MemoRandom: A Thriller (44 page)

Sarac nodded. The sirens were getting closer, echoing between the buildings.

“Get out of here,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

Sarac looked around.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“Get the fuck out of here, David.” Natalie coughed again and spat at his feet.

Sarac nodded but didn’t move for a few seconds.

“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for helping me, Natalie.”

The impact had thrown the trunk open. Sarac grabbed his bag and began to walk up the slope. He stopped after a few steps when he heard Natalie call after him.

“Oscar!” she shouted. “Oscar Wallin, that’s his real name. Rickard’s, I mean.”

Sarac was walking up and down in front of the whiteboard. He was wound up, the adrenaline kick still hadn’t subsided. The van driver wasn’t Janus but the man who had helped him try to save Sabatini up in Högbergsgatan. The man must have heard him ask about Janus. And a couple of days later he shows up with a van and tries to kidnap him. Conclusion? The man in the van was looking for Janus as well.

What puzzled him was how van-man had managed to find him? His address was protected, his phone number was unlisted. But there were probably police officers who were prepared to sell all manner of information, if the price was right. Officers like him. No matter how the man had found him, he was someone else to add to the growing list of people who were searching for Janus.

The lawyer, Crispin, was trying to buy Janus for his clients. Molnar wanted to cover his tracks. And then there was Oscar Wallin, another of von Katzow’s adepts, who wanted to take over control of Janus and pressure him into carrying on his work. Wallin had been one step ahead and had actually managed to infiltrate his own immediate network. Natalie must have reported everything that had happened to Wallin. The notebook, the breakthrough with the codes, the names. He was probably the one she had called from the ferry when they were on their way to see Sabatini in Högbergsgatan. Natalie was tough, she wasn’t easily persuaded about anything, suggesting that Wallin was a considerably more skillful player than Molnar had believed.

He thought about Natalie and wondered how she was. He
suppressed an impulse to call Södermalm Hospital to check. Natalie was a closed chapter. He had trusted her, she had betrayed him. But she had also saved his life, which made it much harder to be angry with her. Fucking hell!

Then there was Dreyer and his internal investigators lurking in the background. Dreyer may have said he wasn’t interested in Janus, but an infiltrator who murdered a police officer was exactly the sort of weapon he needed to sink the whole Intelligence Unit once and for all. Possibly even the whole of Regional Crime.

The last name on the list of people chasing Janus was his own. Why was he so keen? It had long since stopped being about any desire for revenge, or regaining his position on the team. He had let them all down; he’d never be able to look them in the eye again after he had sold himself out to Crispin. No, there was something else.

Did he want Janus to answer for what he had done? Probably not, he was pretty much caught up in it all just as badly himself. Was it about getting hold of the final pieces of the puzzle of who he had once been? That was certainly part of the motivation, but far from all of it. So what was it, then, what was left? Why was he still chasing a truth that kept getting more and more unpalatable? He still didn’t really know.

Janus had been his infiltrator, his responsibility. Maybe, on some unconscious level, he still wanted to try to save him? Compensate for his betrayal, the money he had taken from Crispin to hand him over?

Sometimes handlers and sources get too close to each other, far too close.

It was all fairly clear to him now. Things had unfolded more or less as Molnar had said. Janus had killed Brian Hansen in the car. He could practically describe how it had happened. How their eyes had met in the rearview mirror, a tacit understanding of what had to happen. It wasn’t a surprise, as Molnar had believed, but premeditated murder. Janus had killed Hansen, had
done it for his sake, to save Sarac from ruin, but just as much to save himself.

The murder became their shared secret, tying them together forever. The gun to the head that made it impossible for either of them to betray the other. Was that why he had had a breakdown? Had he realized he had got himself into a situation it was impossible to get out of?

He had promised Dreyer the name of a mole that was actually himself, and in his role as Erik I. Johansson he had already taken Crispin’s money to reveal Janus’s identity. And Bergh and his bosses were demanding more results, the sort of thing that would allow them to go on looking the other way from his rule-shredding operation. And on the sidelines lurked Wallin, eager to get hold of Janus’s secrets.

