Norman Hill was already at the table in the far corner, a glass of red wine in front of him. He was the sort who never drank a lot, always and only expensive wines, who knew all about the vintage and how it was stored, who talked about wine with the same passion as they might about lovers. Finnigan normally tasted it and asked polite questions but had never really understood what the fuss was all about. For him, alcohol was a way to relax, so who cared which grape it was that made it possible?
Hill ordered another glass of wine from the same bottle that he’d selected. Finnigan tasted it, made the sort of comment that he thought you were supposed to. He then looked at the copy of an article that was lying on the table and that was to be printed in the
Washington Post
in a few hours’ time. A story by an investigative journalist about a prisoner on the run, who had been sentenced to death, and about the demands that were being made for him to be returned to the cell he had escaped from.
Finnigan read it and then listened to Hill, who outlined their most recent communication with the Swedish government representatives and a resolution that guaranteed that Frey would be deported out of the country the next day.
“From one communist country to another.”
“And then here?”
“Patience, Edward.”
“When?”
“On a waiting plane.”
Edward Finnigan stood up and went to the bar to buy a cigar. He promised Hill that he would drink the wine first; it was an Australian grape from a vineyard near Adelaide, and he had learned enough to know that wine experts didn’t like to mix smells, or maybe it was tastes. Whatever, he would smoke it later, when their glasses were empty, maybe he’d even phone Alice—he longed for her.
Helena Schwarz had reacted in precisely the way Grens had feared. He had woken her and her son, he heard the boy’s distressed and sleepy shouts in the background. He had of course realized that a phone call at half past three in the morning would do that but felt that there was no alternative. Outside on the balcony, in the cold, Ewert Grens had decided to ignore all the technicalities implied by the total confidence order imposed on the preliminary investigation. And Schwarz’s wife, whom he realized he cared for in some way—her angry and alarmed reactions at the hearing that had been followed by composure appealed to him—was the first person he called.
She had alternately cried and shouted at him and he had let her do it. She understood precisely what he had understood: that John’s deportation to Russia was just a political detour on his journey west. She had several times whispered
you can’t do this
and had repeated that they had a son and that John had said he was innocent and that the extradition agreement didn’t apply to anyone who had been sentenced to death and Grens had waited until she calmed down, until there was silence.
She had asked him to wait on the phone while she went to check on her son and to get a drink of water and they had then talked quietly together about something he couldn’t remember until she had suddenly begged him to go too.
At first he hadn’t understood.
Go too? Where?
And she had explained and wept and explained again.
If John really was going to leave . . . if it was going to happen, with or without the detective superintendent’s intervention . . .
She begged Ewert Grens to be the one to go with him and that his colleagues should also be there: the other man who was slightly younger and seemed so kind, and the girl who her husband seemed to trust when he was being questioned.
If they were there, then at least he would have faces around him that he recognized.
The bar was still quite empty: a young couple holding hands two tables away, a man sitting on his own over by the window reading the newspaper while he waited for the chef’s cheeseburger and potato wedges. Norman Hill had just left, his thin body hidden in a gray coat and a hat that was as high as it was wide. Edward Finnigan ordered a bottle of beer and sat with his mobile phone in his hand, hesitating, before he dialed.
He had punched his best friend to the ground and then thrown a penholder at him. They could talk about that later. He had something else he wanted to discuss.
Robert listened while Finnigan gave a summary of his meetings earlier in the day and the evening’s final conversation with Hill. Neither of them mentioned the fact that the governor had asked his closest colleague only that morning when they’d argued to let the process run its course, to curb his hate and fervor and wait until everything was resolved.
The unease that had brewed in his chest and that he’d tried to get away from whenever it plagued him the most gradually evaporated until it was nothing, and nothing was not frightening. His voice, his punch, had not destroyed the support that he would soon need more than ever. Their friendship had survived their first confrontation, the one they had both dreaded for so long and had therefore always skirted around.
Robert was still there beside him, he would listen.
And Frey would be on his way in a matter of hours.
It was time for the governor of Ohio to contact the judge who once upon a time had sentenced Elizabeth Finnigan’s murderer to death, to accelerate the process of fixing a new date for the execution.
Sven Sundkvist gave up. The night was already lost to him, so just to lie there and wait for sleep made his body ache with impatience. He slipped on a pair of brown slippers and a long-sleeved, polo-neck top. He walked slowly through the terraced house—soon they would have lived there for ten years, and he couldn’t imagine them living and getting old anywhere else.
He stopped by the door to Jonas’s room. Their little boy who was getting big. He had been less than a year old when they had gone to the town one hundred twenty-five miles west of Phnom Penh; he had been so beautiful, so calm, everything they had longed for. His eighth birthday was fast approaching, he was in second grade and even had homework for English and natural sciences. Sven thought about his discussion with Anita a few hours ago about the child not having any choice. Jonas had not chosen himself to lie snuffling and snoring in this particular house, and he hoped that his son would never hold him to account for it. But
if
he did, he would try to explain as best he could.
But if Schwarz’s son wondered if it was true that
his
father had been extradited to face the death penalty, who would he then hold to account—who would have to stand there and explain?
Sven was just about to go in and kiss Jonas on the forehead as he so often did, when an irritated electronic buzz broke the silence. Jonas moaned and turned over in the bed in front of him and Sven sprinted back to the bedroom and the mobile phone that was in there. He sighed when he saw the number: Ewert, another ruined night.
Grens had phoned and quickly explained the situation to Sven Sundkvist, then Hermansson and then Ågestam.
He hadn’t had time for questions, a brief conversation, enough to get Sven and Hermansson to understand that they had to be at Kronoberg by six o’clock, and prepared, if so required, to travel and be away longer than their prescribed working hours.
