Borderline (7 page)

She felt the words flow through her head without settling. The trackers didn’t need either an external aerial or satellite coverage, and the smallest model, which was evidently the one used in this instance, was smaller than a mobile phone and weighed just 135 grams; they had been hidden in the engine compartment, behind the antifreeze container.

She looked out over Riddarfjärden again. It was about to start snowing. The clouds were hanging just above the rooftops.

‘You’re right. We know very little with any certainty. But we can make a number of assumptions. We could be dealing with a hostage situation – the people in the group have been kidnapped. It isn’t unusual in that part of the world. You might have heard of the Somali pirates who hijack ships at sea. This could be a land-based version of that.’

‘Like the Danish family on that yacht?’ Anders Schyman asked.

‘Kidnapped?’ Annika said.

‘If we’re dealing with kidnap, we’ll find out about it within the next few days, probably today or tomorrow.’

Annika couldn’t sit still any longer. She got up and went to the window. Ducks were swimming about in the water: how come their feet didn’t freeze?

‘There are routines in most things,’ Jimmy Halenius said. ‘If we’re lucky the kidnappers will just demand money. If we’re unlucky this could be a political kidnapping, and some fundamentalist group will assume responsibility and start demanding the release of terrorists held captive around the world, or that the US withdraws from Afghanistan, or that global capitalism be dismantled. That’s much more difficult.’

Annika could feel her hands starting to tremble: alien hand syndrome.

‘There’s no chance that they’ll just turn up?’ the editor-in-chief asked. ‘Shaken but unharmed?’

‘Of course it’s a possibility,’ Halenius said. ‘We don’t know anything about the men at the roadblock or their motives so the scenario is completely open.’ He stood up and came over to stand beside her at the window. ‘From the government’s side,’ he went on, ‘we’ll keep you informed of everything that reaches us from Brussels, Nairobi, and the authorities in all the other countries concerned. In other words, Britain, Romania, France, Germany, Spain and Denmark. What information we receive will determine how we proceed. You can count on our support, no matter what happens. I’ve got your email address, so I’ll send you the delegation secretary’s report and details of the other delegates as soon as it’s been checked and cleared. Is there a number I can reach you on?’

She hesitated, then put her hand into her bag and pulled out the newspaper’s mobile. ‘This one,’ she said quietly, switching it on and tapping in her PIN.

Behind her Schyman stood up, and the two men called Hans followed suit.

‘We’ve looked into the limitation period for aggravated harassment,’ the under-secretary of state said quietly. ‘It was done here in the department back in 2007, precisely because of the issue you raised. The inquiry concluded that aggravated harassment was not a continuous crime but consisted of separate offences. That means they each have a separate statute of limitation. Anything else would be out of the question. There’d be a risk of miscarriages of justice.’

She turned and looked up at him. He had been listening to what she had said. ‘There are still prosecutors calling this a political law,’ she said. ‘Did you know that?’

Halenius nodded.

‘So what are all other laws?’ she said. ‘God-given?’ She walked out of the little room.

Behind her she heard Anders Schyman and the under-secretary of state mumbling. She knew exactly what they were talking about. How long could this be kept from the public? Until some group claimed responsibility, probably, but no longer than that. There were too many countries involved, too many organizations. When could Schyman go to press? Who was going to make a statement?

She took the lift down without waiting for Schyman.

* * *

The hut consisted of a single windowless room. The inside was pitch black with soot. In the centre of the floor there was a hearth that presumably acted both as a stove and a source of heat and light, but at the moment just took up space. A hole in the roof to let the smoke out was spreading a gloomy light, making our bodies look dark and indistinct. Our hands had been tied behind our backs again. They had removed our shoes.

It was very cramped.

I was lying with my face towards the crotch of Alvaro the Spaniard. He had had to relieve himself in his trousers, like the rest of us. The stench was heavy and acrid.

The Dane, Per, was having difficulty breathing. He didn’t complain, but his wheezing filled the gloom. The German woman was snoring.

