Project Nirvana

by Stefan Tegenfalk

  Directly after the meeting with the NBI and their German colleagues, Martin Borg went to the garage. He had to tell the Mentor what the Germans had said. Drug-X and Leo Brageler were just a small part of something much bigger and the only one left alive who might have any answers was Brageler. Martin needed the truth serum more than ever. But finding a name on Omar’s hard drive of someone who could get him Diaxtropyl-3S was not a priority right now. Martin had plenty of other problems to deal with.

  As soon as darkness fell, Hedman would make his escape as instructed and head for the meeting place, which he thought was his safe haven. The organization was exposed to one of its biggest threats in its history, according to the Mentor. Martin knew that he was to blame for its biggest problem. But he would repair the damage. Martin parked outside the superstore at Bromma airport and inserted a new SIM card. After three rings, the Mentor answered. Martin recounted what the Germans had told him. The Mentor seemed neither surprised at nor interested in Martin’s information.

  “We have two problems to solve first,” the old man said in a stern voice.

  Martin could not understand why he wasn’t interested.

  “It could be a biological weapon of mass destruction or . . .”

  “Our first problem is the solicitor, Alice McDaniel,” the Mentor interrupted. “The other problem is Hedman, as you know.”

  “But we have a solution . . .”

  “The problem is that Hedman has taken a police officer as his hostage, which puts things in a different light,” the Mentor interrupted again.

  “Really?”

  Martin didn’t understand why it was such a big problem.

  “By taking the policeman as a hostage, the fool has now become public enemy number one,” the old man said. “He’ll be on all the front pages, which is bad news for us. Every investigative journalist in the country will be digging up dirt on him and all it takes is one finger pointing in your direction and it’s all over. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Is it really such a big deal that the hostage is not a civilian?” Martin asked.

  “Yes, and it is making certain people in our organization nervous. The risks are too great.”

  Martin’s mouth was dry.

  “I’ll fix the problem myself,” he said.

  “That goes without saying,” the old man said. “As you perhaps understand, we will have to distance ourselves from you. You are too big a liability now. But to cover your tracks, we have asked the Albanians to furnish a body that matches your description of the Gnesta fugitive. A corpse. You’ll have to fix the rest as best you can.”

  Martin went ice cold. Thoughts spun in his head and he tried to find a plan among them. A plan of action. Or rather a plan of retreat for himself.

  “The woman solicitor?” he blurted out.

  “We’ll take care of her,” the Mentor answered and hung up.

  Martin sat with the phone in his hand for a while. He needed to clear his head of any irrelevant thoughts and simply focus. Focus on Hedman. With that idiot gone, he would be safe.

  The location he had suggested was a small, private garage on Luntmakargatan. There were three exits, one of which was Sveavägen, next to Rådmansgatan underground station.

  Hedman would travel one stop on the underground to Odengatan. From the corner of Karlsbergsvägen and Upplandsgatan, a black Saab 9-3 would take him out of the city. What Hedman did with the hostage was his own business, just as long as he got to the rendezvous point as instructed. Martin now had to return to HQ to avoid arousing suspicion, and then get hold of a black Saab 9-3. It was all up to him now.

  Jörgen Blad’s phone rang. Somewhat surprised, he saw Jonna’s number on the display. He eagerly pressed the green button.

  “Finally,” he greeted her, trying to sound calm.

  “I want you to do me a favour,” Jonna answered, stressed.

  “I see. And the return favour is?”

  “That I don’t hang up.”

  “Not exactly the deal of the year,” Jörgen protested.

  “Well?”

  “Can I use this favour?”

  “Later, perhaps. Subject to our approval, of course.”

  “I should’ve guessed,” sighed Jörgen.

  “Yes or no?”

  Jörgen paused. He looked at his photographer. “Tell me what to do.”

  “I’ll send you a photo that you are under no circumstances to publish.”

  “Who’s in the photo?”

  “A person who will be leaving the police headquarters in Kungsholmen. Either through the garage entrance or one of SÄPO’s exits.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I can’t tell you. Are you by yourself?”

  “No, my photographer Miguel is here too.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  Jörgen looked at Miguel. They had worked together for eight months and he seemed fairly dependable, even for a paparazzi. “I trust him,” Jörgen said. “He’s a professional.”

  “Good. I want you to cover the main entrance and the east entrance.”

  “Cover?”

  “Watch it without being obvious,” explained Jonna. “As soon as this person leaves, you are to call me.”

  “And then?”

  “Follow him until I arrive.”

  “Whatever scheme you have in your head, I want exclusive rights to it,” Jörgen said.

  “Walter will have to decide that.”

  “Walter? Doesn’t he have other things on his mind right now?”

  “He won’t be a hostage indefinitely.”

  “Maybe not, but . . .”

  “Yes or no?” Jonna cut him off abruptly.

  “You don’t need to ask me twice,” Jörgen answered and hung up.

