The Swimmer (18 page)

‘Sit down, for God’s sake, George,’ Reiper said. ‘You’ve had a productive morning. Coffee?’

George wanted to stretch out. Rub his eyes. Take off his shoes and jacket, curl up on the couch, and go to sleep. That’s what he really wanted. Or better yet: stand up, shake Reiper’s hand, and thank him. Then get into his Audi with Avicii turned up to a comfortable volume, drive home to his white, clean, tidy, and tasteful apartment. Take a shower and wash off the last vestiges and memories of Digital Solutions, then crawl between the ironed sheets in his Hästens bed.

‘Coffee? Sure,’ he said instead.

‘So,’ Reiper said. ‘Debriefing. It seems like the technology is working, as far as we can tell. Excellent. Now tell me how you did it.’

‘I guess it all went according to plan in the beginning. I did exactly what Josh told me to do. But Klara came in earlier than I’d expected, so things got tight in the end.’

He shuddered inwardly at the memory of how he’d snuck into Boman’s office.

‘Okay,’ Reiper said.

He frowned. The scar was blazing on his cheek. His green reptilian eyes stared blindly at George.

‘Did she see you?’

‘No,’ George said. ‘Not a chance. I snuck into her boss’s office. There’s no way she saw me. She started talking on the phone, and I slipped out without her noticing. I’m sure of that.’

It felt important, vital, to explain to Reiper that he’d escaped detection, that he’d performed the task flawlessly. He didn’t even want to think about what the penalty for failure might entail. Reiper said nothing but seemed to be weighing what George had said. George sipped his instant coffee. It tasted awful. As he was setting his mug down on the small coffee table, the door to the living room opened. An attractive woman of around George’s age, her blond hair in a high ponytail, peeked into the room. Reiper turned to her.

‘Kirsten,’ he said. ‘News?’

‘I think we have contact,’ replied the girl.

‘E-mail?’ Reiper said.

‘Phone. We think it’s Shammosh, but we can only hear Klara. She’s talking to him right now.’

Reiper turned to George.

‘Hurry up, we need you to translate again.’

Reiper started walking toward the door, motioning impatiently for George to come with him. They walked out into the hall and into a small room next door, which appeared to be a kitchen. Maybe this had been a maid’s quarters, because the kitchen wasn’t bigger than a large closet. At the far end of the room, under a small window overlooking the garden, stood a desk with two computer screens and a laptop. Josh was sitting there, wearing headphones. He motioned to George to sit down and put on another pair of headphones. A sound file was open on one of the screens.

‘Forget the details. Just focus on where Shammosh is, and whether or not they’re going to meet, okay? We’ll figure out the rest later,’ Josh said.

George nodded.

Thirty seconds later he heard a click as Klara hung up. George lifted off one side of the headphones, turned back toward Reiper.

‘Well, I can only hear her, not the other one. But it’s definitely that Shammosh guy. And she’s on her way to meet him,’ he said.

A few minutes later, George again removed the headphones and scratched his head. This was the third time he’d listened to the conversation between Klara and Mahmoud.

‘No, there’s nothing there. She asks where they should meet and he responds. She doesn’t repeat the location. And I can only hear what she’s saying. Not him.’

Josh nodded. The two of them were alone in the room. Reiper and the girl had disappeared as soon as George had given them his first rough translation of the conversation.

‘You can sleep for a while if you want,’ Josh said. ‘Reiper will let you know when you’re needed.’

‘You mean I can go home?’ George said.

He felt his hopes start to rise. If he could just go back to his apartment. Take a shower. Sleep. Maybe all of this insanity would be over by the time he woke up.

‘Wake up, buddy, you’re not going anywhere. You can stretch out on the couch in the living room.’

Josh turned back toward the computers and gently shook his head.

Brussels, Belgium

She didn’t know how long she’d been standing in front of the Royal Palace—ten minutes? twenty?—before she finally saw Mahmoud on the other side of the uneven cobblestones. Barely discernible next to a tall gatepost at the entrance to the park, he wasn’t moving. Klara felt her heart jump. When he understood that she’d spotted him, he held up his right hand and motioned for her to approach. Then he turned around calmly and disappeared into the park.

