Project Nirvana (21 page)

She drove onto the E4 southbound and stayed at a distance that kept her safely out of Borg’s rearview mirror. The Volvo Jonna was driving belonged to County CID and not a fake company. It would be easy to run a trace on its registration number.

She was troubled by her decision to follow Borg as he left Sigtuna. Following a Security Service agent was perhaps not a crime in itself, as long as she didn’t disclose any classified information. But it was not part of an official investigation and if discovered she would lose her job in an instant. Yet, here she was on the E4 about three hundred metres behind Borg’s car. There was nothing wrong with Walter’s powers of persuasion.

Borg turned off the E4 and stopped at a petrol station. Jonna could see that he had taken out his mobile phone to make a call.

Jonna made a note of the time and the location. Then she called Carlinder and asked him to trace the telephone number that Borg was using and the number he was calling. It took Carlinder less than fifteen minutes to retrieve the information from the phone companies, because Borg’s mobile phone had the only unused pre-paid SIM card to log into the relevant base station at that specific time. The sat-nav co-ordinates were a match within the usual ten metres as well. Once again, Borg had called the number near the Olympic Stadium. Who was he talking to, and why?

Jonna called Walter’s mobile.

Rolf Meiton answered. “Walter has switched places with the hostages,” Meiton said.

“Switched places? You mean Walter is the hostage now?”

“Yes,” Meiton sighed. “Hedman has taped his hand to Walter’s head in a dead man’s switch with a sawn-off shotgun. We are attempting to get a tracker attached to the car, but it may prove difficult as Hedman isn’t letting the vehicle out of his sight.”

Jonna was so taken aback by Meiton’s news that she missed Borg as he took an exit off the E4. She barely managed to swerve the car over into the right lane and the exit to Solna. Jonna was familiar with the implication of the dead man’s switch. Her thoughts swirled in her head. Walter, the Germans’ meeting with the National Bureau of Investigation, Martin Borg, her failure on the caravan site raid. The list was long. Walter would have wanted her to carry on, she knew that, but a sudden and overwhelming sense of exhaustion made her doubt herself. How much could she really handle?

Perhaps she should go to David Lilja, despite Walter’s dislike of the man. She drew closer to Borg’s car. He had stopped at a red light that was taking time to change.

Two hundred metres. She slowed down to avoid getting too close. The car behind her was getting impatient.

Why didn’t the lights change? One hundred and fifty metres. She couldn’t drive any slower now and there was no other lane to change to. The car behind her flashed his headlights. One hundred metres. Her adrenaline was pumping.

“Damned red light,” she swore out loud. The man in the car behind her was gesticulating at her. Yet another car joined the queue. Jonna was less than fifty metres from Borg now. The driver behind her tooted his horn. He could not overtake her because of the central reservation barrier.

In the rearview mirror, she could see an infuriated driver. Jonna made a vague sign. The traffic lights changed and Borg’s car started to move. When the distance increased sufficiently, she increased speed again. A hundred metres later, there were two lanes. She saw the car behind her swerve into the left lane and drive up alongside her.

A man in his upper middle-age showed her the finger while mouthing something at her. She responded with a smile and shrugged innocently. She would have preferred to give another response.

Alice McDaniel was
hit by cold air as she left the airport terminal. It was at least six degrees colder in Stockholm than in the Isle of Man and she was glad that she had chosen her dark blue, woollen coat.

She got into a taxi and asked to be driven to the Grand Hotel. The taxi driver inquired which Grand Hotel she meant.

“Are there two?” she asked in surprise.

“Yes,” the driver answered in broken English. “One down in town Stockholm and one to Saltsjöbaden out Stockholm.”

She took out her booking confirmation and found that it was the Grand Hotel in central Stockholm.

“Ah, one of best hotels in city,” the driver said, as they drove onto the motorway.

Alice McDaniel didn’t know what to expect from the meeting with her client. She would have to view the event as an expenses-paid holiday. Deliver the envelope and then spend the rest of the time sightseeing. Perhaps the Stockholm shops had something different to the stores in London.