But after Janus killed Hansen for him, he was trapped. He had got himself caught in a mantrap that was impossible to escape. Was that why he had driven into the tunnel, pumped full of drugs, driving as if the devil himself were after him? Because he couldn’t see any other way out?

Even if he tried to keep that thought at bay, the logic of it was undeniable. The stroke that almost killed him actually may have saved his life. Saved him from himself. Although in fact it had only given him a temporary reprieve. He was back in the mantrap without any possibility of escape.

Sarac put his head in his hands. He had allowed himself to be blinded by the excitement, crawling so far inside Erik I. Johansson’s skin that eventually he had lost sight of himself. And had committed the ultimate betrayal of a source. Selling him out for money.

What had he told Lehtonen, Markovic, and Sabatini that evening that had made them flee for their lives? Was it as he and Molnar both suspected, that Janus was methodically ticking off all the names on a list? Killing everyone who posed the slightest risk of revealing his identity, all apart from one? Erik I. Johansson. Sarac himself.

Janus ought to have had plenty of opportunities to kill him if he wanted to. So why was he holding back? The only way to find out for sure was for them to meet, face-to-face. To find Janus before Janus found him. But he was still missing the last piece of the puzzle. The one everyone was looking for. The man’s true identity.

There was one thing at least that he was completely sure of. What he was looking for was in that room. Somewhere in there was the clue that could help him find the right path, clear an overgrown path in his mind and give him what he needed.

He emptied the desk drawers and lined the contents up. The gun, the two cartridges, the handcuffs. Then the reformatted laptop, the phone book, various pens, a few coins, and the cigarette pack that had contained the matchbook from Club Babel. Finally he laid out the notebook, which he hadn’t found in there, admittedly, but it definitely belonged there.

He opened it again. The first page with the five coded ID numbers, preceded and followed by the remnants of the torn-out pages. Then page after page of dates and coded messages, presumably meetings with various sources and contacts who had been listed on the two missing pages. He wondered whether one of them had been the lawyer, Crispin? Without the missing pages he would probably never know the answer.

He looked at the codes again. The system seemed fairly simple. A combination of numbers that could somehow be changed into an address. Addresses. He leafed through the phone book at random. He had wondered before about its purpose when he had clearly had access to the Internet. But now he suddenly suspected he knew why it was there. He picked the same sentence he had looked at several times before.

Meeting with Jupiter, 14.00 at 781216.

He didn’t know who the source Jupiter was; his encrypted ID number had probably been on one of the missing pages. But he tried looking up page 78 of the dog-eared phone book. He picked out the first column and counted down to the twelfth
row. It was the address of a bicycle shop at number 4 Skeppargatan. Neither the address nor the shop rang any bells at all. But he still had two numbers left of the code. He tried replacing the four with the number sixteen. Then he swore out loud when he realized he didn’t stand a chance of finding out what was at that address, at least not without turning on his cell phone. He thought for a while, then risked it and called directory inquiries.

The address belonged to a restaurant.

He repeated the same procedure with a couple of the other codes and came up with a small hotel, then another restaurant. He compared the dates with the payments on the bank statement. It all fit; he had used the bank card to pay for dinner at each of the locations.

So the phone book itself was the key to the code for the meeting places. The breakthrough ought to have delighted him, but his joy at the discovery was tainted by the fact that it didn’t get him anywhere. Janus’s name wasn’t on any of the pages; he’d already checked that, so once again he had come to a complete halt. But he was close now, closer than he had ever been.

With the cigarette pack in his hand, he slumped into the armchair facing the whiteboard. Almost without looking, he pulled a cigarette from the crumpled pack and lit it, using a match from the little red matchbook. As soon as he smelled it, he realized that the cigarette didn’t just contain tobacco. He stared at it and only now noticed that it was hand-rolled, in contrast to the straight, smooth Marlboros that were left in the pack.

