Bubble: A Thriller (13 page)

He went on looking at her for a few seconds, as his eyes slowly narrowed and his mouth grew thinner.

“There was something else in the box, wasn’t there? Apart from the passports and that photograph . . .”

She didn’t move a muscle, but he slowly nodded as if she had nonetheless somehow confirmed his suspicion.

“You found something else, something much more troubling . . .”

Her hand was still trembling in her lap, and she could feel her heart beating faster. She made a determined effort not to show the slightest sign that might give her away.

Uncle Tage went on staring at her, but this time she didn’t look away. Instead she lowered her chin slightly and maintained eye contact.

Five seconds.

Ten . . .

“Okay,” he eventually sighed, holding up his hands. “There’s another part of the story. Something I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you . . . We worked together on a special . . . project, I suppose you would call it,” he went on. “Something rather controversial, which meant that we had to be extremely careful. That’s why we didn’t use our own staff but brought in freelancers like your father. People without any official connection to the project, but who were still unwaveringly loyal . . .”

“And who you could afford to lose if anything went wrong . . . ?”

“That sounds rather cynical . . .”

“But it’s true, isn’t it?”

He shrugged.

“Your father was well aware of the rules of the game. He knew how it worked. Anyway, this project was given high priority for a number of years, and we had access to almost unlimited resources. Then suddenly everything changed, political support was withdrawn and the budget was cut drastically. But we carried on with our work nonetheless, just more discreetly. Everyone involved in the project was convinced of its importance for national security. And we also had a degree of support from some of our former sponsors, which enabled us to carry on well into the eighties. But eventually one of our most faithful friends abandoned us, someone who had previously been our biggest supporter. Our little unit was shut down for good, the offices closed, and the remaining staff reallocated elsewhere. In conjunction with this I left the service altogether. Since then I have worked for the private sector . . .”

“And Dad, what happened to him?”

“Your father was never formally employed, there was no contract, and thus no obligations . . .”

He shook his head.

“It wasn’t right, considering how faithfully he had served our cause. . . . Of course there were others like him, people who also ended up out in the cold without so much as a word of thanks. But I’m afraid Erland was the one who took it hardest. That was the second time he had been expelled, cast out of somewhere he felt he belonged . . .”

He paused to drink the rest of his mineral water.

“When was this? What year?”

“The late eighties, you’d have been, what, eleven or twelve years old then . . . ?”

She took a deep breath and then slowly let it out. Her right hand had finally calmed down enough for her to dare to put it back on the table.

“Do you remember much from that time, Rebecca?”

“Well, er . . .” she said, her voice catching, and she cleared her throat. “Not much, really.”

But that wasn’t entirely true. She remembered some things well. Far too well.

♦  ♦  ♦

He didn’t wake up until it was almost evening, which wasn’t actually that odd. It had been four o’clock by the time he went to bed.

He had been sitting against that fucking wall listening, trying to pick up the slightest detail of the conversations that seemed to be going on in there. Hour after hour of indistinct muttering, with only random words audible.

By now his notepad was full of things he thought he had heard, but they left him none the wiser.

The words
gluten
,
labyrinth,
and
carer
had recurred several times but, just like with all the other words, it was impossible
to piece them together into anything resembling a coherent context.

He dragged himself up into a sitting position, scratched his beard, then under his arms and his balls. Then he pulled one of the longer butts out of the ashtray on the bedside table and fumbled for his lighter. This whole situation was on the verge of slipping out of his hands. He had no plan, no defense at all, the cops were breathing down his neck, and, to top it all off, he was under constant surveillance.

He hadn’t spoken to Becca for several weeks, months even, which was actually no bad thing. If he stayed away from her, then she ought to be safe. The only problem was that he felt so damn lonely!

He’d tried to get hold of Mange, but the fucking little fag wasn’t answering his phone and the computer shop had been boarded up since winter when his little work experience guys got locked up. Okay, so he could have gone out to Farsta and knocked on the door of Mange’s flat, but that felt like far too ambitious a project. Anyway, besides the fact that he really didn’t feel like leaving the flat, he had no desire at all to bump into Mange’s lawfully wretched other half, Betul the Bitch . . .

He found an old box of matches in one of the kitchen drawers and, with some difficulty, managed to light the cigarette butt.

But even the cigarette wasn’t enough to improve his mood.

He ought to be starving, it had been hours since his last microwaved gourmet feast. But he had no appetite at all.

Just as he slumped onto the sofa his phone began to ring in the bedroom. He briefly considered not bothering to answer it.

But whoever was calling seemed keen to get hold of him, because it went on ringing.

He guessed it was Becca and suddenly felt his mood brighten. He thought he might abandon his principles and answer this time, just a short conversation so he could hear her voice. That would hardly do too much damage.

He struggled laboriously up from the sofa and stumbled back into the bedroom. He’d got about halfway when he realized what was wrong. The ringtone was right, but the problem was that he’d switched his Nokia off once the cops had let go of him. He’d taken the battery out and put the phone in one of the kitchen drawers.

So it wasn’t
that
phone that was ringing.

He sped up and lurched around the door frame into the bedroom.

The phone was still ringing, but the tone seemed to change and suddenly sounded louder, sharper. Like a razor blade against his eardrums. It took him a couple of seconds to identify where the sound was coming from. The pile of newspapers on the bedside table, beside the ashtray he’d just searched for butts. He tipped the whole lot onto the bedroom floor. He saw the silvery phone slide across the parquet floor, halfway under the bed. For a moment his heart seemed to have stopped.

