The Serbian Dane (23 page)

‘Do you have a number for him?’ Per asked.

Sørensen fished a little notebook out of the clutter on the table, leafed through it and wrote down a telephone number and an address in Hellerup on a pad, tore off the sheet and handed it to Toftlund.

‘He can’t always be depended on to answer the phone. He’s kind of special. But listen, what’s this all about? Is Janos in Denmark? You’re not from PET are you?’

‘Thanks for your help,’ Per said.

‘Is Janos in Denmark?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Lise said, disregarding a warning glance from Per.

Toftlund called PET headquarters on his mobile from the DR car park. He said that he was bringing in an old photograph. He was going to need a photo technician, an artist and an Identikit expert. He had a face and a name. Then he called Mikael’s number. He let the phone ring and ring, then eventually shook his head and flicked the mobile shut.

‘Now what?’ Lise asked.

‘I’m going to run you home.’

‘And then?’

‘Then I’m going to pay a call on Mikael. He might be in.’

‘Shouldn’t you have backup for something like this?’

‘Why?’

‘Well, what if this guy Janos is somewhere around?’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘But you don’t want help?’ she said.

‘No, not yet.’

He put the car into gear and drove off.

‘I’m coming with you,’ Lise said.

‘Why? What for?’

‘So we can hold hands and neck like a couple of American teenagers.’

He laughed.

‘All right then.’

The house in Hellerup lay hushed and still behind its hedge, but there was a light burning in the kitchen and in one of the upstairs rooms. Lise waited in the car while Per rang the doorbell, then took a walk around the house. It was almost 11.00 pm, and all was quiet in the streets round about. The grass was long and damp under his feet. It looked as though something had been dragged across the grass and down to the water. The Sound stretched out, black and
rain-drenched
, at his feet. He noticed a couple of flashing lights out on the water, but visibility was very poor in the driving rain. He peered through the French windows, but the rooms were in darkness. He tried the door. It was locked. He walked back to the car. There was a light on upstairs in the house opposite, and he was conscious of someone tweaking a curtain aside and peering down at him. They keep close tabs on one another around here, he thought to himself.

He climbed into the car beside Lise. He smelled of rain, and the windows steamed up.

‘Right, let’s go home. I don’t know whether he’s in there, or whether he’ll be back later, but I’ll organize a search warrant tomorrow morning. I’m pretty certain I can get one if he isn’t answering the door or the phone.’

‘Do you think there’s something wrong?’

‘It’s just a feeling. But yes, I think there’s something wrong.’ He placed a hand on his stomach. ‘Gut instinct. That’s all it is,’ he said.

‘Intuition.’

‘That’s another word for it.’

‘And what happens after tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘Well, we have a couple of days’ more of her, and then Simba is no longer our problem but our Swedish colleagues’. And by then everyone will know that she’s on the move. They’re going to have their work cut out for them over there, but they’ll probably have more resources to draw on too.’

‘And after that?’

‘I’ve got a whole lot of time off owing to me,’ he said.

‘So have I,’ she said, keeping her eyes front. Raindrops coursed down the windscreen.

‘Maybe we could go to Spain,’ he said softly, but Lise thought that even so she heard a hidden prayer there, a new uncertainty, which said he did not take her for granted.

‘That sounds wonderful, Per. Only…’

‘It’s your husband, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Ole. As long as he’s missing I don’t see how I can…’

‘It’s okay. We’ll find him. And then we’ll go.’

She turned her face to his, and they kissed, and at that same moment the car was flooded by a light from the rear that made the raindrops on the windows sparkle like tiny crystals. A patrol car had pulled up behind them, and as they watched one of the officers got out. His partner remained behind the wheel, already in the process of keying Per’s registration number into the car’s computer.

Toftlund got out:

‘Good evening,’ he said.

‘Good evening,’ the policeman said.

Toftlund slipped his hand slowly into his jacket pocket and pulled out his ID card.

‘Toftlund. G division,’ he said.