She looked out of the car window, but her mind was occupied with thoughts of her ex-directory number and with the questions she would ask about it.

If Brageler refused to answer or if his explanation was not plausible, she would refuse to hand over his envelope. She knew that she had no legal right to keep a client’s property. But there was a reason she had an unlisted telephone number. The fear that something was not quite right with this situation resurfaced. What if she was inadvertently involved in some illegal activity and had become an unwitting courier?

She put her hand in the case, felt the contours of the envelope and its small plastic seals. She could perhaps open the envelope. Blame Customs for breaking the seals. Tell him that they wanted to see the contents. Her client might ask for a receipt from the Customs official, probably even call the airport to double-check her story. She would see the contents, but risk a lawsuit that could be costly for her law firm. No insurance would cover her indemnity if she were found guilty.

She could also say that she had been robbed or simply misplaced the envelope. But her incompetence would be penalized and that was not a risk she wanted to take. She would not be the one, out of many generations of McDaniels, who brought down the firm. Always put the client first, her father had told her when he handed over the reins. She now wished that she had continued with her engineering degree instead.

Forty minutes later, she opened the door to a luxurious hotel room. The décor on the walls and ceiling was from the turn of the century. The furniture was baroque and the view over the harbour with its tourist boats was magnificent. As promised, the room was paid in advance and booked in her name, according to the receptionist. She put her small flight bag down on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed. She opened the envelope with a message that had been left for her at the desk and read it with mounting surprise.

Chapter 13

A sea of
flowers covered the coffins. The small one had angels on its side. The other was a coffin for a full-sized body. Soft organ music by Handel echoed off the brick walls. A priest stood between both coffins and read from the Bible. Leo could not hear the priest. The priest had his back to Leo and a large, silver cross embellished on his white cloak. A coldness Leo had never before experienced seeped into his bone marrow and he lost all sense of feeling in his body. He could not move his legs. Nor his arms and mouth. No matter how he tried, his body would not leave the wooden pew. Two steel doors in the wall opened and fire issued from them. The priest put his hands on the coffins and lifted his head. He prayed in a loud voice, but the roar of the ovens drowned him out. Leo tried desperately to hear him. He wanted to hear the priest’s words. Suddenly the prayer ended.

The priest lowered his head and let his arms fall to his side. The sound of the organ music slowly faded away. Something was moving inside the coffins. Leo heard a banging sound. Something like a child crying for help. Slowly, the coffins moved towards the opening in the wall. He tried to call out, but his mouth would not work. The flames licked the coffins and the banging became more and more frantic. He tried to tear himself from the pew, but his body was paralyzed. Now the cries for help were louder. It was the voice of a desperate little girl. She was screaming for help. She was screaming for somebody to save her mummy.

Leo opened his eyes and was met by a bleak, stone wall. He was breathing heavily and his body was covered in sweat. He had never had a dream like this. So vivid, so real. He turned over and allowed his brain to sift through the images. His subconscious was trying to tell him something important. He sat up, propping himself against the wall. Looked at the light through the door crack and waited for his mind to find answers. His inner self hungered for reconciliation and he was ready.

The light from the door opening was dim. So it was the afternoon. Perhaps they already had the envelope and were analysing the contents. If they possessed the competence they claimed, then they would be astonished.

Leo missed Günter Himmelmann. His sharp intellect and brilliance when they encountered a problem. His calm voice and the melancholy eyes. Great geniuses knew the answers before the questions were formulated. Günter Himmelmann was such a man. What Leo had accomplished was nothing compared with Himmelmann’s achievements. It had all come to fruition thanks to the efforts of Leo and others, but Himmelmann was the architect. The creator of the thing that would answer one of mankind’s oldest questions.

But something had gone wrong. The project had suffered several severe setbacks. Leo and the others did not understand what had gone wrong. They must have overlooked something, yet there had been no logical reason for the failures. It was as if somebody had been deliberately sabotaging their work. Delaying and complicating their work by introducing errors so small that they were undetectable. Values were switched and instruments were incorrectly calibrated. But why?

