Under Water (Anton Modin Book 3)

by Anders Jallai

  CHAPTER 94

  Modin heard rapid footsteps coming from the living room. He pulled out his Glock 17 and sat with his back to the wall so he could control both the door and the open window. He was breathing heavily. He felt nauseous.

  • • •

  Jöran saw the two men approaching at high speed. He turned round and looked at Bergman who was on the way up, pulling the sledge. They would soon be able to see him.

  Jöran only had a few seconds to make a decision. He had to do something. He slid out from his hiding place and tried to radiate calm, with one hand behind his back.

  “Hello, I’m looking for Mr. Putin, Mr. Vladimir Putin,” Jöran Järv said in English.

  The two men stopped in their tracks and looked at each other. Then Jöran quickly pulled his handgun and fired two shots. One hit Evald in the forehead. The other shot hit Jaak in the throat. Both bodyguards slumped to the ground. The silencer kept all noise to a minimum.

  Evald was dead before he hit the snow. Jaak was kneeling in the snow, pressing the hole in his neck tightly with both hands. Blood seeped through his fingers, dripping into the white snow. It felt like an eternity before he dropped.

  “Mom,” he said, just before his head hit the ground with a thud.

  Jöran turned to Bergman. He seemed scared shitless. Then the two of them pulled the sledge up toward the house.

  CHAPTER 95

  The door to the bathroom opened a fraction. Modin got up silently, and slipped right behind the open door. He watched Loklinth walk in past him.

  Loklinth did not turn on the light but went straight to the open window and stuck his head out, checking both directions.

  Modin held his breath. Then he took two quick steps, firmly gripped Loklinth’s neck and pressed the rag with chloroform hard over his mouth and nose. As Loklinth pushed back, Modin lost his balance and fell on his back, banging his head on the tiled wall. It forced him to let go of Loklinth’s face. Loklinth was able to wiggle out of Modin’s viselike grip. He let out a scream and pounced on Modin like a wounded animal.

  Fuck, Modin thought as Loklinth raised his right arm to hit him. Then a shot rang out. It sounded like the popping of a champagne cork. Loklinth fell down over Modin, moaning faintly. Modin saw Jöran Järv’s head in the window. He had his gun in front of him, ready to shoot.

  “How is it going, Modin,” he hissed, his mind racing.

  Modin could not utter a sound. He pushed away Loklinth who was whimpering. He rolled him over so he ended up on his back. Then Modin got up and turned on the bathroom light. Loklinth had been hit in his left shoulder.

  “What did you do that for?” Modin panted.

  “Saving your life, old buddy. Come on, grab him. We have to bolt before the cops arrive. They received an alarm, which may have gone straight through to the authorities.”

  “They?”

  “Two dead bodyguards out here,” Jöran Järv said.

  “What’s happening?” Kim was standing in the bathroom doorway.

  “We were forced to shoot him,” Modin said, his eyes flickering from Loklinth to Kim to Järv.

  “Come on, hoist the fucker this way,” Jöran Järv ordered, putting away his gun.

  Modin and Kim helped to lift Loklinth through the bathroom window. They didn’t want to use the front door as they feared someone could see them from the street. They succeeded with some effort.

  “Go get your clothes, Kim,” Modin said. He had regained a certain level of depth to his voice. “We’re going to exit this way.”

  CHAPTER 96

  They skied rapidly over the ice. Away from the house and out onto Stora Värtan lake. They skied one after the other in single file. Kim had left in her car. They would meet up at Jöran’s cottage. It was simply too risky to send Loklinth in the car alone with Kim. He was too much of a pro and might be able to escape, even if he was hurt. They also didn’t want to leave behind any equipment or skis at the scene. Loklinth, knocked out from the chloroform, was being dragged on the sledge. They had temporarily patched the gunshot wound with a pressure pad.

  Modin had dragged the dead bodyguards to the boathouse and hidden them inside before they left. He had tried to cover the blood trails with loose snow, but there was blood everywhere.

