MemoRandom: A Thriller (2 page)

The moment he opened his mouth and transformed that little grin into his best television smile, he thought he could detect a tiny vibration from his watch. As if a new age had just begun.

•  •  •

Atif opened the cooler, dug about among the cans of soft drinks until he found one that was still more or less cold, and pressed it to the back of his neck. Sweat was running down his back; one of the many power cuts had brought the fan on his desk to a standstill more than an hour ago, and the air in the shabby little room was almost still.

He opened the can, drank greedily, and then went back to his lookout post at the dirty, half-covered window.

Outside, everything was going on pretty much as usual. A dozen parked trucks, all with their rear doors or covers open, between which various goods slowly circulated. Half of the vehicles were military green. Their uniformed drivers were standing by the little café, smoking while the workmen unloaded their trucks. A few scabby stray dogs were wandering about in the shadows between the vehicles. They kept their distance as they occasionally sniffed the air, as if to check whether any of the many crates being unloaded contained anything edible.

By now Atif was very familiar with everything that was going on in this dusty square. What brand of cigarettes the truck drivers preferred, the name of the café owner’s sullen daughter, which of the drivers smuggled hash, which one of the mangy animals was top dog. The one the others feared.

The cell phone in his breast pocket began to vibrate. Atif inserted the hands-free earpiece, then raised the binoculars. He zoomed in on the sentry box beside the only real entrance
to the square. The man was leaning against a wall, smoking, his Kalashnikov nonchalantly slung over his shoulder.

His cell phone vibrated again and Atif pressed the Answer button.

“Hello.”

“It’s me. How’s it going?”

“Pretty much the same as usual.”

“Still no sign?”

“This is where the trail brought me.”

“And how long have you been sitting there now, Atif?”

“Almost three weeks.”

“Right. You don’t think it’s time to give up yet?”

“He’ll be here.”

The line was silent for a few seconds. Atif scanned the rest of the square through the binoculars, then went back to the guard. The man was standing up straight now, stubbing his cigarette out on the red earth.

“A woman called,” the voice in his ear said. “From Sweden. Said she was your sister-in-law, she wanted you to call back as soon as you could. Something to do with your brother . . .”

“Half brother,” Atif muttered, without taking his eyes off the guard.

The man’s body language had suddenly changed. He had taken his gun off and was now holding it in both hands, and all of a sudden he seemed to be taking his duties more seriously. The man let out a whistle and the sound brought all activity in the square to a halt.

A dark-colored car with military registration plates and tinted windows was slowly approaching. The guard raised a hand to his forehead, in a sort of hybrid between a salute and a wave. The atmosphere in the square was transformed in a matter of seconds. The drivers dropped their cigarettes and stubbed them out, and exchanged nervous glances. The workmen quickened their pace.

Even the dogs seemed to realize that something was going
on. They drew back further into the shadows as they warily followed the dark car with their eyes. It stopped and a man in uniform and dark glasses got out. Atif didn’t need to look through the binoculars; the reaction of the other people in the square was enough to tell him who it was.

The man he had been looking for.

The top dog.

Atif reached out his hand and picked up the pistol from the wobbly little table and tucked it into the back of his trousers. He tugged his shirt looser to make sure the gun couldn’t be seen.

“I’ve got to go,” he muttered into his cell.

“Atif, wait,” the voice said. “It sounded important. Properly important. You should probably call home.”

The inner city seems to be full of blue lights. They bounce between the facades of the buildings, only slightly muted by the falling snow before reflecting off the dark water under the bridges. Some of the emergency vehicles have their sirens on, but most of them race through the night in silence.

The six students walking north along Skeppsbron are already bored of the commotion. They had stood for a while at a good vantage point up at Slussen, watching the circus down on the long highway bridge. Loads of ambulances, fire engines, marked and unmarked police cars, so whatever it was that had happened inside the tunnel had to be something serious.

