The Killing 2 (68 page)

Not that it mattered. Bilal was a good soldier too. The moment Raben stuck his head round the door he knew he’d been spotted.

After a while Bilal yelled nervously, ‘Step forward so I can see you!’

Raben stayed where he was.

‘Get out of there or I’ll blow her head off now.’

Raben walked straight out, hands down by his side, gun pointed at the floor.

Louise looked up at him with tired, terrified eyes. Her nose was bloody and bruised. Bilal’s fingers wound into her hair, his pistol hard against her scalp.

Said Bilal didn’t even seem frightened. Short dark hair, boyish face, regulation fatigues. Model soldier.

‘Put down your weapon,’ he ordered. ‘Drop it!’

Straight away Raben crouched down, placed the black handgun on the tiles, then pushed it across the floor, hard enough so it came to rest in front of Louise’s feet.

‘Where’s Arild?’ Bilal asked. ‘I told you not to come looking for me.’

‘Sometimes things don’t work out,’ Raben said with a shrug. ‘Let her go. You’ve got me now. Whatever it is you want. Take me. Not my wife . . .’

The gun came away from her head, pointed straight at his face.

‘If only you’d kept your big mouth shut! None of this would have happened.’

‘But it did.’

‘They weren’t civilians! They were Taliban informers. Bankrolling the bastards.’

‘The kids weren’t doing that—’

‘Don’t you lecture me about the kids! Don’t . . .’

Raben’s heart leapt. Bilal’s gun hand was steady as a rock. Then there were more footsteps and they were close.

Lund got there first. Walked to Raben’s side, watched Bilal’s gun turn to face her.

‘Stop this,’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘Put down the gun. Let her go. You can’t—’

His fingers wound more tightly into Louise’s greasy black hair. The pistol went straight back to her head. She shrieked with terror and pain.

‘No!’ Lund yelled, took a step in front of Raben, gun out, two hands on the butt, aimed straight at the man in the army fatigues. ‘Walk out of here. We can talk this over. I
want to hear—’

‘You’re not army,’ Bilal spat back at her.

‘What’s this to do with Louise?’ Lund cried. ‘Leave her out—’

‘You’re not army! I did my duty. What I was told.’

One more step towards him. Gun steady. She was a lousy shot. Maybe he could tell.

‘I believe you, Bilal. I can help. But you have to let Louise go.’

Another step and Raben was edging towards him too.

Then the door on the far side burst open and Strange was walking through, weapon up, face taut and determined.

Bilal looked left, looked right, looked up for an instant, then at Lund. His fingers relaxed in Louise Raben’s hair. His knee pushed her forward.

‘Go,’ he ordered.

Lund didn’t watch as she half-stumbled to her feet then fell into the arms of her husband.

Something wasn’t right here.

‘Get her out, Raben,’ she ordered. ‘Get her upstairs and . . .’

Bilal was sweating. Weeping now. Strange had got in front, checking him over, gun steady all the time. Not taking his eyes away for a minute he edged round to stand next to Lund.

‘I just did my duty,’ the young officer repeated standing erect by the ancient generator.

‘Which was what exactly?’ she asked.

‘You’re not army,’ he said again but more softly this time.

He held his gun loosely by his side. No real threat. Lund walked closer.

‘They were just little things, Bilal. You deleted some radio recordings. Someone told you to. Who was the officer involved? What did the radio messages say?’

Without being asked he leaned down and let the gun fall to the floor. Then back to the stiff soldier pose again.

‘Good . . .’

He wasn’t listening any more. His eyes were ahead. Somewhere else altogether.

‘Lund,’ Strange said. ‘I don’t like this. Something’s wrong.’

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she insisted, not that she believed it. ‘Come on, Bilal. Let’s get out of here. We can go back to headquarters. You’ll be safe. I’ll
get you a lawyer. We can talk . . .’

He was unzipping his jacket. She watched and felt her blood run cold.

A belt there. Wires and packets. Pink sticks of explosive like fireworks. The familiar pineapple shape of a grenade.

Strange didn’t say any more. He raced away from the soldier, grabbed her by the jacket, almost picked her up as he pushed and shoved her back towards the exit.

A voice behind. Loud and certain. The words of an army man reciting a long-cherished refrain.

‘For God, King and Country!’ Said Bilal chanted.