The policeman behind the wheel opened his door a little way and shouted:

‘It’s okay, Niels. He’s one of us.’

‘Christensen,’ the uniformed cop said and offered his hand. The rain had slackened to little more than a drizzle, veiling houses and hedges and enveloping the lampposts in a lovely soft glow.

‘The lady across the road gave us a call,’ the policeman continued. He wasn’t very old, and like so many other young policemen, he spoke with a pronounced Jutland accent. He sported a neatly trimmed moustache and most likely dreamed of a couple of years of working undercover before landing a plum job somewhere in Jutland. ‘She thought you two looked a little suspicious. There are a lot of embassies in this area, you know, so we keep an eye out.’

‘That’s perfectly all right,’ Toftlund said.

‘It’s not the first time she’s called. She’s an old lady, we know her. She hasn’t seen the owner of this house for some days. But she has seen another young man coming and going, which she thought was a bit strange. And then suddenly there was this car parked here, so she called us.’

Toftlund thought for a moment. Then:

‘Tell your partner that you and I are going in,’ he said.

‘But we can’t just go breaking into people’s houses,’ the officer protested.

‘I’ll take responsibility. Have your gun at the ready.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Maybe nothing. But it may have to do with a man we’re looking for,’ Toftlund said, already moving towards the garden gate. Whatever way you looked at it, Toftlund was a superior officer, so the uniformed cop glanced back at his partner, pointed to Toftlund, then followed after him.

‘What about your partner?’ the young policeman asked.

‘She’s a civilian. She stays where she is.’

Toftlund rang the bell again but there was still no answer. He pulled his gun and saw the young policeman do the same. There were beads of sweat on his brow, even though the evening was chilly, and Toftlund could see that he was nervous. It could be that he was still just a probationer. They stole round to the back garden. The inky waters of the Sound lapped gently, and the grass felt wet and clammy against their shoes. Per crept up to the French windows, which consisted of lots of small panes of glass set into a white wooden frame flaking slightly along the seams. He turned to Constable Christensen.

‘Now, Christensen. You watch what I do, and you listen to what I say, and then you write it all down in your report. I am about to force entry to this residence because I have reasonable grounds for believing that a person possibly wanted by the police may be on the premises. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Christensen.

Per Toftlund turned his gun around and used the butt to smash the pane next to the keyhole. He poked a hand inside and found the key in the lock. People just never learned. They made it so easy for burglars to get in and so easy for them to get away again with their loot. He opened the door, cocked his gun and stepped inside, followed by the young policeman who – prompted by the tense set of Toftlund’s body – cocked his own pistol before entering the dark gloomy house.

B
ut the man who called himself Vuk was gone. At that precise moment he was approaching Flakfortet, which lay shrouded in the mist of rain. Using a short double-bladed paddle he manoeuvred the black rubber raft alongside the outer face of the breakwater on the north side of the man-made island. With slow but efficient strokes he skirted the breakwater. He was dressed in black from head to toe and almost impossible to make out in the rain-dark sea. Lashed securely to the bottom of the dinghy was a black waterproof sack the size of a sailor’s duffle bag. A few lights still burned on Flakfortet, but the last guests had sailed back to Copenhagen long ago; the crew on the two pleasure boats were asleep, and the restaurant staff were either flopped in front of some TV programme or had gone to bed. They had had a visit from the police, who had checked their ID, gone over the whole place with dogs and informed the yacht owners, whose identities had also been confirmed, that they would have to leave the harbour early the next morning, since the fort would be closed for a fire drill between the hours of 10.00 am and 5.00 pm.

Vuk had been busy.

Early in the morning two days before, he had rented a middle-range car at Avis’s main office in Copenhagen. He had used his British passport and driving licence and his British Eurocard/Mastercard, given an address in south London and said that he would need the car for seven days. He would deliver it in Stockholm, where he would be checking in to the SAS hotel. He had phoned ahead to book the car, so within a mere ten minutes he was able to drive away. His Eurocard number was checked and found to be in order.

