The Other Son (2 page)

Sophie held her hands tightly clasped together.

She landed at
Arlanda Airport in Stockholm, and showed her fake passport at customs. She passed through the arrivals hall, emerged into the cold January air, and got into a taxi.

The security arrangements were always the same. She would make great detours to get to wherever she was going. Today was no exception. She changed taxis twice. No one was following her. That was the rule she had to stick to.

Eventually Sophie arrived home at her apartment on Eriksbergsgatan. She and Albert lived there under false names. They had left their villa out in Stocksund a few months earlier. All things considered, that apartment might well be the safest place for them.

He was awake even though it was late, and rolled his wheelchair out into the hall when she came in.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hello, Albert,” she said.

He didn't ask where she'd been; he never did. A tacit agreement between them. The less he knew, the safer he was.

“I'll make some tea,” he said, and rolled into the kitchen.

She followed him, and sat down on a stool. She hid for a while pretending to leaf through a newspaper on the counter.

From the corner of her eye, he seemed like he could have been a little boy. But he wasn't. Almost seventeen. A teenager, careful about his appearance, sporty, keen to do all he could to live as normal a life as possible in spite of his spinal injury.

But obviously life was different since he had been run down by a car six months earlier: he had fewer friends, but Anna was still there. Sophie could see the love between them, it was real. That was more than enough for her. But there was something else, too. A sadness that he couldn't handle, that she couldn't handle, that they couldn't talk about.

“Green or black?” he asked.

“Black, please,” she said.

She let it live inside her. Sometimes it grew and swelled up, becoming immense, taking so much space that on a few occasions she had been physically forced to throw up. She knew that nothing could make it disappear. It was always there, firmly anchored in every aspect of her life—her guilt. Because the consequences of her actions were the reason why he was sitting in that wheelchair. Her fault.
Indirectly
, a more kindly disposed person would say. But directly or indirectly, the result was the same when it came to her son.

Her fault…

Sophie had been playing a devious game. Imagined she could control the situation. But she couldn't. On one side she had a police officer, Gunilla Strandberg, who wanted her to inform on Hector Guzman, who was on the other side. Sophie had tried to find a path somewhere between the two of them, had tried to do the right thing. But the police were corrupt. There was no right option. It led to Gunilla's gorillas driving into Albert when they tried to kidnap him in order to blackmail Sophie. He broke his back, so high up his spine that he would probably never get out of that wheelchair.

Her fault…

Sophie went on leave from her work as a nurse at the hospital to take care of Albert at home. Her guilt and grief went hand in hand, and seemed to grow as time passed. She had figured out that she shouldn't fight it, just let it grow, as part of her. A sick part that had the paralyzing power to take control of her entire life at any time.

But it was very different for Albert. To start with, after the accident, she had been amazed at the ease with which he seemed to accept his fate. But that had changed as everything became routine and commonplace. When he realized the consequences of his injury. Old friends who kept their distance and became oddly polite. The loneliness, isolation, the feeling of not being part of things.

She could see how vulnerable he was. And finally the inevitable happened. Despair and grief crashed into his life two months after the accident, becoming large and powerful, terrorizing him day and night as he struggled against them in silence. But the battle was unequal and unfair. Albert gave up and surrendered. She wanted to tell him not to give in, to try to hold it all at bay, at a distance. But how could she tell him? He had to find his own way and deal with this himself. Sophie let him be, and suffered in her own inability to help him. And from having put him in this position.

Her fault…

So there she sat, Sophie Brinkmann, with her beloved son, Albert, about to drink tea. Earlier that day she had negotiated a weapons deal, people had been shot around her, and she herself had only just escaped with her life….

There was no longer any logic to life. Everything was upside down.

The kettle whistled on the stove, and Albert rolled over and lifted it off. The whistling soon stopped.

“Do you feel like a game?” he asked as he poured the steaming water into two large cups.

He meant chess. She always lost.

“Definitely.” She smiled.

He was fairly tall and well built, with the particular look of someone who spends his days in the sun. A mixture of lines and wrinkles on his skin, along with an overdose of sun in his eyes—a freshness, a sort of natural joy.

