The Other Son (28 page)

Hector Guzman opened his eyes.

His pupils shrank from huge to pinpricks. He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. Then he was seized by some sort of horror and began to kick at the bed he was lying in. His movements were weak and impotent, aimed at something that didn't exist, something that was still suffusing his drowsy consciousness. There was panic in his movements; everything happened very fast and he fell helplessly out of bed, landing on the floor. He lay there, breathing hoarsely and unevenly.

He didn't know where he was, and he was scared.

Hector Guzman had been born again.

The sports bag on the coffee table in front of her was black and unassuming, but Antonia looked at it as if it were something sacred, as if it contained all the answers in the world. And perhaps it did.

She leaned forward and undid the bag's zipper. She peered in and took out the contents and put them on the table with trembling hands.

A plastic folder, full to bursting; a thick, heavy official folder; and a black notebook.

Antonia looked down into the bag again and ran her hand over the bottom to make sure she hadn't missed anything. There, tucked into one of the corners, was something small and plastic. She took it out.

A USB memory stick.

She looked at her coffee table. Where to start?

She might as well start with the little black notebook. She opened it. Feminine handwriting, all written in pencil, tiny writing, the pages completely covered. A lot of reasoning and theories about things that Antonia couldn't make sense of. Human behavior, theories about what might happen. It was all too unclear, too complicated. Neither could she get any clear picture of who had written it. She closed it. The lined folder. Masculine writing, sloppy. A lot of text, again, even less comprehensible than the notebook. Antonia opened the official folder. Information about Hector Guzman and his business dealings, including a route for smuggling cocaine between Paraguay and Rotterdam. About direct connections to other syndicates, his background, going back a long way. This was almost unparalleled evidence. Antonia went back to the black notebook and read more carefully. It was Gunilla Strandberg's notebook. Antonia read it alongside the folder. An image began to form. It was hazy, but it was enough to suggest that Gunilla Strandberg had been embezzling money from the cases she had worked on.

Antonia leafed through the pad. Lars Vinge's. Notes, confused ideas. She reached the last page.

Diagonally across an empty page of the pad Lars Vinge had hastily scrawled:
Tommy Jansson.

Her mind was racing. What the hell?

The contents of the plastic folder spilled out. All sorts of documents: computer printouts, handwritten notes, printed photographs…a lot of photographs. She recognized the faces: Gunilla Strandberg, her brother Erik, Anders Ask, the police officers who were investigating Trasten before the shootout. A few photographs of Hector Guzman and Aron Geisler. And toward the bottom of the pile, masses of photographs of the same woman. Of perhaps the last person Antonia had expected to see. She held up one of the pictures in front of her. The woman was standing in a kitchen window. It was a close-up, taken with a telephoto lens. There was no doubt at all.

It was the nurse, Sophie Brinkmann.

A ceiling fan was whirring soundlessly above them.

Hector looked at the woman by his side who was carefully swabbing the inside of his elbow where she had just given him an injection. Her name was Raimunda; she spoke to him in Spanish, acted as if she knew him, lit up like the sun when she spoke, even laughed.

Hector tried to come to grips with the situation. He couldn't speak; he'd tried, but couldn't make a sound.

He could barely keep his eyes open, let alone lift his arms or legs. Everything felt heavy, mentally as well as physically.

He had feeling. And he could see, even if his vision was poor at a distance of more than a few meters, and he couldn't really focus. It was as if his sense of balance had been knocked out and he was drifting on waves.

The woman had checked his condition when she helped him up from the floor and back into bed. She asked yes-or-no questions about his name, family, and friends to gauge his memory and general state. Hector replied with nods or shakes of his head. His hair was long, he could see it from the corners of his eyes.

The low voices and footsteps. Aron appeared in the doorway.

“Raimunda,” he said, “leave us for a while.”

Aron sat down on a chair beside Hector.

“
Aron
,” Hector mouthed.

“Hector,” Aron said.

Hector swallowed and tried to say something.

Aron handed Hector a pad and a pen. Hector couldn't take them; his muscles weren't there, nor the signals from his brain.

Aron helped him, laid the pad on the bed and put the pen between Hector's fingers and squeezed, then he sat down, aware that his old boss would rather do it himself.

Hector tried to lift his arm, and Aron jumped up to help him again, making sure the point of the pen was resting on the paper.

Hector sat like that, motionless, incapable even of scribbling a few letters on a piece of paper. Aron was at the point of getting up again but Hector shook his head, radiating fury, fury at the loss of his dignity. He concentrated and managed to draw a line on the paper.

Aron waited patiently, knew better than to interrupt Hector, knew Hector had to do this.

Minutes passed, and eventually he managed to write a word on the page:
what.

No question mark, just the word
what
.

The question that encompassed everything.

“We're in the villa in Villefranche,” Aron began. “The woman you just met is Raimunda, she was a member of the emergency group of doctors and nurses that your father established some years ago.”

