MemoRandom: A Thriller (27 page)

There was nothing about any meetings with Janus, so how and when they had met must be documented some other way. Unless it wasn't documented at all. But the page with the five numbers under the Janus symbol was the one that felt most interesting. His first impression had been that they were ID numbers. In which case he must have encrypted them somehow. And, if they were ID numbers, and related to five different sources, why had he listed them without giving their code names? Maybe the answers had been on the pages that had been torn out. The glue had come loose in places, and he could see traces of paper both before and after the page containing the list and the Janus symbol. There was nothing about any meetings after October 3. Why not? What was he trying to hide?

He thought about Janus again, wondering where he could be. What he was doing right now. There was a knock on his
bedroom door and Natalie popped her head in. “I was just wondering if you’d like some coffee? Food’s going to be a while yet.”

“Yes, thanks, I’ll be right down,” he replied, and realized he was smiling in a way he didn’t quite recognize. Then it dawned on him that it was because of Natalie.

The smell of tobacco on her clothes made its way across the room, making Sarac think of the man up in the hospital. Did he actually exist, or was he just a product of his imagination? A hallucination brought on by his migraine, like the ones he’d had the other day? He had hoped that was the case, but sadly it probably wasn’t. The man felt real, as did the talk of an agreement.

•  •  •

“You look wiped out,” Natalie said when Sarac came into the kitchen. “Can I ask what your job involves, or is it a state secret?” She smiled and raised her pale eyebrows slightly.

“I have a confession to make,” she said, nodding toward Sarac’s notebook. “The book was lying open on the floor when I found it. I couldn’t help looking.”

Sarac opened his mouth.

“You don’t have to say anything.” Natalie held up a hand. “I know it was wrong of me, but in my defense, I had no way of knowing that there’d be secret police stuff in it.”

Sarac swallowed, feeling his attack of anger subside. The fact was that she was right, it was actually his fault for not taking better care of his things. Fucking stupid shitty brain!

“It’s okay,” he said. “I need to learn to look after things better.”

Natalie shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, if it’s any consolation, confusion is one of the most common side effects of a stroke,” she said.

“H-have you had many patients like me? People of my age who’ve suffered a stroke, I mean?”

She looked at him and nodded. “A couple.”

“And what happened to them? Did they ever become themselves again? The people they had been before?”

She tilted her head and bit her lip slightly.

“No. They didn’t,” she eventually said.

Sarac gulped and felt his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth.

“But, on the other hand, they got something that plenty of other people would like,” Natalie said.

“W-what?”

“A new chance,” she said. “A chance to become the people they wanted to be.”

Sarac sat in silence, then he nodded slowly.

“Can I help at all, David? I’ve got my laptop if there’s anything you want to check.” She nodded toward the notebook on the table.

Sarac thought for a moment. Then he suddenly remembered something Natalie had said the first time she had shown up.

“Didn’t you say you knew someone who worked in the Tax Office?”

•  •  •

“Okay, thanks for your help, Freddie!” Natalie ended the call and turned to Sarac. “What your friend Molnar said was right. The only ID number on the list belongs to a woman in Umeå. Kristina Svensson, she lives on Fältvägen.”

Sarac frowned unhappily.

“The rest of the numbers don’t work, but we already knew that.”

Sarac looked down at the floor. Tried to focus. Maybe Molnar was right after all, and the numbers really were bank accounts. But for some reason that didn’t feel right. The numbers seemed to be connected to people, he was pretty sure about that.

“Listen . . .” Natalie began.

He looked up and saw that Natalie was studying the first page of his notebook. He thought he should probably close it. But what difference did it really make? The numbers meant even less to her than they did to him. He saw her frown; she seemed to be thinking.

“Okay, I’ve got some numbers in my computer that I’d rather keep a bit confidential. My hard disk is encrypted, but I’m still a bit worried someone could get hold of it and get into it. If that happened, I could end up with serious problems.”