The red door was getting closer. She could read the number forty-four. They were turning towards it.

The bellow of an explosion. The world turning the colour of fire. Something lifted her and Strange off their feet altogether, threw them into the corridor outside until gravity beckoned and the
hard damp tiles bit at her body, her face and hands.

When she came to his arms were still over her, fingers holding down her head, shielding it, his body wrapped above hers like protecting armour.

Sparks flew around them. There was the smell of cordite and explosive. And behind that the fresh, sharp tang of blood.

Plough’s house was as inconspicuous as the man himself. A plain detached bungalow down a long drive, almost invisible from the street. Thomas Buch realized he’d no
expectations of what it would be like. No idea how Plough, a quiet, introverted solitary man, lived.

The lights were on downstairs. The front door was open. He knocked then walked in.

A kitchen with half-washed dishes and empty cartons of microwave food. Then a chaotic living room full of packing cases. A map of the world on the wall. Shelves of books.

Two boxes stood open on the desk. Medals inside. Military, from service in Afghanistan.

A set of photographs in frames. Mostly the same face, a young man growing from schoolboy to manhood. Smiling, not the surly, uncertain figure in the army mugshot.

There was a resemblance there, Buch thought, as he picked up the nearest photo. If Plough smiled easily he’d look like this. Perhaps he did once. Long before Frode Monberg, Flemming
Rossing and – it had to be faced – Thomas Buch entered his life.

It was hard to let go of the picture. Buch thought of his daughters, wondered if either of them would want a career in the army. It was safe money these days and there wasn’t much of that
about. A way of paying off your debts to get through college. Security of a kind.

He heard familiar soft footsteps behind, turned and faced Carsten Plough.

‘I’m sorry,’ Buch said, putting the picture back on the desk. ‘I knocked but no one answered. The door was open.’

Plough was in a green and blue plaid shirt and jeans. He looked different.

‘Hans Christian Plough Vedel. Vedel was my wife’s name. In the army they always called him HC.’

The tall civil servant came over and looked at the photo.

‘He was the only one in the squad who got out unharmed. It was a miracle, or so I thought.’

Plough’s calm and gentle face creased with sorrow. He picked up some paperback books from the desk, tidied them into a neat pile.

‘Hans told us there’d been some kind of incident in the village. There’d been an officer, and some civilians were killed. Then the judge advocate came along and called him a
liar. A lunatic, like that Raben fellow.’ A caustic smile, one Buch had never seen before. ‘It wasn’t possible, was it? A Danish soldier would never do such a thing.’

More books. Buch wondered if the man even knew what he was packing.

‘He changed his statement when the army leaned on him. But I think that made it all worse. You see.’ Plough tapped his head. ‘In here he knew he wasn’t mad. He was sure
of what he saw. But the army said otherwise and the army didn’t lie. So I believed the army too, and Hans became sicker and sicker.’

There was a grand piano by the window. He picked some sheet music off the stand, tossed that into the box.

‘Then, a year ago, he drove the wrong way down the motorway to the Øresund bridge. And that was that.’

He went through the pictures one by one, shook his head as if to say, ‘Later.’

‘It was the end of my marriage. Things hadn’t been good since Hans came back.’ The shortest, most bitter of smiles. ‘I was a civil servant, you see. I was bound to side
with authority. So afterwards I buried myself in work, even more than before. And then . . .’ A bright, vicious note in his voice. ‘One day Anne Dragsholm turns up asking for Monberg.
My minister.’ A possessive finger pointed at Buch. ‘Mine. She knew Hans wasn’t lying, any more than Raben. Because Dragsholm had done something all the clever people in
Operational Command couldn’t. She’d found the officer.’

More books. Then Plough carefully closed the lid.

‘I won’t forget that day. I sat outside on a bench eating my sandwich, drinking my bottle of water. Thinking I was the most loathsome, most despicable man on earth. Because my son
had needed me and I’d thought him a lunatic and a liar. When all the time he was simply telling the truth.’

He lifted the box and placed it on the floor. Got another empty one. Fetched some more books from the cases.

‘I’m a loyal, gullible man. So I believed Monberg when he said he’d look into it. But then Dragsholm was killed, and still he did nothing.’ A cold laugh that seemed out
of character. ‘Instead, like a coward and a fool he tried to take his own pathetic life.’

