MemoRandom: A Thriller (35 page)

The man leaned over the table, so close that Sarac could see the delicate tracery of veins at the end of his nose.

“I’ve read the preliminary traffic report about your crash. In contrast to the later version, it mentions the fact that there was another vehicle right behind your car. And that minor damage was found on your rear bumper.”

Dreyer smiled, once again revealing the gold tooth. Sarac’s mouth suddenly felt dry as dust.

“I went to our meeting place, David. Waited over an hour.”

Sarac held his breath.

“But one of your so-called friends made sure that you never made it.”

Sarac took the long way home, both to give him a chance to collect his thoughts and to make sure no one was following him. His head was aching and his brain was struggling to make sense of what he’d just found out. What Dreyer had told him turned everything upside down and left him in an even worse position than before.

Wallin was after Janus to boost his career. Molnar and Bergh wanted to get rid of incriminating evidence. That was why they were watching him, hoping that sooner or later he would lead them to Janus.

But if Dreyer was right, there was someone else with good reason to keep Sarac under observation. Someone in the group who was leaking information, and someone who presumably could earn a lot of money by revealing Janus’s true identity.

In the end it always comes down to money, doesn’t it?
Bergh had said. Was that really some sort of confession? Was that why his boss had given up without a fight, because he knew he was in line to be questioned by Dreyer? That he was going to be uncovered?

And, once again, Molnar had withheld information from him. Maybe he had even been responsible for cleaning up the traffic report, the same way he had sorted out Sarac’s test results? Just as Bergh had hinted in the hospital, someone had forced his car to stop. And made sure he crashed, in the worst possible way.

Sarac had no desire to go back to his apartment. Molnar would be waiting for him and would demand to know where
he had been. Force him to lie, again. He didn’t need any more smoke screens, half-truths, and retrofitted explanations. What he needed was clarity. The problem was that he had no idea how to reach it. The pieces of the puzzle were piling up, more and more of them. He was still looking for a corner piece, something he could work from, where he had his back covered.

Four men had placed their lives in his hands, with varying degrees of willingness. Now they were all dead. Who had killed them, and why? Could it be Janus, as he suspected? He hadn’t got anywhere near to being able to uncover the man’s true identity.

And who was the mole in the police who was presumed to have stolen his backup list from the safe, the person he had agreed to identify for Dreyer? Who was the fifth man on his list, the practically anonymous Erik I. Johansson?

The pieces didn’t fit together. The drugs, the crash, Bergh, Molnar, Wallin, Dreyer, the mole, the list . . . Four dead men, a notebook whose code he had only half cracked, the secret base that had to be out there somewhere. Everything was spinning, turning into a maelstrom of information that he had no hope of sorting out.

There was only one common denominator. Janus. Everything began and ended with him, just as the note had said.

He glanced quickly over his shoulder before going into a 7-Eleven to buy some headache tablets. He found himself looking up at the cigarettes. When he inserted his bank card to pay, the machine bleeped.

Wrong PIN number!

He frowned and tapped the number in again: 3941.

The machine protested again, and Sarac stood there staring into space. Suddenly he could see a coded lock in his mind’s eye. A shiny metal box mounted on a wall.

Three-nine-four-one,
he thought once more, and all of a sudden he could the see the door next to the box. The same door as in his dream.

“Three, nine, four, one,” he muttered out loud. Then he could see the building, then the sign with the name of the street on it.

“Wait, you forgot your card!” the shop assistant called after him.

•  •  •

The front of the building was partially covered with scaffolding, and there were two large containers outside, but he still had no difficulty recognizing it. This was the right place. His heart felt as if it were going to burst out of his chest, and he forced himself to slow down.

The door was locked, but the code 3941 made it click open at once. Sarac pushed the door and went inside. His pulse was racing in his ears.

He looked at the names on the board in the entrance hall. No company names, as far as he could tell, but on the fourth floor there was an E. I. Johansson.

Erik I. Johansson, the fifth name on the Janus list!