  They soon got back to the boat club at Lidingö Island, pulled up the sledge, and stuffed the unconscious Loklinth in the trunk of the car. They got in, Bergman turned on the ignition, and they drove over the Lidingö Bridge toward the Stockholm city center. None of them had said a word since they left the house.

  “What the fuck are we doing?” Bergman finally said. “This wasn’t part of the plan. You can’t just shoot people dead, Jöran.”

  “So what’s your frigging suggestion on how we should have solved this problem? Should we have given up, let the guards capture us, or called Mom? Grow up, man.”

  In the rear view mirror, Bergman could see that Jöran was staring at him.

  “There’s no need to be sarcastic, Jöran. It’s just that this is now a whole new ball game. We’ll soon have the entire task force after us. That’s one hell of a game changer.”

  “Only if they’re able to figure out what happened,” Järv said. “They won’t find out until tomorrow that Loklinth has been kidnapped. It’s in the middle of the night, everyone’s asleep. We’ve got a head start. Besides, I had no choice. Those two weren’t Swedes; they would have shot first. You can bet on that. I had no choice. If anyone ought to understand that, it is you.”

  “Okay, okay. But we have also shot and wounded the head of Special Ops,” Bergman said. “That’s a far cry from the trip to the German Trade Fair I am supposedly visiting this weekend,” he said, referring to the cover story he had fed his wife and daughter. “Is that what you wanted, Modin?”

  Modin didn’t respond.

  CHAPTER 97

  MUSKÖ ISLAND, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8

  They carried Loklinth into the cottage. He was still unconscious but the color was back on his cheeks. While they unpacked and put everything down in Jöran Järv’s basement, Kim started to make ham and cheese sandwiches. She was now one of the team. No one doubted that any longer, not even Modin, who kept glancing at her when she wasn’t looking.

  The smell of food made him relax and he slowly felt life returning to his body, which had been dead stiff with cold.

  There was a special room for Loklinth in the basement. They put him on a mattress on the floor of what had been intended as a bomb shelter close to the Muskö naval base, built and paid for by Special Ops years ago. It was handy to have such a facility, Modin thought. This is where Loklinth would be staying for a while.

  “They provided me with at least three times the living area at no extra cost,” Järv said.

  A porta potty was in one corner of Loklinth’s new abode, and a bucket of water and towels in the other. Modin found a bible on Jöran’s bookshelves, which, judging by the stamp on the inside cover, had been stolen from a hotel ages ago, and he put it in the room too. Was he trying to show respect for Loklinth’s faith?

  They decided not to interfere any more with Loklinth’s wound. The bullet had passed clean through his shoulder. It would heal by itself.

  When they had finished in the basement, Modin went up to help Kim set the table.

  “Two dead, and one wounded,” Kim said. “Is that how you guys at Special Ops operate?”

  “We used to,” Jöran said. “I do believe that Mr. Modin might have forgotten that fact.”

  “Oh, shut up, Jöran,” Modin said as he grabbed a slice of crisp bread and began spreading the butter so vigorously that the brittle slice snapped in two. “Damn!”

  “Relax, Anton,” Kim said and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s OK.”

  “I need something to drink,” he said. “Have you got any hard stuff, Jöran, apart from beer?”

  “There’s whisky in the closet.”

  “I’ve suppressed all that stuff,” Modin said to Kim. “I’m sorry. All I r
emember is a few sporadic incidents. Did we kill people at Special Ops, Jöran?”

  “Are you kidding me? Do you really not remember?” He drank a little tea and looked at Modin with suspicion. “You’ve killed… several times.”

  CHAPTER 98

  DJURSHOLM, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8

  The cars rolled into the yard. Bob Lundin and the Special Ops technician J-O Grahn were in one vehicle, Göran Filipson from the Security Service in the other.

