Farewell to Freedom (17 page)

Then he realized he was sending mixed signals, so he started again and said clearly that everything should take place without their being detected.

“And when you leave the airport, Toft and Stig will come back here and focus on the wiretap, and Rick and Jørgensen will stay on the two Albanians so we know where they go. Then everyone come back here. We have to find out what they're up to before we can plan our next move.”

Louise and Lars were parked at opposite ends of the underground parking lot when Arian and his passenger drove their Audi down to P6 under Terminal 3.

They walked over to the elevator slowly, but there was a crowd of people with suitcases waiting to go up, so Louise pulled her partner over to the stairs instead. Up in the arrivals hall, they quickly spotted Toft and Stig, one of them with a newspaper, the other with a cup of coffee, expectantly eying the passengers as they emerged through customs. Louise nodded quickly at the elevator and walked over to the arrivals screen, where she confirmed that the flight from Prague had just landed, five minutes ahead of schedule.

The two Albanians emerged from the elevator at that moment. They quickly checked on the arrival status and went to stand by the opening where the passengers came out.

“Do we guess the short-haired one is Hamdi? He matches the description Pavlína gave and there is certainly no doubt that the driver is identical to the owner of the car,” Louise told her partner, who nodded without taking his eyes off Arian with his should-length, slicked-back hair and glasses.

After waiting ten minutes with only a trickle of people clearing customs, a large group of travelers pulling suitcases appeared. Hamdi held up a white sign, but Louise couldn't see what it said from where she was standing. Stig walked right in front of her then, heading for a trash can to throw away his empty coffee cup.

Louise watched him.

“Ilana,” he said on his way back past them as he returned from the trashcan.

None of the new arrivals reacted to the sign, nor any from the next group, who came streaming out of customs and spread out in all directions. Louise walked over to the arrivals screen and saw that the baggage had already been assigned to a carousel. Which meant that the passengers could be out at any point. When she turned around to walk back over to her partner, she stopped and suddenly took a step to the left to avoid a column.

Over along the opposite wall she had caught a glimpse of bangs that had been cut just over the eyebrows. It was Pavlína, and Milo
Å¡
Vituk was next to her. Both of them had their eyes trained on the two Albanians, who were steadily watching the stream of emerging travelers.

Louise walked back over to Lars and nodded in their direction.

“Did you see when they arrived?”

He shook his head. “But they obviously aren't particularly eager to be seen,” he remarked, returning his focus once again to the arriving passengers.

Louise agreed with him and followed along with curiosity when Pavlína suddenly took a few steps forward toward a young woman with long blonde hair who was carrying a big bag over her shoulder. The woman was almost all the way to the door out to where the cabs were before Pavlína and Miloš made their presence known. After the two women greeted each other, Miloš gallantly offered to carry her bag and they quickly walked toward the entrance to the train station underneath the arrivals hall.

“So who was that?” Lars asked after the three of them disappeared down the stairs to platforms 3 and 4.

“Maybe her sister,” Louise suggested, shrugging her shoulders, and then adding that of course it could also have been a friend coming to visit.

The two Albanians apparently hadn't noticed the other reunion, and were still standing there scanning the stream of people coming out of customs. The little luggage icon wasn't flashing on the screen anymore, which meant that all the baggage had been unloaded.

After ten minutes they saw Arian take out his cell, and a moment later he stepped back from the crowd and spoke, gesticulating vigorously with his free arm. He walked over to the window that looked out over the luggage return carousels and scanned the area, but then came back and said something to Hamdi. It wasn't hard to tell from their body language that they were impatient and that something hadn't gone according to plan. They were pacing back and forth in front of the exit from customs.

Twenty minutes later Arian made another call.

“I'm going to go over to the police service desk,” Louise suggested. “From there I can call Documentation and find out if there were any problems with the flight arriving from Prague. You hold the fort here, okay?”

Louise walked over to the office that was in the corridor between arrivals and departures. She had a hard time imagining that the Documentation Group with the Danish National Police would be interested in an arrival from the Czech Republic, since anyone traveling between European Union member states that were covered by the Schengen Agreement could just walk right through without showing a passport—but obviously security might have flagged the flight, in which case passengers would have to show their passports. Maybe they had detained Ilana for something like that.

Louise greeted a young officer and showed her police badge before asking if he could get in touch with a person from Documentation and whoever was currently in charge of Concourse C, where the flight had landed, to see if the flight had had any security flags.

“Ask him if they detained anyone, and ask him to check and see if there was a passenger with the first name ‘Ilana' on the flight manifest for Sterling NB564 from Prague.”