He walked slowly up the dimly lit stone stairs. The lighting didn’t seem to be working properly so he had be careful where he put his feet. He was walking much better now, but he probably wouldn’t be able to recover his footing if he tripped. It would be ironic if he were to fall at this point, ending up at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck now that he had finally made it this far. For some reason that High Wire song and the image of the tightrope walker came into his head again, but he shook them off. Concentrate!

E. I. Johansson’s door looked exactly the same as his neighbors’. He paused for a few seconds while he collected himself. The stairwell was quiet; not even the sound of traffic reached up there. All he could hear was the sound of his own heavy breathing.

Sarac crouched down and carefully peered through the mail slot. The room inside was almost pitch black. All he could see were the white outlines of some envelopes on the floor. It
smelled musty. Sarac stood up and got the key out of his pocket. He looked over his shoulder, then slid it into the lock. It fit perfectly, and he turned it without any difficulty.

Once he was inside he realized why the room was so dark. Just a yard or so inside the hall was another door, considerably more solid than the one he had just come through. He looked around the small lobby and found two letters on the floor, which he picked up and slipped into his back pocket. They were both addressed to E. I. Johansson.

He fumbled with the key, then realized that there was no keyhole in the inner door. Instead he discovered a small recess containing a gently glowing red glass plate just above the handle. Without even thinking about it he pressed one thumb to the glass and held it there until the red light had turned green.

The room inside looked almost exactly like his dream.

Two covered windows to the right, with bars on the insides, and below them a small desk. The whiteboard covered with photographs was hanging on the wall in front of him, and by the left-hand wall, next to a stack of moving boxes, was a small, neatly made cot. Right in the middle of the room, a yard or so from the whiteboard, was a shabby, revolving leather armchair. He looked around and discovered a bathroom door and a small kitchen alcove. A faint smell of tobacco smoke hung in the air.

All of a sudden Sarac felt overwhelmed, almost faint. He took a couple of steps and sank down on the leather chair. He shut his eyes and tried to get his pulse rate down. It was difficult.

He’d done it! At least, he had found his corner piece. The location from which he had run what might have been the most successful infiltration operation in Swedish criminal history. And he had done so entirely on his own, which filled him with an odd mixture of horror and delight.

This was OP1, his hiding place, the black hole in the police system that neither his bosses nor his colleagues knew about. Not even his best friend.

Ideally he would have liked to throw himself at it all. But he forced himself to hold back. To enjoy the discovery, to sit for a while gathering his strength. His memories were coming back, one by one. He could see himself there in the room. The way he had organized everything, putting up the photographs, drawing the lines, making notes of different numbers.

He slowly stood up and went over to the whiteboard. It looked almost exactly as it had in his dream, just slightly more detailed. At the bottom of one side were four faces he recognized at once. The dead men: Hansen, Markovic, Lehtonen, and Sabatini. The pictures were all old, glossy police mugshots, with names and dates of birth along the bottom.

In the middle of the whiteboard was a row of other photographs inside a circle, but these were all relatively recent surveillance pictures. Next to each picture their names had been written in with black marker-pen. The handwriting was neat, not as aggressive and jagged as it had been in the hospital.

Beneath each name was a row of numbers that were probably cell phone numbers.

Abu Hamsa,
he read next to a picture of a fat little man in his sixties with a fake-looking quiff. A red line led to a muscular man with cropped hair named
Eldar.

The next picture was of a typical biker. Leather waistcoat, thick neck, long hair in a plait, gold necklaces, and plenty of rings on his fingers, as well as a pair of thin glasses.
Micke Lund.

The red line from Lund led to another man in biker gear, but different colors this time.
Karim,
he had written, omitting the surname for some reason.

The remaining pictures were of two men in tracksuits,
Zimin
and
Ivazov.
At a guess, they were Russians, and below them was a photograph of a bald, hook-nosed man with unpleasantly sunken eyes whose name was evidently
Sasha.

