The Chosen (39 page)

An eternity passed before Gali wiped her eyes and answered the question, her voice no more than a faint whisper.

‘Because he was afraid that the Paper Boy would take them.’

O
ne of the earliest flights from London took off at seven o’clock in the morning, and Eden Lundell was on board. The night had been an endless torment of sleepless anxiety. The story Fred
Banks had told her had triggered a chain of thought she was incapable of stopping. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the Palestinian boy who had died in the explosion on the West Bank. Half
dozing, half awake she pictured him running towards the house where he thought he would be safe. