Anger Mode

by Stefan Tegenfalk

  Martin had a hire car with number plates that were fully visible. It was far from perfect, but there was little movement on the street and it was beginning to get dark. If they handled this correctly, then nobody would notice that anything had happened.

  “Are you ready?” Martin asked, looking at Tor.

  Tor nodded.

  “I’ll go on ahead,” Martin said. “Wait for thirty seconds.”

  “If the door is locked?” Tor asked.

  “Look in the boot and see if there are any tools you can use to smash the window.”

  “Remember, I only have one hand,” Tor said and held up his plastic-cased right hand.

  “Use your left hand then,” Martin said. “Just get him out of the car and I’ll help you.”

  Martin thought one last time before he opened the car door. He could still change his mind.

  But then he felt the charm around his neck and he knew. It was now or never.

  Tor tapped the window. He had found a tyre lever. Martin got out of the car, nodded to Tor, and walked over to the detention centre cell-block doorway. As he passed the Porsche, he saw a figure in the passenger seat. He had moved from the back seat to the front. He signaled to Headcase, who nodded back.

  Martin kept on walking and positioned himself by the doorway of the detention-cell-block. From the corner of his eye, he saw Tor walking towards the Porsche, but from the wrong side.

  Tor ripped open the driver’s door and leaned in. A second later, the passenger door opened, and Martin could see the journalist halfway out of the car, trying to free himself from Tor’s grip. The idiot was trying to drag the journalist through the driver’s door.

  Martin could feel his racing pulse race even faster. After some wrestling, Jörgen managed to wriggle his way out of his jacket and Tor’s grip. The terrified journalist ran off in a panic towards the cell-block entrance.

  Martin turned and pretended to be talking on his mobile phone. When Jörgen was just metres away from the door and safety, Martin punched him hard in the solar plexus. The journalist folded like a pocket knife and fell hard onto his back. Martin quickly looked around. There was no sign of any people around, except for the idiot moose coming towards him.

  “The bastard ran!” Tor panted.

  “We have to get him in the car fast,” Martin hissed.

  Martin and Tor took hold of Jörgen’s shoulders and dragged him, running to Martin’s car. Jörgen could not make a sound. The blow to his belly had pushed all the air out of him and he was fully occupied with filling his lungs with air again.

  After tossing Jörgen into the boot, Martin drove off at high speed. As they passed the doorway of the detention centre cell-block, he saw from the corner of his eye Jonna de Brugge coming out. There had been a margin of only ten seconds.

  JONNA SWORE LOUDLY for the second time in only two days. Not only had she allowed Jörgen to stop by his flat on the way to the detention centre, but he had also been refused entry to the cell block because it was inappropriate to have a journalist roaming free among the staff and detainees. They had not known about their special arrangement, so that was the way it had to be.

  It was Jonna’s decision to let Jörgen change clothes at his flat, even though she knew the risks. But it was bloody well Walter’s fault that she had to go to the detention centre, where Jörgen was not allowed inside and so was forced to stay in the car by himself while Jonna placed Tuva Sahlin in protective custody.

  When she had handed over Sahlin and the leather waistcoat to the surprised custody officer at the detention cells, she had received a call from Walter, who confirmed in an exultant voice that they had been given the green light. Jonna was officially part of Julén’s investigation and, once again, on loan from RSU to the County CID. As a trainee of course, he clarified. Against all the rules and regulations, Walter was leading the investigation operations from his hospital bed. He would be forced to do that for a few weeks at least, according to an agitated Dr Täljkvist. Walter would also have access to a computer, which, although not connected to the police network, did have internet access. And he had his mobile, of course. Therefore, he would be able to lead the operations competently, and that had been sufficient for Julén, who had used her full range of contacts to staff the somewhat controversial investigation team.

  “Where has the baby disappeared to now?” Jonna muttered as she saw the empty car. “Has he wandered off?”

  She took out her mobile phone and called his number, noticing that the passenger door was not properly shut. After five rings, he answered.