A couple of the students had held their cell phones over the ice-cold railing in the hope of capturing some of the action. But when several minutes passed without anything much happening, they quickly lost interest. The intense cold and falling snow persuaded the group to carry on toward the city center.

The snowball fight starts somewhere near halfway along Skeppsbron. One of the boys, it isn’t clear which one, stops and picks up an armful of snow from the windshield of a parked car. He quickly forms an uneven snowball and throws it at the backs of his friends, and then everything kicks off. All six of them are running along the sidewalk, dodging one another’s snowballs and stopping to make new ones.

The young woman in the red woolly hat is the one who makes the discovery.

“Look, there’s someone sitting in here asleep,” she cries, pointing at one of the parked cars, from whose windshield she’s just swept an armful of snow.

“Hello, wake up! He looks like he’s passed out.” She laughs as her boyfriend catches up with her. Through the black hole in the snow he can make out a large, fair-haired man. The man is sitting in the front passenger seat, with his head resting on the dashboard. It looks as if he’s asleep.

The young man on the sidewalk knocks on the windshield as well, and when there’s no reaction he starts clearing the snow that’s still obscuring the view. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, until at last almost the entire windshield is clear. He clears the side window as well. The man in the car still hasn’t moved.

In the distance they can hear the sound of motors and the pulsing roar of a helicopter approaching. Something makes the others stop their snowball fight and approach the car. Cautiously, as if they’re not really sure they want to see who or what is concealed inside. But the girl in the red woolly hat hasn’t noticed the change in mood.

“Come on, leave it,” she says, with laughter in her voice. “I’m freezing, let him sleep.”

She tugs at her boyfriend’s arm, trying to pull him with her. But the young man doesn’t move. As soon as the snow on the side window is gone he presses his nose to the glass.

“Shit,” he mutters.

“What is it . . . ?” Suddenly the girl’s voice doesn’t sound so amused. More like scared. The noise of the helicopter’s rotor blades is getting louder.

“Shit,” the young man repeats, mostly to himself.

Frost on the inside of the glass is obscuring the view, and the inside of the car is dark. But the sleeping man is no more than an arm’s length away and the young man has no problem seeing enough details. The leather jacket, the embroidered logo on the back, the tribal tattoo curling up from the man’s collar like a snake, across his thick neck.

But it’s the dark patch at the back of the sleeping man’s head that catches the young man’s interest. A little hole, full
of black ice crystals, each one just a fraction of an inch across, forming a thin pattern of pearls over the stubble at the back of his neck.

The sound of the rotors is deafening, echoing between the buildings and rising to a howl as the helicopter passes straight over them.

“Shit . . .” the young man says, for the third time, without anyone hearing him. Then he takes a long step backward and starts to fumble for his cell phone.

•  •  •

David Sarac isn’t aware of any of the rescue effort going on around him. Not the agitated voices. Not the firemen drenching the car with foam and struggling intently with their hydraulic tools for almost a quarter of an hour before they manage to free him. Not the paramedics who use a curved piece of apparatus to force an oxygen tube into his throat and stop his lungs from collapsing at the last minute. Where Sarac is, there is no pain, no anxiety, no fear. Instead he feels an immense sense of peace.

His body is nothing more than a number of carefully bonded molecules, a temporary union that—like all other solid matter—is on its way toward its inevitable dissolution.

He can hear sounds around him, machines making warning signals, the focused discussions of the rescue team. An unpleasant gurgling sound that he gradually realizes is his own breathing.

But he isn’t scared. Not the slightest bit. Because he understands this is the universe’s plan. His time to be transformed. To reconnect with the universal stream.

Not until someone lifts one of his eyelids, calls his name, and shines a light directly into his brain does he get scared. Not because of the bright light or the voice calling out to him. What frightens him is the shadowy figure in the corner of his eye. A dark, threatening silhouette on the edge of his field of vision. Sarac tries to keep track of it, but the silhouette keeps evading
him. He manages to see a leather jacket, a pulled-up hood whose shadow transforms the silhouette’s face into a black hole.