Smoking dope just a month or so after a stroke wasn’t a particularly smart move. Especially not if you also happened to be a police officer. But, on the other hand, he had nothing better to do. He took a deep drag and held the smoke in for a few seconds before letting it out. Then he leaned his head back and felt a familiar sense of well-being slowly spread through his body.

He thought about Natalie again. Even though he had found her out, she had saved his life. She had put herself in extreme
danger, even got herself hurt in the bargain. Natalie could hardly have been expecting him to reveal any more secrets to her. Yet she still hadn’t hesitated to save him. He wondered why. She probably had a good reason, far better than any he could come up with.

He took another toke. The faces on the whiteboard were staring at him and were slowly beginning to move. They were drifting through the spiderweb, in from the edges toward the center. Toward the symbol that looked both like two faces looking away from each other and a huge spider.
The answer was there,
he thought. On that board.

“Which one of you is sitting on it? Come on, out with it!” Sarac said out loud. He grinned to himself. Realized he was already starting to get stoned.

“Is it you, Abu Hamsa? Or your muscle-bound friend Eldar?” He grinned again.

“Micke Lund, what do you know about the gods of antiquity? Do you know about Uranus?”

He tipped his head back and cackled at the ceiling. He was laughing so hard that tears were running down his cheeks.
Fucked up beyond all recognition,
he thought.

He pulled himself together, took another toke, and then forced himself to go back to the whiteboard. Four people left. The other biker—Karim with no surname. Then the Russian tracksuit mafia, Zimin and Ivazov, and finally bald Sasha with the hook nose and scary eyes.

Sarac leaned back. Tried to focus on Janus. To conjure up a picture of the face he had glimpsed in the rearview mirror in the seconds before the shot was fired.

Who are you?
he thought.

Where are you?

The feeling came out of nowhere. There was something about his way of thinking that didn’t make sense. That was . . . wrong.

The photographs were still moving through the web, merging into the room in a single big, circular motion.

He was back in Gamla stan. Running along a cobbled street lined with high, windowless walls. The only sound he could hear at first was his own heavy breathing. Then came the voices. Deep, high, strong, and weak in turn. They interrupted and drowned out one another, then blurred into a single maelstrom of words.

“What sort of police officer?”

“Keep the secret!”

“We have an agreement.”

“I was starting to think you’d forgotten me, Erik.”

“In the end it always comes down to money.”

“No loose ends.”

“Destroy ourselves.”

“Someone’s selling information.”

“It’s all his fault.”

“The hooks are turned to face each other.”

“Everything begins and ends with . . .”

•  •  •

The voices stop the moment the street shrinks and comes to an end, turning into a well-trodden path through the snow. Night sky and dark trees all around him. His pulse throbbing in his ears. In front of him on the white ground is a large black rectangle. A grave. He looks down. Sees the man lying down there, his face still covered by the hood. Jumps . . .

He knows that the landing will hurt. That the pain in dreams is unlike any other. But it still overwhelms him, making his sight flare. Blue lights on tunnel walls, fluorescent lights flickering, a spiderweb of red and blue lines leading toward the center.

In toward the poisonous spider waiting in the middle.

Janus.

Unless it was actually the opposite? Could it be . . .

The opposite?!

Hooks facing inward.

The realization hits him like a punch in the chest. Truth and lies have merged together, nothing is what it seems, everything is . . . wrong!

He crawls up into a sitting position and leans over Janus. He’s holding his breath, doesn’t know whether that’s just in the dream. Slowly he reaches out his hand to the hood and pushes it back. At last he sees Janus’s face, exactly as it looked in the rearview mirror. He sees the pale eyes, the familiar, tormented expression. He recognizes it, all too well. The man with two faces.

Janus smiles at him. The night sky reflects blackly, mournfully, in his eyes.

“Life only exists when you’re up on the wire,” Janus whispers softly.

“Everything else, David.

“Everything . . .

“else . . .