Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (40 page)

Nina didn’t understand what he meant. “What jacket?” she asked.

“Saturday evening you gave that little Gypsy shit in there a ride. He was wearing a jacket. Where is it?”

Nina began to see the light. The young Hungarian. She had taken off his jacket to check his rib when they were sitting in her car outside her apartment. And then what had happened to it? That evening wavered in her memory, half hidden in green clouds of nausea.

“In the car,” she said. “It’s in the car.”

“You’re lying,” the Finn said, staring at her expressionlessly. “I don’t believe you.”

Nina waited a few seconds for an explanation, but none came. The
Finn slowly shook his head. Then he hit her. He struck her with the palm of his hand on her left cheek, and the blow wasn’t actually that hard. Just unexpected. Nina took an involuntary step back and bumped into the light-blue wall. The Finn’s eyes had that same glassy look they had had when he pushed her head down into the pillow. She was shaking both from exhaustion and anticipation of the next blow, but instead he suddenly turned his back on her and picked up the Mac laptop connected to the TV and put it on the bed. The big screen mounted on the ceiling flickered obediently and opened a page with a list of choices.
Hotel whore gets pounded. Schoolgirl and teacher
. And of course more
Sabrina, eighteen years old
, who apparently liked it all the time and in every conceivable position. He took his time, appearing to surf aimlessly around between the numerous flashy ads but finally ended up choosing a video with two Asian girls on a beach.

Nina had moved into high alert ages ago. The door behind her was still open and every single cell in her body was tensed for flight. She wanted out of here. Now. She wanted to go to Ida, get her free, and get her away from this place. From this man. What did he want that jacket for?

“If it’s not in my car, then I don’t know where it is.”

Tommi didn’t even look up from his computer. The sound of his rapid fingers on the keys was the only thing audible in the light blue room. Then a new picture appeared on the big screen. Ida. But not like she had seen her on his mobile phone. This was from Ida’s room. The video started, and Nina stood with her eyes locked on the screen over her, watching how Ida tried to escape from the camera at first. A man was holding her so she couldn’t, and Nina recognized the Finn’s gaunt face. He was the one holding her. And touching her. It took a hard grip to hold her in the picture, with his forearms pushed against Ida’s breasts, while he whispered something to her. In the beginning she was screaming and kicking him. She continued to struggle as he pulled down her panties, but eventually she was just crying. Standing there naked, hunched over in front of the camera with her shoulders shaking. It seems as if the guy holding the camera was starting to get bored, because the camera began to drift, pointing now at a couple of pale young men near Ida’s desk. Nina had time to recognize Ulf’s shocked face and shaved head. The young Roma guy from the car was standing next to Ulf with a strangely empty expression. As if he
weren’t really there. Someone mumbled something. Maybe it was Ulf. Eventually, the man with the camera gave up on aiming it at anything.

“Shut up now,” he yelled. “Just shut up, you horny little bastard.” Then the image on the screen froze.

Tommi turned around and looked calmly at Nina.

“You’d be surprised how popular this kind of shit is on the Internet.… You can make a lot of money if you have the right material. Your daughter’s cute, photogenic. We could make a new video. Just her and me.”

The Finn stuck an almost comically pink, pointy tongue out between his tobacco-pale lips and slid it in and out suggestively. That was enough. Nina stared into his slightly bloodshot eyes and for a long, happy moment pictured herself digging her fingers into his eyes. Scratching, biting, kicking. Ferociously, over and over, until she was sure he would never move again. Would never again be able to hurt her and Ida. Ever.

But in reality she didn’t do anything. Just stood there, frozen on the grease-stained gray carpet. Her whole body felt ice-cold, and it was hard to even turn her head. To breathe.

