Ultimatum

by Anders de la Motte

  He let the dog out, fastened his robe, and stepped out onto the driveway barefoot. The pavement was still cool, but that would soon change. Even though it was only six o’clock in the morning, the sky was bright blue and the sunlight so strong that he had to shade his eyes with his hand. He fetched the Sunday papers from the mailbox and slipped back inside the silent house, accompanied reluctantly by the little spaniel. Karolina and the girls wouldn’t wake up before eight. They’d pad down to the kitchen and eat breakfast together in front of children’s summer vacation television shows.

  He wished the same could apply to him. Wished he could get a whole night of dreamless sleep so that his weary brain had a chance to recuperate. But that was a vain wish. The nightmares were back, stronger now than they had been last winter.

  A fourth night in succession in which Sophie Thorning’s naked body fell in slow motion before landing on his windshield with a heavy thud. Her white skin cut by hundreds of pieces of glass, the broken, accusing look in her eyes as she lay there just in front of his face. In the dream she was still alive. Her shattered lips moving, forming words.

  “You’re finished, Jesper. I’m going to crush you. Crush you and your whole fucking family.” The next moment the windshield fell in and her body collapsed on top of him. Hands feeling his legs. Sharp fingernails digging into his thighs, feeling their way upward.

  The dream scream was still echoing inside his head; it felt so real he could almost taste its bitterness in his throat. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass door of the wine cooler. His hair was sticking up, his posture was slovenly, and he had bags under his eyes. Hardly the image of a virile young man who was going to breathe new life into the party.

  Stenberg switched on the coffeemaker, sat down at the kitchen table, and spread the papers out in front of him.

  It was all because of John Thorning. His old mentor was finding his way back into his life again. Treating him like an underling, dragging up thoughts, feelings, and memories that he had tried to put behind him.

  Half the point of his relationship with Sophie had been about her father. Having to sit and take Thorning’s orders and patronizing comments had been far more bearable when he knew he was fucking the boss’s daughter. And Sophie knew that—even used to play on the fact when they were together.

  There was no doubt that she had been a manipulative, deranged, crazy person, but she had also been his secret. The only thing in his life that his mentor, father-in-law, and wife didn’t know about and couldn’t control. His affair with Sophie had made him feel a bit smarter than them. More alive, more in the moment.

  But now that she was dead, Sophie had become a weakness. His only weakness. And as long as John Thorning was trying to put pressure on him, he would keep being reminded of that. And would experience her death all over again, night after night.

  He rubbed his eyes, poured himself a cup of coffee, and started to leaf through the top paper as he sipped the hot liquid. The article on page four made him start, and spill some coffee down his chin and into his lap.

  A number of the evidently ill-considered proposals sent out for consultation by the minister of justice are at odds with the Swedish legal tradition, and risk creating a society in which the individual citizen’s integrity and right to impartial treatment by the judicial system are seriously jeopardized.

  He forced himself to read the article through twice. He felt suddenly nauseous. Fucking hell . . .

  He read the names of the article’s authors one more time. Ten lawyers, none of them real heavyweights or even particularly well-known. Nor among the best of their profession, which was some comfort. But one name on the list stuck out. Per Sörensen. He knew Per. He was young, smart, and ambitious, and one of John Thorning’s acolytes. The timing of the article was perfect in a number of respects. On Sunday mornings almost everyone read the papers, and even though there were only months to go until the election, politics had shut down for the summer. All the professional commentators were bored and on the lookout for something juicy to pounce on in webcasts or social media. And the party’s big summer gala was due to take place the following Thursday. Party dignitaries, senior civil servants, and businessmen—they would all have read the article and the ensuing discussion and analysis. Some of them with concern, others with a degree of schadenfreude, but all the same he would have to smile blithely and shake them all by the hand.

  Taking the accumulated evidence into account, there was only one possible conclusion. The article was a warning shot, a taste of what would happen if he continued to keep John Thorning outside the decision-making process.

  His cell phone began to vibrate. His press secretary’s number. It was just as well to take the bull by the horns.

  “Hi, Cecilia. Yes, I’m up, and, yes, I’ve read it.”

  Stenberg stood up, opened one of the kitchen cupboards, and pulled out a box of acetaminophen. He popped a couple of headache pills out onto the worktop.

  “No, I don’t want to make any comment . . .”

  • • •

  Sunday morning had turned into afternoon, and Natalie had managed to drink two cups of tea, eat half a packet of cookies, and regret doing so at least five minutes before Atif emerged from the bathroom. He had showered and shaved, and the look in his dark eyes showed that he was clearly on the way to recovery.

  “Good morning!” She poured him a cup of tea and waited patiently until he had drunk half of it before presenting him with the proposal she had spent the night working on. The exit strategy that would get her far away from there. Far away from Oscar fucking Wallin.

  “Your plans are going a bit slowly, aren’t they?” she said, and suddenly she had his attention, just as she had hoped.

  “Look, I’ll be gone from here by tomorrow at the latest.”