We were in a camp for people and livestock behind a wall of branches and thorny bushes, known as a
manyatta
. I’d managed to count eight huts in the moonlight before we were shut inside this one. But I hadn’t seen anyone apart from our guards. No cows or goats either. I think I must have slept for a while during the morning.

The air was perfectly still. It was incredibly hot. The square of light in the roof showed that the sun was approaching its zenith. Sweat was running into my eyes. The salt made them sting, not that it mattered.

We’d been given food.
Ugali
, boiled maize flour, the staple in East Africa. I ate too quickly and got stomach cramps.

But I was feeling confident. This would soon be over. The tall man had assured us of this in his rough Swahili. We were just waiting for Kiongozi Ujumla, the great leader. The tall man clearly didn’t have the authority to sanction our release on his own. It had to be Kiongozi Ujumla who took that sort of decision, and we must understand that if you didn’t have authority, then you didn’t have authority. Everyone knew that.

Even Sébastien seemed satisfied. He had stopped demanding medical treatment for the wound to his head, from when he was struck with the butt of the rifle.

Annika was smiling at me in the semi-darkness. I could smell her shampoo.

These people didn’t mean us any harm. They were using us as pawns in an unpleasant game, but they were still people, just like us. They knew perfectly well that we were important people in our respective homelands, and that we had children and families. They were doing this to draw attention to their cause, and then they’d release us. The tall man had assured us of that several times.

And if they didn’t keep their word, it would cost them dear. The entire police forces of Kenya and Somalia would be after them, not to mention the whole of the EU.

I tried to turn my head to get away from the stench of excrement.

Soon I would be at home with Annika and the children again.

* * *

The façade of the building on Agnegatan had been scrubbed and repainted during their time in Washington. The nondescript dirty-brown façade was now sparkling white, with a hint of green. In spite of the cloud Annika had to squint when she looked at it.

Anders Schyman had sent her home after the meeting at Rosenbad. It had been a reasonable decision.

She tapped in the door code and took the stairs up. She dropped her outdoor clothes in a heap inside the door, walked into the living room with her bag, put her laptop on the coffee-table, went into the kitchen to switch the kettle on, then to the toilet. As she was washing her hands she found herself staring at Thomas’s towel, hanging next to the basin; he was the only member of the family who insisted on having his own.

She dried her hands on it.

She fetched a fresh roll of toilet paper from the top cupboard in the children’s room, plugged in the landline, made some instant coffee in a mug with the words ‘The White House’, then checked her email.

Halenius hadn’t sent her the report from the British woman who was guaranteed to be pretty and blonde.

She stared at her inbox with her hands tightly clenched in her lap. For some reason the picture of the fat woman on the front page of the
Evening Post
had stuck in her head.

Perhaps it was all just a terrible misunderstanding.

Perhaps the men at the roadblock had thought the EU delegation were Americans, maybe CIA agents, and as soon as they realized their mistake they’d drive Thomas and the others straight back to the airport in that town, Liboi. Thomas would have a beer in the bar and take the opportunity to do some duty-free shopping, perfume for her and maybe some half-kilo bags of sweets for the children. He’d get home tired and dirty, complain about the facilities at the airport in Liboi and moan about the food on the plane …

She checked her email again.

Nothing. No British woman.

She wondered if he’d slept with her yet.

She got up from the computer and went into the children’s room. Kalle had made his bed, but Ellen hadn’t.

Living with the children made it worthwhile. She’d tried the alternative, and it had driven her to the brink of madness. The year when Thomas had lived with Sophia Grenborg and she had had the children every other week had been a nightmare. Plenty of other people managed it, most of them, even, but not her.

She slumped down on Ellen’s pillows.

She really had made an effort.

When they’d got back together and moved to the USA, she had done her best, with sex and cooking and sensible working hours. She had masturbated when she was alone in an effort to build up some sort of sex-drive, bought cookbooks with Mexican and Asian recipes, and blamed the time difference when she wriggled out of the newsroom’s demanding schedule to bake chocolate-chip cookies for the school fête.

