MemoRandom: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

  Once he was inside he realized why the room was so dark. Just a yard or so inside the hall was another door, considerably more solid than the one he had just come through. He looked around the small lobby and found two letters on the floor, which he picked up and slipped into his back pocket. They were both addressed to E. I. Johansson.

  He fumbled with the key, then realized that there was no keyhole in the inner door. Instead he discovered a small recess containing a gently glowing red glass plate just above the handle. Without even thinking about it he pressed one thumb to the glass and held it there until the red light had turned green.

  The room inside looked almost exactly like his dream.

  Two covered windows to the right, with bars on the insides, and below them a small desk. The whiteboard covered with photographs was hanging on the wall in front of him, and by the left-hand wall, next to a stack of moving boxes, was a small, neatly made cot. Right in the middle of the room, a yard or so from the whiteboard, was a shabby, revolving leather armchair. He looked around and discovered a bathroom door and a small kitchen alcove. A faint smell of tobacco smoke hung in the air.

  All of a sudden Sarac felt overwhelmed, almost faint. He took a couple of steps and sank down on the leather chair. He shut his eyes and tried to get his pulse rate down. It was difficult.

  He’d done it! At least, he had found his corner piece. The location from which he had run what might have been the most successful infiltration operation in Swedish criminal history. And he had done so entirely on his own, which filled him with an odd mixture of horror and delight.

  This was OP1, his hiding place, the black hole in the police system that neither his bosses nor his colleagues knew about. Not even his best friend.

  Ideally he would have liked to throw himself at it all. But he forced himself to hold back. To enjoy the discovery, to sit for a while gathering his strength. His memories were coming back, one by one. He could see himself there in the room. The way he had organized everything, putting up the photographs, drawing the lines, making notes of different numbers.

  He slowly stood up and went over to the whiteboard. It looked almost exactly as it had in his dream, just slightly more detailed. At the bottom of one side were four faces he recognized at once. The dead men: Hansen, Markovic, Lehtonen, and Sabatini. The pictures were all old, glossy police mugshots, with names and dates of birth along the bottom.

  In the middle of the whiteboard was a row of other photographs inside a circle, but these were all relatively recent surveillance pictures. Next to each picture their names had been written in with black marker-pen. The handwriting was neat, not as aggressive and jagged as it had been in the hospital.

  Beneath each name was a row of numbers that were probably cell phone numbers.

  Abu Hamsa, he read next to a picture of a fat little man in his sixties with a fake-looking quiff. A red line led to a muscular man with cropped hair named Eldar.

  The next picture was of a typical biker. Leather waistcoat, thick neck, long hair in a plait, gold necklaces, and plenty of rings on his fingers, as well as a pair of thin glasses. Micke Lund.

  The red line from Lund led to another man in biker gear, but different colors this time. Karim, he had written, omitting the surname for some reason.

  The remaining pictures were of two men in tracksuits, Zimin and Ivazov. At a guess, they were Russians, and below them was a photograph of a bald, hook-nosed man with unpleasantly sunken eyes whose name was evidently Sasha.

  All the photographs, both the dead men at the bottom of the board and the gang inside the circle, had a blue line leading toward the center of the whiteboard. The red and blue lines crossed each other, making the whole whiteboard look like a spiderweb. In the center of the board was a familiar symbol. Two curling Js with their tails facing each other. Two faces in one, turned away from each other.

  Sarac stood still in front of the whiteboard, waiting for the buzzing in his head to stop, and hoping that the spiderweb would help things to fall into place. But nothing happened. He tried closing his eyes for a few seconds, then opening them quickly. Still nothing. The men in the photographs just went on staring at him. Making no effort to make themselves known to him.

  Disappointed, he walked over to the desk and started pulling the drawers open, one by one. In the first one he found more or less what he was expecting. Pens, paper, a dog-eared phone book, some other office equipment. In the second drawer a laptop and a bundle of dollars. In the third—a pistol.

