MemoRandom: A Thriller (36 page)

“Why?” Hansen said. His voice was surprisingly high.

“We trusted you, man,” Markovic said. Water was seeping out everywhere, from his clothes, nose, and mouth. It was trickling over the edge of the hole.

Sabatini remained silent, just held his bloodstained hands in the air. The water was running faster now, Sarac could hear it, could feel it getting deeper around him. He tried to get up, but his body wouldn’t do as he wanted, leaving him lying on his back. He felt the water cover his legs, then his chest. He tried to hold his head up as high as he could. One of the dogs was
whimpering but fell silent when the water reached his ears, his cheeks. Washing darkness into his eyes.

Sarac woke up in a cold sweat. The room was dark, the only thing visible was the pale rectangle of the whiteboard. The photographs formed dark shapes on its surface. If he looked carefully, he could just make out the outlines of the faces.

He sat up in the armchair and reached for the light switch. He felt something rustling in his back pocket. The letters he had found on the mat in the hall. He opened the first envelope. A bank statement from a foreign account in the name of Mr. E. I. Johansson. There was another one in the other envelope, but for a different account.

He got the thinking behind the name now. Erik I. Johansson—with the English sense of
I.
Erik I. Johansson wasn’t an informer but his own alias. One that made it possible to do things that couldn’t be traced back to him. Like getting hold of this apartment, for instance. He wondered who had sorted out an ID number for him. Favors given, favors received.

He sat down at the kitchen table, smoothed the statements out, and put them down side by side. It didn’t take him long to see a pattern. The first account seemed mostly to deal with in-payments. At the start of the period covered by the statement there had been more than a million dollars in the account, and four new payments had been made, amounting to almost the same again. There were only three withdrawals, although they actually seemed to be transfers. One for three hundred thousand dollars done at the beginning of the period, one for one hundred thousand in the middle, and finally one more at the bottom of the page. That transfer was for almost two million dollars and had emptied the account, leaving just one cent in it.

The account detailed in the other statement had an opening balance of twenty thousand dollars. There followed a number
of small withdrawals, all marked
cash,
for even multiples of a hundred dollars, all withdrawn from various bureaus de change in the city center. The sums varied between five hundred and thirty-five hundred. They seemed to be cash withdrawals, suggesting that there was a debit card linked to the account. This theory was confirmed when he found the names of different well-known restaurants further down the statement. In the middle of the page was an in-payment of one hundred thousand dollars. He checked the date and reference number and saw that the money had been transferred out of the other account. Several more cash withdrawals followed, interspersed with more restaurants. At the bottom of the page he found a transfer that, just like on the other statement, left the account practically empty.

Sarac frowned. One account for income, another for expenses; that seemed to fit with what Molnar had said. But where did all the money come from? Two million dollars, that was about fourteen million Swedish kronor and, to judge by the activity in the expenses account, far more than was required. Every in-payment was identified only by a transaction number, so there were no clues there.

And someone had pretty much cleared out the accounts on the same date, in fact with an interval of just a couple of minutes. Who? Clearly someone with access to the right program, with the codes and passwords. Which raised the question—why? Why withdraw all the money and close what appeared to be a perfectly functional system? He studied the dates again and realized there was something he had missed.

The accounts had been cleaned out on Saturday, November 23. The same night as his crash.

•  •  •

The car was parked more or less where Atif had expected to see it. In the street, barely three hundred feet from the unprepossessing little door marked
Istanbul Hamam.
He opened the
door and found himself in a courtyard. He carried on toward the building on the far side and went in through a shabby door.
“Best Turkish sauna in town, boys, I come here every Tuesday.”

He ignored the receptionist and walked toward the men’s changing room. The moisture and heat from the various saunas could already be felt outside. His top began to stick and his heart was beating alarmingly fast. He opened the door, slipped inside, and grabbed a spray can of deodorant from an open locker.