  “Jörgen?” she asked, as she heard something rasping on the other end.

  “Iss … kid … nah …” someone gasped.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  Just breathless gasps in reply. It sounded as if someone was speaking in the middle of a storm. Then she heard faint, unfamiliar voices in the background. A second later, the call was cut off. When she redialled, she got his voicemail.

  “HOW THE HELL could we miss the mobile?” Martin swore loudly and shook his head. This was the second time he had messed up a body search. The stress was making him forget elementary skills. To forget to frisk a subject for a mobile phone was as negligent as not taking a weapon from a bank robber. Luckily, Jörgen had not been able to say much after the body punch from Martin. And even if he had managed to communicate anything on the phone, he did not have a clue where he was or in what car he was lying.

  Martin closed the boot of the car. Jörgen was lying in the foetal position with his back to the boot lid, presumably trying to conceal his mobile, so he had not seen Martin’s face.

  He now had to minimize every conceivable risk while still obtaining maximum benefit from every opportunity. The weak link in Martin’s strategy was the lanky git sitting next to him. The question was whether he should continue to do business with him. Immediately after the shooting in Gnesta, it all seemed very clear. He had imagined a scenario with an obedient moron who did everything that Martin told him without thinking. Tor was now looking unreliable. He was always brooding. Perhaps the shock had worn off. Perhaps he was no longer an obedient moron, but a vengeful one instead. Late shall the sinner awaken, as the saying went.

  Martin took a right turn into Långholmsgatan and then on over the Västerbron bridge. He sank deeper into thought. The situation would be coming to a head within the next hour, and his thoughts went over many possible scenarios.

  At Brommaplan, he turned left and continued towards Ekerö island. After passing the Sånga-Säby sign, he drove down a gravelled road with thick forest on either side. After a few hundred metres, the road ran out and he stopped the car next to a ditch.

  The light from the star-bright night sky lit up a small field in front of them.

  “What are we doing here?” Tor asked.

  He had been sitting quietly during the whole journey, contemplating his situation. He was an accomplice in a cop murder and would be a corpse as soon as the real cops got hold of him. Shot dead in some rigged shootout with a gun put in his hand and holes in his skull like a Swiss cheese. If the psycho sitting beside him didn’t already have plans for him. Why did he need Tor now that he had the journalist in the boot? Was he going to kill two birds with one stone and finish off Tor here in the middle of nowhere? If Tor was going to make his move, he had better do it here and now. Even if he did not have a weapon. Just a switchblade. The place was perfect, and both Omar’s hard drive and the ball of lard were in the car. Two possible sources of income. Jerry could always be trusted. This bloke was looking more like a loser’s ticket or even a bullet with his name on it.

  “We’re going to get some information out of our friend in the boot,” Martin answered and got out of the car.

  “Why?” Tor asked. “He has the evidence in some fucking safety deposit box.”

  “I want to make an assessment of the situation myself,” he said dryly.

  Suddenly everything fell into place. The loose ends that Tor had tried
to figure out suddenly connected with ominous precision, and he now knew why the cop had taken Jerry’s gun. It was linked to the cop murder and as contaminated as a crackhead tart. Jerry had been holding the gun, but Tor would be the fall guy. The psycho was arranging a set-up here. First, he would shoot the bloke in the boot with Jerry’s gun after he had made him talk, and then he would put it in Tor’s hands so that he …

  Death was slowly creeping up on him.

  CHAPTER 32

  “GONE?” WALTER CRIED and knew that he was going to have a migraine shortly.

  “Yes,” Jonna said. “He wasn’t in the car when I came out of the detention-cell block.”

  “Did you call his mobile?”

  “Of course,” Jonna answered, irritated. “And all I heard was someone gasping for breath and some strangers talking.”

  “Why would he want to leave?” Walter said. “He’s been hanging around you like a back pack. Why would he leave?”