  He recognized the weapon almost immediately. A nine-millimeter SIG Sauer, in all likelihood his own service pistol. He picked it up, pressed a button with his thumb, and released the cartridge from the base of the handle with a practiced hand. Then he clicked it open and caught the small brass bullet that had been in the chamber.

  He sniffed the weapon gently, breathing in the familiar smell of powder and gun grease. He found himself thinking once again about Brian Hansen and the bullet that had ended his life.

  He put the gun down on the desk, then emptied the cartridge and lined the bullets up in a row. He felt the anxiety in his chest grow as he counted them in his head. Fourteen in total. Fourteen brass bullets in a shiny little row. There was just one problem. The cartridge had space for fifteen bullets.

  FORTY-THREE

  Natalie was slowly turning her coffee cup. Rickard’s instructions had been crystal clear: keep an eye on the notebook and report everything Sarac did. Not particularly difficult, actually rather exciting, especially since they cracked the code together and managed to identify the five men. Sarac reminded her of a patient she had had while she was training. A woman with cancer who had been utterly furious with everyone and everything. She had even thrown a bedpan at the oncologist. Just like Sarac, she had refused to give up, refused to let people feel sorry for her.

  But the murder in Högbergsgatan had left Natalie feeling wary. She had called Rickard from the ferry and had told him whom they were going to see and what the address was. And just before they got there Sabatini had been murdered.

  The thought troubled her more than she wanted to admit. Rickard was hardly a killer, he was a cop. Wasn’t he?

  That was also something else that was worrying her. Rickard’s appearance and the way he talked reeked of cop, but she couldn’t recall his ever showing his ID. But he had to be a cop, surely, because how else would he have access to the police database? Maybe she should ask to see his police ID the next time she saw him.

  He had called her a little while ago. He had sounded even more stressed than the previous time. He told her she still hadn’t delivered what he was looking for, that he had expected more from their collaboration. She hadn’t objected, hadn’t wanted to let on how much the murder in Högbergsgatan had frightened her, and had made her question what she was doing. Instead Rickard had persuaded her that she had to work harder. Stay focused on her goal, do whatever was required. It had worked. She still had a chance to get back everything she had thought was lost. She just had to grit her teeth and get on with it.

  First and foremost, she had to find Sarac and get him to confirm who the man in the pictures on her cell phone was. Sarac wasn’t back in his apartment, wasn’t answering his phone, and according to the helpful neighbor out on the island, the house there was silent and deserted. It was almost as if Sarac had vanished off the face of the earth. And that bothered her on more than one level, she reluctantly admitted to herself.

  • • •

  He dreamed he was lying at the bottom of a deep hole. Little threadlike roots stuck out of the dark, earth sides, narrow, hairy fingers writhing in pain. The sky high above was dark. In the distance was a snatch of music. The High Wire.

  The four men were standing up above, around the edge. They were looking down at him with dead eyes. Hansen in his leather waistcoat, Markovic in his yellow padded jacket, Sabatini with his T-shirt soaked in blood, and Lehtonen in a bomber jacket with a dragon on the back. Two dogs were panting at his side. Their tongue
s were long and pink.

  “Why?” Hansen said. His voice was surprisingly high.

  “We trusted you, man,” Markovic said. Water was seeping out everywhere, from his clothes, nose, and mouth. It was trickling over the edge of the hole.

  Sabatini remained silent, just held his bloodstained hands in the air. The water was running faster now, Sarac could hear it, could feel it getting deeper around him. He tried to get up, but his body wouldn’t do as he wanted, leaving him lying on his back. He felt the water cover his legs, then his chest. He tried to hold his head up as high as he could. One of the dogs was whimpering but fell silent when the water reached his ears, his cheeks. Washing darkness into his eyes.

  Sarac woke up in a cold sweat. The room was dark, the only thing visible was the pale rectangle of the whiteboard. The photographs formed dark shapes on its surface. If he looked carefully, he could just make out the outlines of the faces.