“. . . need to get out of here now. The helicopter’s just arrived,” someone says, presumably one of the paramedics.

But the silhouette doesn’t move, it just hovers at the corner of Sarac’s eye. Somewhere a cell phone rings. Once, then again.

The sound only exacerbates his fear. It grips Sarac’s rib cage, making his heart race and setting off a painful fusillade of fireworks in his head. Then the paramedic lets his eyelid fall and he slips back into the merciful darkness.

Jesper Stenberg flushed the condom down the toilet, showered carefully, and then dried himself with one of the thick towels in the bathroom. He inspected his appearance briefly in the bathroom mirror, checking as he always did that there were no telltale signs on his body or face. Then he quickly put his clothes back on before returning to the main bedroom.

It was 9:32 p.m.; his parents-in-law were looking after the children and Karolina had gone out to dinner with her girlfriends. She had offered to postpone it, but he had persuaded her to go. They could celebrate properly tomorrow. His father-in-law had already arranged everything. Dinner at his favorite restaurant, champagne, cognac, expensive wine. And of course his father-in-law would foot the bill and would go on about the future, and the possibilities that lay ahead of them, as long as they played their cards right.

She wasn’t lying in bed as he had been expecting. Instead she had poured herself a drink and was sitting on the sofa in the living room. She was still naked, and he couldn’t help admiring her body. Small, firm breasts, long, lithe legs, porcelain-white skin, and a toned stomach that suggested diets and an exercise regime he could barely imagine. He was going to miss her body. And the things she let him do with it . . .

But times were changing. From now on everything was going to be different.

“So, Jesper, you’ve been asked the question,” she said.

He went over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a stiff whiskey in one of the heavy crystal glasses. He shouldn’t really have any more to drink if he was going to drive. But he
needed a drink; he realized that the moment she opened her mouth.

For a moment he got it into his head that she had already realized this wasn’t going to be as hard as he imagined. But her tone of voice instantly dashed any hopes of that nature. Obviously he should have realized she wasn’t going to make it easy for him. Sophie Thorning never made things easy for anyone. In that respect she was just like her father.

“Everyone’s got what they wanted. You’ve got your big chance, John gets to pull the strings, and your ambitious little wife and her power-crazed family have finally got themselves a new launchpad.” She laughed, a low, mocking laugh that he didn’t like.

“And now you want to break up with me, don’t you? Minimize the risks, reestablish control?” She made a slight gesture toward the bedroom with her glass.

He still didn’t answer her, just turned away and looked out the window. Far below he could see the exit from the parking garage. In just a few minutes he would be down there. In the car, on his way home. Ready to put all this behind him.

“Everyone’s got what they wanted. Everyone except me,” Sophie went on. “I’m just expected to back down and act like the last few years never happened. Is that what you’re thinking, Jeppe?”

He turned around slowly. She knew he hated that nickname.

“Jeppe on the mountain, like the old story.” She leered. “An idiot who thinks he’s something special. That he’s suddenly someone to be reckoned with. But in actual fact he’s just a marionette, a puppet who jumps whenever anyone pulls his strings. Does that sound familiar?”

He opened his mouth to tell her to shut up, but stopped himself at the last moment. Sophie knew precisely which buttons to press. He mustn’t let himself be provoked.

“Ooh, did that make you cross?” She smiled. “You know what they say—the truth hurts. But you like pain, don’t you,
Jeppe? Just like me. You get a real kick out of forbidden pleasures.”

She twisted around and crossed her long legs, slowly enough for him to get a good view of her hairless genitals.

“I think we should go back to the bedroom to celebrate your success properly. I’ve got a few ideas that I’m sure you’d enjoy, things Karolina would never agree to.”

Stenberg emptied his glass and put it down slowly on the island unit between the living room and kitchen.

“No, Sophie,” he said. “This was the last time. I’m leaving now. From now on we’ll only see each other in the office, and any interaction between us will be strictly professional.”

He held up his hand before she had time to say anything.