Ten Swedes Must Die

by Martin Österdahl

  He understood now. And he had heard enough. Anastasia would never tell him where Ozols was. She didn’t care about the consequences. It wasn’t peace she wanted. Max remembered what Sarah had told him about her first meeting with Anastasia. Casus belli. An event that provides a justification for a declaration of war. The terrible thing Max was trying to prevent from happening was exactly what she wanted to happen. There was no possibility of reconciliation.

  It was time to hand her over to the police.

  He looked at the purse on his lap.

  We will never lay down our weapons.

  He laid his fingers on the clasp.

  Anastasia threw herself at him, tried to bite him in the neck and jerk the purse from his grasp at the same time. He rolled to the side, down on the floor. Anastasia followed him down, dug her nails into his cheeks. Max twisted free and pushed her away. Her back struck the edge of the table, and she let out a gasp when she fell to the floor. Twisted in pain.

  Max stood up and opened the purse. Dug around in it among keys, wallet, cell phone, powder compact, lipstick.

  No weapon.

  At the bottom of the purse lay a slip of paper. He took it out. It was a ticket for a cruise. The boat was to leave Stockholm in only a few hours.

  The gigantic luxury cruise liner that lay anchored in the middle of Saltsjön.

  The Seas of the World.

  120

  Sofia ended the call as the car they were riding in turned toward Skeppsbron. She turned to Max.

  “A police boat is meeting us at the quay. We’ll board the ship via a rope ladder. The vessel’s captain has been informed, and they’ll delay their departure until we’ve given them the go-ahead.”

  Max nodded.

  He took Anastasia’s cell phone from his jacket pocket, opened her contacts list, and looked for Ozols’s name. It wasn’t there. He went on to her text messages.

  The last text was from an unknown cell phone number.

  It was in Latvian. All Max understood was “Sky Bar” and “Seas of the World.”

  The message had been sent two hours earlier. Max checked whether Anastasia had replied to it. She hadn’t. Could Ozols have heard that something had happened to her? If she didn’t show up soon, he would smell trouble.

  The car stopped abruptly, and they ran down to the waiting boat.

  On their way across the water, they passed a Djurgården ferry overloaded with passengers. There was a longer line than usual over at the ferry terminal. A warm, sunny day in August. Given that the area around Kungsträdgården had been blocked off, it wasn’t surprising that the ferries to Djurgården were taking on extra passengers.

  The enormous vessel towered over them like a skyscraper. They quickly jumped from the police boat to the rope ladder. When they reached the door opening, a guard told them that most of the passengers were on one of the decks or behind the panorama glass that surrounded the ship’s restaurants so that they could take their last pictures of the Swedish capital. The ship had four thousand passengers. The crew had gotten the call from the police so recently that they’d had no time to search the vessel for the man Max was looking for. Ludwigs Ozols and Anastasia Friedenberga were booked into cabin 105, but no one was there at the moment.

  They ran up a flight of stairs and reached the promenade deck. Max pushed open the door, and they ran out. Ahead of them was a passage that looked like a large shopping center. And a myriad of people, mostly roughly the same age as Ludwigs Ozols, between seventy and eighty.

  “How in the hell are we going to find him here?” said Sofia.

  Max looked toward an endless row of restaurants and shops offering luxury brands, discovered an orientation sign. He walked over to it and studied the ship’s spaces from the uppermost deck to the engine room at the very bottom. At the top of the ship were the main recreation areas. Two swimming pools with slides, a climbing wall, an ice rink, a basketball court, tracks along the edge of the ship on which passengers could jog or skate. On a lower level was an auditorium that would hold two thousand people. Cabin 105, which was one of the ship’s larger cabins, was on one of the upper decks on the port side.

  Above them the sun shone through the high domed glass roof of the shopping arcade’s atrium. The glass roof was help up by a broad ellipse-shaped steel girder that was held up, in turn, by twelve pillars. The panes of glass were separated by thin metal supports that gave the roof a delicate, gracile appearance.

