Last Will (20 page)

Annika licked her lips and shuffled on her seat.

“How can you know what text messages were sent?” she asked. “And from which number and when? And how can you know what it
said
?”

Q fingered his mug.

“I didn’t think that was even technically possible,” Annika said, leaning back. “Keeping track of every conversation and text message?”

“Of course it is,” Q said. “How else could the networks get paid?”

Annika reflected for a few seconds, letting this information sink in.

“They get paid,” she said, “because they know who called who and for how long, but they don’t know what they said or what they wrote in their texts. That’s not possible. Those details aren’t stored.”

“Right,” Q said. “And what does that tell you?”

She thought for four seconds.

“You’ve found a phone.”

Q tilted his head to one side and smiled.

“Bravo! In a trash can at the bus stop outside the main entrance, right opposite the Serafen health center. No fingerprints, just traces of the soap used inside the City Hall. The SIM card was erased, but we’ve got guys down in a garage in Nacka who can reconstruct that sort of thing.”

“Like in Knutby?” Annika said.

“Like in Knutby. So what does the text message mean?”

Annika looked at Q and thought hard.

“An accomplice,” she said. “She had help, from inside the City Hall.”

Q nodded and drank the rest of his coffee.

“At least one, right, and at least one more outside: the person driving the boat. But we have no idea who these people were. We’ve got a list of suspects, but no conclusive evidence.”

Annika stared at Q, her head spinning.

“The phones were bought in August, you said? Three months ago?”

“The same time the getaway boat was stolen. Which suggests she knew exactly what she was doing.”

“So she didn’t shoot the wrong person? She didn’t miss Wiesel and just happened to hit von Behring by mistake?”

Q got up and walked over to the window, then turned back to face the room.

“Apparently not.”

Annika felt the information hit her in her chest.

“I knew it,” she said, looking into Caroline’s eyes once more. “I knew she was the target, and she knew it too.”

She looked at Q again.

“Had there been any threats made against Caroline? Anyone who wanted to get rid of her?”

“Nothing that’s come to light yet.”

“There has to be something,” Annika said keenly. “You need to dig deeper. Caroline wasn’t surprised when she died, I could see it in her eyes.”

Q turned around and looked at her thoughtfully.

“So you say,” he said. “Was there anything else you were wondering about?”

Annika looked past the detective inspector and out the window. So Caroline really was the killer’s target, someone really did want to get rid of her.

“What happened after the shots were fired?” she asked.

Q sat down again, looked into his coffee cup, saw it was empty, and threw it into the wastebasket.

“We’ve got more witnesses for that, but not as many as you might think. We know she made her way out using the elevator in a service passage leading to the Golden Hall. And from there it’s less than a hundred meters to the water.”

Q got up, pulled open one of the desk drawers, and took out a large, rolled-up map.

“Look at this,” he said. “After Liljeholmen there are no built-up areas along the shore of Lake Mälaren until you get to Södertälje, with the exception of this little road here, Pettersbergsvägen in Mälarhöjden. We’ve got a witness who saw two people get onto two small motorbikes in Gröndal. They could have made their way without being seen all the way from the center of Stockholm and out into the Baltic, if they wanted to. And that’s exactly what I think they did.”

“That’s impossible,” Annika said. “Wherever you go, there’s always someone.”

“Stockholm’s got a hell of a lot of green,” Q said. “Shore protection and the environment fascists have made sure of that. Do you have any idea how much coastline we’ve got in Sweden? Enough to go round the planet nine and a half times, and no one’s allowed to build on any of it.”

Annika tried to follow his argument.

“So who did it? Any particular group? What were they trying to achieve?”

The detective inspector sat down again and for once looked quite normal, serious.

“We have one suspect,” he said. “We’ve got an identity of one person that matches. It was your information that did it.”

Annika blinked.

“You’re kidding?”

“The eyes,” Q said. “Her golden yellow eyes. We got lucky with the CIA. She’s American, a professional assassin, expensive, and extremely damned talented.”

Annika felt her throat tighten; she was having trouble breathing.

“What’s her name?” she said, her voice sounding thin.

“She uses a whole list of identities and nationalities, but the CIA know her by her nickname. It comes from her eyes. She’s known as the Kitten.”

“Kitten?” Annika said.

“Yep, Kitten,” Q said, standing up. “And I’m only telling you so you understand why it was so important that you kept quiet.”

“About her eyes?” Annika said.

“That was the decisive detail for us,” Q said, “but as you’ve doubtless realized, that information mustn’t go beyond this room.”

“Why not?” Annika asked. “Large parts of this aren’t exactly controversial. And however much you try, it’ll leak out in the end.”

“Not this,” Q said.

“Yes it will,” Annika said. “Everything leaks. It’s just a matter of time.”

“If this gets out,” Q said, “it’ll be because you’ve talked. We’re keeping this within a damned restricted team, because this isn’t just about us and the Nobel killings.”

Annika let what he said settle into some sort of order in her head.

“You’re waiting for other security services,” she said. “You’re working with foreign police on other crimes, other murders. Where?”

Q looked faintly amused.

