Lars Kepler 2-book Bundle

“I wasn’t heading in hard,” she says. “I held back because I’d just thought of something important.”

  “I get it!” He laughs.

  “I don’t give a shit what you think you get or don’t get,” she says. “My idea is to use Penelope as bait.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I started to think about how she wants to go somewhere else and then at the moment I was about to hit you, I got an idea. I couldn’t knock you out if I had to talk to you.”

  “So talk,” he says.

  “I realised that Penelope would be bait anyway, whether we’d be involved or not. She’d lure the hit man to her.”

  Joona stops smiling and nods slowly.

  “Keep talking,” he says.

  “We don’t know for sure if the hit man can listen in to our communication, if he can hear everything we say via RAKEL … but it’s probable since he found Penelope on Kymmendö,” Saga says.

  “Right.”

  “He’ll find her one way or another, that’s what I think. He doesn’t care if she’s under police protection or not. We’ll do everything we can to keep her placement a secret, but it’s hellish to protect her without radio communication.”

  “He will find her,” Joona says.

  “That’s what I was thinking. Penelope will be bait, no matter what. The question is: Are we going to be ready when he comes? She gets just as much protection as planned, but if we put the stakeout guys from Span to watch the place as well, maybe we can catch this guy.”

  “That’s entirely possible. You’re thinking in the right direction,” Joona says.

  76

  the safe apartment

  Carlos, Saga, and Joona are heading down the long hallway to Säpo headquarters. Verner Zandén is already waiting for them, and without unnecessary greetings, he speaks the minute they’ve shut the door behind them.

  “Klara Olofsdotter at the International Prosecutor’s Office is in on this. I don’t have to tell you, this is a big stakeout for CID and Säpo. But who the hell are we trying to catch?”

  “We know next to nothing about him,” Saga says. “We don’t even know if he’s working alone or if he’s part of a team of professional killers from Belgium, or Brazil, or even leftover operatives from the KGB or from the former Eastern bloc.”

  “It’s not very difficult to listen in on our radio communications,” Carlos admits.

  “This man knows Penelope’s being protected and it will be difficult to get at her,” Joona says. “But there are always small chances: at times a door must be opened, guards change, people bring her food, she’ll have to meet her mother, confer with a psychologist, and she’s planning to meet Niklas Dent from the NHS—”

  Joona stops talking when his mobile phone rings. He checks the display and clicks it to voicemail.

  “Of course, our first priority is Penelope,” Saga says. “But even while protecting her, we feel we might have a chance to catch this man who’s murdered so many of our colleagues.”

  “I don’t have to remind you that he’s extremely dangerous,” Joona says. “None of us will meet a more dangerous human.”

  The secure apartment, at Storgatan 1, has a window that faces Sibyllegatan with a view over Östermalm Square. There are no apartment buildings across the street and the closest building is at least one hundred metres away.

  Saga Bauer holds the steel door open at street level for Dr Daniella Richards to lead Penelope Fernandez from an iron-grey police bus. Armoured Säpo guards surround them.

  “This is the most secure above-ground apartment in all of Stockholm,” Saga explains.

  Penelope doesn’t seem to notice her words. She just follows Dr Richards to the lift. Security cameras proliferate around the entrance hall and the stairwell.

  “We’ve put in motion detectors, an advanced alarm system, and two encrypted direct lines to Central Control,” Saga tells Penelope as the lift heads up.

  On the fourth floor, Penelope is brought through a heavy door to yet another locked door, which yet another uniformed officer opens, letting them into the apartment.

  “This apartment has tremendous protection against fire,” Saga says. “It has its own electrical generator and its own ventilation system.”

  “You’re safe here,” Dr Richards says gently.

  Penelope raises her face and looks at the doctor with an empty expression.

  “Thanks,” she finally says, almost soundlessly.

  “I can stay with you if that’s what you want.”

  Penelope shakes her head. Dr Richards and Saga wait for a long moment before they turn to leave.