Eldar, the thickset bodyguard, was sitting on one of the benches fiddling with his cell phone. He didn’t see Atif until he was almost upon him. He flew up, fumbling for his gun. Atif sprayed a serious dose of Irish Spring directly into his eyes. Then he kicked him in the crotch as hard as he could. But his timing was off; Eldar managed to twist out of the way and the kick didn’t have the full effect. Instead the man threw himself backward over the wooden bench and off the other side. Atif had to go around the bench to follow up his attack, giving Eldar a few seconds’ respite.

The man pulled out his gun and aimed it at Atif as he rushed toward him. He was rubbing his eyes hard. Atif knocked the arm holding the pistol aside and butted the man right in the face but didn’t manage a clean strike. The two men stumbled into the shower room. Eldar’s legs crumpled and he fumbled for something to hold on to, and managed to pull off one of the shower hoses. Hot water began to spray around the room.

Eldar was taking wild swings around him. Atif ducked and then aimed a solid left hook directly at the man’s liver. He finally landed a blow as he had intended. Eldar fell as if he’d been struck by lightning. Water was still pouring from the broken shower, soaking the prone man’s clothes.

Atif staggered back into the changing room. His heart was pounding against his rib cage. He rubbed his forehead and found the back of his hand covered with a mixture of water and blood. His shirt was drenched, sweat was dripping down
his back, and the humid air was hard to breathe. He sat down heavily on one of the benches. Eldar’s gun was lying on the floor and he picked it up. Another Zastava, but in considerably better condition than Bakshi’s. Atif stood up with an effort, released the cartridge onto the floor, and kicked it away. Then he dismantled the gun and flushed the pieces down the toilet.

Eldar was moaning feebly in the shower room, trying to curl into a ball but not really succeeding. Atif knew it would be a while before he was back on his feet. A heavy punch to the liver was astonishingly painful, nine, maybe nine and a half. Not the sort of thing anyone could shrug off quickly.

He opened the door with the word
Hamam
on it. He walked down the tiled floor of a corridor and emerged into a large room with a vaulted ceiling and tiled walls. His pulse was still racing, and he could taste blood and adrenaline in his mouth.

Abu Hamsa was lying on one of the stone benches while a sinewy little man massaged his hairy back. When the masseur caught sight of Atif he backed away in horror, holding his hands up. Atif nodded toward the door and the man immediately made himself scarce.

Abu Hamsa sat up.

“You look bloody awful, Atif,” he growled, without seeming particularly surprised.

Atif shrugged his shoulders.

“Eldar?” Abu Hamsa raised his eyebrows.

“He’ll live.” Atif sat down on the next bench.

“That’s just as well. Otherwise I’d have hell to pay,” Abu Hamsa said.

“Why?” Atif picked up a washcloth and wiped the blood from his eyes.

“He’s engaged to my daughter,” Abu Hamsa said.

“Which one, Yasmina?”

“No, no, Yasmina’s at university. Studying to become an engineer. Susanna, she works for me. Looks after my bureaus de
change. That’s how she and Eldar . . .” He gestured toward the changing room, then fell silent and looked at Atif.

“You know I can’t just let this pass,” Abu Hamsa went on. “Not even for the sake of old friendship.”

Atif shrugged again.

“Okay, my friend.” Hamsa sighed. “I’m guessing you didn’t come here just so you could beat up my staff. So what is this about?”

Atif spat some bloody saliva toward the drain.

“I want help with something,” he said. “The address of a police officer.”

“You have a very odd way of asking for help, my friend.” Abu Hamsa chuckled. “Explain to me why you think I should even consider such a request.”

“Because I’m proposing a deal. You give me the address, and I give you something in return,” Atif said.

“And what might that be, my friend?” Hamsa smiled. “What can a man who’s as good as dead possibly offer me?”

“I can give you Janus,” Atif said.

