by Arne Dahl
He pressed a button inside his belt, cleared his throat, and said, “The game has landed.”
He stood, straightened his tie, slung the bag over his shoulder, and waited with his eyes closed. Children were snaking back and forth between his legs; parents were yelling, sometimes heart-piercingly and sometimes just piercingly. Experienced wearers of suits kept second-class passengers at a distance with well-practiced smiles.
He remained still. People hardly noticed him. He didn’t attract attention. He never had.
Then the line started moving rather quickly. The blockage was sorted out, and he sauntered calmly through the fuselage of the plane, then along the metal jetway, and through the swaying walkway.
He stepped into gate ten. He was here.
Now it would come full circle.
Now he would be able to start for real.
It was interesting to see how many faces one’s brain could file away before they started to blur together. Söderstedt found that his limit was as low as fifty. The stream of passengers arriving from Newark was mostly an anonymous, gray mass, and sure enough, most of them were middle-aged white men traveling solo.
He couldn’t make out any signs of variation. The horde shuffled more or less as one down the concourse. Some slipped into a restroom; others stopped at a boutique; still others bought sandwiches at the café—and had their appetites spoiled at the cash register. A few ended up in the bar and attempted to converse with the human waxwork Adolfsson, who seemed about to pass out.
A tourist attraction, Söderstedt thought.
The first Newark travelers descended the stairs down to passport control.
“They’re coming,” he said out loud and, with that, found himself to be the only deviation from the norm.
The words echoed in Kerstin Holm’s ears like the declaration of peace after World War II. She had been mentally composing her letter of resignation from the police, inspired by the stealth-farting immigration officer in the gas chamber that was their booth. This wasn’t what she was meant for. But then the first American faces peered in through the half-matte glass pane and blew away her sensations of odor. The immigration officer neatly guided each passport into a small, computer-connected camera device and discreetly photographed it. Each photo and name were immediately registered on a computer. If nothing else, they would have a picture of the killer.
Face after face swept by. In every smile and every yawn she tried to imagine a killer without a conscience. A persistent tic in the eye of a man who had been extremely reluctant to remove his Ray-Bans almost convinced her to call Hultin. Other than that, all was utterly tranquil.
Viggo Norlander’s booth experience was a bit different. He was the only member of the A-Unit who’d had a wonderful year. After the fiasco during the Power Murders, when he’d run amok and been crucified by the mafia in Estonia, he’d begun to work out. He got a hair transplant and turned once again to the fairer sex, which caused his stubborn bachelor life to take on new dimensions. His stigmatized hands had proved an asset in that respect. Unlike Holm’s, the immigration officer in whose booth he had ended up was young and female, and he had flirted with her uninhibitedly. By the time the Americans arrived, she had practically finished composing her sexual harassment report.
But in a second Norlander forgot her—he was immediately on the ball. Pumped with adrenaline, he thought he recognized a serial killer in every passenger, and when he notified Hultin of his third suspect, a coal-black, eighteen-year-old junkie, he received such a sharp reprimand that it reminded him forcefully of his past, and he became more discerning in his judgment, as he put it to himself.
He had been sitting in browbeaten silence for a few minutes when a well-dressed man of about forty-five with a confident smile handed his passport over to the immigration official, who gallantly photographed it along with the name Robert E. Norton. When the man caught sight of Norlander over her shoulder, his smile vanished abruptly; he blinked and peered around uncontrollably. Then he snatched back his passport and dashed away.
“I’ve got him!” Norlander yelled into his invisible miniradio. “He’s getting away,” he continued a bit inconsistently, then he threw open the door and lit out through the arrivals hall after Robert E. Norton. Norton ran like a man possessed, his bag thumping hard against his shoulder. Norlander ran like a man even more possessed. He sent women who were in his way sprawling; he stomped on children’s feet; he broke duty-free liquor bottles.