Klara had remained still for a moment after she ended the phone call earlier. Boman had already gone home for the weekend. There was nothing keeping her at the office. Nothing that couldn’t be done later. She felt numb, still confused and shaky from what she’d discovered that morning at Cyril’s apartment. Suddenly, it felt completely natural to meet Mahmoud.

He’d asked her to take a back way out of the Parliament. The only way she knew was through the parking garage, so she’d taken that. Then she rode the subway to Gare du Nord and took a taxi to the palace. She’d done exactly what he’d asked. Without question, without thinking. She needed to get out and away in any case. And his voice had been so naked, so lonely and tense. Klara looked around one last time before she ran after Mahmoud into the park.

She’d felt very vulnerable standing between the gray, run-down palace and the wide, cobblestone avenue separating it from the park. But at least she’d been able to establish that she was alone. Mahmoud’s paranoia was unwarranted. Maybe that’s why he’d wanted to meet her here? To be able to make sure of that.

She saw him again when she entered the park. He was sitting on a park bench by the gravel path, waiting for her. He looked tired, older. His hair was shorter than she remembered it. Not as short as when they’d met, when he was a newly graduated paratrooper with a military buzz cut. But still definitely shorter than the tousled curls she remembered from their last time together in Uppsala.

She had trouble meeting his eyes, when he stood up. She’d put so much effort into leaving those eyes behind, into forgetting them. And now here they were again, right in front of her. Despite the large, dark rings around them, his eyes were the same as she remembered. Deep and with that irrepressible gleam of independence that made him seem arrogant to some. But at the same time they held a deep and melancholy warmth that she still, after all these years, realized she had a hard time resisting.

He was unshaven. His dark coat had dry specks of something red and sticky on the lapel and all the way down one side. He looked terrible. He was just as beautiful as she remembered him.

‘Moody!’ she said, and stopped in front of him. ‘Oh my God. What happened?’

He held up his hand, hushing her.

‘Sorry,’ he began, whispering. ‘But you have to give me your purse, okay?’

Klara looked at him questioningly.

‘What? Why?’

‘Please,’ Mahmoud said. ‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have a good reason. I promise.’

Hesitantly she handed over her dark blue Marc Jacobs bag.

‘Sorry,’ he said again.

Then he turned it upside down over the peeling park bench and emptied all of its contents.

‘What the hell, Moody,’ Klara said in a high-pitched voice.

He didn’t seem to hear her.

‘You turned off your cell phone like I asked you, right?’ he said instead as he quickly and methodically combed through all of the compartments in the bag: her makeup, her purse, her tampons. Nothing was left untouched.

‘Yes, but are you going to tell me what you’re doing.’

He looked up at her and started putting her belongings back in the bag.

‘I know it seems crazy,’ he said. ‘But the last few hours have been very intense. Stretch your arms up in the air.’

Klara looked at him hesitantly. There was something pleading, something desperate in his eyes. A gleam of something she’d never seen there before. He stood up and came over to her, very close. She caught a whiff of his scent. Either he still used the same cologne or it was just his natural scent. Musk and jasmine. But weaker than she remembered it, hidden beneath the smell of dirt and sweat and blood. He put his hands into the pockets of her duffel coat. Quick and efficient. Then inside her coat, into the pockets of her pants, running quickly along her waist. Finally he felt along the seams of her clothing. Up and down her body. When he was finished, he took a step back and looked away.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Believe me, this wasn’t how I had imagined how it would be when we finally met again.’

He sat on the park bench and rubbed his hands over his face. Klara cautiously sat down beside him. She put a hesitant arm around his shoulder. It felt so strange. So completely natural.

‘Since you’ve already frisked me, maybe I can give you a hug?’ she said.

He turned his face toward her, answered her crooked smile.

‘You must think I’ve completely lost my mind?’ he said.

Klara shrugged.

‘Seriously, Moody, I don’t know what to think. I saw your e-mail about coming to Brussels.’

She cleared her throat. Looked out over the park.

‘And honestly, I didn’t know how to answer. It was hard for me. You know, what we had. When it ended. It took a long time for me to accept that I was never going to get an explanation. That you just stopped loving me. It’s really hard to accept something like that, do you understand that? I didn’t even know if I wanted to see you again.’