Vuk drove first to Østerbro, where earlier he had passed a sports shop specializing in diving equipment. He was served by a muscly young man with
a toothpaste-ad smile, who turned out, nonetheless, to be competent enough and knowledgeable when it came to scuba diving. It took Vuk an hour to choose his equipment. He spoke English to the young man. Explained very briefly that he was from the Czech Republic, and that it was far better and cheaper for him to buy his gear in Denmark, since he could get the tax refunded at the border. The assistant couldn’t have cared less. He received a commission on everything he sold, and he soon found out that Vuk knew what he was talking about, so he helped him to select and try on a wetsuit, explaining as he did so, quite unnecessarily, how the wetsuit worked by allowing the water to seep through it and form a very thin layer between the suit and the skin, thus insulating the body against the cold of the surrounding water. Vuk also bought a mask and snorkel, flippers, a lead-weight belt and a full oxygen tank complete with harness, as well as a small buoy for tying to one’s belt or fixing to an anchor, to warn passing ships of the presence of a diver in the water. To all of this he also added a powerful torch specially designed for use both above and below the water and a little waterproof pouch for hanging around the neck. He paid cash.

In another water sports shop Vuk bought a detailed chart of the waters between Copenhagen, Saltholm, Flakfortet and Sweden, along with an anchor and anchor chain. He deposited his purchases in the boot of the rented car and made his way down to a shop near Nørreport station specializing in all manner of outdoor gear. Here he bought a lightweight sleeping bag, a sleeping mat and a waterproof rucksack, a battery-driven camping lamp and a waterproof
wrist-compass
with a luminous dial of a sort used frequently by divers. Again he paid in cash. In the hunting supplies shop Hunter’s House he found a large waterproof bag with a zipper and a drawstring neck for sealing it shut. His last stop was at the Magasin department store, known so well from his childhood and youth. Here he bought a black woollen pull-on hat and a pair of black deck shoes. In the food hall he purchased a pack of sliced bread, salami and cheese. And finally, in the cosmetics department, he picked up some black hair dye.

He dumped the lot on the floor of the kitchen in Hellerup and made a round of the house to make sure that everything was as it should be. There were no signs that anyone had been inside; there was nothing in the ordinary mailbox except advertising bumph, but in the computer’s mailbox lay messages
from all over the world. He did a quick scan of them. They were all for Mikael and all perfectly innocent.

He drove up to Helsingør on the north coast and took the ferry across to Helsingborg in Sweden. There was no queue; he was able to drive straight on. He had his Danish passport ready, but there was no control when he drove ashore. He drove south, past Malmö and parked the car close to Limhamn harbour, in a quiet residential street with no parking restrictions. Then he took the ferry back across from Limhamn to Dragør on the island suburb of Amager. He ate a steak with onions on board and read the Danish newspapers. There were only a few passengers on the ferry, mostly pensioners returning from a shopping expedition to Sweden.

Vuk took the bus into the city centre, then the train out to Hellerup. Twilight was falling on the villa, but another tour of the house told him that everything was as normal. He poured himself a vodka from the bar in the sitting room and carried the glass through to the kitchen where he switched on the television to watch the early evening news at 6.30. The news was mainly Danish. It didn’t mean much to him. Minor disputes that were blown up into great dramas simply because things were, by and large, so peaceful here, he thought to himself. There was no news from Bosnia and nothing about Sara Santanda. Normality reigned. He popped a frozen pizza into the oven, got out the sea chart and proceeded to study it. The distance from Copenhagen to Flakfortet was approximately five miles, and about half that from Flakfortet to Saltholm. What interested him most were the international shipping lanes on either side of the patch of Dirty Sea. On the city side there would be markers around the outskirts of the Dirty Sea He remembered how the
M/S Langø
had sailed in a wide arc from the mouth of Copenhagen Harbour to Flakfortet, instead of heading for the man-made island in a straight line. A quick look at the key map in the Copenhagen A-Z was enough to show him why, but the sea chart gave a very clear picture of the way in which Middelgrund and the Dirty Sea lay like a barrier, a kind of minefield, between the two shipping channels. He assumed that in the shallows of the Dirty Sea lay an old rubbish dump or ships’ graveyard.