  “Max,” said Sofia in a low voice. She pointed at the sign, on which the Sky Bar was marked.

  Max nodded and looked for various ways to get there. Ozols would no doubt have positioned himself for a perfect view of everything so he could enjoy the sight of his beloved when she arrived, triumphant, after executing the last part of their joint plan—and so he would be able to spot an enemy from a distance.

  They couldn’t rule out the possibility that Ozols was armed.

  They ran toward the restaurant that lay directly under the Sky Bar. It was full of passengers starting their cruise with a brunch laid out on long tables. Waiters in white shirts and black bow ties poured steaming coffee at the tables or hurried to the buffet with new trays of sliced sandwich meat and cheese and just-fried bacon. Max saw the swinging door they were passing through, hurried over there and pushed it open. It struck a waiter on his way out. He lost his balance, and a pitcher of tomato juice spilled on the floor.

  “What the hell?”

  Max and Sofia ignored him and looked ahead and to the side, to stairs leading upward. The muscles in his thighs and calves burned as he flew up the stairs. His heart was pounding in his chest.

  When they reached the uppermost landing, Max stopped and tried to get the violent throbbing in his chest to diminish. So close now.

  He turned to Sofia. “Are you ready?”

  She pulled her gun from its holster but held it concealed inside her jacket.

  They stepped out onto the top deck. A wonderful view of Stockholm.

  Sofia took Max’s arm and pointed toward Kungsträdgården. Max saw a slowly rotating light at the center of the square. It was the digital clock that indicated how much time was left until the inauguration of Mir 2000.

  He understood what Sofia meant.

  An hour and twenty minutes.

  A stress signal sent to the Russian embassy.

  A signal that was counting down.

  A booby-trapped suitcase the bomb group had found.

  Shit. The countdown for the stress signal has been in front of our noses the entire time.

  He glanced at his watch.

  In an hour and twenty minutes, it would be noon. That was the time the foreign minister and the prime minister had been scheduled to inaugurate the new Swedish-Russian cooperation, in front of thousands of Stockholmers.

  The perfect opportunity for a terrorist. The perfect weapon for a terrorist.

  “The bomb is going to go off when the prime minister was supposed to be taking the stage to kick off the event,” he said.

  Sofia pulled at his arm and pointed toward the bar. At the moment, there was no bartender. A lone man was sitting there with his back to the wall. He was wearing a beige linen suit of burlap-like fabric. Max recognized the sharp, straight lines of the man’s profile, the white hair, and the thick brown frames of the sunglasses. He was old. He was unmistakably the man in the picture from the counterterrorism police in Riga.

  Ozols.

  “Here, take these,” Sofia said quietly. She gave him her handcuffs. “Do you know how to use them?”

  Max nodded.

  “Good. I don’t want to take my eyes off him for a second.”

  They walked slowly toward the bar area. When they had reached the entrance and thus drawn level with Ozols, Sofia took cover behind a wall that separated the bar from the open deck, in order to avoid a panic if at all possible. She took out her Sig Sauer and pointed it at him.

  Max walked on. The old man turned toward him, raised his eyebrows slightly when he saw
the pistol a few meters away. He lifted the glass in front of him and took a sip of the clear, iced beverage.

  “Who are you? And your female friend?”

  “We know everything, Ozols. Anastasia is with the police. She’s told them everything.”

  Ozols slowly put the drink down on the bar with his right hand. His left hand lay completely still in his lap. He was wearing leather gloves.

  “I don’t know why you are speaking to me so threateningly,” he said in strongly accented Swedish. “But I don’t appreciate it.”

  “You couldn’t accept our apology?” said Max. “You couldn’t do as your brothers did—forgive what happened and move on. You had to murder a Swede for every brother who took his own life or was shot as soon as he boarded the Beloostrov. Ten Swedes, carefully chosen because of sins committed in the forties, chosen for the ten legionaries who lost their lives.”