  Penelope locks the door behind them and then walks over to one of the bulletproof windows with a view of Östermalm Square. The window is opaque from outside. She looks down and understands that some of the people moving about on the square must be police in disguise.

  She slowly touches the window. She can hear nothing from the outside world.

  The doorbell rings.

  Penelope jumps and her heart starts to pound.

  She walks over to the monitor, finds the intercom button, and presses it. The female officer’s face appears and she says that Penelope’s mother has arrived.

  “Penny? Penny?” her mother’s anxious voice asks from behind the officer.

  Penelope presses the combination to the door lock and hears the mechanism tick an answer before she can open the heavy steel door.

  “Mamma,” she says quietly. The sound of her own voice drops into the apartment’s oppressive silence.

  Penelope lets her mother into the room, then closes and locks the door. After that, she can’t seem to move. She presses her lips together and feels her body start to tremble. She forces all feeling from her face.

  She glances up at her mother but doesn’t dare meet her eyes. She waits for her mother’s tirade and accusations because she wasn’t able to protect Viola.

  Claudia has stopped and takes a slow look round.

  “Are they taking good care of you, Penny?” she asks.

  “I’m fine now.”

  “But they have to guard you.”

  “They are, so I’m safe here.”

  “That’s all that matters,” Claudia says in words almost beyond hearing.

  Penelope tries to swallow her tears.

  “There’s so much I have to take care of now,” her mother says, and turns her face away. “I … I just can’t believe that I have to arrange Viola’s funeral.”

  Penelope nods slowly. Her mother reaches out her hand to touch Penelope’s cheek, but Penelope startles back and her mother jerks her hand away.

  “They tell me that it will be over soon,” Penelope says. “The police think they’ll get that man … the man … who killed Viola and Björn.”

  Claudia nods and looks at her daughter with a face so naked and unprotected that Penelope is surprised to see her smile. “Just think, you are alive!” Claudia says thickly. “Just think, I have you again! It’s all that matters now … It’s the only thing that matters.”

  “Mamma.”

  “My little girl.”

  Claudia reaches out her hand again, and this time Penelope does not shy away.

  77

  the stakeout

  Jenny Göransson is in charge of the stakeout. She’s positioned in the bay window of an apartment three floors up on Nybrogatan 4A. She’s waiting. The hours pass. No one has reported anything. All seems quiet. Routinely, her eyes sweep in surveillance of the square and up to the roof of Sibyllegatan 27. Some pigeons startle and fly up and away.

  Sonny Jansson is positioned on that roof. He must have shifted and scared the birds.

  Jenny contacts him and finds out that he had moved to look into another apartment.

  “I thought they were in the middle of a fight, but then I realised they’re actually playing Wii and jumping around in front of the television.”

  “Return to your position,” Jenny says drily.

  She lifts her binocul
ars to peer at the dark area between the kiosk and the elm trees again. She’s decided it could be a potential hot spot.

  Blomberg calls in. He’s undercover as a jogger running down Sibyllegatan.

  “I see something in the cemetery,” he says in a low voice.

  “What?”

  “Someone is under the trees, about ten metres from the gate.”

  “Check it out, Blomberg, but be careful,” she says.

  He jogs past the horse stairs by the Military Museum’s gable and on into the cemetery. The night is warm and green. He moves silently onto the grass next to the gravel path and thinks that he’ll soon stop and pretend to stretch. Right now, he just keeps going. There’s a rustling among the leaves. The light left in the sky is blocked by branches and it’s dark between the gravestones. He is startled by seeing a face near the ground. A woman of about twenty. Her hair is stubby and dyed red and her green military backpack is lying next to her head. Blomberg begins to see more clearly as another person, a black-clad, laughing woman, pulls up the other woman’s sweater and begins kissing her breasts.

  Blomberg carefully moves away and reports back to Jenny Göransson: “False alarm. Lovers.”