He turned his attention to the weather forecast that followed the news. The weatherman said there would be rain that evening, but that this would
clear away during the night. The weather the next day would be cloudy but generally dry, with the possibility of showers later in the evening; but these too would give way to brighter weather, and on the day itself the nice man on the TV promised that the morning would be sunny with scattered clouds, a moderate wind from the east and temperatures a little above normal for the time of year. In the afternoon rain and strong winds would move in across the country from the east. The weather forecast pleased Vuk. Rain and poor visibility at night was exactly what he wanted.

He picked up the remote control, switched to CNN and turned down the sound. He went on scanning the chart while he ate his pizza, making quite certain of the coordinates he would give to Berlin. They, in turn, would see to it that these were passed on to the captain of the Russian barge, which, with any luck, was already laid up somewhere close by with supposed engine trouble – probably in some small harbour not far from Copenhagen. He called Berlin and had to wait fifteen minutes for them to call him back. He read out the coordinates from the sea chart, first in English and then, to be on the safe side, in German. Between 14:00 hours and 16:00 hours, Thursday. He had his specifications read back to him over the clear line, then said:

‘Any problems with the competition?’

‘Negative.’

‘Okay.’

‘This office will close once the deal has been completed,’ the voice in Berlin said.

‘Understood,’Vuk said. ‘I’ll need a note of the new address.’

‘We prefer email.’

‘Fine.’

Vuk took down the email address. Now he would be able to get in touch with his employers via any computer with an Internet connection, without anyone knowing what he was writing to them about. This he could do from an Internet café or a library, for example, in Vienna or Belgrade; and they would have no idea of his actual whereabouts. He would head back to Serbia, he had decided. From the news reports he knew that NATO forces in the Balkans now appeared to be actively hunting down and arresting those whom enemies of the Serbs called war criminals. He would get in touch with Emma,
and together they would lie low until all the fuss died down. They would never be able to find him on his own home ground. That was the safest place for someone like him right now while the plan of pinning the blame on some fanatical Muslim was given time to work.

He plotted his course on the sea chart, marking the vital reference points. He would be able to take his bearings from the Nordre Røse lighthouse, Saltholm, Flakfortet, the spires of Copenhagen, and in daylight he would be able to see the innocent-looking buoy he would be dropping on the border between the Dirty Sea and Dutchman’s Deep.

He packed his diving gear into the rucksack and drew it closed. Into the waterproof bag he stuffed the sleeping bag, the mat and the torch. There was still plenty of room. He laid his black, rubber-soled Ecco shoes on top of the mat. He neatly folded his smart tweed jacket, grey flannels and a light-blue shirt and placed these too in the bag. To these he added a discreetly patterned tie, a pair of dark socks and a small mirror he had found in the bathroom. And lastly he packed in the black jeans, polo-neck and a thick cotton undershirt. He tamped the whole lot down firmly by cramming a large bath towel on top.

Down in the basement he lifted the black rubber dinghy off its hooks. He did not so much as glance at the bodies of Mikael and Ole under their tarpaulin. His mind was on the dinghy. It was in good nick, if a little soft, looked like it hadn’t been used in a while. In the bottom of the raft lay two short canoe oars and a stubby, double-bladed kayak paddle. He fetched the foot-pump from the corner, pumped up the dinghy with ease. It was a four-man craft, a navy model: a real beauty. He inspected the outboard motor. It seemed well
cared-for
and relatively new. What luck for him that one of Mikael’s few hobbies, apart from computers, had been to chug up and down the Sound looking at ships. Vuk found an old petrol can in the workroom and filled the motor’s tank. He was beginning to feel tired after having to stay so focused all day. When shopping in town he had been constantly on the lookout for possible tails, or simply for people he knew, who might recognize him.