  Thirty seconds later Jörgen received the message. He studied the picture on his mobile phone. It was fuzzy, but most of the man’s face was clearly visible. The picture looked as if it had been taken secretly.

  “Who’s this guy?” Jörgen muttered to himself.

  “I’m also in on this story, right?” Miguel asked, after Jörgen told him about their sensitive mission.

  “Of course,” Jörgen answered, starting his car. “You take the main entrance and I’ll take the east. Not a word to anyone? Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” said Miguel.

  Jonna had raised the stakes significantly. Her impromptu response was probably due to her eagerness to get Martin Borg. One of the people she least trusted was now her most important ally. Yet she knew deep down that this was the right thing to do. Jörgen was relatively predictable, especially if a news exclusive was involved. She had used Jörgen last year. Then, it was Walter who had made an unholy pact with him. The end had justified the means and results quickly followed. Now, it was a similar situation, except that it was Jonna who was enlisting the journalist’s help.

  She had checked that Borg was still in the police headquarters. She called him on his office phone and asked for some trivial information on Leo Brageler. She inquired whether he would be in the building much longer, in case she had any more questions. In a relaxed voice, Borg had replied at least one more hour. She looked at the clock at the end of the corridor. In ten minutes, she had a witness interview with Alexander Westfeldt which was totally meaningless in terms of the police investigation. Despite her lack of sleep, which made her eyes heavy, she felt excited. My body has no energy, but my mind’s racing, she thought, as he appeared in front of her.

  “Nice of you to come,” Jonna began, shaking his firm hand. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “No, thank you,” he answered, sitting down in the visitor’s chair. She folded her hands; her green eyes were eager and expectant. Jonna observed him as he gazed at the pictures on the wall.
He was wearing jeans and a black ski jacket. His hair was ruffled from his woollen hat and he had a few days’ stubble.

  Jonna looked at a memo that gave details of the new timesheet procedure. “I see that you are an archaeologist,” she said.

  “Not yet. I’m studying to be an archaeologist,” he corrected her, politely.

  ”Yes, that’s what I meant,” she corrected herself. “But you work extra hours as a security guard?”

  “Not any more.”

  Jonna lifted her eyes from the internal memo and felt her cheeks turn red. “It seems I don’t have up-to-date information,” she said, smiling wryly.

  “It seems not.”

  “Perhaps you are wondering why you are here?”

  He nodded.

  So am I, she thought.

  “We need your statement about this man,” Jonna said, holding up a photograph of Leo Brageler. “He’s a fugitive and he was on the Cinderella the day that you were on duty.”

  “I can’t say I remember much about him.”

  “Just tell me anything you remember.”

  Alexander shrugged his shoulders. “Well, as I said earlier, he left the cruise ferry just before it departed. Apart from that, I have no idea when he boarded, but the cameras should have filmed that.”

  “Yes, we have footage of him boarding and disembarking the ship.”

  “Well, then,” Alexander said. “My statement is hardly necessary?”

  No, it really isn’t, Jonna thought.

  “Is there anything you think the cameras might have missed that you could tell us?” She felt more and more stupid. What must he be thinking? she thought.

  “No, nothing comes to mind. As I said, I only saw him for a second as he left the ship.”

  “Was someone with him?”

  “Not when he left the ship.”

  “You didn’t see him before he left the cruise ferry?”

  “I just said that, didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” Jonna said, with a demure smile. “I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t missed something.”

  Alexander twiddled his thumbs patiently.

  Jonna didn’t have anything else to say. It was as if she was having a blackout. She hadn’t managed to say a fraction of what she had planned. It was becoming awkward. She had to let him leave now.

  “OK,” she said, putting the memo away. “If you remember anything, you can call me.”

  “Of course,” he answered, taking her business card.

  “My private number is on the back in case you think of something after office hours.”

  Puzzled, he looked Jonna straight in the eyes and she felt her face explode into a red blush. She hadn’t intended to say that. What did she really mean? She wasn’t sure herself.

  “Duly noted,” Alexander said, shaking her hand.

  She followed him to the reception and thanked him once again. His hand was warm.

  When she came back to her office, she threw herself into her chair. She tossed her pen in the air and it landed on her desk and bounced into the wastepaper basket. A place she felt was more appropriate for her at this moment. That had to be the most feeble pick-up attempt of all time. She might as well have talked to him through a short-wave radio while he was on the other side of the globe.

  Jonna came back to reality and lifted her phone to ask Martin Borg yet another irrelevant question about Leo Brageler. This time, he sounded more reserved but still dutifully answered her question. After that brief conversation, she called Jörgen and made sure that he and his photographer were in place. She went to the B entrance so she could avoid Cederberg’s office, which was by the lift. In the stairwell, she realized that she had not clocked out. If Cederberg could not find her in her office, he would inevitably call and ask where she was. After a few seconds’ thought, she decided to carry on to the garage. She would deal with Cederberg if and when it became a problem.