He stood in the kitchen, looked out of the window at the morning that was still some way off. He knew that there wasn’t much time. And that he, for the second time in an hour, would ignore the total confidentiality stamp on the preliminary investigation.
Vincent Carlsson answered immediately.
His voice was chirpy, he was working nights, as Grens had hoped he was.
It took ten minutes to explain the whole story in a way that was clear and he could understand. Vincent Carlsson immediately realized who he was talking to and that this was seriously potent news that had just been released by the otherwise taciturn detective superintendent.
There was still plenty of time before the first news broadcast of the day.
And by then, the planned program schedule would have been cleared and replaced, every news item taken out except the one that would dominate. Not only today’s news bulletins, but possibly all other bulletins for some days to come.
He looked at his watch, two minutes to four, then he called a meeting with the entire news-desk editorial team.
IT WAS STILL DARK WHEN A CITY POLICE VAN DROVE TOWARD THE MAIN
terminal at Bromma Airport. The air was cold and clear; the vehicle’s headlamps sparkled in icy patches on the road and the exhaust from the car in front hung in a compact cloud as it often does in extreme temperatures.
Ewert Grens had left his apartment on Sveavägen two hours ago and taken a taxi to Kronoberg. Helena Schwarz had phoned him twice in the space of ten minutes and begged, as she had in their first phone call, that if the decision to deport her husband was not overturned, then he and his two colleagues would be the officers who accompanied him out of the country.
And here he was, sitting in the back of the van, next to Hermansson. In front of her, Sven with a handcuff around his right wrist, the partner of which was attached to John Schwarz’s left wrist. A young, rather large police constable was driving, Grens didn’t know his name and couldn’t be bothered to ask.
The last few hours had been dreadful.
He had woken everyone who had anything to do with the case, shouted and told a lot of them to go to hell, and gradually come to accept that John Schwarz was going to be deported, whether he liked it or not, that this was politics and the powers that be had acted with greater alacrity than he could have anticipated.
He hated journalists and normally wanted nothing to do with them and had never made a secret of it, but the anger inside had driven him to contact one for the first time in his police career. He had met Vincent Carlsson two years earlier in connection with a sensational pedophile murder. Carlsson had known the father, who had shot his daughter’s murderer, and unlike most other TV journalists seemed to be almost wise and sensible. They had spoken together three times over the past few hours and Carlsson was now at Hotel Continental in the room where Ruben Frey had until recently been asleep, while his colleagues gathered and caused a commotion outside Rosenbad and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanding answers. Grens didn’t imagine that it would make the slightest bit of difference, it was too late for that, but the media spotlight would at least blind the damned bureaucrats for a while and shine light on their shit.
He had also made a nighttime call to Kristina Björnsson, the public defense counselor whom John had refused to have present when he was questioned. She had been awake and Grens had for a moment wondered why, before briefing her about the deportation demand, then exhorting her to appeal the decision. She had taken a deep breath and been about to answer when he had continued, asking her to investigate the requirements for political asylum. When he then stopped talking, she had asked in a tired voice whether it was her turn now, and gone on to explain that John hadn’t allowed her to entertain any such thoughts, he seemed to have given up, he had no hopes or desires, and besides, there wasn’t time—she was nearly whispering when she said this—John would have landed in Moscow before the Migration Board even started its working day. Grens hadn’t listened, or had refused to accept what she was saying, he had continued to exhort her, plead with her until he realized that she was right, that these were possibilities that would never be tried.
He turned and looked at him.
John Schwarz seemed to be smaller than ever.
Hunched up, head down, alarmingly loose at the neck, his pale face was gray, his eyes empty; he had closed himself off, was somewhere else. He hadn’t said a word, hadn’t showed any emotion when they opened the cell and asked him to get dressed in his own clothes and then come with them.
Sven had several times tried to start a conversation, spoken about the wind and the weather, asked questions, made provocative claims, but had just been met with silence. Schwarz was unreachable.
They passed a long line of taxis that had already delivered passengers who had an early check-in for the first morning flights. Sleepy travelers had put their luggage down in the road while they got out, and the constable who was driving honked in irritation until they registered the marked vehicle and quickly moved up onto the sidewalk.
The van drove on a few hundred feet past the terminal building, pulled up in front of a wrought-iron gate in the fence, and waited there until it was opened by a man in Air Navigation Services coveralls. He turned when he was ready, nodded to the driver, and then without much success tried to peer into the van, curious to catch a momentary glimpse of the person he assumed was the reason for the secure transport.
There didn’t seem to be any wind. But out on the airstrip it was blowing, not hard but enough; at close to minus twenty degrees even the slightest wind could flay any unprotected face in the short distance from the van to the plane.
Ewert Grens studied the government plane before starting to walk toward it.
It was a Gulfstream model, snow-white and a lot smaller than he’d imagined. It had been bought some years ago to shuttle important people between capitals, in advance of Sweden taking over presidency of the EU, and was officially owned by the air force. When it became public knowledge that it had cost two hundred and eighty million kronor, it caused a great deal of grumbling. Grens knew that it was used regularly by the government and the royal family but was certain that this was the first time the tank had been filled to ensure that a person who was suspected of aggravated assault left the country.
A few airport staff were moving about on the asphalt and the runway, others were loading luggage into the hold of Malmö Aviation’s early morning flight south, otherwise no one else to be seen, or to see. But Sven still took off his thick winter coat and covered the handcuffs that linked him to Schwarz, the less attention the better.
It was surprisingly spacious inside. Room for fifteen passengers, with soft, white leather seats. They sat in the same positions as they had in the van. Sven with Schwarz beside him, Ewert and Hermansson behind them, with full overview. Four people sitting close together while they waited for a flight that was not going to be particularly long. The plane’s fuel tank was large enough to cross the Atlantic, so there was hardly the need to stop before Moscow.