  Three hours have passed. Blomberg shivers. It’s getting chilly. The dew is forming on the grass as the temperature drops. He rounds a corner and pulls up abruptly in front of a middle-aged woman with a well-worn face. She seems extremely drunk as she wobbles on her feet. She’s walking two poodles on a lead, jerking back angrily as the dogs eagerly sniff the ground and want to pull away.

  Near the edge of the cemetery, an airline attendant passes by. The wheels on her blue carry-on clatter against the asphalt. She gives Blomberg a disinterested glance and he hardly glances back although they’ve been colleagues for more than seven years.

  Maria Ristonen hears the sound of her own heels echo along the wall. She’s pulling her carry-on towards the entrance of the underground to check on someone almost hidden nearby. The carry-on gets stuck in a cobblestone and skitters sideways. She has to stop and as she bends down, she checks out the person in the shadows. He’s very well-dressed but he has an odd look on his face. He seems to be waiting for someone and he eyes her intently. Maria Ristonen’s heart begins to beat harder and she hears Jenny Göransson’s voice in her earpiece.

  “Blomberg has seen him, too, and he’s on the way,” Jenny says. “Wait for Blomberg, Maria. Wait for Blomberg.”

  Maria feels she can’t hesitate too long. The normal thing would be to walk along again. She tries to move more slowly and now she’s nearing the man with the odd look. She’ll have to walk past him and then her back would be to him. The man draws back further into the shadows as she approaches. He has a hand inside his jacket. Maria Ristonen feels the adrenaline pump through her veins when the man suddenly steps towards her and pulls something out that he’s had hidden. Beyond the man’s shoulder, Maria sees Blomberg take a stance, weapon suddenly in his hand. Jenny shouts that it’s a false alarm. The man holds only a beer can.

  “Bitch!” The man spits beer towards her.

  “Oh God,” sighs Jenny in Maria’s earpiece. “Just keep on going to the underground, Maria.”

  The rest of the night passes without incident. The last nightclubs close and then only a few dog owners and aluminum-can collectors go by. Then the newspaper delivery people. Then more dog owners and a few joggers. Jenny Göransson can hardly wait for her relief at eight a.m. She gazes at Hedvig Eleonora Church and then at Penelope Fernandez’s blank window. She looks down at Storgatan and then back towards the priory, where the film director Ingmar Bergman grew up. She pulls out a stick of nicotine gum and studies the square, the park benches, the trees, and the sculptures of the hunched woman and the man with the slab of meat on his shoulder.

  There is a small movement near the high steel gate guarding Östermalms Saluhall. Gourmet food stalls have reinvigorated the interior of the huge redbrick building. Now the weak shine of glass in the entrance is briefly hidden by dark movement. Jenny Göransson calls Carl Schwirt. He’s on a park bench between the trees where the Folk Theatre had once been. Two bin bags of scavenged cans sit between his feet.

  “I don’t see a damn thing,” he replies.

  “Stay there.”

  Maybe, she thinks, maybe I should let Blomberg leave his spot next to the church and jog down Humlegårdsgatan to check this out.

  Jenny peers through her binoculars at the entrance again. She can now see the vague image of someone on his knees inside the black grille. An illegal taxi has driven the wrong way on Nybrogatan and swings around. Jenny watches the light from the car’s headlights slide along the redbrick wall of the Saluhall. The light flicks across the entrance, but now she sees nothing. The car stops and reverses.

  “Idiot,” she thinks as the taxi drives backwards until one wheel goes up onto the pavement.

  Then the headlights shine onto a display window further along the street, and that window glass throws a reflection right into the entrance.

  There is someone behind the high fence.

  Jenny needs only a second to understand. The man is adjusting the scope on a rifle.

  She drops the binoculars and radios Central Control.

  “Alert! I see an armed man!” she almost shouts. “Military-grade rifle with scope, at the entrance to the Saluhall … I repeat! A sniper at ground level at the corner of Nybrogatan and Humlegårdsgatan!”