  He sat up in the armchair and reached for the light switch. He felt something rustling in his back pocket. The letters he had found on the mat in the hall. He opened the first envelope. A bank statement from a foreign account in the name of Mr. E. I. Johansson. There was another one in the other envelope, but for a different account.

  He got the thinking behind the name now. Erik I. Johansson—with the English sense of I. Erik I. Johansson wasn’t an informer but his own alias. One that made it possible to do things that couldn’t be traced back to him. Like getting hold of this apartment, for instance. He wondered who had sorted out an ID number for him. Favors given, favors received.

  He sat down at the kitchen table, smoothed the statements out, and put them down side by side. It didn’t take him long to see a pattern. The first account seemed mostly to deal with in-payments. At the start of the period covered by the statement there had been more than a million dollars in the account, and four new payments had been made, amounting to almost the same again. There were only three withdrawals, although they actually seemed to be transfers. One for three hundred thousand dollars done at the beginning of the period, one for one hundred thousand in the middle, and finally one more at the bottom of the page. That transfer was for almost two million dollars and had emptied the account, leaving just one cent in it.

  The account detailed in the other statement had an opening balance of twenty thousand dollars. There followed a number of small withdrawals, all marked cash, for even multiples of a hundred dollars, all withdrawn from various bureaus de change in the city center. The sums varied between five hundred and thirty-five hundred. They seemed to be cash withdrawals, suggesting that there was a debit card linked to the account. This theory was confirmed when he found the names of different well-known restaurants further down the statement. In the middle of the page was an in-payment of one hundred thousand dollars. He checked the date and reference number and saw that the money had been transferred out of the other account. Several more cash withdrawals followed, interspersed with more restaurants. At the bottom of the page he found a transfer that, just like on the other statement, left the account practically empty.

  Sarac frowned. One account for income, another for expenses; that seemed to fit with what Molnar had said. But where did all the money come from? Two million dollars, that was about fourteen million Swedish kronor and, to judge by the activity in the expenses account, far more than was required. Every in-payment was identified only by a transaction number, so there were no clues there.

  And someone had pretty much cleared out the accounts on the same date, in fact with an interval of just a couple of minutes. Who? Clearly someone with access to the right program, with the codes and passwords. Which raised the question—why? Why withdraw all the money and close what appeared to be a perfectly functional system? He studied the dates again and realized there was something he had missed.

  The accounts had been cleaned out on Saturday, November 23. The same night as his crash.

  • • •

  The car was parked more or less where Atif had expected to see it. In the street, barely three hundred feet from the unprepossessing little door marked Istanbul Hamam. He opened the door and found himself in a courtyard. He carried on toward the building on the far side and went in through a shabby door. “Best Turkish sauna in town, boys, I come here every Tuesday.”

  He ignored the receptionist and walked toward the men’s changing room. The moisture and heat from the various saunas could already be felt outside. His top began to stick and his heart was beating alarmingly fast. He opened the door, slipped inside, and grabbed a spray can of deodorant from an open locker.

  Eldar, the thickset bodyguard, was sitting on one of the benches fiddling with his cell phone. He didn’t see Atif until he was almost upon him. He flew up, fumbling for his gun. Atif sprayed a serious dose of Irish Spring directly into his eyes. Then he kicked him in the crotch as hard as he could. But his timing was off; Eldar managed to twist out of the way and the kick didn’t have the full effect. Instead the man threw himself backward over the wooden bench and off the other side. Atif had to go around the bench to follow up his attack, giving Eldar a few seconds’ respite.

  The man pulled out his gun and aimed it at Atif as he rushed toward him. He was rubbing his eyes hard. Atif knocked the arm holding the pistol aside and butted the man right in the face but didn’t manage a clean strike. The two men stumbled into the shower room. Eldar’s legs crumpled and he fumbled for something to hold on to, and managed to pull off one of the shower hoses. Hot water began to spray around the room.