Louise waited patiently while he checked. Documentation didn't have anything. It took a little longer to access the flight manifest, but when the officer on duty called him back five minutes later, he was able to report that an Ilana Procházková was on the manifest but that she had never checked in.

Louise thanked him for his help. It wasn't hard to see that the young officer was curious, but he refrained from asking what was wrong when she didn't volunteer anything.

“Let's see what happens,” Lars said when Louise returned. “I'm sure they'll give up at some point and drive back into town. At least now we've put faces to the names,” he said, trying to look at the bright side of a trip that hadn't turned up anything useful.

Louise nodded and glanced over at the men, wondering which had done the knife-work in Kødbyen. Since Arian owned the car and apparently also did the driving, she guessed it was Hamdi who had jumped out of the back seat.

The two Albanians gave up an hour later and drove back to Copenhagen, and the whole way back in from Kastrup Airport, Louise and Lars took turns with their two colleagues tailing the dark Audi.

“Remember to maintain eye contact if he looks at you,” Lars warned when they pulled right up next to the car at a stop light in Amager at one point.

Louise nodded. She knew looking away was an easy way to tip people off. They made room for Toft and Stig as they passed Hotel Scandinavia and agreed that their colleagues would turn off at police HQ while they followed the Audi for the rest of the trip.

They continued along Tietgensgade behind Central Station, and with the sun glaring on the windshield they drove down past the conference center.

There was a lot of traffic. It was a quarter after five, and the cars were inching along over Halmtorvet. If they lost the Audi, they could fall back on the electronic chip Toft had mounted underneath it, but they wanted to be able to follow them in person to see where they went after they parked.

With two cars between, they continued down past Kødbyen. Traffic was much less heavy here, and when they turned up Saxogade, Louise started to relax.

“They're going to the club,” she said and started looking for a parking spot. They'd had the Albanian club under surveillance since Pavlína told them about it, but they hadn't seen any sign of Arian or Hamdi going there. The Audi parked two buildings farther up the street.

“Let me out,” Louise said quickly. “I'll stay here while you find a parking spot.”

She hopped out of the car just outside the club and busied herself rooting around in her bag while she watched the two Albanians approach her.

They were talking and didn't look her way. All the same, she pulled back against the wall of the building and turned her face away. Arian sounded angry, as if it were Hamdi's fault the girl hadn't shown up. They took the four steps down into the basement club in two bounds and disappeared through the door.

In the brief instant the door was open, Louise saw that there was a fair number of people inside. She smelled smoke and heard conversations. She waited for Lars, who'd found a spot not too far away.

They stepped into a doorway with a good view of the entrance to the basement club. But they realized the view must be just as good from inside the club, so every time the door opened they were sure to back farther into the shadow of the doorway.

“They've made us,” Louise confirmed after she noticed a head pop up over the side of the stairwell to look in their direction. “Let's move over to the other side of the street.”

Three older men deep in conversation walked down the sidewalk and went down the stairs into the club side by side.

“I wonder what they do down there?” Louise said, considering the basement windows covered with faded yellowish curtains.

“Play cards, talk, smoke,” Lars said, and Louise smiled.

“Sounds like just the place for you,” Louise said.

Lars nodded.

“Doesn't sound so bad to me. Nice to have a place to hang out,” he said. “A woman-free zone with a bar and gambling.”

“They're playing for money?”

Her partner started laughing.

“What, did you think they were playing Go Fish? I'm betting they sometimes play for quite a bit, but they're clever enough to use all kinds of codes so there'll never be money in the clubs if the police stop by.”

He shook his head.

“But that's true of all clubs, not just the Albanian one,” he hastened to add. “It's like that in most of the expat clubs we've raided.”

“Damn,” Louise exclaimed. “And here I thought they were drinking sweet tea and chatting about old friends and memories. In reality, it's organized gambling with a bar.”

Two hours had elapsed without any sign of Arian or Hamdi. It was a little past six, and they agreed to return to HQ, where Willumsen was still waiting for them.

They found him in his office, collecting all the information that was still coming in about Kaj Antonsen's murder. A large team from the downtown precinct was questioning the residents of the buildings surrounding the courtyard, and the first reports from the crime-scene techs had just come. He stood up and cleared the meeting table while Louise went to get Toft and his partner.

“There's no doubt that those two were up to something that didn't work out for them,” Toft stated. “We traced the calls made from Arian's cell phone while we were at the airport, and they all went to a foreign number, which we weren't able to identify, but the country code was the Czech Republic. So I think we can assume that he was trying to get hold of the Czech contact who was supposed to see the girl off.”