  “We stopped off at his flat before I dropped off Tuva Sahlin,” Jonna said, with a guilty conscience.

  The phone went quiet. Probably the calm before the storm, she thought, and moved the phone a little farther from her ear.

  “And why did you do that?” Walter finally asked, now in a stern voice.

  “He needed to change clothes. He nagged me constantly about it and there was the lorry driver in the back seat complaining as well. In a moment of weakness, I let him persuade me.”

  “To give in to him was perhaps not such a good idea,” Walter declared.

  “You mean that somebody tailed us to the police station and took him by force?”

  “Why not? The Finn and Headcase are both looking for our fairy queen.”

  “I saw no sign that we were being followed.”

  “No, but you can’t always be sure. Good hunters are never seen. Were you never taught surveillance techniques at RSU?”

  “Do you think that Headcase and Salminen would be any good at surveillance?”

  “Probably not,” Walter agreed. “But there might be others who are.”

  “Who could that be?” Jonna asked doubtfully. “The ones that shot at Jörgen on the street? The Albanians?”

  “Hardly,” Walter said.

  “Who do you mean then?” Jonna asked, irritated. “Folke Uddestad, maybe?”

  “No, not him either. But he may have hired someone more professional, some ex-KGB or GRU people. There are quite a few of them for hire nowadays.”

  “If that’s the case, then we have quite a problem on our hands,” Jonna said resignedly.

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “To leave him in the car by himself wasn’t my decision,” Jonna said bitterly. “Since there were no explicit orders from Julén and yourself to allow him to enter the detention centre cell-block, there was no other option than to leave him in the car. And we were outside a police station.”

  Walter chuckled. “Let’s write one-one in the fuck-ups score sheet then.”

  Jonna knew she had made a mistake letting Jörgen go back to his flat. She was getting overconfident, perhaps? Negligent? Hardly, but extremely unlucky if they had been shadowed by some retired Russian agents who then had the nerve to grab him outside a police station.

  Commissioner Folke Uddestad was apparently quite innovative.

  “We should send out a description of Jörgen,” Jonna said, becoming overwhelmed by her sense of guilt.

  Even though she did not care much for Jörgen, she felt ashamed of her naivety.

  “Yours truly will take care of that,” Walter said. “Now let’s concentrate on bringing Leo Brageler in for questioning; he’s on the wanted list now. I’m waiting for a search warrant from Julén. In the meantime, you have to go to Uppsala where you’ll meet some local talent from their CID.”

  “I see, and who will lead the interrogation?” Jonna asked. “Should we bring him to the hospital, perhaps?”

  “Lilja will lead the interrogation, with you assisting,” Walter answered. “Inspector Lilja is about as proficient at interrogations as I am at cooking.”

  “How should I interpret that?”

  “When I get out of Täljkvist’s claws, I will treat you to some of my home cooking. Lilja’s technique will give you a flavour of how that will taste.”

  So they had finally found the pattern. The fifth had been a failure, just as the first. But that meant nothing any more. He found less and less comfort in what he had done. She had stopped talking to him. He prayed for Cecilia to show herself, but she remained silent. To whom was he praying anyway? There is no God. Perhaps he was praying to his subconscious, so that it would speak to him in Cecilia’s voice.

  He was sitting in a park with no compass, no direction. He had no idea why he was sitting there. Perhaps he was looking for an answer; he just wanted to look Bror Lantz in the eyes.

  The flat he lived in had become increasingly bleak. The house with his memories was occupied by the police. The end was getting closer and he knew what that meant. He and the others were experts on death. The soul was a chemical composition that together with electrical impulses constituted a sense of ego in the brain, nothing else. Like a memory card in a camera. The body was the camera. Empty and without content.

  He knew he would never see her again. There was no life after death, but the scientific certainty of the end still comforted him. That, in the infinite darkness, he would be rid of his pain.

  He was ready.