  The man at the entrance waits patiently behind the bars of the gate. He has been surveying the empty square for some time and waiting for a homeless collector of cans on the park bench to leave, but decided to ignore the homeless man when it appeared he was going to spend the night on the bench. Under the cover of darkness, he unfolds a tubular barrel with the absorbing shoulder support for a Modular Sniper Rifle. With precision ammunition, the sand-coloured semiautomatic rifle is accurate for distances of up to two kilometres. Calmly he mounts a titanium flash suppressor on the barrels, pushes in the magazine, and lowers the tripod in front.

  He had slipped inside the Saluhall just before it closed for the night. He’d hidden in a storage area until the cleaners had finished and the guards had left, and as soon as the place was locked and all the lights were off, he’d moved into the Saluhall itself.

  It took only a short time to disconnect the building’s alarm system from the inside. Then he was able to slip into the outer entrance, which was protected from the street by a large wrought-iron fence.

  He’d been protected from all sides in this deep entrance, like a little hunter’s hut, behind the fence. He has a clear view out but can’t be seen at all if he remains still. If anyone happens to come near the entrance, he can simply back away to disappear into the darkness.

  He aims his rifle at the building where Penelope Fernandez is located. He seeks her room using his electro-optic scope. He’s patient, slow, and systematic. He’s been waiting a long time. Soon it will be morning and before light comes, he’ll have to retreat, reactivate the building’s alarm system, and wait for tomorrow night. His instinct tells him that she will be drawn to the window to look out sometime, assuming the bulletproof glass will protect her.

  He adjusts the scope and then the headlights of a car pass over him. He turns away for a moment and then returns to his observation of the apartment at Storgatan 1. There is a heat signature behind the dark window. The image is blurry and vague, weakened by the distance and the bulletproof glass. A worse target than he had expected. He tries to get a fix on the centre of this blurry outline. A pale rose shadow moves in the speckled violet, thins out, and then appears again.

  He is interrupted. Two figures have materialised from somewhere on the square, and they run directly at him, pistols out and close to their bodies.

  78

  östermalms saluhall

  Penelope wakes up early and sleep is gone. She lies in bed for a while, but then gets up and boils some water for tea. She thinks about the watch the police have on her and wonders how long th
ey can afford to keep it up. Perhaps for only a few days. If police officers hadn’t been killed, they might not even have given her that. It would be too expensive.

  She takes the kettle of boiling water from the stove and pours water into the teapot. She drops in two bags of lemon tea, takes the pot with her to the dark living room, and puts the teapot and cup down by the window nook. She turns on the green glass lamp hanging there and looks down into the empty square.

  Two people pop up from nowhere and go running over the stone pavement. Then they fall flat and lie still. It looks odd, like a puppet show from up high. She quickly switches off the lamp. It sways from her jerky movement and bangs against the windowpane. She moves to one side and looks out again. A SWAT team is running along Nybrogatan and she sees a sudden pop of light in the entrance to the Saluhall. At the same moment, it sounds as if someone has thrown a wet rag at the window, which thumps as a bullet goes through the glass and into the wall behind her. She throws her body on the floor and crawls away. Glass splinters from the green lamp are all over the floor. She doesn’t notice that she’s cut her palms.

  Stewe Billgren had always had a very quiet job at CID. However, right now he’s in the passenger seat next to his boss, Mira Carlsson. They’re in Alpha Car, an unmarked car slowly proceeding up Humlegårdsgatan. Stewe Billgren has never found himself in an active position, though he’s wondered many times how he might handle it. This situation was beginning to wear on his mind, especially since the woman he was living with had come out of the bathroom with her pregnancy test and triumphantly shown him the results.

  Stewe Billgren’s entire body aches from playing in a football game yesterday, and experience has taught him the pain will only get worse over the course of the day.

  Shots snap out somewhere. Mira has just enough time to glance out the window and ask, “What the hell was that?”

  A voice over the radio yells that two officers are down, shot, and lying in the middle of Östermalm Square. Group 5 is ordered in from Humlegårdsgatan.