Footsteps a long way off. A door closed. The sound of voices got closer. Leo felt his muscles tense and, for the first time since he had been captured, he felt anxiety. The moment of truth was approaching. He hoped that Alice McDaniel had done what she had been asked.

Tor kept his
eye on the old man’s white Mazda through one of the kitchen windows. He parted the blinds just enough so that he could see the car. Not a chance in hell that he would allow them to plant a tracking device on his ticket out of here.

Walter sat on a chair in front of him. Tor had been given a blanket and had forced Walter to help him put on the helmet. His index finger was twitching on the trigger. He looked at his taped hand and remembered that Omar’s ring was still in his pocket. He had intended to stash it. Hide it in a safe place until everything had blown over. Instead, that highly incriminating piece of evidence was still on his person. Despite that fact, he felt confident. He was going to find a way out of this mess.

In four hours or so, it would be dark enough to leave. He went over his plan one last time. First, the blanket had to cover the cop and himself. Gröhn would have to do that. Then, go through the front door and down the steps. Be careful not to miss a step and fall over. Then directly to the left towards the car. Tor estimated that the distance was about five metres. While they were making their way to the car, the cops could put a tracker on the car.

This was a weak spot in his plan. To be on the safe side, Tor had to get the cops at least two hundred metres from the house.

Lastly, the cop would have to get into the car from the passenger side and sit behind the driving wheel with Tor following him. Then they would drive to the place that he had agreed with the psycho cop. A garage in the middle of town for which Tor had been given the entry code. He had no idea what would happen after that. Hopefully . . .

“Whatever have you and Martin Borg been up to?” Walter said, interrupting Tor’s thoughts.

“Who the fuck is that?” asked Tor. He had never heard that name before.

“He’s a cop and you met him at Omar’s in Gnesta.”

Tor was speechless. So that’s the psycho cop’s name, he thought. But how could Gröhn know about what happened in Gnesta? The cop had hardly snitched on himself. Gröhn must be taking a guess. “Never been in Gnesta,” Tor said, “and never met any fucking cop there.”

“You could still improve your situation. I could talk to the prosecutor . . .”

“Shut up,” bellowed Tor angrily. “I have my own way out of this mess. And I won’t have to spend a single day in the nick. Understand?”

“No,” Walter said. “In actual fact, I don’t understand.”

“To me, it makes no difference if I waste you or not. For the time being, you’re my ticket out of here. Besides, I won’t get a deal because of . . .” He stopped himself just in time. Three more seconds and he would have blurted out a confession to a police murder.

“Because of . . . what?” Walter inquired.

“No more talking!”

“Listen to me . . .”

“Shut it!” Tor roared, pressing Walter’s head sideways with the gun. “I don’t want to chat, so shut the fuck up!”

The nausea that Walter felt when the sawn-off shotgun was pressed against his neck had passed. Now he was strangely ambivalent about the prospect of death. Didn’t he possess more hunger for life than this? He was totally at the mercy of a lunatic and the end would be quick if he pulled the trigger. If he was lucky, he would not even see it coming.

It was more important that the doctor and the old couple had survived. He hoped that Jonna would do well also, now that he was taking stock of his life.

She knew what she had to do. All that worried him was the threat from Borg if he was discovered. Walter was convinced that Borg was deeply involved in something. He just didn’t know what. But what worried him most was that Borg probably was not alone. A fifth column within the Security Service or was it villains outside the service? Of Sweden’s fifteen thousand police officers, Borg was one of the few who crossed the line into criminal activity and who no longer knew who his real employer was.

How had he passed the polygraph tests? What was his motivation? Was he selling information? There were more questions than answers and Walter feared what the full extent of the truth might be.

“I’ve been thinking,” Walter began tentatively.

His kidnapper was staring out of the window with blank eyes. “Quiet,” Tor replied.