Norton stopped for breath and looked around in wild desperation. Hjelm jumped up from his bench, threw down the unread brochure, and made a rush for Norton. The sight of the two charging policemen with an apparently dubious past was too much for the American, who swung his bag above his head and flung himself toward an unmoving baggage carousel. He leaped like a tiger through the plastic ribbons that covered the opening of the conveyor belt. His tiger leap was immediately followed by Norlander’s. Hjelm didn’t take any tiger leaps; instead he carefully parted the plastic ribbons and stepped off into the baggage area, where he saw Norlander chasing Norton among piles of luggage. Norton threw a suitcase at Norlander, who gave a muffled growl, hurled himself at the man, took another suitcase to the face, and tumbled over. Norton tore loose and headed back toward the conveyor belt. As Norlander rose on shaky legs, Norton came closer and closer to Hjelm, who had climbed back inside to await him. Norton ran straight into his arms, swung his bag, and landed a direct hit. It threw Hjelm backward, but it felt as though he turned in midair and was on top of the man. Norlander arrived and threw himself into the pile, bent Norton’s arms beyond their physical limits, and planted himself atop him with his knees on the back of the man’s neck. Hjelm, with one hand on his bleeding mouth, grabbed Norton’s bag with the other and emptied it onto the floor. Among the sundry items that fell out was a small packet of hashish.
At that moment, Hultin’s voice entered Norlander and Hjelm’s ears: “I’ve got our man’s name from the FBI now. Go immediately from Plan B to Plan A. He’s traveling under the name Edwin Reynolds. I repeat: Edwin Reynolds. If the man who has been so energetically chased through the arrivals hall is not named Reynolds and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with this case, release him immediately and return to your positions. Maybe we can still fix this.”
Norlander and Hjelm immediately released Robert E. Norton to the Arlanda police, who had come to get him. They went back into the arrivals hall through a side door and returned to Norlander’s passport control booth.
Hjelm took over. He thundered at the female immigration officer, “Fast as hell: Edwin Reynolds. Has anyone by that name passed through?”
A few quick stabs at the computer gave her the answer. “No. Randolph. Robertson. No one in between.”
Norlander sank down onto his stool. Hjelm sank to the floor.
They pulled the door closed, caught their breath, and licked their wounds. Maybe there was still hope. Barely half of the passengers had come through. If Reynolds hadn’t been among those whom Norlander trampled down, he was still back there.
Thus reasoned the two heroes in the booth and, in a haze of testosterone, forgot the group’s more estrogenic member. Kerstin Holm’s voice sounded in everyone’s ear canals. “Eleven minutes ago an Edwin Andrew Reynolds passed my booth. He was among the very first.”
It was quiet for a few endless seconds.
Then came Hultin’s voice: “Okay. Close passport control. Don’t let anyone else out. Demand ID from everyone you see in the whole fucking airport. Discreetly, of course. Officially, we’re looking for drug smugglers. We’ll use everything we’ve got now. Get going. I’ll arrange for roadblocks. Kerstin, do you have a photo of him? What does he look like?”
“The one I have is really bad. He may be blond. Unfortunately it’s a terrible photo.”
“And neither you nor the immigration officer remembers anything?”
“Unfortunately, no. He could have gotten pretty far in eleven minutes.”
“Okay. Get
going—now.”
Norlander exhaled in relief—his blunder hadn’t been crucial after all. But Hjelm, as he stood up, thought Norlander’s sigh was almost criminal.
They emerged from the booth just as Holm stepped out of hers. Her intensively searching gaze met theirs.
The white middle-aged men were everywhere. Armed men poured out of the airport’s hollows like maggots out of a corpse and detained them where they were, demanding their passports.
Hjelm ran through customs. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gunnar Nyberg being showered with passports from a cluster of white, middle-aged men. His baggy lumber jacket was unbuttoned.
Hjelm hurried outside and surveyed the congested sidewalk. An airport bus came over the crest. Taxis swarmed. It was impossible to get an overview.