The working day was over and Eduardo Garcia moved along the side of the ship from the bow toward the stern. There he boarded an open boat that was tethered to the larger vessel and pulled on a windbreaker and life jacket. It was January. The daytime temperature was around ten degrees Celsius, but the wind from the sea was hard and biting.

He pulled away and headed at speed over the rolling swell toward the French mainland, and Biarritz.

Eduardo Garcia lived a peaceful life. A life he had consciously chosen.

His real name was Eduardo Guzman, although he had been using his alias for an eternity now. He left Spain and Marbella in his late teens together with his girlfriend, Angela. They set off to France and Biarritz for the surfing. They discovered that they liked it there and settled down. A new life, a new name, a new country.

Now, so many years later, they had two boys and steady jobs. He was a marine biologist, Angela a legal assistant at a small law firm in the city. The only change in the makeup of the family was Hasani, a stocky Egyptian bodyguard who had knocked on their door six months earlier. Hasani had been sent by Eduardo's father, Adalberto Guzman. Things had kicked off in Stockholm. Eduardo's brother, Hector Guzman, had been run down by a car at a pedestrian crossing in Stockholm by a rival group. That was all Eduardo knew. And he didn't want to know more. He had kept his distance from his father and brother's affairs.

Eduardo saw his
sons on the pier as he approached land, along with Hasani. A comical sight. The big Egyptian, always in a smart jacket, together with the two happy boys with their schoolbags over their shoulders.

Eduardo raised his arm and waved. The boys waved back eagerly. Hasani joined in, but in a more reserved way, as if he understood that Eduardo's wave wasn't meant for him.

Eduardo walked with his sons up through the city, away from the harbor, hand in hand through the streets that took them away from the tourist areas. This was what happened every day, the same routine. The children came to meet him after school, then they went to have something to eat and drink and later got some groceries and went home to prepare the evening meal. Hasani was always a few steps behind them.

The boys suggested the Lord Nelson. They liked the aquarium with its live fish and lobsters. Eduardo said no, he wanted to sit outside, despite the time of year and fairly cool temperature. He often went to the same place, in a small square. There were plenty of people milling about and Eduardo and the boys sat down at one of the outer tables. Hasani sat down two tables away.

When Eduardo beckoned the waiter over and was ordering the usual, two bottles of orange juice and a coffee, his cell phone rang in his trouser pocket.

“
Sí?
”

It was Angela, letting him know she was going to be late, that someone was on the way to appraise the house, and that Eduardo would have to let them in.

They'd discussed moving to something larger. Eduardo wanted the appraisal. But he also wanted to sit outside the café for a while.

“OK,” he said, and ended the call. He waved to get Hasani's attention.

“Take the boys home and the let the estate agent in; I'll be along soon.”

The boys protested but Eduardo didn't listen. He wanted them to be with Hasani the whole time. Because even if there wasn't any visible threat, he knew Hasani was always a valuable extra precaution.

The boys left with Hasani, heading off across the square. Eduardo watched them go, smiling at their body language, which made it abundantly clear that they thought they were being treated unfairly. He smiled even more when they abruptly forgot the injustice and started chasing each other instead.

The coffee and bottles of juice arrived on a tray. The waiter looked over at the boys.

“Shall I take their drinks back in?”

Eduardo shook his head.

“I'll take them home with me, if that's OK?” he said, then gestured toward a newspaper that was rolled up under the waiter's arm. “Could I borrow that for a bit?”

Eduardo drank his coffee and skimmed the main headlines, failing to find anything remotely interesting, then turned to the sports pages and checked the football news.

A bicycle was approaching. A multi-gear bike, its wheel making the characteristic ticking sound. Eduardo looked up from the paper. The cyclist stopped just across from him, next to the row of tables closest to the square. The man who got off the bike was short and had a rucksack on his back. He sat down at a free table next to Eduardo and nodded when their eyes met. The man was pale, with cropped hair, and there was something familiar about his eyes….

Eduardo smiled at him and went on reading his paper. He found the list of international league tables, scanned it, and frowned at Málaga's lack of progress. He didn't want to have to support Barca or Real; for him it was Málaga or nothing.

A gust of wind swept across the square, catching the top edge of the paper and folding it down, fluttering silently.

At the same moment, he heard the ticking sound of the bicycle. Eduardo looked up at the cyclist who left on his bike and disappeared. Eduardo turned his attention to the paper again.