  The sun was struggling to rise through a bank of mist just over the horizon at Stora Värtan lake, creating long shadows over the uneven ground all around. The residents of the exclusive Djursholm suburb were on their way to work or school. They were so weighed down by the heavy lid of the sky and their day-to-day worries that they barely noticed the approaching helicopter. It was hovering over Djursholm, looking for traces of the night’s events.

  A national alert had been issued at around ten in the morning to all the top brass in the intelligence and security organizations throughout Sweden. Special Ops chief Chris Loklinth had vanished. He had not turned up at work that morning. He could not be reached by phone or email. The Security Service had traced his cellphone to his home in Djursholm. That was why Bob Lundin was now standing at Loklinth’s door ringing the doorbell.

  “Hey, you guys, this window is open,” J-O Grahn said. “Someone has opened it from the inside.” He pointed cautiously up at the window with his gloved fingers and peered in through it. “Oh fuck! There’s blood in here.”

  “We’ll have to break down the door.” He gave a sign to a huge gorilla of a man. The gorilla turned up shortly afterwards with a battering ram and a significant underbite.

  “You guys move,” Lundin said.

  The gorilla with the underbite banged the door open and stepped aside.

  The house was empty. There were two half-empty whisky glasses on the table. The light was on in the bathroom and the bathroom door was open. Grahn went in first and photographed and measured the pools of blood on the floor.

  “Don’t go in there. I have to do tests and footprints,” he said as he was on his way out to the car.

  “What could have happened?” Lundin said, when Grahn returned.

  “Don’t know yet. We’ll know more when we’ve checked the blood and the other marks on the floor and tiles.”

  “Don’t forget to check the glasses for fingerprints.”

  Grahn, usually composed, was as pale as a sheet of paper when he said that he had already thought of that.

  “It doesn’t look too good. Seems like someone has taken Chris away from here by force, dead or alive,” Lundin said. “This is no lone lunatic. If it’s a kidnap, there’ll be a demand soon. Let’s hope so, anyway. I’ll call in the Special Forces Team.”

  “No, don’t do that, Lundin. I have a better suggestion,” Göran Filipson said, who was surveying the scene of the crime, his hands deep in the pockets of his trench coat.

  CHAPTER 99

  MUSKÖ ISLAND, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8

  A large van turned into the yard in front of Jöran Järv’s cottage. The headlights were shining straight onto the living room windows. Kim was awake, put on a jacket, and walked slowly out onto the steps. It was a delivery van.

  The man driving the vehicle pulled on the emergency brake with a rasping sound and got out.

  “Diving equipment. Is this the right address?”

  Kim nodded.

  The driver pulled out four large pallets with air bottles, diving suits, two large gas tubes with oxygen, two with helium and one with argon; a compressor, several boxes with diving computers and software, diving masks, fins, belts, ropes, buoys, emergency rockets, rolls of lines, Thinsulate underwear, and more.

  “Sign here, please. What are you going to do? Dive to find Atlantis?”

  “Something like that,” Kim said and signed the form. At the same time, she realized that the driver could be a problem. Maybe they should have sent the stuff to another address, but it was too late now.

  She let the equipment remain where it was and went back in to wake up the others.

  She made fresh coffee and set the table with warm milk, juice, and bread. Then she turned on the radio and tuned in to the popular call-in-tunes-on-demand show on Swedish Radio Channel One. Someone was complaining about the fact that electricity had become too expensive—things were better before, they said, when there was a state monopoly. The radio would have to do as an alarm clock!

  Modin jumped out of bed. He didn’t notice the equipment. He had clearly not heard the van either. It was still dark outside, and from the inside, you could barely make out the pallets with the equipment in the front yard. Modin went over to the radio and turned down the volume. Bergman and Järv showed up at the same time, both fully dressed.

  “Breakfast’s ready, guys,” Kim said. “When you’re finished, there’ll be a few things to pick up from the yard.”

  Bergman and Järv stretched their necks. They surveyed the pallets and their eyes lit up.

  “Amazing what a woman’s hand can arrange,” Bergman said with a smile. “Food and other necessities as soon as you get out of bed.”