Sarac leaned over the battered old leather armchair. He had spent almost twenty-four hours in the room, with just a short outing to get supplies from the closest 7-Eleven. The packing crates over by the camp bed had turned out to contain his files. So he had emptied his office himself, just as he had suspected. Probably not long before the crash. Something seemed to have happened, something which had raised the stakes, making him even more paranoid. But what? Was it something to do with the mole Dreyer was hunting, or the threat Wallin had mentioned? Or was it something else entirely? The puzzle he was trying to put together kept growing the whole time. It was well on its way to becoming a five-thousand-piece Ravensburger with no picture to show what it was meant to look like.

He had written his thoughts down on a fresh piece of paper. He had divided everything into columns in a fairly understandable way that might help make things clearer. He certainly hoped so, anyway.

Problem number one:
four men had been murdered. Four men who had given him information and whose names were listed on the first page of his encoded notebook. Presumably their names had also been on the missing backup list.

Theory:
Whoever killed the men wanted to stop them from revealing something they knew. Something to do with Janus.

Conclusion:
The murderer was someone the men knew,
or at least were aware of. Someone who had a lot to lose. He believed he had a strong candidate already, Janus himself.

Weakness:
The Janus project was top secret, so how could four minor-league informants have known anything that important?

Problem number two:
Erik I. Johansson, aka Sarac himself, had access to two foreign bank accounts and secret premises. Up to the day of his accident the accounts had contained large sums of money. A number of small withdrawals had been made from one account, with large in-payments made to the other.

Theory:
Erik I. Johansson didn’t exist. He was an alias that Sarac himself used to be able to manage the project. So the accounts were his as well. The small withdrawals were mostly cash payments for the various CIs or used to settle bar and restaurant bills.

Conclusion:
Running the Janus operation under a false identity, with murky funding and eventually from external premises, broke every conceivable rule. If it got out he would be fired and would probably end up in prison. So he had chosen to move out from Police Headquarters and turn himself into the solitary scapegoat.

Weakness:
There was no obvious weakness here but plenty of questions. If the accounts were his, where was the debit card? And, even more pertinent, where did all the money come from?

Problem number three:
Peter Molnar blamed both his stroke and his car crash on extreme stress in combination with drug abuse. And claimed that the confused car journey was part of his breakdown.
Dreyer, on the other hand, claimed that he had been on his way to a meeting with the Internal Investigation Department, ready to reveal the name of the mole in Regional Crime, but that someone had stopped him very literally by forcing his car into a concrete wall. Bergh and Wallin seemed to be working along the same lines as well: that someone wanted to see him dead.

Theory:
One or more of the men were lying, or withholding important parts of the truth. Possibly even all four of them.

Conclusion:
No one could be trusted, they were all trying to manipulate him for their own ends. Even his best friend.

Weakness:
Sadly there was no obvious weakness here either.

And finally, where he had ground to a halt:

Problem number four:
the same night he suffers his violent accident, a violent gang member, Brian Hansen, is found dead in the passenger seat of his own car in Gamla stan with a nine-millimeter bullet in his head. During the preceding hours someone also empties Erik I. Johansson’s bank accounts of about fourteen million kronor. His own service pistol is locked inside the premises belonging to Erik I. Johansson. The gun is missing a nine-millimeter bullet from the cartridge. And he also has a number of disturbing memories of Hansen’s death, to put it mildly.

Theory:
The fact that these three events took place on the same day couldn’t be a coincidence. Nor the gun and the missing bullet. His service pistol had probably been used to kill Brian Hansen.

Conclusion and weakness:
Impossible to work out without more information. At least that’s what he tried to convince himself.

The events of Saturday, November 23, all had one common denominator, and this time it wasn’t Janus.
He himself
knew Hansen,
he
had access to the gun, the bank accounts, and the premises. It was
he
who suffered some sort of meltdown, and then, either with or without anyone else’s help, had a violent crash. So what did that mean?

Why did he seem to remember the meeting with Hansen in the car, the shot hitting the back of his head? What had he actually been doing during the hours before the crash? He had been entirely certain that Janus was behind Hansen’s death. But after finding the gun he was no longer so convinced. Could he have murdered someone without realizing it? Or was that precisely what he had done?