  Natalie held one hand up.

  “It wasn’t an accusation. Just a statement of fact. You’re still not back to normal, and considering that you’ve been asleep for over twenty-four hours, your meeting can’t have gone quite as well as you might have hoped.”

  Atif looked like he was about to protest, so she kept her hand in the air.

  “I was thinking of making a suggestion. Something I think could help both of us. I’m sick of this shitty country. I was already thinking about moving abroad before you turned up. To Thailand: get myself a little bar or something, so I don’t have to freeze my ass off for five months of the year. But to do that, I need capital. You, on the other hand, need a way to contact your family and explain what’s going on, so they’re ready when the time comes. And, even more importantly, you need a plan to get them out of their apartment and then out of the country. Right now there must be half a dozen cops watching Cassandra and Tindra, just waiting for you to show up. What you need is someone who can move freely without rousing any suspicion. Someone who can help you come up with and put into action a plan that will work.” She paused to apply some ChapStick to give him a bit of time to think.

  Atif sat in silence, drumming his fingers against his teacup.

  “How much?”

  “One million for my services, and the same again for the plan,” she said, tapping her notepad, which was full of scribbled notes. She quickly went on before he had time to be overwhelmed by the size of the amount. “The offer also includes me getting the cash for you to pay for all the things you’ll need. Plane tickets, fake passports, hotel, new clothes. I’ve done the math and you’re going to need at least fifty thousand, probably more.”

  Natalie almost smiled when she thought about where the money would be coming from. But that was one detail she had to keep to herself. Even if she said so herself, her plan was a work of genius. The question was: Would Atif go for it?

  He emptied his cup, then slowly put it down and moved his chair a bit closer to hers.

  “Tell me what you had in mind,” he said.

  Twenty-Three<
br />
  Julia Gabrielsson had shut the door of her office and switched on the red lamp to indicate that she was busy. Not that she expected anyone to disturb her on a Monday morning, even under normal circumstances. And at the moment almost all of her colleagues in Violent Crime were out hunting not one but two murderers. Everyone apart from her and a couple of civilian employees who were managing the deskbound part of the investigations.

  More database searches, more additions to the Excel file detailing Abu Hamsa’s network of contacts, and even more frustration. She had considerably more important things to be doing. David Sarac had been in that office. He had probably met Frank Hunter there not long before he was murdered. But there were still plenty of pieces missing from the puzzle. ­Sarac’s passport had been used in Frankfurt the evening after he escaped. But, according to all the evidence, Sarac was in a very poor state. How could he have managed to escape and travel abroad on one and the same day? And why had he come back, and how? Until that piece of the puzzle was put into place, it was almost impossible to make any further progress.

  Her phone rang and she grabbed the receiver.

  “Hello, Julia, this is Johan Zachrisson at IT-Secure. It’s about that laptop you asked me to look at.”

  “Wow, that was quick. How did it go?” She straightened up. If they were lucky, the computer found in Hunter’s hiding place could answer a lot of their questions.

  “Well, it’s a bit mixed, to be honest. The reason for the quick response is that there isn’t much on the hard drive. But I can at least tell you a few things.”

  “Okay.” She reached for a pen and paper. “Go ahead.”

  “To start with, the laptop’s brand-new, hardly used. Judging by the dates on the drive, the owner first used it at 3:46 p.m. on February thirteenth. After that, it was used regularly until February twenty-eighth. But since then it hasn’t been connected to the Internet, no programs have been updated, and there haven’t been any changes to any files. Nothing at all to indicate that the computer has even been switched on.”

  “Hmm.” Julia jotted the information down on her pad. February 28, three days after Sarac left the country, which meant that Hunter must have remained in the hiding place for that long at least. Why? What had he been waiting for? And why the hell would Sarac have gone to Belgrade?

  “The laptop was mainly used to look at the news online,” Zachrisson continued. “I’ve made a copy of the browsing history for you, but there’s nothing exciting in it. He seems mostly to have been interested in Swedish domestic politics. The only exception was a travel site, and he only visited that once.”

  “Lufthansa,” she said. “A flight from Frankfurt to Belgrade. February twenty-fifth?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  A thought was slowly growing in her head. Something Eskil the nurse had said about how Hunter’s appearance seemed to float somewhere between pictures of Hunter and Sarac. And blurred into what Amante had said about Hunter’s work.

  “Did the user communicate with anyone?” she asked without answering Zachrisson’s question.

  “He did, but I’m afraid I can’t say who. He used an encrypted webmail program called Inkognite. I’ve come across it a few times before. Inkognite doesn’t save anything locally in the computer. You have to log out each time, and when you do so, Inkognite erases almost all traces of activity from the computer. It takes a practiced eye even to detect that the service has been used. You basically need to know the exact IP addresses. The user connected to Inkognite about ten times, so it seems likely that he was both receiving and sending e-mails.”

  “And when was the last time?”

