The Other Son (24 page)

Christian Hanke found his father and Roland Gentz in one of the estate's big reception rooms. They were sitting talking in front of a blazing fire, and they turned toward him when he came into the room.

“We're not supposed to be together,” Ralph said.

“Never mind that now,” Christian replied.

“What's happened?” Gentz wondered.

“One of our men has been found beaten to death in one of our safe houses.”

“Where? Who?”

“I don't know, it doesn't matter. But it does mean that we're going to have to rearrange things.”

Everything stopped for a brief moment.

“Are they here?” Ralph asked.

“We can't be sure. But that, together with Carlos's kidnapping…”

“What are you thinking?” Roland interrupted.

“Move one of the boys.”

“Where to?”

“Colombia. To Don Ignacio, we'd be safe there.”

“ ‘We'?”

“I'm going too,” Christian said. “You two should consider your own security as well.”

“Take Lothar,” Ralph Hanke said. “Hector's son is more important, leave the other one, the Swedish boy, behind.”

“I was thinking the opposite,” Christian said.

Albert woke up to find strong arms lifting him from the mattress, putting him in his wheelchair, and pushing him out of the room.

He had time to register a corridor, doors leading to other rooms, a guard's room with a window.

It was night, pitch-black, when he emerged from the building. Albert tried to look around, to get some idea of where he was.

He was quickly lifted into a blacked-out minibus parked there with its sliding door open. He was placed on a seat, then the man who had so abruptly pulled him from sleep disappeared and the door closed electronically and perfectly, without a sound.

There was total silence in there. Albert was alone in the minibus, fighting the suspicion that he was all alone now. No dad, no brothers and sisters…no mom.

The driver's door opened and the silhouette of a man got in behind the wheel. Then the sliding door opened again and two other men got in. Albert recognized one of them.

“Ernst!” Albert was relieved, unbelievably relieved. But Ernst avoided his gaze, and sat down two rows in front of him, behind the driver.

“You and Ernst are not to talk to each other,” the other man said. He had sat down in the same row as Albert, one seat away.

“My name is Christian.”

The sliding door closed and the vehicle pulled away into the darkness.

“Ernst, is my mom alive?”

Ernst didn't move, he just sat there staring ahead of him.

“Ernst!”

“Stop talking. And no Swedish,” Christian said.

“Ernst, you fucking idiot, answer me!”

“I don't know,” Ernst said with a sigh.

“What are you talking about?” Christian asked in English.

“None of your fucking business,” Albert replied in Swedish.

“Ernst, what are you talking about?” Christian asked.

“The boy wants to know if his mother's alive,” Ernst replied in English.

Christian composed himself, then looked at Albert.

“Your mother's alive. Put your seat belt on.”

“Where is she?” Albert retorted.

Christian leaned over, pulled the seat belt across Albert, and clicked it into place.

“I don't know.”

“Of course you do.”

“No, I don't.”

“Does Ernst know?”

“No, Albert, Ernst doesn't know either.”

Albert leaned his head against the window. He ran a hand through his hair. Tears sprang to his eyes.

His body was telling him it was the oysters he had eaten the previous day.

Tommy Jansson clung to the toilet seat and his vomit was torrential.

He had fallen asleep on the basement floor last night, hammered on gin. But it wasn't the gin that had made him sick, he was sure of that. He understood what happened when he drank. It was the oysters, or some sort of stomach bug.

His phone rang in the pocket of his robe. It was Ann Margret.

“
Miller's and Ingmarsson's search histories and computer records are in your inbox now.
”

“Thanks, Ann Margret,” he managed to say politely.

