Authors: Jeremy Duns
‘Who made Hope’s passport?’ he asked Marta.
She threw her hands up and shook her head. ‘Why does it matter?’
He glared at her.
‘A man called Vesterlund.’
‘An old man, lives above a bakery in Gamla Stan?’
She nodded, and Dark swore under his breath. But perhaps there was a chance.
‘How well known is he?’ She peered at him, not understanding, and he tried again, willing her to follow the speed of his own thoughts. ‘Is it possible the authorities know
about him?’
She hesitated for a moment, then shook her head – but the hesitation had given him all the information he needed. She wasn’t sure, so Vesterlund was out. Even if Säpo
didn’t already know about him, they might be able to track him down and apply some pressure until he told them about his most recent visitor, and the name on the passport he had made for him.
He thought for a moment, staring into Marta’s puzzled, almost angelic-looking face. She was beautiful enough in the classical Scandinavian way, but did nothing for him and apparently the same
applied in reverse as he’d never had any inkling she found him attractive. That didn’t surprise him, but he couldn’t for the life of him understand what she would see in someone
like . . .
Jonas. He looked over at him, still standing by the door in his briefs, watching. He was in his early thirties, pigeon-chested and with a weak chin. But his colouring and the general set of his
features were close enough.
‘Where’s your passport?’ Dark said. ‘Your emergency one, I mean. You must have one.’
The young man glared at him. ‘I think perhaps it’s time you left.’ He looked across at his girlfriend, his arms folded.
‘Claire and Ben are missing,’ Dark said, also looking to Marta. ‘Please.’
She took a deep breath, and then nodded. ‘Go and get it, darling. Quickly.’
The office in Kungsholmen was thick with the fug of cigarette smoke, and some of the men were rubbing their eyes, the hours of concentration taking their toll. Weale,
paradoxically, felt more awake than he had done in days. His concerns about his cover had faded now he’d passed muster with the Swedes, and his focus had become more intense. He was starting
to panic that he’d lost Dark.
The old forger Vesterlund had been turned over to the police to be arrested and charged, but he hadn’t given them any serious leads. He had admitted to having made Dark the five passports
he’d had on him in Helsinki, but claimed to have had no other contact with him. Weale was an expert in weighing the reliability of such testimonies from his work with captured terrs, and in
his judgement the man was telling the truth.
Morelius had placed a couple of his men on watch outside Vesterlund’s flat in case Dark came calling, but Weale’s instincts also told him that that possibility wasn’t on the
cards now. Dark might have used more than one forger, or be visiting another one at that very moment. He might already have left the country. Weale hoped to hell he hadn’t – he
didn’t relish the idea of having to tell Harmigan he’d lost sight of the target.
He tried to think through what he would do in the other man’s shoes. Dark’s overriding concern must be to find out why his family had been taken, and from there try to figure out by
whom. But Weale had no idea how much the girl had told him of her past life, and she would be up in the air with Voers and the others by now so he had no way of checking.
‘We’ll find him,’ said Morelius, sensing Weale’s frustration. ‘We’re watching the ports very closely.’ He indicated the banks of computer screens his
men were huddled around, most of which showed closed-circuit television stills.
‘We’re linked to every customs post in the country here, and they all have the photographs of Dark that Interpol and your colleagues in London provided. We’ve also tightened
the usual restrictions on travelling within Scandinavia at the request of your prime minister, so even within the region he would have to show a passport – provided he hasn’t already
got through, of course.’
Weale wanted to ask why the hell they had such an idiotically lax system in the first place, but bit his tongue. His eye had been drawn to one of the screens, which had just started showing
images of passports in rapid succession.
Morelius followed his gaze. ‘Yes, that’s something new from the customs people at the airport. They have it in Berlin, too, and a few of the larger American cities. Each customs
official has a glass plate under their desk, and they place passengers’ passports on it when they go through.’ He mimed the movement with one hand. ‘A linked computer in their
control centre scans the page, rather like a photocopy machine, and we can access the resulting image from here. But it doesn’t help us much in this case because it takes twenty minutes or
more for the images to get here. Even if we did happen to spot Dark’s photograph among them, by that time his flight would already have left. Perhaps in a few years this system will be of
use, but today . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘But we have access to all the flight manifests,’ said Weale. ‘So if we match the name on the passport with the manifests we can figure out where he’s heading. Do you get
every single one of these photographs sent here as a matter of course?’