The phone had been dead, switched off—he was absolutely certain of that!

He had even tried to bring it back to life the other night, just to make sure. Why the hell hadn’t he simply destroyed it, smashed it with a hammer and thrown the pieces in the bin?

The screen was flashing and the vibrations were making the phone move, almost as if it were a living creature hiding under his bed.

HP felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The phone had almost spun around one hundred and eighty degrees, and he couldn’t take his eyes off it.

Obviously he shouldn’t answer, there were at least a thousand logical reasons why not.

Wrong!
Ten thousand!

But, even so, he still sank to his knees and reached slowly under the bed. He was trying in vain to stop his hand from trembling. His fingers brushed against it, slowly closing around the rectangular metal object . . .

“Hello?” he croaked.

There was silence on the line, and for a few moments he thought the person at the other end had hung up.

Then he heard music, in the distance, and he pressed the phone hard against his ear to try to work out what it was. Organ music, like in a church.

It took him a few more seconds to work out what he was listening to.

The wedding march.

SHE STILL DIDN’T
know what to think. The whole of Uncle Tage’s story obviously sounded completely unbelievable, and if it had come from anyone else she immediately would have dismissed it as utter rubbish.

But right now his story was the only explanation she had. And in a lot of ways it fit very well. It explained both the photograph and the fake passports, and also cast a certain light over other things, not least the bitterness that seemed to have consumed her dad from within, turning him into a different person, a person who was increasingly difficult to like. And she really had tried. Doing all she could to please him, searching for the smallest sign of approval. Longing for it . . .

But there were still far too many gaps in the story. According to Uncle Tage, Dad had been dismissed sometime in the mideighties. But as far as she knew he had gone on working, still going off on his business trips for almost another ten years before he finally came home from Spain in a coffin.

She hadn’t asked Uncle Tage about that, hadn’t raised any of the details surrounding Dad’s death. Nor, in spite of his
prompting, had she said anything about the revolver in the safe-deposit box.

But the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that he already knew about it. And that it was actually the gun he was most anxious to get hold of.

That was also why she wanted to wait before asking any more questions, at least until she’d had time to check out his story. Put a bit more meat on the bones.

But, if she was honest, her reluctance was probably just as much to do with the fact that she was worried about the answers.

Or that her brain was already full of other, considerably more pressing matters. Like the weird circumstances of Henke’s arrest and Mark Black’s impending visit, now only four days away.

And she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that van that had been following them. She had just found the response from the Highways Agency in her pigeonhole. The van was a rental vehicle registered to a new company set up out in the western suburbs. Groundstone Ltd., a standard name allocated whenever the person registering a new business hadn’t supplied a company name. The address was a post office box, just like thousands of other businesses. All together, the information in the letter didn’t really help either to dismiss or reinforce her suspicions.

But at least the van hadn’t shown up anymore, which was obviously something of a relief.

There was something else that was starting to worry her more and more, though: the way her hands kept shaking, particularly the right one. Since she had almost lost hold of the bottle of water in the café, the shakes had returned a couple of more times. It was probably due to lack of sleep, as her doctor
had suggested. Or it could be a temporary side effect of her new pills.

It’ll take a few weeks for your body to get used to them, Rebecca, you’ll just have to be patient . . .

She hadn’t said anything to Micke, or anyone else for that matter. The dose she had been given was mild, but antidepressants were hardly something she wanted to boast about.

She walked along the corridor toward her office, passing Micke’s door on the way.

It was closed, but she could see his back through the small glass window.

As he did most mornings, he had got up early and had got to work while she was still in bed.

They spent far too little time together, she was all too aware of that, but this time it wasn’t her fault alone. She’d taken the job at Sentry partly in an attempt to make things up to him after her affair with Tobbe Lundh. So that they would see more of each other.

It had been a good idea in theory . . .

To be honest, she would probably rather they had had a fight about it, with his calling her terrible things, all of which she would have deserved. Slamming doors and not speaking to her for weeks, until she begged and pleaded for forgiveness.

And maybe not even then . . .

But obviously his behavior had been far more mature.

She had made a mistake, and he had forgiven her. End of story.

Much more sensible than throwing a load of accusations at her and slamming doors. But also kind of unnatural . . .

She shut the door of her office behind her and started up her computer.

While it was booting up she found herself glancing at the desk drawer.

A couple of minutes could hardly hurt. Besides, it looked like her computer was updating . . .

She opened the drawer and carefully took out the photograph. Then she switched on the desk lamp, adjusted the beam, and took the magnifying glass she had just bought out of her handbag.

The resolution of the picture wasn’t great, and the almost fifty years that had passed since it was taken hadn’t done anything to improve things.

But the man in the middle of the front row, who, unlike the others, was only smiling slightly rather than showing his teeth, certainly looked very much like her dad.

She examined him carefully through the magnifying glass. The same pointed nose as hers, the same prominent cheekbones and dark eyes. But it was impossible to be absolutely certain. The beret the man was wearing was pulled down low over his forehead, making the proportions of his face look rather squashed. And it also hid his hair, making him even harder to identify.

She moved on to the other men grouped around the armored car.

Sixty-nine of them in total, all somewhere in their twenties, dressed in light khaki uniforms and berets. One of the men in the back row also looked rather familiar.

His face was shadowed by the men in front of him, which made it even harder to make out any details. But it could very well be Uncle Tage . . .

Her computer bleeped and she put the magnifying glass down and typed in her username and password.

Then she opened the search engine and typed in a few search terms.

Weapon smuggling, UN, Cyprus.