Then an image forced its way into Eduardo's consciousness, an image of the cyclist. An image telling him that something wasn't right, that something was missing. His gaze moved to the table where the man had just been sitting. What had he seen? Had the man looked smaller when he left? Was something missing? Had he forgotten something? A jacket? No, something else. He leaned over. The rucksack was there under the chair. But it seemed alive somehow. As if Eduardo could see something that wasn't visible, some sort of life inside it that would soon make the rucksack move.

The speed of
a feeling is perhaps slightly quicker than the speed of light. So Eduardo had time to feel a nanosecond of gratitude. A brief but warm and intense feeling of gratitude that the hand of God had led his two beloved sons away from the hopeless situation that engulfed him in that instant and blew him to pieces.

The heat from the brutal, intense explosion vaporized everything in the vicinity.

Everything that had previously been Eduardo Garcia vanished into infinite nothingness.

The underground train rushed through the tunnel.

The train car was half-full of passengers. Most were busy with their cell phones. A few were talking quietly among themselves. Some were staring into space. A woman a few seats away from Sophie was talking on her phone, conducting a character assassination of a friend in an innocent voice.

Sophie leaned her head against the cold glass.

She wanted to call someone and just talk. About nothing. Just be ordinary. But that was impossible, because she wasn't ordinary.

Sometimes she forced her way back into it. Into being
ordinary
. As if to provide herself with an alibi. Only temporarily, often to dinners where ordinary people got drunk, where ordinary men got too close and sought ordinary or not-so-ordinary attention, affirmation perhaps, possibly just love. She could never figure it out.

And no one questioned her right to be or not to be in that world. All the
ordinary
people treated her with a mixture of distance, consideration, and exaggerated respect. She, Sophie, the widow with a son in a wheelchair; the label had become her defense. And that was how she wanted it, to protect Albert and herself. Isolated, no close ties, nothing but a shell, impersonal in a personable way—anything to stop people from wondering and asking questions.

At Östermalmstorg she got off and walked through the streets around Stureplan for a while, checking she wasn't being followed. Then she hailed a taxi and gave the driver an address in the city center.

As they approached the roundabout at Sergels torg she leaned forward.

“Hang on,” she said. “I've changed my mind. Can you go around the roundabout twice, then head up Sveavägen toward Frescati?”

The driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Sure, lady. No problem.”

Sophie turned around and looked out the rear window. As usual, no one was following her. Sophie faced front again. She was constantly on her guard.

Outside: traffic, people, cars, and an indistinct reflection of herself in the window. Sophie looked away.

The taxi stopped at Kräftriket by some handsome old brick buildings, some of which were attached to the university on the other side of the motorway.

She paid the driver in cash and went into a three-story building that contained a number of small businesses. She walked up the stone steps to the first floor and opened an unfamiliar door, then walked along the corridor lined with empty, unfurnished offices and a small, glass-walled conference room. She noticed that someone had written some mathematical calculations on the whiteboard in black marker.

At the end of the corridor Sophie opened a door and walked in.

“Sorry I'm late.”

Ernst Lundwall didn't answer; he was concentrating on a sheaf of papers. Leszek was sitting alone on a chair farther away.

“Hello, Leszek,” she said.

He didn't answer either. There was nothing impolite about that; it was just that he never said hello.

She sat down at the table in front of a cell phone.

Sophie looked at the men. Ernst, Hector's legal and financial adviser, who had an almost unbelievable grasp of the Guzman organization. He was an awkwardly intelligent person with a pronounced lack of interest in other people.

And Leszek Smialy, Adalberto Guzman's bodyguard for many years. Now at her side as some indeterminate mixture of bodyguard, probation officer, and warden.

She looked around the room. She had never been there before, would never go there again. That was always the way with these meetings, which took place regularly once each week. Always in a new location, the details of which she was informed about a few hours in advance.

The phone on the table in front of her vibrated. She waited a couple of seconds before picking it up and answering.

“Yes?”

“
Who else is in the room?
” Aron's voice.

“Leszek and Ernst.”

“
Is the speaker on?
”

She switched the phone to speaker mode and laid it flat on the table. There was a slight hiss, possibly because the reception was bad up in the mountains of southern Spain, where Aron was calling from.