Sarac said nothing and tried to imagine what
serious problems
could mean for a care assistant, or why she had any use for a contact in the Tax Office. He didn’t succeed terribly well.

“So I checked out the whole business of codes and ciphers,” Natalie went on. “I realized that if it was going to work for me, I’d have to be able to decode things quickly and simply.”

“And?” Sarac straightened up.

“I use a simple Excel spreadsheet. A few lines between the numbers, to make it nice and easy to read. But there’s another reason. Between the lines, so to speak.”

Something clicked inside Sarac’s head. That piece of music was suddenly back. It started slowly, like a whisper, then grew quickly louder.

I owe everything

Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.

“Take a look at this!” Natalie pointed at the open notebook. “The first number, 9728444477, starts on the second line. The next one on the third line. One line between them. Nice and neat. But look at the third number, it’s suddenly two lines below, and the gap before the fourth one is even bigger, do you see?”

Sarac nodded. The music in his head was getting louder.

“In my Excel spreadsheet I add the number of the row to each number,” Natalie went on. “So if the number one thousand is in row five, the real number is actually one thousand five. If you used a similar system, then the first number would be the figure on the second line, plus two.”

She took out a pen and wrote the numbers down on the back of an old newspaper. She left a space and added two to the number.

“No, that isn’t right. That only changes the last digit in the number. Or possibly the last two, but the rest stay the same; 9728444479 still isn’t a proper ID number. Shit!”

She stared at the paper.

“Okay, I know. What if you add two to every digit, like this: 9728444477—nine plus two is eleven, so, one. Seven plus two is nine, two plus two is four.”

She wrote all the numbers down. Then stared at the result.

194066-6699

“Er . . .” Natalie said, and rubbed the back of her neck. “Well, it would be a very old person, born on the sixty-sixth day of the fortieth month in 1919. Crap!”

She crumbled the sheet of paper up.

“Forget it, I thought I’d come up with something clever.”

Sarac closed his eyes. The music was echoing in his head, almost drowning out his thoughts. Something in the song
’
s title . . .

He picked up the pen and wrote the numbers down again.

9728444477

“Odd lines minus. Even lines plus,” he muttered, almost without thinking about it.

He deducted the number of the row from each digit, then leaned back.

750622-2255

“Shit,” Natalie said. “I’ll give Freddie another call right away.”

•  •  •

Atif carefully wound the bandage around his left hand, pulling it as tight as he could. His index and ring fingers had swollen up like sausages, and his wrist and lower arm were bluish-yellow and stiff. He probably had a hairline fracture in the bone, or possibly, in the worst case, had actually broken it. At least the dog bite looked a bit better, although that was scant consolation in the circumstances. The left side of his chest was blue as well, and hurt like fuck when he took deep breaths. He guessed that one or more ribs were broken. He also had the headache from hell, which not even four acetaminophen seemed able to touch. All in all, a pain level of a strong five. An irritating nuisance, but at least it was surmountable. He was planning to rest for a couple of days and lie low over the New Year.

Besides, he needed to do some thinking and figure out his next move. Maybe it was time to accept Hunter’s proposal after all? At least that way he’d avoid any further undesirable incidents. No one would dare touch him. Or he could give up on the whole thing and just go home. Put all this behind him. But he knew that wasn’t going to happen. He’d never let anyone get away with anything before, and he wasn’t about to start now. Above all, definitely not Janus.

His phone started to ring, interrupting his thoughts. It made him think of Tindra and Cassandra. He rushed over to the door and dug his phone out from his jacket pocket. The pain was making his temples throb. But the screen was dark.

There was a second ring, and he realized that the sound wasn’t coming from his phone but Pitbull’s. He found the right pocket, opened the phone, and pressed Answer. Number withheld.

“Hello?” he said.

But the person at the other end had already hung up.

“Freddie’s typing the numbers in now.” Natalie held her hand over the phone as she turned toward Sarac.

The code was actually childishly simple. Deduct the line number from all the digits on even lines and add it to the digits on odd lines. And hey, presto, the numbers turned into ID numbers. People born between 1968 and 1981.