  Modin remained serious.

  “Who’ll feed the monster?” he asked with sleepy eyes.

  “It should be someone he doesn’t recognize,” Bergman said, sitting down to breakfast. “I don’t think he has realized who kidnapped him, yet.”

  “Oh, he knows all right,” Modin said and sat down next to Kim. “The fact that Kim was there at the time will make the old fart put two and two together. We’ve got a sly old fish in our net.”

  “I agree,” Jöran Järv said, who was limping around, trying to stretch out his back. “We might as well be open about it. We’ll let him go in exchange for immunity for us. That’s the only alternative, the way I see it. Or he dies.”

  “Do you have to be so literal?” Bergman said, and looked down into his coffee cup.

  “Can you be anything else if you are up against the whole security apparatus of the state?”

  He laughed.

  “I recognize you, Jöran. That’s exactly what we were like,” Modin began to laugh, too. “Do you remember when we told each other that we’d rather die if we, for example, lost a leg in battle. That we would kill one another in that case. We were all pretty strange in the head at the time. With the right training, you can get soldiers to do whatever you want.”

  He turned to Kim. She held his eyes for a moment.

  “Isn’t that how it should be?” Jöran said, reaching for another slice of crisp bread.

  “No, Jöran,” Kim said and smiled at Modin gently. “There is another world out there, one you should go and investigate. It’s a world where people are real, not manipulated, where people care about each other, and not about money.”

  “Says the woman with millions in her bank account from a husband she didn’t care about.”

  “How dare you?” Kim yelled, but Modin put a hand on her shoulder to calm her down.

  “I need you right now like a hole in the head,” he said, glancing over at Jöran. “Go for it, Järv.”

  “Stop that,” Kim said. “You’re like two buddies at a juvenile detention center. We have to be cunning, not strong and tough.” She sank her teeth into a cheese sandwich and waited until she had chewed most of it. “Tell me about your plans. Why do you have to obey the U.S. to dive down to the M/S Estonia?”

  CHAPTER 100

  I owe the Americans a favor,” Bergman said as he watched Kim chewing away. “They rescued my daughter Astrid last summer. Now they want me and Modin to help them get something that is inside the Estonia ferry.”

  Bergman reached for the butter. A ray of light lay across the packet and he followed it with his gaze out through the window. Daylight had snuck up on them. He couldn’t help looking out over the strait. It looked inviting. The ice lay thick, but the rising sun was radiating warmth through the window. Spring was in the air, he could feel it. He then shifted his eyes
back to his friends and companions.

  What have we gotten ourselves into? The events of the last day with two deaths in Djursholm and a wounded state official in the basement had completely changed the parameters. Like last year on Black Island, they were at a point of no return.

  “What do you think this dive to the Estonia is all about?” Jöran said.

  “Could it be weapons?” Bergman said.

  “I know that there were weapons on board or at least military technology, “Jöran said. “That’s what they were saying at the office, for a while after the accident and before we dove.”

  “You have already dived down to the Estonia?” Kim said with big eyes. “Please do tell.”

  “It is still classified information, but I assume you will keep it to yourselves.” Jöran turned toward Kim. “We dove a few weeks after the ferry sank from one of the Navy’s small vessels. The group we belonged to was simply termed the ‘Diving Group’—Special Ops people with diving training and experience. Modin was part of that team up until the Estonia sank.”

  “So you dived down there, too?” Kim looked at Modin in surprise.

  “No,” Modin said sharply. “My family was down there, and so they thought I was a security risk.” He glared at Jöran.

  “We measured the radioactivity on board and made a superficial survey of the wreck,” Jöran continued after a pause. “We dove using a manned underwater craft.”

  “Did you pick up any radioactivity?” Kim said.

  “Not directly. It is hard to measure radioactivity under water. Water insulates. We would have to have measured right over the source to obtain any results.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That we didn’t find the source of the radioactivity. It may not have been on board any more. What do I know? What is clear is that we didn’t pick up any radioactivity.”