The Bomber

by Liza Marklund

  Liza Marklund’s next thriller,

  VANISHED

  Prologue

  Time has stopped, she thought. This is what it’s like to die.

  Her head hit the tarmac, and she blacked out momentarily. Fear vanished, along with all sound. Only silence remained.

  Her thoughts were calm and clear. Her stomach and pelvis were pressed against the ground, ice and gravel against her cheek and in her hair.

  How strange, the way things turn out. How little you can actually predict. Who could have guessed that it would end up like this? A foreign shore, far away in the north.

  Then she saw the boy in front of her again – his outstretched arms – and her fear returned. She heard the shots, the sobbing that went with them, and felt helpless.

  ‘Sorry,’ she whispered to the memory of her brother. ‘I’m sorry I was so weak, so pathetically useless.’

  Suddenly she felt the wind again. It tugged at her bag, hurting her. Sound returned. One foot was aching. She became aware of the damp and cold coming through her jeans. She had simply fallen, she hadn’t been hit. Her mind went blank again, but one thought remained: Get away from here.

  She struggled onto all fours but the wind forced her back down. She tried again. The buildings were making the squalls unpredictable, sweeping in mercilessly from the sea, and along the road.

  I have to get away from here. Now.

  She knew the man was somewhere behind her. He was blocking the route back to town. She was stuck.

  I can’t just stay here in the glare of the headlights. I’ve got to get away. Anywhere but here!

  A fresh gust of wind took her breath away. She gasped and turned her back to it. More headlights, bright yellow, turning the grey, grimy surroundings into gold. Where could she go?

  She picked up her bag and ran with the wind behind her towards a building by the water. A long loading bay ran the whole length of it. There was a mass of wreckage that had blown to the ground, what on earth was it? A staircase? A chimney! Furniture. A gynaecologist’s chair. A Model T Ford. An instrument panel from a fighter plane.

  She struggled onto the loading bay, dragging her bag behind her. She wove between bathtubs and school-desks, finally crouching down behind an old desk.

  He’s going to find me, she thought. It’s only a matter of time. He’s never going to give up.

  She curled herself into the foetal position, rocking and breathing heavily, covered in sweat and filth from the tarmac. She realized she had walked right into the trap. She wasn’t going to get out of this. All he had to do was walk up to her, put the revolver to the back of her head and pull the trigger.

  She peered cautiously under one of the sets of desk-drawers. All she could see was ice and warehouses, bathed in the yellow of the headlights.

  I have to wait, she thought. I have to work out where he is. Then I must try to escape.

  After a few minutes her knees began to ache. Her thighs and calves grew numb, her ankles were sore, particularly the left one. She must have sprained it when she fell. Blood was dripping onto the quay from the cut in her forehead.

  Then she saw him. He was standing by the edge of the loading bay, three metres away, his harsh profile dark against the yellow. The wind carried his whisper with it.

  ‘Aida.’

  She shrank back and screwed her eyes shut, now a small animal, invisible.

  ‘Aida, I know you’re here.’

  She was breathing through her mouth, silently, waiting. The wind was on his side, silencing the sound of his footsteps. The next time she looked up he was walking along the other side of the road, beside the fence, his weapon discreetly concealed under his jacket. Her breathing accelerated, coming in irregular bursts, making her feel giddy.

  When he vanished round the corner and went inside the warehouse she got up, jumped down onto the tarmac and ran. Her feet were thudding, louder than the wind, her bag bouncing on her back, her hair blowing in her eyes.

  She never heard the shot, just sensed the bullet as it whistled past her head. She started running in a zigzag pattern, making abrupt, illogical twists and turns. Another whistling sound, another turn.

  Suddenly the ground stopped and the raging Baltic Sea took over. The waves were enormous. She hesitated for just a second.

  The man went over to the place where the woman had jumped and looked out at the sea. He peered intently, his gun poised, trying to see her head among the waves. Hopeless.

  She’d never make it. Too cold. The wind was blowing too hard. Too late.

  Too late for Aida from Bijeljina. She had overplayed her hand. She was too alone.

  He stood there for a few moments, the wind coming right at him, firing crystals of ice into his face.

  The sound of the Scania truck starting up behind him was carried away, never reaching him. The vehicle glided off into the yellow light and disappeared silently.

  Sunday 28 October

  The Securitas guard was alert. The chaos left by the previous evening’s hurricane was everywhere – toppled trees, sheets of metal and plastic from the roofs and walls of the warehouses, their contents scattered by the wind.

  He braked sharply as he entered the Frihamnen port area. In the broad, open space facing the water lay the innards of a fighter-plane cockpit, some medical equipment and sections of a bathroom. It took him a few seconds before he realized what he was looking at: wreckage from one of Swedish Television’s props stores.

  He didn’t see the dead bodies until he had switched off the engine and undone his seatbelt. Rather oddly, he didn’t feel fear or horror, just genuine surprise. The black-clad corpses were lined up in front of the wreckage of a staircase from some cancelled TV series. Before he had even got out of the car he knew they had been murdered. It didn’t take great powers of deduction. Parts of the men’s skulls were missing, and a sticky substance had run out of their bodies onto the icy tarmac.

  Without a thought for his own safety, the guard got out of his car and walked over to the men. They were no more than a couple of metres away. His reaction was one of astonishment. The corpses looked extremely odd – their eyes had partly popped out of their sockets, and their tongues were hanging out a bit. Like Marty Feldman’s younger brothers, he thought. Each had a small mark towards the top of his head; each was missing an ear, and, as he’d already noticed, parts of their skulls were missing.

  The living, breathing man stared at the two dead ones for a while; he was later unable to estimate for how long. His stare was broken when a lingering gust of the storm swept between the grain silos and knocked the Securitas guard to the ground. He put his hands out to break his fall and one of them landed in the spilled brain tissue from one of the bodies. The feeling of the cold, sticky goo between his fingers made him immediately, violently sick. He threw up on the bonnet of his car, then tried frantically to wipe off the mess from his fingers on the material of the front seat.

  Read the complete book – coming soon