Nina thought about the radiation from Valby. About the rays that had penetrated everything, her and the children. And she knew that she ought to think it was important. But instead she closed her eyes and tried to picture the jacket. She had set it in the back seat along with the first aid kit and then.…

She tried to remember everything from that evening. The nausea, the headache. The precarious drive to the Coal-House Camp. And then it hit her. There had been two jackets. When Magnus drove her to the hospital, he had scooped her stuff out of the Fiat and moved it over into his beloved Volvo. And there had been two jackets. Her’s and that young Hungarian’s.

“Magnus Nilsson,” she said, swallowing. “My boss at the clinic. It was all in his car when we left the Coal-House Camp.” She let her head fall back, recalling the feeling of total weightlessness when Magnus had lifted her up and carried her into the hospital. Magnus, big, strong, and occasionally hot-tempered. She hoped to God he wouldn’t be there when the Finn came looking.

A
FTER THAT SHE
was allowed to sit on the floor next to Ida. The Finn carefully secured her left arm to the heating pipe the same way, and after a
fair amount of maneuvering they managed to get themselves into a more or less comfortable sitting position, with Nina’s arm behind the back of Ida’s head. Then the Finn disappeared out the door. Nina could hear the car on the gravel and guessed he was headed for the jacket in Magnus’s Volvo. Mr. Suburbia was still sitting on the living room sofa, staring fixedly at the computer screen in front of him while Ida dozed, her head resting on Nina’s shoulder.

Nina couldn’t sleep.

Even though the fatigue sat in every muscle of her body with a paralyzing weight. Now she was worried about Magnus. Magnus and Ida. Because there was nothing to indicate that this was the end of it. It worried her that the Finn hadn’t done anything to hide his identity or keep the location of this property a secret.

Nina looked down at Ida’s tear-stained face as it rested heavily against her shoulder and again felt the same corrosive sense of impotence that had flooded through her when Tommi showed her the clip from the apartment. She should never have given them Magnus. She shouldn’t have helped them find the fucking jacket. She may have postponed the unpleasantness for Ida by giving them Magnus, but that was all she had done. Postponed and delayed something, although she didn’t quite know what.

The man on the other side of the radiator moved his uninjured hand a couple centimeters up the pipe and moaned softly as he tried to push himself into a more upright position. Then he cleared his throat and out of the corner of her eye Nina saw that he was looking right at her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Nina shifted slightly so she could see him. He looked terrible. His shirt was damp and filthy and covered with bloodstains presumably from both his face and his injured hand. His eyes were dull and washed-out.

“I was in your apartment. I should have stopped them,” he continued. His English was easier to understand than the Finn’s, possibly because he spoke more slowly. It took him a long time to find the right words. Nina couldn’t be bothered to respond. She didn’t have the energy to provide him with water, soap, and towel so he could wash his hands of the whole thing. She had seen the video. No one had been holding a gun to his head. No one had forced him to watch while someone ripped off her daughter’s underwear. He was a free agent.

“She’s fourteen years old,” she said, noting much to her own irritation how the exhaustion and the seething rage made her voice tremble slightly.

The young man winced, and Nina knew that she should feel sorry for him. But she just didn’t care.

“
I
would have stopped them,” she snarled. “I would have stopped them no matter what.”

Ida moved fitfully against Nina’s chest, raising her obstinate head and looking over at the young man.

“Mom,” she said, with a little of the old Ida’s arrogant tone. “It wasn’t Sándor. He couldn’t help it. They had his brother. They killed his brother.”

Nina sat there in total silence. She didn’t react. Didn’t make any doubting or shocked or sympathetic comments. She just felt the weight of her daughter’s living body and tried not to think about the implication—that they had killed someone. That that was a line they had already crossed.

O MATTER HOW
you look at it,” Torben said stretching in his chair, “it is a secret organization in breech of some of this country’s laws.”

Søren felt almost as tired as before he had slept.

“They help deported refugees and other illegal aliens,” he said. “They’re sentimental do-gooders, for Christ’s sake, not some gang of violent extremists.”