There was a crackle, then Aron's voice again: “
Hector's brother, Eduardo, was murdered yesterday in Biarritz
.”

The room grew darker.
Hector's brother.
She had never met him…Eduardo, the marine biologist from Biarritz, she knew that much, married to Angela, two sons…

“What happened?” Leszek asked.

“
A bomb in a café
.”

Silence.

“Was it meant for him?” she asked.

“
We assume so
.”

She looked at Ernst and Leszek. Ernst showed no reaction. Leszek, on the other hand, looked grief-stricken, as if all the air had just gone out of him. She was aware that of the three people in the room, he knew Eduardo best. He had sent Hasani to Biarritz on Adalberto's orders to protect Eduardo and his family last year, after Hector had been knocked down at a pedestrian crossing in Stockholm by the Hankes. That had been the starting shot for everything, and led to Hector being admitted to Danderyd Hospital, where Sophie worked, and where they met for the first time.

“And the children? His wife, Angela?” she asked.

“
They're safe. Hasani has moved them
.”

“Who did it?” she asked.

The loudspeaker crackled, then the noise disappeared when Aron's voice came back.

“
The same people who tried to kill us in Istanbul.
”

“Hankes?”

“
Who else?
”

“Why now? Why Eduardo?” Sophie asked.

“
You tell me
…” Aron said thoughtfully. Then his voice became clearer and he said, “
Ernst? Skip everything that isn't urgent right now. What's critical?
”

Ernst adjusted his glasses.

“First, Don Ignacio is putting us under pressure again. He wants to expand, and is being quite aggressive, asking for Hector. He wants to talk to him in person.”

Ignacio Ramirez, or Don Ignacio as he was usually known. A drug baron from Valle del Cauca in Colombia. An old business acquaintance, principally of Adalberto Guzman, Hector's father. The biggest fish they ever dealt with, by far.

“
What have you told him?
”

“The same as usual: that this is what the agreement looks like, for security reasons.”

“
Does he believe you?
”

“No, and I think we've dragged it out as far as we can now.”

“
What else?
” Aron asked.

Ernst picked up a document and began to talk about other business. To start with, the forged-goods industry in which they invested a lot of money in fake groceries, designer labels, and medicine; then people they were trying to extort information from in companies listed on the stock market. About drug smuggling, weapons, about the cold war between their organization and other factions, about securing their assets and ruining other people's. Acquiring market share, getting rich by any means possible. Murder, blackmail. Striking hard and without mercy against anyone who got too close. Never questioning right and wrong. Just racing at full speed until you hit something without a safety belt. At which point you might be forced to consider things more thoughtfully. Something like that.

Sophie switched off and thought about her own concerns.

She missed Hector. She wondered where he was in his coma. Could he think? Dream? If he could, she knew he would be missing her, too. She had felt loved by Hector Guzman. Unconditionally. He had raised her up, awoken something inside her. But she hadn't been able to return his love. He had too many hidden sides. And she didn't feel able to love them all. And now his brother was dead. Hector didn't know about that. His whole family, apart from one sister who lived in Madrid, was gone. Her heart ached for him….

Aron's voice crackled over the feeble loudspeaker.

“
Sophie? Pick up the phone
.”

She woke up from her thoughts and switched off the speaker-phone function.

“Yes?”

“
How are you, Sophie?
” Aron asked.

The question surprised her, it wasn't like Aron.

“I'm OK.”

He was silent for a moment, then said, “
You did well in Istanbul
.”

“Thanks, Aron,” she said.

Then he reverted to his professional self again. “
I
want you to arrange a meeting with Don Ignacio
.”

“What for?”

“
Calm them down.
We need them on our side, but we can't expand, not now. Ask them to be patient. Raise the price if you have to
.
We need time to figure out what's happening to us calmly, so make sure they're calm. It's important that we've got them on our side….”

She wanted to argue, saying that she could not do the things that they asked of her. That she was the wrong person. But it was her lifeline. As long as she filled a function…

“Where shall I meet Ramirez?”

“
You'll have to go to them, ask Ernst to arrange it
.”

He sounded stressed.

“Colombia?” she asked.

“
That's where they live
.”