‘From Arlanda airport, yes. But we’re talking about thousands of passengers. Are you proposing to look through them all to try to spot him? If I can be direct with you, the idea
seems a little desperate. This isn’t something that can be done with the naked eye.’
‘Why not? That’s how the passport officers are doing it. I suggest we set up what is in effect a separate customs post here, double-checking every scanned passport image as fast as
we can manage. Dark will know we’re looking for him by now, and he’ll also know that to get out of Scandinavia he’ll have to use a photograph that looks enough like him to get
through customs, but not enough like the photographs we’ve circulated to have him stopped. But with all due respect to your customs officials, I think our judgement as to how he might
disguise himself is probably more sophisticated. We can also order the information here: start with the easiest and work outwards to the harder stuff. So let’s filter out all Caucasian male
passengers between the ages of, say, thirty and sixty, and start looking at those.’
Morelius clicked his fingers at one of his men.
‘Not bad, Mr Collins,’ he said when he had given the instructions. ‘I’m starting to understand what Sandy Harmigan sees in you.’
Paul Dark paid the taxi driver and walked through the revolving door into the main concourse of Arlanda airport. He quickly found an overhead monitor and saw that SAS had a
direct flight to Brussels departing in three hours. He was about to approach the airline’s desk when he sensed something strange about the space directly around him. It took him a few seconds
to see them – uniformed soldiers were discreetly patrolling the perimeter of the concourse, armed with machine-pistols.
His stomach tightened. The coincidence was too great: they had to be here because of him, and that meant someone had worked out who he was. And to get the usually placid Swedes to bring troops
in, it had to be someone who had a hell of a lot of clout. CIA? Or Service? The latter was the most likely explanation, as they had the most information on him. Who was Chief now? Still Innes,
perhaps. He was a safe choice.
He turned away from the desk. Airline check-in staff usually just glanced at your passport photo as they tapped in your details, but the soldiers meant full measures were in place, so they would
also have been put on the alert for him. There would probably also be passport checks at both ends now. So he had to think again. Could he take a non-commercial flight – sneak onto a freight,
perhaps? He quickly dismissed the idea. Fewer people meant identifying himself would be even more difficult. His one advantage was the crowd: those chasing him had to find him in the haystack of
the hundreds of thousands of people travelling around Europe.
Further down the concourse he spied a bookshop with a stand outside containing the day’s newspapers, and he walked towards it to put more distance between himself and the soldiers. He was
stopped short by a frame on the wall that featured enlarged reproductions of all the front pages. The British and other international papers were running with two stories: the Portuguese had lost
control in eastern Timor, and three people had been killed in an explosion in a pub in Armagh. But the Nordic evening papers and late editions were leading with a different story: him. The front
pages of
Expressen
,
Ilta-Sanomat
,
Aftonbladet
and
Aftenposten
all featured the same two photographs of his face: the one taken just hours earlier in the
coastguard station in Helsinki and one of him clean-shaven – an old Century House pass, he thought. The headlines in each language proclaimed he’d murdered his girlfriend and son and
was now on the run and might kill again at any moment.
Aftonbladet
had the most striking cover, making the most of the fact Claire had worked for them by using a smiling photograph a
colleague had taken of her at her desk with Ben seated on her lap making faces at the camera.
‘HAN DÖDADE DEM – HITTA HONOM!’
was the headline: ‘He killed them
– Find him!’
So they were playing it like that. Not ‘sought for questioning’, not ‘a prime suspect’, but that he’d actually killed them. His jaw clenched at the tactic, but he
could hardly expect Queensberry rules.
