MemoRandom: A Thriller (8 page)

“Like I said, I’m going back first thing next week,” Atif said, still without looking away from the young men. “And whatever a load of snotty kids think about that, well—” He broke off, realizing that his tone of voice was getting harder. “You must
forgive me, I didn’t mean to sound unpleasant,” he said, and looked back at the little man.

“No problem, my friend. I understand. Not an easy situation, this. Your brother, his little girl. What’s her name again? I’m starting to get old, I was at her naming ceremony and everything . . .”

“Tindra,” Atif said, noting how his voice softened as he said it.

“Little Tindra, yes, that was it. Losing your father so young, in that way . . .” Something in Abu Hamsa’s voice made Atif frown, and the little man noticed. “I . . . I assume you know what happened?”

Atif nodded. “Cassandra told me.”

“And you know the details?”

“The boys were unlucky,” Atif said. “An unmarked cop car saw them driving away from the security van. Evidently one of them hadn’t taken his balaclava off in time, so the cops followed them and called in backup. The rapid response unit went in just as they were changing cars, and shots were fired. Adnan and Juha were killed, and Tommy was left a vegetable.”

“Sadly that’s all true.” Abu Hamsa nodded. “I just wanted to be sure that you knew all the details. Sometimes stories take on a life of their own, people talk so much. You know how it is.” The little man held out his hands. “By the way, you don’t have to worry about Adnan’s family.” Hamsa tilted his head toward Cassandra. “There are a lot of people supporting them, people who are angry with the police. Perhaps you heard that the rapid response unit was cleared of any suspicion of using excessive force, and that the whole thing was regarded as self-defense seeing as Adnan fired first? Things looked very unsettled for a while afterward. Cars set on fire, stone throwing, all the usual.”

Atif nodded slowly and drank his cooling coffee.

“And I myself will keep an eye on Tindra and her mother. For the sake of old friendship,” Abu Hamsa added. The little man glanced at Atif, evidently expecting some sort of reaction.

“Thank you, Abu Hamsa. I know Adnan would have appreciated that,” Atif said.

Abu Hamsa went on looking at him, then broke into a smile.

“You seem different, my friend. Calmer, nowhere near as angry as you were before. You look much healthier, and your Arabic is much improved. You did the right thing in leaving. If your brother had done the same, or me too, for that matter, who knows how things might have turned out? But it takes great courage to do what you did, leaving everything behind. Starting again from scratch. Courage that most of us don’t have.” Abu Hamsa gestured toward the ceiling again.

“Well, my friend, I shall let you finish your coffee,” he said. “It was lovely to see you again, even if the circumstances could obviously have been better. Please, convey my condolences to your mother. How is Dalia, by the way?”

“Alzheimer’s,” Atif said quietly. “She’s living in a nursing home. But I promise I’ll tell her. She remembers things from the past fairly well. The present is more of a problem.”

“I understand.” Abu Hamsa nodded. “I myself have come to the painful conclusion that I have forgotten considerably more things than I remember. My doctor says that it’s all there in my head, and that I’ve just forgotten how to find it. Like a path in the forest getting overgrown. Maybe she’s right, unless she’s just saying that to cheer me up.” The little man patted Atif on the shoulder. Tenderly, almost cautiously, in a way that made Atif smile slightly without knowing he was doing it.

“Farewell, dear friend. Now I must convey my condolences to the beautiful young widow,” Abu Hamsa said. “But if there’s anything you need, I hope you’ll be in touch. Cassandra has my number, you only have to call. No matter what.” Abu Hamsa gave him an emphatic wink.

“Really, I thought you were going to retire?” Atif said.

“Inshallah!” the little man said, bursting into a hoarse laugh. “If it is God’s will. Have a safe journey home, my friend!”

He had to make sense of things. Get his weak, pathetic body out of this damn hospital bed and force his head to make the right connections. Try to work out what was going on. Why he had lied to his boss about the gaps in his memory, why he was scribbling cryptic warnings to himself, and why that name made his pulse race out of control.

