Last Will (21 page)

“Have you checked to see if there’s any extra gas in one of the other labs?” he asked.

She looked even more horrified.

“But surely you’re not allowed to do that?” she said.

He smiled and suppressed an impulse to put a hand on her shoulder.

“Well,” he said, “you can borrow the reserve cylinder from my lab. I’m in the next corridor on the right.”

“No kidding?” she said, taking off her glasses, and now he could see that she was actually very pretty. She had a red scar at the top of her right cheek—it was shaped like a little bird.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll help you carry it. Can you pass that to me?”

He gestured to the large wrench that was lying on the radiator behind the gas cylinders, left there for precisely this eventuality.

She followed close on his heels as they went down the corridor, and watched wide-eyed as he closed the valve and unscrewed one of the gas cylinders from its place in his own lab and put it onto a small hand truck.

“They’re really heavy,” he said, slightly apologetically, as he set off with the cylinder.

Putting it in position in her lab took less than three minutes.

Good job I used to do so much work on my moped, he thought, putting the wrench back on the radiator.

She was practically crying with joy as the carbon dioxide levels in the incubator rose far enough to make the alarm shut off.

“How can I thank you?” she asked. “Can I offer you dinner?”

Johan Isaksson laughed, rather embarrassed.

“I have to work tonight,” he said. “Sorry.”

“What about one beer, then?” she said. “Please, I’m practically done here, have just one little
cerveza
with me?”

She tilted her head and fluttered her eyelashes.

He laughed again, more relaxed now.

“I suppose one little beer won’t do any harm,” he said.

She clapped her hands and jumped up and down a couple of times, making her ponytail bounce.

“Great! Hang on, I’ll go and get them …”

She disappeared inside her lab and emerged with two bottles of Budweiser.

“I hope you like Yankee beer,” she said, pulling off her lab coat. She handed him the bottles as she kicked off her sandals and pulled on a pair of high-heeled leather boots.

“Cilla,” he said, reading the name from the sandals as she put them by the airlock. “Is that you?”

She took the beers from him and smiled.

“Shit, no,” she said, then held out her hand. “I’m Janet.”

He took her hand and smiled back.

“Johan,” he said. “Where do you want to sit?”

She went over to the table at the end of the corridor, and he noticed that she was limping slightly with her left leg. Over at the table she opened both bottles and passed him one.

“
Para mi héroe
,” she said, raising her bottle.

Taking his beer, he drank in careful sips. The beer was bitter, slightly sour, and he couldn’t help pulling a face.

“What is it?” she said, looking worried. “Don’t you like it?”

He cleared his throat.

“It’s good,” he said. “I’m just not used to it … So you speak Spanish?”

She shrugged her shoulders awkwardly and laughed.

“My family is from Mexico,” she said. “I’m the first person in our family to go to university—it’s a big deal for them.”

He nodded sympathetically—she must be a smart girl.

“We swam across the Rio Grande when I was five years old, just west of Cuidad Juárez.”

His eyes opened wide. Some people really had been through a lot.

“I got caught on some barbed wire they’d put up to stop people like us from reaching the American dream,” she said, pointing to her cheek and her left leg. “I never really recovered.”

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

She looked rather sad.

“Only in here,” she said, putting her hand on her heart.

“Do you miss your family?”

She nodded, smiling sadly.

“So I just have to drown my sorrows.”

She knocked her bottle of beer against his.

“Bottoms up,” she said, and downed her beer in one.

He took a deep breath and followed her example, gulping hard several times. He didn’t really like beer, and this one was particularly awful.

“Do you want another one?” she asked, and he hurried to raise his hand to stop her.

She tilted her head again.

“There’s just one little thing I could use some help with,” she said. “My samples, they’re on the top shelf inside the freeze room, and I can’t reach them even if I stand on a stool. Could you give me a hand?”

He smiled—she really was very sweet.

“You know,” he said, “you’ve got really beautiful eyes.”

She smiled, and dimples appeared in her cheeks.

“Thank you,” she said. “You’re pretty cute yourself.”

He downed the last of the beer with a grimace.

“My samples …” she said, gesturing toward the door of the freeze room.

He went over to the control panel to the right of the door, switched on the light inside, and checked the thermostat: minus 27 degrees Celsius.

“Where are they?” he asked.

“Right at the back, on the top shelf,” she said, opening the door for him.

He walked in and shivered at once in the cold. It really was freezing in there.

The space between the shelves was narrow and cramped. Boxes of slides, crates of samples, long rows of frozen cellular tissue. He looked along the labels, feeling a bit peculiar.

“What did you say it said on the samples?” he asked behind him, and at that moment the door closed.

He stared at the frozen door without really understanding what he was looking at, noting the emergency release switch and freezer apparatus to the left of the door.

“Janet?” he said.

There was a clicking sound and the fluorescent lights in the ceiling flickered and everything turned black.

“Janet!” he shouted into the darkness. “The door’s closed!”

He put his hands out in front of him, fumbling in the air and dislodging a glass retort that crashed to the floor. He felt his way to the door and pressed the emergency release switch.

Nothing happened.

He pressed again, harder.

“Janet!”

He pushed against the door with his whole weight. It didn’t budge.

He screamed and screamed and screamed and then all was silent.

The Kitten sighed and tugged at the yellow-and-white striped apron with the elastic cuffs. The fastener was chafing against the back of her neck. Cilla’s sandals were too big, flapping when she walked. She pushed the dark-framed false glasses onto her nose, checked the time and sighed again.