  Eldar was taking wild swings around him. Atif ducked and then aimed a solid left hook directly at the man’s liver. He finally landed a blow as he had intended. Eldar fell as if he’d been struck by lightning. Water was still pouring from the broken shower, soaking the prone man’s clothes.

  Atif staggered back into the changing room. His heart was pounding against his rib cage. He rubbed his forehead and found the back of his hand covered with a mixture of water and blood. His shirt was drenched, sweat was dripping down his back, and the humid air was hard to breathe. He sat down heavily on one of the benches. Eldar’s gun was lying on the floor and he picked it up. Another Zastava, but in considerably better condition than Bakshi’s. Atif stood up with an effort, released the cartridge onto the floor, and kicked it away. Then he dismantled the gun and flushed the pieces down the toilet.

  Eldar was moaning feebly in the shower room, trying to curl into a ball but not really succeeding. Atif knew it would be a while before he was back on his feet. A heavy punch to the liver was astonishingly painful, nine, maybe nine and a half. Not the sort of thing anyone could shrug off quickly.

  He opened the door with the word Hamam on it. He walked down the tiled floor of a corridor and emerged into a large room with a vaulted ceiling and tiled walls. His pulse was still racing, and he could taste blood and adrenaline in his mouth.

  Abu Hamsa was lying on one of the stone benches while a sinewy little man massaged his hairy back. When the masseur caught sight of Atif he backed away in horror, holding his hands up. Atif nodded toward the door and the man immediately made himself scarce.

  Abu Hamsa sat up.

  “You look bloody awful, Atif,” he growled, without seeming particularly surprised.

  Atif shrugged his shoulders.

  “Eldar?” Abu Hamsa raised his eyebrows.

  “He’ll live.” Atif sat down on the next bench.

  “That’s just as well. Otherwise I’d have hell to pay,” Abu Hamsa said.

  “Why?” Atif picked up a washcloth and wiped the blood from his eyes.

  “He’s engaged to my daughter,” Abu Hamsa said.

  “Which one, Yasmina?”

  “No, no, Yasmina’s at university. Studying to become an engineer. Susanna, she works for me. Looks after my bureaus de change. That’s how she and Eldar . . .” He gestured toward the changing room, then fell silent and looked at Atif.

  “You know I can’t just let this pass,” Abu Hamsa went on. “Not even
for the sake of old friendship.”

  Atif shrugged again.

  “Okay, my friend.” Hamsa sighed. “I’m guessing you didn’t come here just so you could beat up my staff. So what is this about?”

  Atif spat some bloody saliva toward the drain.

  “I want help with something,” he said. “The address of a police officer.”

  “You have a very odd way of asking for help, my friend.” Abu Hamsa chuckled. “Explain to me why you think I should even consider such a request.”

  “Because I’m proposing a deal. You give me the address, and I give you something in return,” Atif said.

  “And what might that be, my friend?” Hamsa smiled. “What can a man who’s as good as dead possibly offer me?”

  “I can give you Janus,” Atif said.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Sarac leaned over the battered old leather armchair. He had spent almost twenty-four hours in the room, with just a short outing to get supplies from the closest 7-Eleven. The packing crates over by the camp bed had turned out to contain his files. So he had emptied his office himself, just as he had suspected. Probably not long before the crash. Something seemed to have happened, something which had raised the stakes, making him even more paranoid. But what? Was it something to do with the mole Dreyer was hunting, or the threat Wallin had mentioned? Or was it something else entirely? The puzzle he was trying to put together kept growing the whole time. It was well on its way to becoming a five-thousand-piece Ravensburger with no picture to show what it was meant to look like.

  He had written his thoughts down on a fresh piece of paper. He had divided everything into columns in a fairly understandable way that might help make things clearer. He certainly hoped so, anyway.

  Problem number one: four men had been murdered. Four men who had given him information and whose names were listed on the first page of his encoded notebook. Presumably their names had also been on the missing backup list.

  Theory: Whoever killed the men wanted to stop them from revealing something they knew. Something to do with Janus.