Janus. Clearly a code name for a CI, and a very important one, to judge by Bergh’s questions and paranoid behavior. The problem was that he couldn’t remember any code names, he couldn’t actually remember a bloody thing. Well, that wasn’t quite true, he wasn’t Jason Bourne. He could remember loads of things, just nothing that could help him make sense of what had happened. It was as if the stroke had sliced through his brain, cutting off all connections to the part where events of the past few years were kept. The only thing that seemed to bridge the gap was an indefinable, creeping sense of unease. Something was wrong, considerably more wrong than just a weak body trying to recover from an accident, or even a gash in his brain and migraines from hell. What was it Bergh had said about his crash? The words hadn’t wanted to fall into place properly.

Sarac snorted and tried to hold his breath for a moment to stifle a sob. The mood swings were hard to get used to. He was being tossed between anger, grief, and fear, and occasionally a euphoric sensation that felt almost like happiness. The whole process made it much harder to make sense of everything.

Damn it!
He grabbed a couple of tissues from the bedside table and blew his nose. It would get better, it had to get better.

One of the nurses put her head around the door.

“Can you handle another visitor, David? It’s the man with the beard,” she whispered with a smile.

“Hmm.” Sarac tried to sound as if he knew who she was talking about, but didn’t succeed.

“About forty, six three, suntanned, very fit. He’s been to see you most days.”

“Sure.” Sarac nodded, feeling relieved. He recognized the description and his mood improved at once.

The nurse walked into his room, followed by the man with the neatly trimmed beard.

“Hi, David!” The man smiled broadly as he pressed Sarac’s hand between both of his. He went on holding it in a way that made a lump start to grow in Sarac’s chest. “Good to see you looking brighter today.”

Sarac nodded, then held his breath for a few seconds to get this new surge of emotion under control. Peter Molnar was one of his best friends, and also something of a mentor to him, but bursting into tears the moment he saw him was definitely not Sarac’s usual reaction. What the hell was happening to him? He swallowed a couple of times and managed to force a smile.

“Fucking good to see you, Peter,” he muttered. Then suddenly wondered when he had started to swear so damn much.

The nurse’s description of Molnar was pretty accurate. The only thing she had left out was his short, blond hair, with a slightly raised side part, and the chewing gum that was constantly on the go between his square, white teeth, spreading a smell of mint around the room.

“I brought some roasted nuts from that place you like on Södermalm.” Molnar tossed a ziplock bag, filled to bursting, onto the bedside table.

“I mean, he is allowed nuts, isn’t he, nurse? There aren’t any rules about that, are there?” He winked at the nurse, who was adjusting Sarac’s drip, and rounded it off with a dazzling smile.

“You don’t seem the type to be too bothered about rules.”
She smiled back. “Ten minutes, maximum, or you’ll have me to deal with.”

The nurse left the room, slowly pulling the door shut behind her as she gave Molnar one last look. The man pulled up a chair, sat on it the wrong way around, and rested his arms on the back.

“Nice!” He grinned, nodding toward the door. “I can see why you’d want to lie here and get looked after while the rest of us work our backsides off. We did a raid on that heroin case last night—more than two pounds. Your information was correct, as usual.” Molnar was still smiling, and Sarac realized that he was doing the same, almost without noticing.

“Like I said, good to see you, Peter,” he said, trying to match his relaxed tone, but mainly just sounding a bit maudlin. The happiness he had felt just now was gone. He couldn’t remember the case Molnar was talking about, couldn’t actually remember a single case they had worked on. And this strong, suntanned man in front of him only emphasized his own wretched condition. His collarbone and the bandages around his head and stomach. The mood swings, not to mention the lack of energy. He must have lost at least fifteen pounds of muscle while he’d been lying there, if not more. Molnar seemed to notice the change in his mood, because he hurried to break the silence.

“The boys say hello. They wanted to come as well, but I told them to wait a bit. Thought you probably needed a chance to recover first. After everything you’ve been through.” He pulled a face.

Sarac nodded and unconsciously put a hand to his head.

“I bumped into Bergh. He said you had a few gaps in your memory,” Molnar said.

Sarac took a deep breath, trying to muster his thoughts, but the headache kept getting in the way.