She’d been playing at being a lab rat in this getup for too long now—she was sick of it.

Another quarter of an hour.

She glanced through the window in the air-lock door; the gloomy corridor outside was empty. The spring evening was getting dark, no longer reaching far into the long corridors of the lab building.

God, she was so sick of all this! And she really, really needed a cigarette!

She took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and forced herself to focus on the rest of the chain of events. This whole damn job was a matter of timing and waiting, and the latter was without a shadow of a doubt her weakest point.

She was utterly sick of this city and this whole business. Basically everything about this bastard North Pole sucked. At least the last job had been a bit rock ’n’ roll, but this was just a drag. Her ambivalent attitude toward the country wasn’t just the result of the scar on her cheek and the pain in her leg. There was something about the blandness of the architecture and the landscape, the naïveté of the people, the hopeful expressions on their faces.

A self-satisfied people, she thought. A gang of imbeciles wandering about looking at the world around them through a haze of insipid loveliness. Here we come: if everyone were as lovely as us there’d be peace on earth, hallelujah—bastard fucking morons.

The cretinous blabbermouth in the freezer was no exception. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and just look how that turned out. What a stroke of luck that she kept hold of her wingman’s cell phone! For safety’s sake she’d kept it switched on and charged, an intuitive precaution that turned out to be entirely justified.

Little Yappy had sent the first text just as she finished cleaning up after the pisshead doctor in communist hell. The message had been sent from the blabbermouth’s private number, short and possibly the result of a degree of panic:
Call me! I want to talk!

Naturally she hadn’t replied, but presumed he must have his cell phone set to inform him when messages were delivered, because the next text said:
I know you’re there. I know what you did. Call me!

Waiting for his next move had become a sort of hobby. Of course she never replied, just let him sit and stew in his bloody igloo.

Then, on Tuesday, it stopped being fun.

Ok. Fine. I’m going to the police.

She had gathered her things, left the apartment in her own good time, locking it carefully behind her and making her way to the airport. That same evening she had searched his student room. There was a draft of the letter in his computer, an anonymous letter to the police explaining what Yappy himself had done, how much money he had been paid, what her wingman had done (so pathetically clumsy!), and information about the phone number her wingman had been using.

She left the document as it was. The boy didn’t have broadband in his room, and she hadn’t found a modem, so he couldn’t use the Internet. She had kept Yappy under close observation for the rest of the week. He hadn’t posted any letter; she had gotten to him in time.

With a deep sigh she struggled over to the carbon dioxide cylinders to the right of the lab door. The pain below her left knee flared up every time she put any weight on the leg. The bone had healed crooked, because that bastard communist quack had been so useless.

She wondered if anyone would notice that both normal cylinders were empty. Probably—scientists were so fucking picky about their precious little samples. Her walks through the lab building pushing a cleaner’s cart had taught her exactly how fussy they were. They were bound to notice the cylinders and talk about them, but not about the cleaner who had been in there, wiping and disinfecting. No one sees cleaners; no one would be able to describe her afterward.

She opened the door to the corridor and listened. No one but Yappy had booked a lab that evening or overnight, but you couldn’t be too careful. You could still smell the gas in the corridor, which wasn’t good, but there was nothing she could do about that. Not that carbon dioxide was particularly dangerous—she’d checked—but she’d emptied out the contents of two full cylinders, so it would be a few hours before the air returned to normal.

She looked at the time and sighed again.

He’d managed to down the whole bottle in the end, but what sort of man doesn’t like lager? Okay, so the chemicals made it taste pretty crappy, there was no getting away from that, but it wasn’t bad enough for a thirsty young man to turn his nose up at it.

Really, though, it was pretty damn rich that she should have to clear up other people’s mistakes like this. She wasn’t the one who had hired Yappy, she’d been sure to point that out: that had been her wingman’s mistake, the fucking amateur.

Oh well, there was no serious harm done, which was something to be grateful for.

She looked at the time again.

One hour and fifty-three minutes.

That would have to do. The combination of the cold and the drugs would kill an elephant within two hours. It was time to pick up the cell phone and clear the contents of a computer over in the student residences.

She pulled off her protective clothing and glasses and put them in the bag with the empty beer bottles. She kept the latex gloves on: she had already wiped any surface she had touched with her bare hands, and she had no intention of doing it again.

She quickly pulled on her boots and denim jacket, then went off to Yappy’s office, checked through his things, and grabbed his cell phone. Then she left the door ajar, just as she had found it.

Finally she took out the key and went back to the freeze room. She listened at the door for a few seconds, even though she knew she wasn’t going to hear anything.

Then she put the key in the lock and turned it.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 26

Annika was walking along a path in the forest. The wind was warm, the sun was shining, almost hot, and she was treading lightly because she was on familiar territory. This was the path to Lyckebo, her grandmother’s cottage in the woods beside Lake Hultsjön.

Suddenly she caught sight of a woman ahead of her, a blond woman with a page cut who was moving slowly through the pines, almost floating. She was wearing a white dress with wide sleeves, so long that they almost touched the ground.

Then the woman laughed, a laugh that sounded like birdsong, and realization struck Annika with enough force to make her lose her breath.

First she took my husband, and now she wants to take my grandmother from me as well!

Annika screamed, rushing after Sophia Grenborg, screaming so loudly that it echoed through the forest—she would soon catch up with her. Then Annika realized that she was holding a pistol in her hand, a Walther 7.65, loaded with Israeli soft-tipped bullets.