Hector's eyes were glued to Aron's.

“Do you remember Stockholm, the Trasten restaurant?”

Hector thought. Aron continued:

“You had a meeting with Alfonse Ramirez….Sophie and Jens came. Three Russians were after Jens. They came shortly after…”

Hector nodded a yes.

“Do you remember escaping from Trasten to Spain with Sophie on board your dad's plane?”

Hector gathered his memories. Aron went on.

“And you and Sophie were attacked on the motorway between Málaga and Marbella?”

“
Sophie
,” Hector mouthed.

“Later,” Aron said. “At the same time, the Hankes attacked your father's house in Marbella. You got Sophie there, then you lost consciousness. The doctors there helped you. Our security arrangements kicked in and we moved you to the house in the mountains, where Raimunda became your nurse.”

Aron stopped, scratched the back of his head hard, then met Hector's gaze again.

“Adalberto didn't make it. Your father's dead, Hector.”

There was the sound of quick footsteps on the stairs, children bouncing down to the hallway barefoot, then running straight into the room where Hector and Aron were sitting. Two boys in pajamas. The smaller one looked terrified when he saw Hector awake, and grabbed the bigger boy's hand.

Hector squinted, unable to understand what was going on, then Angela came into the room. Then he realized, even though he hadn't seen her or the boys for many years.

“Get Fabien and Andres out of here,” Aron said.

Angela put her hands on their shoulders. But Fabien shook it off.

“Are you awake now?” he asked, wide-eyed.

Hector nodded.

“You've been asleep for a very long time,” the boy said.

Angela pulled the boys away.

“Come on, Uncle Hector needs to rest.”

She turned toward Hector, looked blankly at her brother-in-law, then left the room.

Hector wanted to say something, but Aron got up and closed the door to the room.

“
Eduardo?
” Hector mouthed.

“You've just woken up from a coma, Hector,” Aron said.

Hector waited for more.

“Five months,” Aron said without elaboration.

Hector looked down. He searched inside himself, looked up, was about to try to express something, but stopped as more questions seemed to occur to him.

“
Eduardo
,” he mouthed again.

“He was murdered in Biarritz a few weeks ago.”

That was too much. Hector stopped. But there was no sign of grief. His eyes searched for Aron's.

“The Hankes, we think,” Aron said. “They found Eduardo….Shortly after that, Daphne and Thierry were murdered in their shop.”

Hector listened.

“Ernst disappeared at the same time. I'm assuming they've got him.”

Aron was aware that another piece of bad news could have disastrous consequences. So he chose the only good news he had for his boss.

“Carlos,” he said.

Hector's eyes got bigger.

“He's been tucked away with the Hankes, he fled to them after Trasten, after he'd told them your whereabouts in Málaga, after he betrayed you.

“We found him, mainly thanks to Sonya. She saw it as her duty. She tracked him down and picked him up and took him to the house in the mountains. He saw you, and had to face up to what he did.”

Aron stopped. Hector's eyes narrowed.

“Now?” Aron said. “Now Carlos is in hell, where he belongs.”

It looked like Hector was smiling slightly, a few brief seconds of genuine happiness.

The room was silent and still. Aron would have liked to stop there, but that was impossible.

“Sophie…” he said cautiously. “I brought her in, when I wasn't sure how you wanted things. She's been working with me and Leszek, helping us…but…Carlos…Carlos said he'd seen her with the Hankes in Munich, they had some sort of meeting. Ralph Hanke, Sophie, and Roland Gentz.”

Hector was listening intently.

“Carlos didn't hear everything, but he claimed she wanted to offer them what we've got, and give them parts of our organization. As soon as I heard that I pulled Leszek and Hasani out of Stockholm and brought them here, along with Angela and the boys. That was when Ernst disappeared, so she must have given him to them.”

Hector began to write again, it took a long time.

Damage?
Aron read.

“The authorities have frozen all your accounts and confiscated all your legal companies, seeing as there's an international warrant out for your arrest. And the Hankes are busy helping themselves to the rest now, with Ernst's help. They're taking over all our operations and making them their own. Right now we can't do anything but watch as it happens.”

Hector pointed again to the word he'd written.

“Total,” Aron concluded.

Hector tried to absorb the information, but Aron wasn't finished.

“There's one more thing. The Hankes may have managed to track down another one of us.”

Aron leaned closer.

“Lothar,” he whispered.

Hector shook his head, as if that was an impossibility.

“Carlos said that the Hankes had found a boy they'd been looking for. I called and reported a break-in at their address. The police said the apartment was empty, no one there, no break-in. Franka isn't answering my calls. I've sent another man to Berlin, he's been looking but hasn't found anything. They're gone.”

Hector tried to think.

“Who knows about Lothar, apart from you, me, and his mother?” Aron went on.

Hector looked up at the ceiling, following the counterclockwise motion of the fan. He turned his head toward Aron, and there was a sad look on his face as he mouthed: “
Sophie.
”