“Well . . .” he said. He cleared his throat to make his voice sound more steady. “It’s not like it is in films. I know who I am, where I live, what my parents’ names were, where I went to school, how to tie my shoelaces, all that sort of thing.” He
waved one hand, trying to find the right words. “But everything feels so distant, it’s like I’m not really . . . present. Like I’m looking on from the sidelines, if you see what I mean?”

Molnar nodded slowly. His clear blue eyes were looking straight at Sarac, as if he were saying something incredibly interesting. Peter was good at making people feel that they were being noticed, appreciated.

“What about the crash, do you remember anything about that?” Molnar said in a low voice.

Sarac shook his head and decided to tell the truth. “To be honest, I can hardly remember anything about the past couple of years. After 2011, all I’ve got are random fragments floating about in my head.

“But that’ll pass,” he added quickly. “The doctor’s sure that things will become clearer as soon as the swelling has gone down. It’s just a matter of time.”

This last bit wasn’t entirely true. Dr. Vestman was far too cautious to promise anything like that. But no matter. Sarac had made up his mind. He was going to get better, completely better, in both mind and body, and in record time.

His headache was on the move, gradually unfurling its spidery legs.

“So when precisely do your memories stop? You started in the Intelligence Unit early in 2011. I was the one who recruited you,” Molnar said.

Sarac nodded. “Yes, I remember that, no problem.”

“Do you remember any specifics about what you were working on?” Molnar leaned forward slightly.

“Of course. I recruit and handle CIs. Tip-offs, secret sources, people who might be useful to us.”

Sarac put his hand to his forehead. The spider’s legs were all around his head, laying siege to his brain. A faint buzzing sound that he thought at first came from the fluorescent lights in the ceiling started to fill his head, making Molnar’s words indistinct.

“And you’re very good at it, David. In fact you’re the best handler I’ve ever come across. Myself included. Professional, ambitious, loyal, always reliable. And you know exactly how to read people. It’s actually a bit uncanny. You seem to have a sixth sense for how to find a way in, how to get people to trust you with their deepest—”

Secrets.

Something suddenly flashed into Sarac’s head. A brief glimpse of a parked car. A dark color, a BMW, or possibly a Mercedes?

“I left the Intelligence Unit in early 2012 when I was offered the job of being in charge of Special Operations. But you and I carried on working together closely. You did my old job better than I ever did. Your CIs were the best, and there’s no question that they gave us the best information.”

Molnar’s words were blurring together. The image in Sarac’s head suddenly got clearer. He’s sitting inside the car, at the wheel, or possibly in the backseat? His perspective keeps switching, seems to change the whole time. A thickset man with a shaved head gets into the front passenger seat. He brings a smell of cigarette smoke with him into the car, and something else as well. The smell of fear.

“It was after that operation that Bergh and, indirectly, Kollander, basically gave you carte blanche to do as you liked. You really don’t remember any of this? It was all over the papers, Kollander and the district commissioner even appeared on television to bask in the glory.”

Sarac didn’t answer. All he could manage was a little shake of the head.

“Then you started work on a top-secret project. With one particular contact.”

“Janus . . .” Sarac mumbled.

Molnar didn’t respond, unless Sarac’s headache had affected his hearing. Suddenly everything was completely quiet, a perfect, dry absence of sound, with the exception of his own
heartbeat. He tried to conjure up the image of the man in the car. Tried to see his face. But the only thing that appeared was a pattern, a snake in black ink, curling up from beneath a collar. A faint sound, growing louder. The car’s chassis buckling, protesting in torment. Then a sudden collision.

Sarac jerked and woke up. “Th-the accident,” he muttered. “Tell me . . .”

Molnar was silent for a few moments. Ran his tongue over his even front teeth.

“Please, Peter. I need to know.” Sarac put his hand on Molnar’s arm. Molnar bit his bottom lip and seemed to be thinking.

“You called me from your cell,” he began. “Your speech was slurred and you weren’t making much sense. You wouldn’t tell me what was going on, just that something bad had happened and that you were in trouble. We dropped everything and set out to meet you. But when we got to the meeting place, all we could see were the taillights of your car.”

Molnar’s voice drifted off again.

“. . . impossible to catch up. You were driving like you had the devil himself in the back of the car.”