‘And then you get me, the new boy, dumb and innocent, waiting to be fed a line,’ Buch said, alarmed by the venom in his own voice.

Plough looked offended.

‘What else could I do? I’d tried Monberg and he let me down. I had to lead you to the case. So I leaked the PET memo. Yes! Me! Quiet as a mouse Carsten Plough, the most discreet and
reliable civil servant in Slotsholmen. I made sure Karina found Monberg’s private diary. I laid a trail of breadcrumbs for my fat sparrow and you followed them, Buch, every last one. More
enthusiastically than I could ever have hoped.’

‘For God’s sake! You could have gone to the police!’

That bitter laugh again.

‘Eight days a minister and still so much to learn. Of course I couldn’t. Rossing had been pulling Erik König’s strings for years. The two of them were in cahoots long
before any of this happened. König answered more to the Defence Ministry than he ever did to us.’

‘Then the Politigården . . .’

‘Who would have turned the case over to PET in an instant. Give me credit. I know the system. I invented half of it.’ The books had been forgotten. ‘But I had no proof. Not
till yesterday. And then . . .’ The broadest, happiest of smiles. ‘I gave it to the Prime Minister.’

He beamed at Buch.

‘There was no hesitation on Grue Eriksen’s part. He didn’t dither, like you.’

Buch closed his eyes and groaned.

‘Of course not! He had his own skin to save.’

‘No. Monberg as good as told me. He had a meeting with Rossing. As soon as he returned, the case was closed. There and then.’

Buch picked up a paperback on the desk. A cowboy story. It looked familiar.

‘Thanks for giving me that,’ Plough said. ‘But it’s not to my taste.’

‘You should have told someone.’

‘Who would have believed me?’ Plough touched his arm, an odd and unexpected gesture in such a man. ‘Not you. Not in the beginning anyway. Thomas . . . I’m genuinely sorry
for the way things turned out. But you and Karina will do all right.’

Another book. A guide to Manhattan.

‘When we talked the Prime Minister asked me whether I really wanted to go to Skopje. If there was anywhere else I’d prefer. So I said . . .’

Plough went through the photo frames, picked up one, showed it to Buch whose heart fell instantly.

‘New York. Of course.’

A younger Carsten Plough. Dark hair. A pretty, happy wife by his side. A son with them, tall and smiling, no more than twelve or thirteen. They stood on the observation deck of the World Trade
Center. Clothes from a different time. Everything from a different time.

‘It was the most expensive holiday we ever had,’ Plough admitted. ‘I wanted it to be something we’d remember for ever.’

He gazed at the picture: lost faces, lost world. Lost family.

‘There’s nothing wrong with dreaming, is there? You’ll be the crown prince now, Thomas. Karina can be your right hand—’

‘All this time, Plough, all these years of service! And still you don’t see how it works, do you? Monberg was screwing with you! What else are you hiding?’

A furtive look and that too was new.

Buch walked round the desk, tapped Plough on the plaid shirt.

‘Tell me dammit or I’ll take you down with them.’

‘I’d like you to go now, please.’

The prim tone was back in his voice.

‘Jesus.’ Buch wanted to scream. ‘You did just what they wanted all along. You helped the wrong man. You sucked up to the bastard who caused your own son’s
death—’

It came out of nowhere. A slap across the face. Like a challenge to a duel. Or a spat between children. Buch felt his cheek. It barely hurt. Not physically.

‘The right people have been punished. I owed that to my son.’ His arm stretched out to the door. ‘You will leave now. I demand it.’

There were tears behind the staid horn-rimmed civil servant’s glasses.

Thomas Buch picked up his old Western novel from the table, wondered why he’d given it to Plough in the first place. Even he wouldn’t like these stories any more. Too many heroes and
villains. Too much black and white and never a hint of grey.

‘Goodnight,’ he said then let himself out into the dark chill street.

Raben was back in a Politigården interview room, facing the same lawyer he’d seen the day before. He couldn’t work out whether she was mad with him for
fleeing the cops at the hospital or pleased he’d been proved right.

Either way it didn’t matter. Louise now sat by his side. There was a deal on the table, a better one, though it still came with conditions.

‘I don’t think there’s any doubt they’ll accept your story this time,’ the woman said. ‘That doesn’t change everything. You still need to drop your
accusations against the police officer here.’