, nodded at the unconscious woman and man on the floor.

  “Take them downstairs with you!”

  The corridor was full of thick black smoke. The heat was almost intolerable despite the fact that the window glass had been blown out. Max hoped to hear the sirens of fire trucks, but all he heard was the sound of steps in the stairwell, the screams from the courtyard below, and the pounding of his heart.

  Where was Pashie’s office? It was impossible to see through the smoke. Max began crawling along the floor; he cut himself on fragments of glass, and blood began streaming out in a steady, pulsing rhythm. He took off his jacket, scarf, and sweater. Wrapped the scarf around his injured hand and his sweater around the other one. He laid the jacket on the floor to give his hands and knees extra protection.

  Finally he reached a threshold that seemed very likely to be at the entrance to Pashie’s office. The remains of a black telephone line lay on the floor. He crawled farther into the room and tried to reach the place where the desk had been standing.

  He encountered something that felt like a boot. He took hold of it and pulled it toward himself. It was much too easy.

  Max tried to see something through the smoke. The laces on the leather boot were shredded and burned, a fragment of a tube sock was stuck inside it, and charred shreds of flesh surrounded a teenager’s shinbone.

  26

  David Julin pulled into Solvalla’s south parking lot and saw the dark-blue Volkswagen Passat parked some distance from the other cars, right next to a lamppost. And then he saw Ray nonchalantly leaning on the driver’s-side door.

  David parked next to Ray’s car without getting too close.

  He turned off the ignition but couldn’t make himself get out of the car. Just sat looking over at Solvalla’s spectator seats without really seeing them. His pulse was racing, and he took some deep breaths before he was finally able to open the car door. You didn’t want a man like Ray to see that you were upset.

  “We’ll talk in my car,” said Ray when David walked up to him.

  Without even looking at David, he opened the car door and sat behind the wheel.

  David stared at the car. Then he looked around. The parking lot was almost empty. It was quiet except for the cars on the highway and an airplane ta
king off from Bromma. He didn’t want to be here now, alone with the man who called himself Ray.

  Somehow he had to end this nightmare. There was nowhere to run to; the company still needed him, and with three children to support he depended on his monthly salary.

  He simply had to make a final deal with Ray.

  With Ray’s cold blue eyes watching him, David walked around the car. The license plate was Swedish. Ray spoke Swedish well, but there was definitely something un-Swedish about his manner. There was no doubt that the video he had sent David had come from a country other than Sweden.

  He opened the passenger-side door and got in. Ray looked as calm as always; it was as though he had only one emotional state. The notch in his lip contributed to his stiff facial expression.

  The blue shirt under his blazer was well ironed; his brown leather shoes were so highly polished that none of the gravel and slush that surrounded them on the streets of Stockholm would stick to them.

  Ray’s neatness and steady gaze had a strangely calming effect on David; he felt almost numb. It was difficult to retain the aggression he had felt during the drive now that he was sitting next to a man who could easily have been confused with one of the hundreds of anonymous IT consultants David worked with in the offices of Telia or Ericsson.

  But he had no idea who Ray really was.

  “You did a good job,” said Ray. “But you need to understand that it’s I, not you, who decides when your debt has been paid.”

  “Do you have any idea what I—”

  “And you don’t interrupt. When I speak, you listen.”

  The ice-blue eyes blazed.

  “I know everything about you. More than your family knows, and I think you’d like things to stay that way.”

  David felt his mouth, his tongue, his throat, his whole damned system suddenly go on strike. He could only nod.

  “Good. Of course I know what you’ve gone through. I don’t suppose you think I’m unaware of the consequences of the instructions I give you?”