He sprinted along the sidewalk. He queried ten or so potential serial killers, who watched his mediocre running pace. They identified themselves without protest. As he skimmed their passports, his suspicion became a full-fledged thought.
He did another second of futile surveying. Suddenly Hultin was standing beside him. Each read his own thought in the other man’s eyes. It was Hjelm who formulated the unavoidable conclusion: “He’s out.”
Hultin held his eyes for another moment and gave an unofficial nod that was contradicted by his stern injunction: “We have to go inside and continue. Don’t stand here wasting time.”
Hultin disappeared. Hjelm stayed there for a minute, wasting time.
He fingered his lips and was surprised by the blood. He turned his face up to the darkening sky and received a chilly sprinkle of rain.
Autumn had come to Sweden.
5
That afternoon the A-Unit reconvened in the room that had once been called “Supreme Central Command,” whose quotation marks had become less and less ironic as the Power Murders investigation had gone on. Now a secret wish for a similar course of events whistled through the somewhat stale air. Otherwise the dominant atmosphere was relatively well-controlled fear; there was no question about the gravity of the situation.
Jan-Olov Hultin came out of the bathroom absorbed in some papers that looked as though he had used them and forgotten to flush them. He settled into his well-worn armchair and, after ten seconds, began. “The results of the Arlanda debacle are discouraging. The only concrete result is three complaints against officers. Two are against Viggo.”
Norlander’s expression managed to unite shame with pride.
“The first complaint is from the immigration officer at passport control,” Hultin continued without looking up. “She found your attention far too intense but says she’ll be satisfied if you are reprimanded. If we didn’t have other things to worry about, I wouldn’t have settled for that. Bonehead. The second complaint is in regard to a little girl you ran over while you were chasing the seriously drug-smuggling Robert E. Norton. You have a real flair for handling the fairer sex, one could say. Double bonehead. The third complaint is a bit hard to interpret. An officer from Märsta has been reported for having been, quote, ‘out of control’ in the concourse bar.”
Arto Söderstedt laughed shrilly and abruptly. “Sorry,” he said, calming himself. “His name is Adolfsson.”
Since further clarification was not forthcoming, Hultin continued neutrally. “So, on to the essentials. Edwin Andrew Reynolds does not exist. Naturally, the passport was a fake. And despite the laborious efforts of our data technicians, the passport photo is still not helpful.”
He turned the computer monitor around on the desk, to show an enlargement of a completely dark face. One could make out the shape of the face and a few contours; possibly he was blond. Otherwise it was unrevealing, and the man was anonymous.
“We don’t even know if he used his own picture. They will accept ten-year-old photos, of course, and it’s really not that hard to use a photo that has only some reasonable resemblance. In any case, customs’ new photo devices were wasted—all the pictures they took look about the same. They’re blaming this failure on the fact that the technology is brand new, and they didn’t have enough time to prepare properly, and so on.
“It’s a given that information about our man has gone out to hotels, Swedish Railways, airports, ferries, dung heaps, et cetera. I hardly think we should count on anything from those sources, but of course we will keep looking. One plus is that the media doesn’t know anything, even though the TV cameras showed up quickly at Arlanda. I imagine you’ll see the results tonight. Our most esteemed boss Mörner appeared and gave a statement, which guarantees some sort of quality TV, at least. Questions, anyone?”
“What happened with the roadblocks?” asked Gunnar Nyberg.
“The only thing we accomplished was a few hours of complete traffic chaos on the E4. The Arlanda traffic in every direction is quite simply too dense. In addition, it took a hell of a long time to set up the roadblocks. Only a true amateur would have been caught. We’re trying to identify all the taxi and bus drivers who were working around Arlanda at the time in question, but as you know, deregulation has made the taxi traffic in Stockholm unmanageable, so we’ll probably have to admit defeat on that point. Anything else?”
“Not a question, really,” said Kerstin Holm. “Just some information. According to the data register, our man was number eighteen to pass through my passport control. I’ve tried to get my impressions in order, and I’ve talked to the immigration officer, but neither of us has any memory of him at all. Maybe something will come up eventually.”