They were surrounded by boxes of ring binders, confiscated from Peter Erhardsen’s house in Vanløse. Names, dates, addresses, budgets. The man had a better grasp of who his “clients” were than most social service agencies. And absolutely no clue about how to run a covert operation. They could unravel his whole so-called Network based on his own meticulous lists.

“You of all people should know that idealistic, altruistic motives are no guarantee against terrorism. On the contrary. There
is
a risk that we’re dealing with a group of people who might do something to promote their cause during the Summit.”

“Yes, but not a dirty bomb, for God’s sake.” Søren studied Torben to see if he was playing devil’s advocate or if he really believed this theory. He knew that privately Torben was less than thrilled with the current government’s immigration policy, but that would only make him especially careful to keep his threat assessment objective and professional.

There was a knock on the door. It was Gitte.

“Our visitor from the NBH has arrived,” she said.

“Good,” Torben said. “Then let’s try to get this business under control before it’s too damn late.”

Søren looked up abruptly and caught a glimpse of the revved-up tension
underneath Torben’s calm, professional demeanor. Torben noticed him noticing and subtly shrugged one shoulder.

“Central Station,” he said. “Or the stadium on Wednesday during the international game. Don’t you see? They don’t even need to target any of the politicians at the Summit; they just need to hit Copenhagen. If we have a big, nasty radioactive bomb crater somewhere in the downtown area, the Summit won’t happen, at least not right here, right now. And that might be enough of a victory.”

Søren felt a chill down his spine. He was glad he wasn’t running security right now. That he wasn’t the one who had to decide how to divvy up the available equipment, where to position people with Geiger counters, and where not to. They couldn’t cover all of Copenhagen—that was impossible. Someone would have to prioritize who and what should be protected, and for the rest, all they could do was hope.

“How big an area are we talking about?” he asked. “I mean, how big would the contamination zone be?”

Yet another understated shrug. “It depends entirely on how strong the explosives are and how much radioactive material there is,” Torben said. “And maybe we’ll know more about the latter after we’ve talked to our man from the NBH.”

T
HE MAN FROM
the NBH looked like a retired wrestler, Søren thought. Short, graying dark hair, strong shoulders, strong neck, low center of gravity, but definitely more muscle weight than fat. His name was Károly Gábor, and he radiated a calm professionalism that matched Torben’s perfectly.

“We traced the radioactive material to this old, disused hospital,” he said, pushing a button on his laptop so the projector showed a picture of the skeleton of a building and a little map indicating where it was located. “Apparently the Soviet troops abandoned some radiation-therapy equipment in the hospital’s basement when they left in 1990. Unfortunately the radioactive substance was cesium chloride, which has both a very long half-life—about thirty years—and physical properties that allow it to bind very easily with its environment if the seal is broken.”

A new picture—this time of people in yellow suits that resembled the ones currently decontaminating the soil in Valby. In this picture, however, there was a Latin American slum in the background.

“In terms of comparable events there’s the Goiânia disaster in Brazil, in 1987, where careless handling of a similar unit resulted in the deaths of four people, and 249 others suffered serious radiation sickness. Like the device in Goiânia, the actual radioactive core in our unit was sealed in a ball-shaped lead capsule that rotated inside another lead ball, both with small openings so that when these two openings lined up, and only then, there would be a brief, controllable beam of radiation.”

Cross sectional diagrams and animations helped him get his point across. The man had done his homework.

“In our case, however, the device was damaged following an earthquake, and the outer casing had split, so the two young Roma who found it were able to open it and access the unit itself: a small cylinder packed full of cesium salt, which they put in a big paint bucket filled with sand. We questioned one of the two young men, an eighteen-year-old named László Eros, better known by his nickname, Pitkin. He is currently at a hospital in Miskolc being treated for radiation sickness but appears to be recovering. The second, sixteen-year-old Tamás Rézmüves, was identified from the photo you sent us. He’s your corpse.”