Tommy pulled the cord of the light in the basement and the solitary little bulb came to life. He went over to the desk and switched the computer on, then checked his e-mail. Ann Margret had sent Antonia Miller's and Miles Ingmarsson's Internet histories as attachments. He printed them out and started to skim through Antonia's online activity, both internal and external. It was a long list, the searches varying from work-related to private. She had bought books and clothes on the Internet. She had read
Dagens Industri
and
Svenska Dagbladet
online. She seemed to be the sort of person who typed impulsive questions straight into search engines. Blood types? How is tarmac made? House clearances in Stockholm? How many people have been to the moon? Who was the second president of the USA? Procedure for opening a safe-deposit box? Best slalom skis? Easy pasta recipes? Sex toys from the drug store? Stephen King bibliography?

A lot of questions. Tommy skimmed the list for names. Lars Vinge appeared several times. He saw other names he didn't recognize. Why Vinge? And why now?

He switched to Miles Ingmarsson's records. Much thinner. There were searches for old sailing ships, men's clothing from Jermyn Street in London, recipes. What things cost. Names, names, and more names, as well as other nondescript searches for safe-deposit boxes, a restaurant's business hours. More names, more sailing ships, tobacco, old books.

Tommy felt like a drink. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and there it was—happiness, transparent and reliable. A big bottle of gin from a shop on the German border. He took the bottle out and drank a few cautious mouthfuls, enough to turn the grayish tone of the world into something reminiscent of the way things used to be, a bit like when he was a child.

Tommy carried on reading. Fucking sailing boats the whole time. A swig of gin. Another sequence of names: Roger Lindgren. Herbie Hancock, the Blue Note Years…

An alarm went off somewhere in the back of Tommy's head. He looked back and checked the previous name he'd just read,
Roger Lindgren.

He leafed through Antonia's list, running through it with his finger. Yep, there it was: Roger Lindgren.

Tommy found a pen and circled the name on both lists. Who the hell was Roger Lindgren? He checked on his computer but couldn't find anything interesting.

He put the lists down side by side. Then he compared everything carefully and thoroughly. It took time, it took gin, and it took a lot of effort. When he was finished there were three common denominators between Miles Ingmarsson's and Antonia Miller's search histories.

Roger Lindgren.

Lars Vinge.

Safe-deposit boxes.

Fucking hell.

Tommy called every informant on the police payroll that he could think of.

“Roger Lindgren?”

“
No idea.
”

Four calls to four crooks before he got an answer.

“
There's a gyppo from Trångsund of that name. He's a real asshole, if I remember correctly, cooks meth, hits women.
”

“Where does he live?”

“
Where he lives? How the fuck should I know?
”

“Can you find out?”

“
I'll get back to you when I've got something.
”

Twenty minutes later the phone rang.

“
Roger Lindgren's fucking a divorcée who works in the Cultural sector; she lives in Vasastan.
”

“Whereabouts in Vasastan?”

“
Hagagatan…
”

Sophie was lying on her stomach, her binoculars aimed at a farm four or five hundred meters below her. Jens was lying beside her, taking photographs through a telephoto lens.

She could see movement. Several men outside the building. It was big. Old—150 years, perhaps—long and wide. Recently restored without looking modern, half-timbered. Some distance away was a brick stable block, and beyond that some white-fenced paddocks and a few horses.

“Can you see anything?” Jens asked.

She looked.

“Well, there's a few men moving around outside the building.”

“Are they armed?”

“I can't tell.”

Jens put the camera down, marked their position on a map spread out next to him, noted the distance to the farm, glanced up at the sun behind him and then back at the farm again, and made a note of the time and the position of the sun.

His cell phone buzzed and he passed it to Sophie, then went on writing.

“Nothing at the other farms, according to Mikhail,” she said.

“In which case he has to be here,” Jens said. “Come on, let's head back.”

“We're staying,” she said.

He stood up, shaking his head.

“No. We're going back to the hotel. You can't do anything here, not now.”

Sophie looked down at the farmhouse, where Albert might be. So close…

He held out his hand to Sophie. She took it reluctantly, and he helped her to her feet. They walked away, toward the car.

Sophie turned around several times. The idea that she was leaving her son, letting him down, weighed heavy on her. She'd lost count of the number of times she had felt like that.