He retreated to one of the seating areas, his mind racing through his rapidly narrowing options. After he’d given Marta and Jonas a graphic description of what might happen to their friend
and his son if they didn’t give him all their assistance, he’d persuaded them to part with two spare passports, a fresh set of clothes, an attaché case, some cosmetics and enough
of their parents’ kronor to buy him the plane ticket and anything else he needed for the next few days. But it had taken him time to persuade them, valuable time, and after a while he’d
felt he couldn’t afford to spend any more of it in case he missed a flight.
So he’d taken the taxi here. He’d been right about the flight, because if he had delayed much longer he’d have missed it, but the security cordon was much tighter than
he’d bargained for. They’d set up the sort of measures reserved for a terrorist on the loose: armed troops and a major media alert. No doubt they had arranged radio and television
broadcasts, too, in which case he’d been lucky the driver hadn’t heard or seen any and driven him to the nearest police station.
The check-in time for the flight was in just over an hour, and he didn’t even know if there were any seats left on it. But the next direct flight to Brussels wasn’t for another
couple of hours, and indirect routes would take even longer. And the more time he took, the worse his odds of getting through. It was now or never.
He stood abruptly and walked to the bathroom area, locking himself in one of the stalls. He removed Jonas’s leather jacket and shirt and hung both on the door hook. Then he took
Marta’s box of Jane Hellen hair bleach from the attaché case, and as he leaned over the basin applied a dose of the bleach into his scalp and eyebrows. The instructions said it would
take forty-five minutes to turn him into a ‘platinum blonde’, but his hair was too dark for that to work and it wasn’t what he wanted anyway. He estimated fifteen minutes should
be enough for the desired effect, and noted the time on Kurkinen’s wristwatch, which he was still wearing.
Reaching over to the door, he removed some items from the pocket of the jacket, then flipped down the lid of the toilet and seated himself on it. The first item was his wallet. The leather had
been damaged by the water, but the photograph in the inside pocket was still dry, and there he was, looking down at a newborn Ben cradled in the arms of Claire. Or Hope, as he now knew was her real
name. He traced a fingernail across her face and thought of the way she tasted when they kissed, and the way the tiny crevices of her lips would sometimes catch his. He remembered the morning of
his birthday when she had given him the wallet, and Ben bounding onto the bed to give him his card, and then the three of them in Haga Park. He bit into his cheek unconsciously, his ribcage
thumping as the shame and guilt and rage coursed through him.
He snapped the wallet shut. All his training said he should destroy the photograph, as it could ruin his cover if found on him, but it was the only concrete link to his family he had left.
Besides, he told himself, he might need it later to help find them. He spent the next five minutes thinking up a legend that would at least sustain initial interrogation in the unlikely event it
came to that. So the man in the photograph was his brother, Karl. He was two years older than him, a dentist in Gothenburg, and this was his family: Karl’s wife Ingrid and their son Nils. The
Swedish word for dentist was
tandläkare
, so shorten that to ‘TAN’ to remember it. Make Gothenburg ‘GO’, and he was two years older, so the phrase to remember
was TWO TANGO, as in ‘It takes two to tango’. And the first letters of Karl, Ingrid and Nils spelled ‘KIN’.
Having committed this to memory, he reflected how deluded he’d been to believe he had left his past behind and become a peaceful Swedish citizen called Erik Johansson. Within a matter of
hours, he’d reverted to the dedicated operative preparing a cover story without a second thought. A few hours too late, he thought bitterly. He’d meant to investigate Claire’s
past when they had met as a matter of routine, but he’d been swept up by the thrill of new love and before he had managed to catch his breath she’d become pregnant and all his remaining
caution and tradecraft had deserted him, his mind preoccupied with the prospect of bringing a new life into the world.
There was little point in dwelling on the error now. He turned to the other items he’d taken out: Jonas’s two spare passports. One was in the name of Per Sundqvist, a pharmacist from
Uppsala, and the other was Henrik Jansson, a primary-school teacher from central Stockholm. After examining them both, he replaced the Sundqvist passport in the jacket. Jansson was a much more
common name, meaning it would be harder to run checks on, and his Swedish accent was a Stockholm one.