“The USA, Colombia, and France, among others.”

“You’ve got something else as well,” Annika said. “What?”

“We’ve managed to link her fingerprints to the identification, and this is the first time anyone has managed that.”

“How?” Annika asked breathlessly.

Q couldn’t help smiling.

“She dropped one of her shoes on the steps down to the water,” he said. “Can you believe it?”

“Cinderella of Death,” Annika said.

“I presume you can see the headline in front of you,” Q said.

He rolled up the map and put it back in his desk drawer.

“So when can I use it?”

“All in good time,” Q said, heading toward the door. “If you’ve eaten enough of my marzipan cake, maybe you can do the washing-up out in the kitchen, because I’ve got to load my great big gun with some dumdum bullets and catch some baddies. I don’t want to end up in the two-thirds that never do anything, after all.”

He stopped in the doorway.

“And we’re not just letting the CIA lead us on this one,” he said. “We’ve still got problems to deal with here at home.”

“Because you don’t know who hired her,” Annika said.

“Correct.”

She got up and pulled on her jacket, hoisted her bag onto her shoulder, and left the room. She stopped and turned back to him.

“A qualified guess?”

He closed the door behind them.

“Well, it certainly wasn’t Neue Jihad.”

PART 2

May

SATURDAY, MAY 22

Johan Isaksson swiped his card through the electronic reader. He waited for the click to let him know the door was unlocked, then pulled the heavy outer door open.

Inside the laboratory corridor he glanced quickly to the right to check his pigeonhole. He paused and stopped for a moment, looking up at the bulletin board above the table where the mail got sorted:

ID cards must be visible at all times on FBF premises
and

Use color-coded envelopes for external mail!
as well as

In case of faulty equipment, call
…

No new notices. Most of them had been there since he took up his postgraduate post in the department four years before. The absence of news made him feel a bit safer.

With some trepidation he went over to the individual pigeonholes.

His contained two circulars about new summer opening hours in the café and a reminder that carbon dioxide cylinders could only be exchanged between 8:00 and 9:00
AM
, Monday to Friday. He quickly looked through the papers in several of his colleagues’ boxes; they had received the same sheets.

He breathed out.

No general offers, no odd invitations to make some quick money, nothing that looked like it could be meant for everyone but was actually meant just for him.

No
Serving at the Nobel Banquet! Want to earn some extra money? Help us with our practical joke and save money! Ring
…

He had rung. In fact he had practically thrown himself at the phone. When he got the job he had been delighted, had assumed there had been
a lot of them fighting for the job. Afterward he had realized that the photocopied note hadn’t been generally circulated. The message had been directed specifically at him.

How did they know that he could be a waiter?

And how did they know he needed money?

He rubbed his chin, realized he had broken into a sweat.

Now he was here, on a Saturday evening, instead of at Agnes’s party. It felt pretty good. He had neglected his research, but that was at an end now. The decision to explain everything in an anonymous letter to the police had made him feel a whole lot better.

He headed toward his cramped office. It was dark and there was a sour smell in the corridor, like old E. coli bacteria.

I ought to let in some air, he thought.

He passed the equipment room with its DNA-sequencing and measuring machines, and the centrifuge room on his right, and the bacteria lab to his left, all of them abandoned and deserted. He stopped at the storeroom behind the photocopier and pulled out a tray of petri dishes and a load of retorts. He hesitated in front of the shelf holding the ten-millimeter test tubes, then remembered that he’d already gotten some. Then he went and got a tray of sterilized needles. He tapped in the code to unlock his office and put down his equipment, then waited by the door, listening.

An alarm was ringing somewhere. It sounded like the carbon dioxide alarm, which went off whenever the percentage of the gas sank too low in the incubator and you had to switch from the A-cylinder to the B-cylinder. The whole lab had had trouble with mold and cell death throughout the spring, and now some poor bastard’s cells were going to suffocate unless someone saved them.

He let the door swing shut behind him and headed toward the sound. The alarm got louder as he reached the corridor at the far end. A slender girl with a ponytail, wearing a lab coat, was standing at the air lock to one of the cell labs, looking bewildered.

“Do you need any help?” he asked and the girl jumped.

“Oh shit!” she yelled in English, staring at him in horror. “You scared the hell out of me. Can you turn this thing off?”

She was evidently American.

“It’s the carbon dioxide alarm,” he replied, also in English. “Have you tried changing the cylinder?”

“Are there more than two of them?” she asked, opening the door to let him into the air lock.

He went over to the equipment to the right of the door of the lab and checked the pressure gauge. Both cylinders were empty—someone had forgotten to change the reserve tube. He shook his head.

“The gas is empty. You can only call to get the cylinders changed between eight and nine in the morning. It’s a nightmare. Sorry.”

The girl looked like she was going to burst into tears.

“But,” she said, “what’s going to happen to my cells? I got a new batch last week, and with all the problems with mold and everything I’m running out of chances. The carbon dioxide in the incubator is already down to 1.1 percent—they won’t last till Monday. What am I going to do?”

She looked so wretched in her big wooden sandals and clumsy glasses that he felt obliged to stay and help.