  She signed out an unmarked car and wondered how many regulations she had broken since she got out of bed this morning. She had stopped counting after eight. It all started with the fiasco in the caravan and then she was led astray by Walter. But in the last eight hours, she had probably exceeded Walter’s wildest expections about bending the rules in the line of duty. Even Walter would be worried. Well, perhaps not.

  She drove out of the police garage and parked so that she could see the exit. There were eight different entrances to the police headquarters, as well as the garage. With Jörgen Blad and the photographer, she had a three in nine chance of success.

  Chapter 15

  Alice McDaniel checked out from the Grand Hotel and took a taxi to Hotel Amaranten in Kungsholmen. She had booked a single room for one night, although she was not certain that she needed to use it. That depended on how Leo Brageler responded to her stubborn behaviour. She would welcome an end to this ridiculous game. She was tired of this cloak-and-dagger plot involving keys and storage lockers. Of course, she had other clients with eccentric requests, but this one definitely took first prize.

  Her only condition had been that she should receive a truthful explanation of how he had managed to get hold of her ex-directory telephone number. When he gave her that, she would give him the damned envelope. How difficult could it be? When it was over, she was going to sue the telephone company; she had a cantankerous fellow solicitor in mind for that. Her uncle. He loved to sink his dentures into big corporations.

  The taxi stopped outside the hotel entrance; she paid with her credit card and got out. Then she tipped the driver. Then her plan quickly disintegrated. The flight bag that she had placed by her side was suddenly missing. Only a few seconds had gone by, while she was turned towards the taxi driver. She felt a rising panic.

  “Where’s my bag?” she cried, looking around in confusion.

  The driver looked up from his wallet and the twenty-crown tip she had given him. “Say again?”

  “The bag that was here,” she said, pointing at the ground beside her.

  The driver shrugged his shoulders, not understanding.

  “Where is my bag?”

  “No idea,” he said, not moving his head a millimetre.

  There were people walking along the pavement, but none of them was carrying a dark grey, Samsonite bag. She thought of the hotel porter. Perhaps he had been in a hurry to get her bag into the hotel’s reception. She rushed into the hotel and up to a man in a black suit with a name tag on his chest.

  “Have you brought in a small bag?” she asked, with her heart in her throat.

  The man looked at her, puzzled. “No.”

  She raced out of the doors again, almost colliding with some Japanese tourists. How could her bag just disappear like that?

  She didn’t understand. Farther down the street to her right, she saw a woman carrying something. She started to run after her, but stopped when she saw that the woman was carrying a soft, fabric bag. Damnation. She tried to remember getting out of the taxi. Was there somebody standing next to her? There was herself and the taxi driver. There were also two women having a conversation. They were still there. And one man. That was it. A man in a dark jacket had passed by her as she was giving the driver his tip. But how had he vanished in just a few seconds? She had looked around. A car. There had been a car parked behind the taxi. A light-coloured car that had driven off as she rushed into the hotel. It slowly dawned on her that she was never going to see that envelope again.

  Tor ordered walter to drive off the E4 as they passed the Karolinska University Hospital. “We’re paying a visit to a cemetery,” he said. “Happy now? You’ve been harping on about death.”

  Walter said nothing and just swung into Solna Kyrkväg. On the left was the huge Karolinska complex with adjoining wings. After a few hundred metres, he turned right and continued down a side road. Tor told
him to pull the car over and to turn off the engine. The road was poorly lit and a few people were moving about in the area. Tor looked anxiously in the rearview mirror. Through spaces in the tall hedges, Walter could make out gravestones.

  Long rows of carved gravestones stretched out over the dark grass. In the middle of the cemetery, there was a statue resembling an angel with wings pointing towards the heavens. He had wanted to bury Martine in a beautiful cemetery under a splendid headstone and to know that she was resting there in the earth beneath his feet. Instead, her body had been cremated and her remains scattered in the wind.

  All that was left of her now were his memories and photographs.

  He had kept the small, gold piece of jewellery in his hand for several hours, not moving. The guardian angel that he had given her for her eighteenth birthday as a keepsake. It was so wrong. It was supposed to be around her neck, not in his bloody hand. Walter recalled the moment when he had gone through the door into her flat. The thousand emotions that had hit him like a blow to the solar plexus. It had taken him a few months after the funeral to muster enough strength to go there. Her flat had been deserted and the sound of Walter’s shoes echoed off the walls. Total absence of life. Her few possessions were in her bookshelf – objects she had collected over the years that meant something to her. Her first, small shoes and her student hat with all her badges. The photograph of her and Walter when they visited the Vatican City. Always smiling with those warm eyes, which often made Walter wonder if he really could be her biological father. The soft hands and the kisses on the cheek she always gave him when they separated. He had sat on her sofa until darkness swallowed up the flat. Staring apathetically at the objects in her bookshelf and wishing he could awake from this nightmare.

  “Promise me that you’ll eat a proper dinner this evening, Dad,” she had said.

  “I promise,” Walter had lied, thinking what took the least time to warm up in the microwave. A pizza or a frozen lasagne.