“Okay, are you ready, here comes the first result,” Natalie said in a tense voice. “Brian Hansen, born 1975 in Bromma. Details confidential.”

She wrote the name down, her pen scratching on the cheap paper. The scraping sound made him think of falling snow. Sarac’s eyes flashed. A face, a thickset man with cropped hair, a snake tattoo. A voice that was surprisingly high-pitched.

I was thinking of suggesting a deal.

The man in the snow-covered car. Brian Hansen! He felt his heart pound, pumping adrenaline faster and faster through his body.

“What exactly does ‘details confidential’ mean?” Natalie said into the phone. “That your records aren’t shown in public registers,” she repeated, looking at Sarac.

“Can anyone have that?” she asked.

There was a short pause while the man on the other end answered.

“On appeal, if there’s a clear threat. Abused women, politicians, some police officers,” Natalie summarized. “But most people whose records are confidential are—”

“Criminals,” Sarac said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“That’s right.” Natalie looked at him. She was frowning slightly.

“So that’s all? We can’t get anything but his name?” she said to the man on the other end. He said something that made her expression change. She looked much more serious. “Ah, okay. No. We won’t get much further there, then.”

“Why not?” Sarac said.

Natalie held the phone away from her mouth and looked at him before she replied.

“Because Brian Hansen’s dead. He died on November twenty-third. The same night you—”

“Crashed,” Sarac said. He shut his eyes again.

“Does it say how he died? He was only, what? Not quite forty,” Natalie said into the phone.

Sarac thought he knew the answer, but obviously he couldn’t say anything. Nor, apparently, could the Tax Office computer.

“Oh well, forget him then,” Natalie said impatiently. “Try the next number instead. Selim Markovic, born 1978 in Spånga.” She made a note of the name, giving Sarac a quick sideways glance.

He took a deep breath, then leaned his head in his hands. He could see a thick yellow padded jacket in front of him, and inside it a twitchy little man with a downy mustache, talking on a phone. The man from his dream.

Hey, Erik J., long time no see!

“And he’s dead too?” Natalie asked. “Just last week,” she added, looking at Sarac. “He was even younger. This seems really weird. Shame it doesn’t say how they died. Hang on a bit, Freddie, I’ll call you back!”

She ran out of the room, over to her rucksack by the door. She returned with her laptop.

“Let’s see. November twenty-third, criminal, man, dead, Stockholm.”

Natalie typed the information into the search engine and pressed Enter. She read the screen, then clicked on something with the mouse.

“Here,” she said. “It’s from the
Aftonbladet
website the same night.”

She turned the screen so Sarac could see.

Criminal found murdered in Gamla stan.

The picture showed a snow-covered car that he recognized instantly. The back window was covered in an orange health service blanket. A short distance away on the sidewalk he could make out the backs of what looked like a group of young people.

“It’s impossible to be certain, but all the details fit.”

Sarac said nothing. All he could think about was Brian Hansen. His high-pitched voice, the smell of his fear. The bullet throwing his head forward against the dashboard.

“Let’s try the other date.” Natalie typed the details in. It took considerably longer this time.

“Okay, this one’s harder. There’s nothing that resembles what happened in Gamla stan. But Freddie said it’s the day someone is declared dead that counts as the date of death. In which case this might fit.” Natalie turned the screen toward Sarac again.

Dead man found in water by Riddarholmen.

The picture showed a dark-colored van and some firemen lifting a bright yellow bundle onto a stretcher. One of the firemen seemed to be looking away, as if he’d rather not be there.

“Well, I don’t know,” Natalie said. “But at least the date fits.”

“It’s him,” Sarac said.

“Are you sure?” Natalie’s voice sounded excited. “How can you know?”

“I just do, okay?” he snapped.

They fell silent. Sarac massaged his temples, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. And failed utterly.

How can you know?
That was the million-dollar question.

“Shall I call Freddie about the other numbers?” Natalie was looking at him.