The Chosen (23 page)

He was shaken by the turn his visit to Stockholm had taken. It had sounded so simple, so uncomplicated. It had seemed like a welcome break from the usual intensity of his work, which mainly
consisted of recruiting new sources and double agents for the Israeli military security service.

Eden had been a failure. The project had taken two years, and had produced nothing. Two years, two attempts. The first had been broken off for the simple reason that Eden had told him she was
pregnant when Efraim first seduced her. He had made sure that she was well and truly hooked before he brought the first attempt to an end. And then, when she was back at work after her maternity
leave, he had reappeared. It had gone well. Very well, in fact. But not well enough.

No one within the organisation had blamed him. Sometimes you succeeded, sometimes you didn’t. Efraim had many assets, and was still regarded as one of their most skilful agents. Eden
Lundell had been a high risk project, they had known that from the start. And they had lost.

Eden most of all.

The film was indescribably boring. Efraim didn’t think he would have liked it even if he had been able to understand what they were saying. When it came to an end at long last, he had to
make a real effort to stop himself running out of the cinema.

It had finally stopped snowing as he set off back to the hotel. The sky was dark and clear, studded with stars. It was a quarter to nine, and the inner city had a pulse that Efraim hadn’t
noticed before. A Friday night phenomenon, no doubt. There were people everywhere, even though it was so cold. In a country where it was apparently impossible to motivate men and women to train to
bear arms, people were clearly happy to freeze to death for a couple of beers.

It would have been easy to dump his Säpo shadows in the crowd, but Efraim let them stay with him. They were between fifteen and twenty metres behind him, all wearing black boots and woolly
hats. If he had been their boss he would have turned around and asked them what the hell they were doing.

The soles of his shoes were too thin to keep out the cold, so he increased his speed and went past the theatre and the attractive little shops along the first section of Strandvägen. By the
time he reached the warmth of the hotel, his cheeks and ears were glowing.

He went up to his room, using the stairs rather than the lift. There were no messages outside his door. Or inside. He opened up his laptop and plugged in the micro-camera that he had installed
above the bathroom door in order to check whether anyone was coming into his room. No one had been there since he left.

He took off his coat and picked up his mobile. He had got rid of the first pay-as-you-go card he had bought when he came to Sweden; he was trying to make himself as invisible as possible.
Traceability equalled vulnerability.

Peder Rydh answered almost immediately. When he realised who was calling, there was a brief silence.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ Efraim said.

‘No, not at all. How can I help?’

You would have needed only half of Efraim’s experience to hear that Peder’s tone of voice had changed since they last spoke. It was strained, almost stressed. Possibly with a hint of
fear and nervous anxiety. A clear indication that he wasn’t comfortable speaking to Efraim.

‘Have you spoken to the police?’ Efraim said.

‘What? No, absolutely not, of course not, why would I do that?’

The words came pouring out. With a certain amount of surprise Efraim realised that he had been given more information than he had expected: Peder had definitely spoken to the police.

About Efraim.

‘Why would you do that,’ Efraim said rhetorically. ‘Perhaps because I asked you to?’

Silence.

Efraim pictured Peder, cursing his own stupidity.

‘Oh right, yes, of course,’ he said, his voice a little steadier. ‘Yes, I have.’

‘In that case, let’s try again. Have you or have you not spoken to the police?’

‘I have spoken to the police.’

‘Okay. What about?’

Efraim wished Peder had been sitting in front of him; that would have made things so much easier, both in terms of frightening him and reading his reactions.

‘About . . . about what you said.’

‘Which was?’

What kind of fucking amateur had they appointed as head of security? Efraim had met children who were better liars than Peder Rydh.

‘The bag. You wanted to know more about the bag. So I asked.’

‘Who did you speak to?’

‘Alex Recht.’

‘Good. And what did you find out?’

‘He didn’t say anything about the paper bag.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘He wouldn’t tell me whether it was of any significance in the investigation; he said it was too early.’

‘But the police came and collected the bag, didn’t they?’

Peder hesitated.

‘They did, yes.’

‘So Alex Recht wouldn’t tell you anything about the paper bag; did he say anything else that might be of interest to me?’

A longer hesitation this time.

‘Only what’s already in the news.’

Efraim frowned. He hadn’t checked the news since he got back from the cinema, and to be honest it was a fairly pointless exercise; he didn’t have a decent translation program to
work with.

‘For obvious reasons I find it difficult to follow the Swedish news,’ he said. ‘What exactly are you referring to?’

‘This business about the gun.’

Efraim froze.

‘The gun?’

There was a rushing noise inside his head, and his pulse rate had increased to an alarming level.

‘The boys were shot with the same gun as the teacher,’ Peder said.

Impossible.

Impossible, impossible, impossible.

He forced himself to answer Peder.

‘Oh yes, I knew about that.’

Then he ended the conversation with a promise to call Peder again over the weekend.

He stood there with his mobile in his hand. This was worse than he had thought. If the children had been shot with the same gun as the teacher, then that ought to mean that they had been killed
by the same perpetrator.

But they hadn’t.

Because Efraim Kiel knew who had shot the boys, and that person had had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of the teacher.

T
he snow is falling heavily, desperate to bury all evil beneath its blanket of white. The inspector leaves the apartment with the woman who has lost the love of her life and one of her
children.

‘I was never meant to have it all,’ she says when they are standing on the pavement.

He has no idea what to say. He knows nothing about her past and her personal life apart from what he has heard from others.

He does know that her story contains elements of darkness that she does not wish to share with anyone else. Soon she will have to be interviewed about what has happened, fill in the gaps
for the investigators. Because somewhere in Stockholm, there is a killer on the loose.

‘I thought we’d got him,’ the inspector says eventually.