  Ozols stared at Max through his thick glasses.

  “You seem to know who I am. Shouldn’t you be polite and tell me who you are?”

  “It doesn’t matter who I am,” said Max.

  Ozols took another sip of his drink without taking his eyes off Max.

  “The photographs,” he said. “You are the boy Rebeka took to her heart. I should have realized that. And warned Oto.”

  “Too late for that now. Did you think they were going to let you get away with what you did to Goga Golubkin? Oto wasn’t a pretty sight when the Russians were through with him.”

  Ozols nodded.

  “The Russians,” he said, clenching his teeth. “It’s never a pretty sight.”

  “You drove him to murder his own mother. In the end it all led to his own execution. Was that how you wanted his life to end? Perhaps he was just a tool to you and Anastasia.”

  “Oto’s life was over before it began. Rebeka saw to that. Oto is a martyr for Aistia. I made his life meaningful in the end.”

  “Aistia?” said Max. “Did you think your senseless violence could bring that nation into existence?”

  “Senseless?” he said. “What nation has come into existence without violence? The Russian empire? Your nation, perhaps? Is that what you believe?”

  “It wasn’t enough for you to extinguish ten Swedish lives for your comrades who died. You had to win. By a large margin.”

  Where Ozols sat, he was perfectly positioned to watch the last act play itself out down on Stockholm’s most central square.

  “I see there are no people down there,” said Ozols, looking toward Kungsträdgården. “Is that your work?”

  Max took a few more steps toward Ozols and stood in front of him. He took out the handcuffs.

  Ozols positioned his hands in front of his body.

  “Here you are,” he said. “I have nothing to hide. You can tell your colleague to put the pistol away.”

  Max cuffed the man’s wrists. One of his arms was strangely thick. Sofia slid the pistol into its holster and walked over.

  “How do we open the suitcase?” Max asked.

  “It’s too late.”

  “I can’t let it explode.”

  Ozols shook his head, and Max realized he would never reveal the answer.

  Max began searching through the pockets of Ozols’s jacket and trousers. He was unarmed. All Max found was a key card. He pulled the pistol out of Sofia’s holster with his right hand and held the key card up in front of Ozols in his left.

  “Get up,” he said. “We’re going to your cabin.”

  Max pushed Ozols along in front of him, toward the stairs that led down from the ship’s upper deck. Sofia followed at a sensible distance. Max saw her constantly looking around to check whether Ozols might have help. Despite the care with which they moved, it was obvious that the old man was being coerced. The people in their vicinity moved around them restlessly as they slowly approached the stairwell.

  Too many people, thought Max. But he was forced to take the quickest route to the cabin.

  They passed alongside the vaulted glass roof Max had seen from below when he’d been standing down in the gallery. Ozols began pulling at his left arm as though he were unbuttoning cufflinks. Suddenly his arm jerked. His glove fell to the deck with a heavy thud, and Ozols twisted around. His arms were free, and before Max could react, Ozols had struck him in the face with the hard metal of the handcuffs, which were now attached only to Ozols’s right hand.

  Max recoiled and took a few staggering steps backward to regain his balance. Felt blood running down his cheek. He looked down at the hand on the floor. A prosthesis.

  Ozols started running.

  Now the other passengers reacted, running and yelling. Toppled sun chairs and people pushing toward the stairwell blocked their path. Ozols took a quick look behind him, realized he could neither continue forward nor go back. He grasped the railing that separated the deck from the glass roof, swung himself over it, and walked out onto the glass.

  Shit.

  Max went over the railing and followed Ozols cautiously out onto the glass, placing his feet delicately as though he were walking on weak ice.

  “Stop!” shouted Sofia.

  But Ozols kept walking. He had now gotten almost to the center of the big glass roof.

  “Get off the glass!” said a voice from the ship’s public-address system. “Get off the glass immediately!”

  Max kept on carefully walking toward Ozols. He was moving faster and with greater agility than the old man. But Ozols did not hesitate. He walked out to the center of the glass with his gaze fixed on the railing on the other side.