She turned back toward Mahmoud. He was looking down at the ground. His leg shaking, jumping. From nervousness or stress.

‘And now this. What’s going on, Moody?’

Mahmoud suddenly stood up.

‘We can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘Come on, we have to keep moving.’

They walked deeper into the park, under the bare trees, over frozen gravel paths covered in dry winter leaves. The sun was pale and cold, as if it were even farther away than usual.

Klara said nothing while Mahmoud cleared his throat, took a deep breath. Prepared himself. And finally he told her. About his research, his trips to Afghanistan and Iraq. About the messages from someone who seemed to be a fellow ranger from the old days. About the conference and the phone call. About the meeting at the African Museum and Lindman’s murder. And finally about the surreal attack at the hotel that very morning and the transmitter he’d found in his bag. He told her everything, holding nothing back. A mighty river flowed out of him, calm on the surface but with terrible force underneath.

‘My God,’ Klara said, when they reached the other end of the park. ‘What have you gotten yourself into?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Lindman seems to have—or have had, I mean—some information that somebody else is willing to kill both of us to get hold of.’

‘The Americans he worked for?’ Klara asked.

‘I don’t know.

Mahmoud dug into his wallet and took out a little piece of paper.

‘All I know is that Lindman said something about a train station in Paris, and he seems to have had luggage in a locker at the Gare du Nord. That’s all I have to go on.’

Mahmoud hailed a taxi that stopped at the curb. He held open the back door and looked questioningly at Klara.

‘I’m not saying I want you to come to Paris with me, but do you have a little more time?’

He took a deep breath. It looked like he was blushing.

‘I owe you a huge explanation. And oddly enough, or however you want to put it, the explanation involves Lindman.’

Karlsborg, Sweden

Euphoria and endorphins. It’s unthinkable, and yet so obvious, they can smell the freedom through the shoe polish and gun grease, the felt and the cleaning solution. So sudden and so real, they can taste the freedom through the vodka. They mix it with Fanta and drink it in their green plastic cups, the same cups they’ve had with them since the first day. With them through two-week marches, through endless survival drills in -25°c in Norrland, with them up Kebnekaise mountain and down again, and with them in the airplane from the first jump to the last. They laugh and laugh and laugh. Call each other nicknames. Tell stories about the draft, the jumps, frostbitten fingers, ranger marches. Stories memorized and refined, spun to perfection while they were cleaning their weapons and standing guard duty, through sleepless nights and early mornings.

It’s like this is the first time. Like they just met, like they’re in love. Like they’ve never been apart. Everything is bathed in a new light this evening. An initial, reflexive flash of nostalgia or sentimentality. They wrestle. They can’t stop touching the warmth, the strength of one another. Fifteen months of a purely physical closeness the likes of which they will never experience again, though they don’t realize it now. Not with girlfriends, not with wives or children. Not like this, not in the same way. They rub each other’s buzz cuts. They’re so relieved it’s over; they can’t believe it’s over.

Mahmoud leans back on his bunk. For a moment he tunes out all of the testosterone and energy. He closes his eyes, feeling the vodka and the tight maroon beret around his temples. He wishes he could cry. He wishes his mother could see him now. It doesn’t matter, she wouldn’t understand. No one could understand what he went through. What he accomplished.

The tremendous discipline it required—the concentration to get his beret and his wings. To emerge from the hopeless concrete projects to this. He, if anyone, has shown determination, courage, and endurance. He rose above the suspicion and the insults. Commanders who called him Bin Laden for the first two months. Graffiti in black, thick marker. al qaeda. raghead. allahu akbar. Every morning for those first few weeks. Sometimes a swastika. In the beginning he forced himself to get up an hour before anyone else, so he could rub the shame off of his locker. He’d ignored the voices behind his back and the sudden silences when he entered a room. He never yielded. Just grew up and out. Just got better than them. Stronger. Harder. Until he couldn’t be excluded anymore. Until, almost imperceptibly, he became a part of them. He went from being Bin Laden to Shammosh. Felt their trust, their respect. Felt like they no longer treated him differently.