The Andalucian Friend (19 page)

Jens didn’t recognize the man
who came into the room where he and Aron were sitting talking.

“Is Carlos here?”

Aron shook his head.

“He called me, told me to come down.”

Aron shook his head again. “No, I haven’t seen him.”

The man seemed to think about this for a moment, then dropped it when he saw Jens sitting in the room. He held out his hand.

“Hector Guzman.”

Jens took his hand. Hector was a large man, with his leg in a cast, smartly dressed, he looked friendly, and there was a confidence to him — the dog that ate first, not only here, but probably everywhere.

“Jens is the man I was telling you about, on the boat,” Aron said. “He has a problem which happens to be ours as well.”

“That’s good, he can have our share too,” Hector smiled. “What sort of problem, exactly?”

Jens told him the story, from when they loaded up in Paraguay to Mikhail’s visit to his grandmother’s house in Jutland. In the middle of it Hector sat himself down on a chair, looking at Aron, who occasionally elaborated on some detail. Hector thought for a while when Jens had finished.

“That’s some fucking story.”

Jens waited.

Hector thought some more, then looked up at Jens. “What did your poor grandmother say?”

Jens hadn’t been expecting that question.

“She’s fine.”

A smell of cooking from the kitchen seeped into the office where they were sitting.

“If we help you to get your goods back, you can choose, either pay cash for our services, or repay the favor in kind in the future.”

“And if you don’t succeed?”

“We always succeed,” Hector said.

“OK. What do we do?” Jens said.

Aron answered. “We don’t do anything yet. We’ll have to get in touch with them. It’s in our interests that they understand that the weapons aren’t ours.”

Hector looked at Jens. “We’re dealing with very volatile people here, but you already know that.”

Hector fell into deep thought, then turned to Aron.

“You’re sure Carlos isn’t here?”

Aron nodded.

“OK, Jens,” Hector said, slapping his hands on his knees, “it was good meeting you. Now I’m going out to have dinner with a lady I rather like. She’s been waiting out in the restaurant for long enough.” He gestured with his thumb, then stood up and looked down at Jens. “Do you have anyone like that?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“A shame,” he said, and walked toward the door.

Jens watched him go. Just as Hector was about to open the door it flew open in his face. He staggered back. Mikhail and another man burst in. Jens had time to see the smaller of the pair hit Hector over the head with a telescopic baton as he was knocked to the floor by a hard blow to the throat. Mikhail flew straight at Aron. It was quick, practiced. Jens leaped instinctively at the smaller man. Head-butted him hard and rained blows down on him, and managed to get him on the floor. But Mikhail had come up behind him once Aron had been dealt with. A hard kick against the side of Jens’s head got him off balance. He managed to turn around, started to get up and throw out a fist, but the blows to his head from Mikhail’s baton were quick and hard. Jens tried to defend himself. He blacked out.

He could hear muffled sounds,
someone was shaking him, saying something he couldn’t make any sense of. The sounds were woven together in some indeterminate world where he was swept in and out of consciousness and dream.

Jens opened his eyes. His headache was monumental, with a hint of migraine cutting through everything; the world was sharp and blinding, and he closed his eyes again. Someone was shaking him, harder this time, he felt like protesting, telling whoever it was to leave him alone, but the shaking was relentless. He opened his eyes again and in the harsh light he saw something that made him realize he was dreaming: Sophie Lantz was there, shouting at him. He was happy to see her in his dream, he’d forgotten how pretty she was. She was older now, had little wrinkles around her eyes, but she was still pretty damn attractive. He smiled at her and rolled over to carry on sleeping. He discovered that he was lying on the floor of the office behind the restaurant, and realized that he had brought part of the real world into his dream. His memory returned, Mikhail had come into the room …

Jens moved his legs, checking them out, then his hands, opening and closing his eyes, he wanted to get out of this bizarre dream.

“Jens?”

He opened his eyes again. She was still there, and Jens tried to focus. It was hard, the world didn’t seem to want to stop moving.

“Jens? Can you hear me?”

Now he could see her clearly, and realized that he wasn’t dreaming.

“Sophie?”

A quick smile flickered behind her concern. She helped him sit up, crouching in front of him and reading something in his eyes. He looked back, remembering those eyes, remembering the way she looked, the revelation.

“You’ve got a concussion,” she said.

He looked at her. “What are you doing here?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she replied.

He was finding the whole situation utterly absurd. The door behind them opened and Aron came in, with blood drying on a split eyebrow and bruises on his cheek and around his right eye. He looked focused and stressed at the same time.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Jens stood up unsteadily.

“Get your car, Sophie. We’ll meet you ’round the back,” Aron went on.

Sophie left the room.

“We need your help now, Jens,” Aron said. “They took Hector, I can follow him with the GPS. Have you got anything with you?”

Jens shook his head.