But she had always known there were other women. No one in particular, just women he could get into bed without too much effort. She assumed he must have done pretty well. He looked like a Viking, with his blond hair, grey eyes and broad shoulders. He laughed easily and was a good listener; he was competent at most sports, from bowling to hockey, and he was reasonably domesticated.

Conferences, like the one in Nairobi, were his prime hunting ground. The fact that he worked for the government did nothing to harm his chances. His involvement in Frontex wasn’t, of course, particularly sexy, so he usually said he worked in international security analysis. Which was probably true, at least in part.

She resisted the urge to make Ellen’s bed, went back to her laptop and Googled Frontex.

She was completely uninterested in Thomas’s new job. The knowledge that he would be going off to international conferences several times a year had been enough. She knew very little about the actual organization.

One of the first hits came from her own paper. The question of EU border security had been the responsibility of the Swedish EU commissioner for the past couple of years, which meant that a number of inquiries into the subject were being organized from Sweden.

And, yes, they occasionally landed on Thomas’s desk.

On the organization’s official website she read that its latest initiative had been introduced early: the waters off the Italian island of Lampedusa were being patrolled by air and sea to stop refugees from the turbulence in North Africa making their way to Europe. According to the Swedish EU commissioner, Frontex was there ‘to save lives’, which might be true. Refugees coming ashore on the beaches of Spain and Italy were so common that no one cared. They didn’t even merit a mention in the media now, not in the Mediterranean countries and certainly not in Sweden. If they ever came up, it was because some Swedish tourist had tripped over a body and not been granted compensation by their tour operator.

There was a ping from her inbox, and there, attached to an email from Halenius, was the report from the pretty little British woman. It was in English, fairly short, and described the situation in the border town.

The crossing between Kenya and Somalia was mostly unmanned. A sign next to the police station in Liboi, saying, ‘Republic of Kenya, Department of Immigration, Liboi Border Control’, was the only indication that it existed. There were neither staff nor a permanent presence at the border.

At present there were more than four hundred thousand people, most of them Somali, in refugee camps in the neighbouring town of Dadaab.

Annika looked up from her computer. Where had she heard of Dadaab? Something about drought in the Horn of Africa?

She went into Google Maps and typed ‘liboi, kenya’ in the search box. She was rewarded with a yellowish-brown satellite image of parched earth. Liboi was shown as lying in the middle of a great expanse of nothing, and was no bigger than the head of a pin. A yellow road, identified as Garissa Road A3, ran across the image. She clicked to zoom out, and Dadaab appeared in the southwest, then Garissa, the sea and Nairobi. Kenya lay right on the equator, circled by Somalia, Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania. Christ – what a bunch! She stared at the satellite image with a deafening sense of unreality. All those people, living and going about their business in those countries, and she knew absolutely nothing about them.

A phone rang somewhere in the flat. She pushed the laptop away and stood up, at first unable to work out where the sound was coming from. Then she realized it was the landline. No one called her on it except her mother, and that hardly ever happened. She ran towards the door to the children’s room and grabbed the receiver.

It was Jimmy Halenius. ‘Annika,’ he said. ‘We’ve received two messages from the group holding Thomas and the other members of the delegation.’

She collapsed on to the living-room floor, her mouth as dry as tinder. ‘What do they say?’

‘I’d rather not go into it over the phone …’

‘Tell me what they said!’

The under-secretary of state seemed to pause for breath. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s not really a good idea to hear this kind of information over the phone, but okay … The first message was picked up by the Brits. A man in a shaky video saying in Kinyarwanda that Fiqh Jihad have taken seven EU delegates hostage. The rest of the message consists of political and religious slogans.’

‘What did he say? In Kinyar-what …?’

‘A Bantu language spoken in East Africa, mainly Rwanda. The message really doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already suspect, that they’ve been kidnapped by an organized group.’