Vuk spent the rest of that evening and a good part of the night at the workbench in the basement, making two lock-picks on the well-equipped lathe. That done, he had another glass of vodka and turned in for the night. He slept peacefully, with no worries about nightmares. He knew himself well
enough to be aware that both his conscious mind and his subconscious would now be concentrated on the job in hand, allowing no room for anything else. After the successful completion of the job, the demons would return, but right now they were leaving him in peace. He felt perfectly safe in this house. No one knew he was in the country, and no one knew that he had the schedule for the condemned writer’s movements during her stay in Denmark.

Vuk woke early, but well rested the next morning. The weatherman had been right, he saw, when he looked out of the window. The clouds hung low and looked heavy with rain, but it stayed dry. He made coffee and watched CNN while he had breakfast. After that, he cleared the kitchen table and got out his weapons. He dismantled the rifle and put it back in the case. He would not be using the rifle. They would have police snipers positioned up on the old gun emplacements, of that he was sure. For his escape plan to work he would need to create utter chaos during those few crucial minutes.

He lifted the pistol. He had checked it and seen that it was okay, but you could never check too often! It could have been bought or stolen. It was a very common model, so in all likelihood it had been obtained legally. It was an Italian gun, a black Beretta 92F, the pistol that had come out on top in field trials carried out by the American military to find a new service pistol. It had replaced the old Colt 45, to which it bore a great similarity. But it was more stable and safer to use. Vuk actually preferred revolvers to pistols. They were more robust and could take a lot more punishment than the more complex pistols, which had a tendency to jam at the most inconvenient moments, but his revolver of choice, the Smith & Wesson, could only take five cartridges, which was too few when there was an element of uncertainty attached to his escape. And the Beretta was a good gun that he knew well. It would give him fifteen bullets in the magazine in its butt plus one in the chamber, and that was all-important. He loaded fifteen 9 mm bullets into the magazine and smacked it up into the butt. Having made sure that the safety was on, he raised the pistol into the firing position, holding it with both hands. The two pounds or so of steel was nicely balanced. Vuk knew that a bullet would leave the barrel at a speed of almost 1,300 feet per second and at the distance at which he planned to use it would go right through the Target and wreak appalling damage on
the human body on the way out. He would be able to plant three bullets in the Target in a second or two. Vuk also assumed that the gun had been tested, but he needed to discover for himself how it reacted and which way it pulled. He wasn’t happy about this. Denmark was a small country, no one here was ever very far from anyone else, and hence it was hard to find a place where he could try it out, but he had to. It would have been easier in Sweden, but he wasn’t stupid enough to try carrying a pistol across an international boundary. It was too risky. The odds on getting caught were too high.

Vuk took the train to Hillerød then switched to the little private line, nicknamed ‘Grisen’ – the Pig – that carried him through the largest forest on Zealand, Grib Skov. He was the only passenger on the train apart from two high school kids conducting a
sotto voce
discussion about classmates and teachers. Vuk got off at Gribsø and struck off into the forest. He walked for twenty minutes, until he was sure that he was far enough off the beaten track. He had a dense thicket of pines to one side of him and old beech woods to the other. The trees would deaden the sound. The clearing in which he stood measured about two hundred square feet. He picked up three large pine cones and arranged them four inches apart at head height in a hollow in an ancient tree that had been gashed by lightning. He walked back ten paces, cocked the pistol and fired. The gun pulled a little to the right. The bang had not been particularly loud, but it had still sent a bird flapping, screeching, into the air. The bullet had hit home just above the right-hand pine cone. He steadied the Beretta with both hands, aimed along his outstretched arms and fired again. The pine cone disappeared in a cloud of dust. He took two paces forward, at the same time pressing the trigger four times in rapid succession. The other two cones shattered. He walked up to the tree: four bullet holes all in a row. He slipped the gun back into the satchel in which he had transported it. It was of blue canvas, indistinguishable from so many others. He left the forest quickly, going in the opposite direction to that by which he had come and found his way to the station, where he had to wait half an hour for a train. He didn’t meet a single person and had the train to himself for most of the way back to Hillerød.