Aron fetched a revolver from a cupboard, a snub-nosed 45. “This is part of clearing the debt.”

Jens took the gun, checked it was loaded. They hurried out through a rear door and found themselves in a courtyard, walked across it, through another building and out into the next street. The Land Cruiser came driving up between the buildings at high speed and stopped sharply. Aron opened the passenger door.

“Sophie, stay here for a while. We need to borrow your car.”

“You need me,” she said. “You and Jens will have your hands free if I drive.”

Aron didn’t have time to argue. They jumped in the car, Aron in the front, Jens in the back. The car accelerated away.

“The E4, northbound,” Aron said, staring at the GPS on his phone.

Sophie drove quickly
past Norrtull and pulled onto the northern link road, accelerating hard when she hit the highway.

That was when she noticed the same Volvo that she had passed on the road when she left the house. It was a little way behind her, in the left-hand lane of the otherwise empty highway. The Volvo got closer in the rearview mirror. Sophie debated with herself. Should she let him follow her … help them rescue Hector … Then what would happen?

The Volvo was getting closer.

Sophie maneuvered the Land Cruiser into the right-hand lane as they approached the slip road by Haga Park. When they had almost passed the turn-off she waited till the very last minute before wrenching the wheel to the right and accelerating up the slip road. The Volvo was too slow to react and kept going, straight up the highway. She managed to get a glimpse of the man driving, she’d seen him before.

Aron looked up from his GPS.

“What are you doing?”

“Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking, I thought I was in the wrong lane!”

She got up to the junction, but instead of going straight over and down onto the highway again she turned left, toward Solna on the Frösunda link road.

“Sophie?!”

Aron sounded upset.

“Sorry, sorry … shit, I have to turn around!”

She sounded stressed and nervous, Aron stared at her, trying to understand her mistake. She went right around the roundabout and headed back the way they had come, then pulled out onto the highway again with her foot on the floor.

It had played out the way she had hoped, the Volvo had turned off at the next junction at Frösundavik, turned around and was coming back down the highway again. She saw it coming toward her on the opposite roadway, on its way back toward the city. She didn’t look at the driver, just increased her speed.

Common sense had been telling her to go home, to not get involved in this, but her common sense seemed to have deserted her. She hadn’t reacted logically and was governed by just one feeling: concern for Hector. Nothing else mattered at all just then.

She caught sight of Jens in the rearview mirror. She had been alarmed when he had popped up out of nowhere. Now he was sitting there, staring out the window. Older, rather larger than she remembered him. Still the same scruffy blond hair, suntanned like a big kid just back from his summer vacation. She recognized the look in his eyes, an irreconcilable mixture of thoughtful and crazy. He looked up, as if he could read her mind, and met her gaze in the mirror. Aron read out directions from the GPS on his phone.

“They’re west of us now, pull off at the next junction.”

Sophie left the highway and they emerged onto a main road that led through a patch of forest, and they went on through the darkness until they came to a gravel track leading off into the trees. Sophie turned off the lights and drove on in total darkness.

“Stop.” Aron studied the GPS. “I’ll go. You wait here, keep your phones on.”

Aron screwed a silencer onto his pistol.

“I’ll come with you,” Jens said. “There are two of them.”

“No, you wait here, in case one of them comes this way.”

Aron got out of the car and disappeared quickly into the dark forest.

Jens and Sophie were left sitting there in a silence that seemed to have taken over the whole car. He felt he couldn’t just sit there, and opened the door, taking a few steps into the forest in the direction in which Aron had vanished.

Sophie watched him from behind the wheel.

Mikhail wasn’t happy.
Klaus had been too brutal with the Spaniard. The plan had been to go into the restaurant, pick off anyone who happened to be around him, then have a quiet word with Hector Guzman, explaining to him that they had no chance against Hanke’s organization, forcing him to accept the changes that Ralph wanted, and then leaving. If not, they were to shoot him there and then. But Klaus had knocked Hector Guzman out and they couldn’t just sit there waiting for him to come around. And now they were in the middle of the forest, somewhere just west of the highway, you could make out the sound of cars in the distance. Mikhail realized that the situation had changed.

Hector came to after a while. He was sitting on the ground, leaning against the car, beaten up, and he noticed that the top part of the cast on his leg had cracked.

Klaus was standing a few yards away relieving his bladder and quietly whistling Beethoven’s Fifth. Hector looked up at Mikhail, who was standing in front of him.

“Hanke?” he asked, his throat dry.

Mikhail nodded.

“What do you want?”

“They want the cocaine you stole, they want the Paraguay-Rotterdam route, they want the setup. They want you to sign up with them and act as a subsidiary group. And for you to do your best to fit in with their wishes as of now. They also want the name of which one of you torched Christian’s car and girlfriend. And they want to know why you’re getting hold of weapons.”