Hultin nodded and continued mysteriously. “To be on the safe side, I’ve made sure that all deaths reported to the police in the country, from now on, are reported directly to us, and the same goes for all suspected crimes against Americans in Sweden. If there’s the least suspicion of foul play, our brains must unanimously think: Could this have anything to do with our serial killer? This is our case now, even in an official sense, and it’s our only one, and the whole unit is part of it, and it is top-top secret, and no one around you must even catch a whiff of the words bestial-American-serial-killer-loose-in-Sweden. Wherever you are, think: Could the serial killer have anything to do with this bus being late? Might he have any connection at all to this bike accident or to that man’s incredibly spastic movements or to your better half’s increasingly loud snores? In other words, full focus.”
They understood.
“I have kept in rather intensive contact with the authorities in the United States,” Hultin continued. “Special Agent Ray Larner with the FBI has supplied us with a detailed account of last night’s events and a brief profile of the perpetrator. Concerning the results at Arlanda, more information will be streaming in during the next few days. Here is the broad outline as it stands right now.
“The Swedish literary critic Lars-Erik Hassel was tortured to death just before midnight Swedish time in a janitor’s closet at the Newark airport outside New York. It was a few hours before he was found. He had no ticket on him, but a flight to Arlanda that same night was found to be written down in his agenda. In other words, it was likely that the killer had taken his ticket, but a person can’t check in if the name on the ticket doesn’t match the name on the passport, so they took a chance and checked with SAS to see if Hassel’s ticket had been canceled. Why steal the ticket otherwise? His wallet and agenda and everything else were still there, after all. And they got lucky—they got hold of a ticket agent who remembered a late cancellation by phone, which was quickly followed by a late booking. But of course this all happened at night New York time, and in order to find the name of the person who booked last, they needed a data expert who could go into the computer and get exact booking times. They finally managed to tear someone matching that description from the arms of his sweetheart, and he dug up the name, after which it was delivered to us. Eleven minutes too late.”
Hultin paused and let the A-Unit’s slightly overloaded brains absorb this information.
“This caused us to face certain problems. The likely scenario
is that the killer murdered Hassel, called in his name to cancel his ticket, then called again and booked the recently canceled spot in his own fake name. What does this tell us?”
Since everyone realized that the question was rhetorical, no one was interested in answering it. Hultin complicated the laws of rhetoric by answering it himself, with another question: “The basic issue is, of course: Why Sweden? What kind of evil thing have we done for this to happen to us? Let us assume the following. A notorious serial killer finds himself in an airport. His intention is to flee the country, hence the fake passport. Maybe he can feel the FBI breathing down his neck. But in his excitement, his desire to kill is acutely intensified. He waits in a suitable place until a suitable victim comes close. He does his deed, finds the ticket, and gets it into his head that it’s a suitable place to flee to; the plane is leaving soon, after all. But when he calls to book his seat, it turns out the plane is full. He knows, however, that one seat is definitely free. He takes a peek at the ticket, finds the difficult-to-pronounce name Lars-Erik Hassel along with a booking number, and calls to cancel, at which point a spot is vacant. What is wrong with this picture?”
“Spot the difference,” said Hjelm. No one laughed.
“It is actually almost possible to find several,” Chavez said with an unintentional but hardly career-boosting dig at Hultin, who didn’t blink. “The most important part of your scenario, Jan-Olov, is the coincidence. If he truly didn’t get the idea to travel to Sweden until after the murder, one might ask if he would really go to that much trouble to get to such an arbitrarily chosen country. The traffic to and from Newark is nonstop, after all. Why not just as well fly to Düsseldorf five minutes later or Cagliari eight minutes later?”
“Cagliari?” said Nyberg.
“It’s on Sardinia,” Hjelm said helpfully.
“It was just an example,” Chavez said impatiently. “The point is, Sweden doesn’t seem to have been chosen randomly at all. It feels a little extra unpleasant.”