  JUST AS THOMAS KOKK was about to switch off his desk lamp for the evening and make his way home to his sleeping family, he received an urgent email. It was from Forensics and concerned Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik. After a moment’s hesitation, he sat back down in his chair and started to read the attached post-mortem report.

  Thirty seconds later, he picked up the phone and dialled the number of his newly discovered blood brother, Agency Director Anders Holmberg. Thomas Kokk would not be with his family for many hours.

  MARTIN BORG WALKED to the boot of the car and was about to open the boot lid when he heard a sound in the forest. At first, Martin thought it was a frightened animal. When he looked into the empty car, he realized that it was Tor who had run off into the woods. Martin stared thoughtfully at the thick forest.

  Why had he run off now? Was that journalist story just a bluff?

  There was no point in starting to hunt for Tor. Visibility was negligible and the forest was big enough to hide in. Tor did not present an immediate threat; he could not talk without implicating himself. If the idiot wanted to break their agreement here and now, there was nothing Martin could do to stop him.

  In fifteen minutes, Martin would himself be gone, but first he would have a little talk with the guy in the boot.

  EVERYTHING HAD HAPPENED so quickly. From out of nowhere, that Headcase had appeared and torn open the door to the Porsche. He had tried to pull out a terrified Jörgen, who instead had managed to open the passenger door on his side, throw himself out of it and run towards the detention-cell-block doorway. Just as safety had come within reach, everything had gone black.

  When he came to his senses, he was lying in the boot of a car. He had difficulty breathing and a terrible pain in his back and head. Somewhere through the fog, he heard a familiar sound. At first, he could not place the familiar snatch of music, the schnapps song with little Santas clinking glasses, but after a while he remembered that it was the ringtone of his mobile phone. After fumbling in the dark, he managed to get the mobile phone from his trouser pocket and luckily find the right button. But all he could get out were cracked whispers.

  Suddenly, the boot opened, and someone brutally tore the mobile phone from his hand.

  His last chance of salvation was gone.

  Jörgen was left in the dark and cold for some time until the boot opened again.

  This time, a voice told him to pull his shirt over his head and to turn his face away. The voice was disguised, almost in a comical way. It was dark and deep, like a trailer voiceover
for some Hollywood action film.

  Jörgen shook with cold and the fear of death. He was still having problems breathing and it was not helped by the ice-cold air. Through a crack between his shirt buttons, he could distinguish a figure in the dark. He had something wrapped around his head to hide his face. Judging by his height, it was not Headcase.

  “Where is the evidence on Folke Uddestad?” the voice muttered impatiently.

  So the purpose of the kidnapping was now clear. These characters were not keen on small talk.

  Jörgen did not know what to answer or even how to make himself heard. All his concentration was on keeping his breathing somewhat under control, while pain flashed between his lower back and his head. He tried to signal his inability to answer by waving a hand.

  “Uddestad!” the voice boomed, even more impatiently.

  Jörgen waved once again. This time, he managed to make a small sound. It sounded like a gasp.

  “Let’s try this one last time,” the voice said, more composed.

  Through the thin shirt fabric, Jörgen felt something cold and hard against his head. Shortly afterwards, he heard a familiar metallic sound.

  Jörgen closed his eyes and prayed. He prayed to a god he had never believed in.

  Suddenly, he created a sound. A sound left his lips between his tortured breaths.

  “I can’t hear you,” the voice hissed. “Speak louder.”

  “I don’t have anything anymore,” Jörgen blurted out. Slowly, he was beginning to regain control of his breathing and his voice.

  “Anything what?”

  “The police have everything on Uddestad,” Jörgen answered carefully. He had to struggle for each word.

  “You mean RSU and that little cunt Jonna de Brugge who drives around with you in a Porsche?”

  Jörgen nodded. How did he know that?

  “What was the evidence?”

  “A video and some photographs,” Jörgen answered truthfully.

  “What type of video?”

  “A sex video,” Jörgen explained.

  The voice pressed the gun harder. Obviously, not the right answer.