All the photographs, both the dead men at the bottom of the board and the gang inside the circle, had a blue line leading toward the center of the whiteboard. The red and blue lines
crossed each other, making the whole whiteboard look like a spiderweb. In the center of the board was a familiar symbol. Two curling
J
s with their tails facing each other. Two faces in one, turned away from each other.

Sarac stood still in front of the whiteboard, waiting for the buzzing in his head to stop, and hoping that the spiderweb would help things to fall into place. But nothing happened. He tried closing his eyes for a few seconds, then opening them quickly. Still nothing. The men in the photographs just went on staring at him. Making no effort to make themselves known to him.

Disappointed, he walked over to the desk and started pulling the drawers open, one by one. In the first one he found more or less what he was expecting. Pens, paper, a dog-eared phone book, some other office equipment. In the second drawer a laptop and a bundle of dollars. In the third—a pistol.

He recognized the weapon almost immediately. A nine-millimeter SIG Sauer, in all likelihood his own service pistol. He picked it up, pressed a button with his thumb, and released the cartridge from the base of the handle with a practiced hand. Then he clicked it open and caught the small brass bullet that had been in the chamber.

He sniffed the weapon gently, breathing in the familiar smell of powder and gun grease. He found himself thinking once again about Brian Hansen and the bullet that had ended his life.

He put the gun down on the desk, then emptied the cartridge and lined the bullets up in a row. He felt the anxiety in his chest grow as he counted them in his head. Fourteen in total. Fourteen brass bullets in a shiny little row. There was just one problem. The cartridge had space for fifteen bullets.

Natalie was slowly turning her coffee cup. Rickard’s instructions had been crystal clear: keep an eye on the notebook and report everything Sarac did. Not particularly difficult, actually rather exciting, especially since they cracked the code together and managed to identify the five men. Sarac reminded her of a patient she had had while she was training. A woman with cancer who had been utterly furious with everyone and everything. She had even thrown a bedpan at the oncologist. Just like Sarac, she had refused to give up, refused to let people feel sorry for her.

But the murder in Högbergsgatan had left Natalie feeling wary. She had called Rickard from the ferry and had told him whom they were going to see and what the address was. And just before they got there Sabatini had been murdered.

The thought troubled her more than she wanted to admit. Rickard was hardly a killer, he was a cop. Wasn’t he?

That was also something else that was worrying her. Rickard’s appearance and the way he talked reeked of cop, but she couldn’t recall his ever showing his ID. But he had to be a cop, surely, because how else would he have access to the police database? Maybe she should ask to see his police ID the next time she saw him.

He had called her a little while ago. He had sounded even more stressed than the previous time. He told her she still hadn’t delivered what he was looking for, that he had expected more from their collaboration. She hadn’t objected, hadn’t wanted to let on how much the murder in Högbergsgatan had frightened
her, and had made her question what she was doing. Instead Rickard had persuaded her that she had to work harder. Stay focused on her goal, do whatever was required. It had worked. She still had a chance to get back everything she had thought was lost. She just had to grit her teeth and get on with it.

First and foremost, she had to find Sarac and get him to confirm who the man in the pictures on her cell phone was. Sarac wasn’t back in his apartment, wasn’t answering his phone, and according to the helpful neighbor out on the island, the house there was silent and deserted. It was almost as if Sarac had vanished off the face of the earth. And that bothered her on more than one level, she reluctantly admitted to herself.

•  •  •

He dreamed he was lying at the bottom of a deep hole. Little threadlike roots stuck out of the dark, earth sides, narrow, hairy fingers writhing in pain. The sky high above was dark. In the distance was a snatch of music. The High Wire.

The four men were standing up above, around the edge. They were looking down at him with dead eyes. Hansen in his leather waistcoat, Markovic in his yellow padded jacket, Sabatini with his T-shirt soaked in blood, and Lehtonen in a bomber jacket with a dragon on the back. Two dogs were panting at his side. Their tongues were long and pink.