The snow chills his face, and he feels like crying out there in the street.

Because he doesn’t understand what went wrong.

When she doesn’t respond, he says:

‘I can’t make any sense of this. When you feel up to telling us what you know . . .’

He breaks off as she turns her back on him and walks away.

‘Hang on a minute!’

He hurries to catch up with her, places a hand on her shoulder and almost slips in the snow.

‘Let go of me.’

Her voice is calm, but there is no misunderstanding the steel in her tone. He has the feeling that if he doesn’t let go, he will die.

‘Listen to me,’ he says.

Begs.

Pleads.

Because in a world where all is chaos, only pleading remains.

‘You must realise that I can’t simply let you walk away.’

He glances back at his colleagues, waiting by the door. Like him, they are in shock at what they have seen and experienced. If necessary, he will not hesitate to ask for their help.

Because the woman who has lost almost everything cannot be left alone.

The risk that she will declare war on her opponent is too great. She will not rest until she has her revenge.

‘Who has done this?’ the inspector says, his voice betraying a higher level of frustration than he would wish. ‘Who was it?’

‘Me,’ she says, beginning to weep. ‘I did this.’

S
o many loose ends, so many roads that led nowhere. Alex Recht couldn’t settle. Not at night, not during the day.

‘Are you going in to work?’ Diana had said when he slipped out of bed and started to get dressed.

Alex had always worn pyjamas during his marriage to Lena; with Diana he slept naked, except when the grandchildren stayed over. Then he dug out an old pair of ugly PJs, as his son put
it.

‘I’ve got a few things to sort out,’ Alex had replied.

Diana had looked disappointed. She had thought they could take their cross-country skis and drive up to Nacka, which wasn’t a bad idea. The weather had once again changed from foul to
fantastic; the sun was shining with every scrap of its winter strength, and the snow looked like stiffly whipped meringue.

But Alex couldn’t bring himself to take the day off and go skiing, because in that same stiffly whipped meringue they had found two murdered children just days earlier. So work had to come
first, particularly as Fredrika Bergman was flying out to Israel the very next day. Alex had to get in touch with his Israeli colleagues and set up a collaborative process that Fredrika could tap
into.

He had spoken to the National Crime Unit the previous evening; they already had a network of contacts with Israel, and had set the ball rolling. The prosecutor liked the direction the investigation was taking. He had great confidence in what
he referred to as ‘the Israeli lead’, and thought Fredrika would solve the whole thing in just a couple of days. Alex was rather more doubtful. The case had started
to look like a jigsaw, with far too many of those involved claiming too great a share of the pieces available.

For example, Abraham and Simon’s parents were withholding information that Alex needed, which was why Fredrika was going all the way to Israel. But Alex had no intention of giving in
so easily. He called Gideon and Carmen Eisenberg and asked them to stay at home for the next few hours.

‘I’m coming over; I need answers to one or two additional questions.’

‘Have you made a breakthrough in the case?’ Gideon wanted to know.

His voice was strained and weary; it belonged to a man going through hell, and Alex’s call had clearly ignited a spark of hope.

‘We’ll talk about that when I see you,’ Alex said.

He wasn’t prepared to have that kind of conversation over the phone. When he had finished speaking to Gideon Eisenberg, he called Fredrika.

‘I’m going to show the parents the pictures of the boys when we found them,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘We have to find out the significance of those paper bags over their heads.’

‘Are you going to tell them about the bag that was sent to the school as well?’

‘No. They might hear about it anyway, through the Solomon Community, but as far as I’m concerned the most important thing is to see if those damned bags mean something to
the parents.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Fredrika asked.

‘Thanks, but no – there’s no need.’

Then he changed his mind.

‘Actually, yes, if you’ve got time. It might be useful for you to talk to the Eisenbergs before you go off tomorrow.’

He could hear the sound of children’s voices in the background, and felt guilty; why hadn’t he told her to stay at home? However, he needed her – more than ever. The team
must be expanded as soon as possible, with permanent members; they couldn’t carry on like this.

‘No problem,’ Fredrika said. ‘I’ll meet you in the car park.’

Alex threw down his mobile. They had three key questions for the parents: did they know who the Lion was, had their sons met him, and could they explain the background to the paper
bags?

He hoped to come away with at least an embryonic lead.

As far as the Lion was concerned, Alex was surprised they had found so little to go on. The boys’ email accounts and their conversations on Super Troopers had been checked, and it appeared
that Simon and Abraham had never communicated with one another about the Lion, not once. That didn’t mean they hadn’t spoken about him in school or over the phone, of course, but
there was nothing at all in their online messages.

To be on the safe side, he went through the material one more time. The Lion had contacted the boys about three weeks ago. He wanted to meet them to discuss their sporting ambitions and his tennis academy. Grants for short training courses at international schools had also been mentioned.

Surely the boys
’
parents must have known about that?

He went through the latest material, and established that the analysis of the traffic on the boys’ mobiles had also failed to generate anything useful. There wasn’t a single call to
or from an unknown individual. Every person on the list was a friend from school or the tennis centre, a parent, or another relative.

Fuck.

He made a note to pass on a list of Simon and Abraham’s school friends to the technicians who were analysing the telephone traffic; it was worth checking whether the Lion had contacted
anyone else. Maybe they could track his communication, if that was possible. Now that he was no longer active on the forum, perhaps that information was no longer available.

The phone on his desk rang just as he was about to go down to the car park. It was a colleague from the National Crime Unit.

‘I thought you’d be in today, somehow.’

‘Hard to avoid it under the circumstances,’ Alex said, thinking briefly of Diana. He pictured her gliding along on her skis, and wished he was by her side. With a bit of luck the
snow would linger, and they would be able to go another day.