  When Max’s fingers reached Ozols’s shoulder, Ozols suddenly stopped. He bent his knees and hopped with his feet together. Once. Twice. Max backed away, felt the glass ripple and vibrate under his feet, and stopped. He stood completely still and stretched out his arms to balance on the swaying glass.

  What the hell is he doing?

  A smile spread across Ozols’s lips when he heard the crack.

  “Max! Get off the glass!”

  Sofia was standing at the railing with her pistol pointed at them. She shook her head.

  A screeching sound from the public-address system triggered even greater panic in the mass of people. Max saw Sofia trying to calm them as they ran around her, but nothing helped.

  Ozols hopped again. Same wild look as before.

  The cracking sound from the glass got louder.

  Was this the end? For a man who’d lost everything and won at last? If the plan went through to its conclusion, it made no difference to him whether he survived.

  He threw himself at Max, knocking him over.

  The sharp edge of a thin metal beam holding roof panes together cut into Max’s back when they landed on the glass. Under them, the glass was cracking more and more. Max looked down. Four stories below them, people stood with their mouths open, looking up. They dropped whatever they were carrying and jumped aside.

  “Max! You have to get off the glass!”

  Just then it broke.

  121

  Ludwigs Ozols fell, his arms waving. When his body struck the marble floor between the shops far below, the sound it made was not a bang but a dull thud, which was followed by a compact silence. This silence lasted for about a second. Then came the loud smattering noise of glass raining down on his body.

  Max balanced on the metal girder that had saved his life. He held on to the adjacent girders with his hands and feet. His weight made them sway. He turned over so he was lying on his stomach and crawled cautiously along the metal structure until he reached the railing.

  Sofia was waiting for him.

  “Oh my God. Are you all right?”

  Max exhaled and took a last look at the gallery far below him.

  “We have to get to the cabin.”

  They pushed through the crowds to the stairs and up to the deck where cabin 105 was located. No hysterically screaming people here. Just a long corridor of closed doors. They arrived outside the cabin, and Max took out the key card.
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  “What if this door is booby-trapped, too?” asked Sofia. “Maybe we should wait for someone from the bomb team.”

  “There’s no time for that,” said Max. He slid the key card into the door.

  When they heard the quiet click from the lock, Max looked at Sofia and nodded.

  They entered the cabin. A coral-colored sofa was just inside the door on the right. On the left was a desk with a cupboard of cherrywood above it. Chair, TV, double bed. Two windows with white curtains. On the bed a comforter bearing a flag in the Nordic Dannebrog style that characterized the Swedish flag. A black cross against a white background. The great Baltic nation.

  Max’s heart was pounding in his chest. They were so close to fixing everything now. And at the same time so close to an apocalyptic catastrophe. Fifty minutes remained until twelve o’clock.

  Sofia pulled an old backpack from under the desk. She opened it and took out a brass case.

  “What could this be?” she asked.

  “Wait, Sofia. Don’t touch anything.”

  Shit.

  He took out the little piece of paper he had torn from the alprazolam package. In his mind he saw the eagle on the man’s ring, the eagle that had defiantly turned its angry head toward the east and away from the west.

  Ivanovich.

  Had Papanov known the entire time? Did the suitcase explain why he had come to Sweden?

  I have no choice.

  He took out his phone and dialed the number.

  “You were aware of the threat from the beginning,” he said.

  “You should have worked with us,” said Papanov. “Now we don’t have much time.”

  “The suitcase is in Kungsträdgården. It’s equipped with a molniya. How do I open it?”

  “You don’t.”

  “There’s always a first man and a second man who can open the molniya and disarm both it and what’s in the suitcase. I assume Goga Golubkin was one of them. Are you the other agent?”

  “No, the second one drew his last breath at the bottom of the Barents Sea.”

  So what Charlie Knutsson had heard was true? There really was a connection between one of the feared suitcases and the Kursk?