  “February twenty-eighth. But before that something interesting happens. He created a Word document on February twenty-sixth that he probably sent as an attachment via In­kognite. I’m guessing, because he erased the document from the computer shortly after signing into Inkognite that same day. Or at least he thought he’d erased it.”

  “But?” Julia had an idea where he was heading.

  “Emptying the wastebasket isn’t enough to make something disappear. The computer doesn’t erase the document itself, just the path leading to it. The document is still on the hard drive until the computer needs the space and overwrites it with something else.”

  “And seeing as the user stopped using the laptop two days later . . .”

  “The document is still on the hard drive. I’ll send you a link where you can download everything and read it for yourself. Then there was one other little thing.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I’m not entirely certain, but I think the user attached an image along with the document he sent. I’ve found evidence suggesting that. There are no images stored on the computer, so it must have come from some external source.”

  “You mean a camera?”

  “Camera, cell phone, memory card. Some type of external storage device that can be attached to a laptop. If you haven’t found anything like that, keep an eye out. I’ve got a feeling that picture’s important. I’m sure you’ll agree once you’ve read the document.”

  Julia wrote down EXTERNAL MEMORY, then added a series of exclamation marks and underlined the words several times.

  “Anything else?”

  “No, I think that’s about it. I’ll call if I come across anything else.”

  “Thanks, Johan. When do you think I can have the link to the document?”

  Her computer made a subdued two-note bleep.

  “You just got it.”

  She ended the call and followed the instructions. The download took barely thirty seconds. As soon as it was done, she opened the Word document. She read its contents several times, then leaned back slowly in her chair.

  Twenty-Four

  Julia sat down heavily on one of the bar stools in Amante’s kitchen. The keys to Hunter’s hideout were lying on the middle of the island unit.

  “No sign of an external memory?” Julia said, even though she already knew the answer. He would have called her at once if he’d found anything, not wait until she had time to call in and see him several hours later.

  “I’m afraid not. I went through the place in minute detail, but I couldn’t find anything that explains what that’s about.” He pointed at the Word document from the laptop. The message on it was only two sentences long.

  You betrayed me. Pay your debt.

  There were two words missing. The ones David Sarac’s voice had been whispering inside Julia’s head since the day before. Words that had no doubt cost him his life.

  Or else . . .

  “Is this all about money?” Amante said. “A blackmail attempt that got out of hand? It sounds like it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Julia put the pictures of Sarac’s mutilated body down beside the note. The feeling she had had since the very first time she saw that macabre smile was back. The murder was an act of rage. Ice-cold and controlled, but nonetheless: rage. This wasn’t about money but something much more important.

  “Sarac was thinking of committing suicide,” she said. “That was why he was carrying those pills around with him. But Hunter must have been offering something important enough for Sarac to postpone his plans, abscond from the nursing home, and make his way to that office to meet him.”

  “I’m with you that far,” Amante said. “But what happened after that? Sarac and Hunter talk for a few hours before Sarac leaves the country. Two days later Hunter sends what looks like a blackmail letter from his laptop. At a guess, he’s received some kind of information from Sarac that he’s trying to make use of. A photograph, maybe?”

  Julia didn’t answer. The thought that had started to grow since she spoke to the IT security guy had now firmly taken root. She was beginning to get an idea of how everything hung together. But she still lacked evidence.

  “Either way, not long af
ter that, Sarac returns to Sweden by some unknown means, seeing as his passport isn’t logged anywhere after February twenty-fifth,” Amante went on. “Someone murders him and disposes of his body parts in the water at Källstavik. And that’s what I can’t make sense of: If Hunter sends the blackmail letter from his laptop while Sarac is in Belgrade, why is that the point when Sarac gets murdered? And where has Hunter gone? Has he been murdered as well? Are there more bodies out there in the water?”

  “Okay,” Julia said. “That number you had for Bloodhound—have you still got it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can I have it, please?”

  Amante read out the number as she tapped it in. After a few moments of silence the call went through. A double ringtone.

  “Bloodhound Incorporated. How may I assist you?” a cool receptionist’s voice said.

  “Frank Hunter, please.”

  “I’m sorry, but we don’t have anyone here by that name. I can connect you to someone else if you like. Who may I say is calling?”

  “David Sarac.”

  A Muzak medley began to play. “Best of Bossa Nova” by James Last, or something like that. Julia noticed that Amante was observing her with interest. He could do with a shave and a haircut, she thought. And some new clothes.

  “Hello,” a male voice said. “Who am I speaking to?”

  Amante was right. The man’s English was good. Yet there was still something in the way he stressed his sentences that suggested that it wasn’t his mother tongue.

  “This is Detective Inspector Julia Gabrielsson from the Crime Unit of the Stockholm Police,” she said in Swedish. “Do you still have David Sarac’s passport?”

  There was silence on the line. Amante went on watching her.

  “What makes you think I’d have someone else’s passport?” the man at the other end said slowly.

  “Because Sarac gave it to you on February twenty-fifth and you used it to leave the country. You look similar enough for that to work. David Sarac is dead; he was murdered a few days later. But perhaps you already knew that.”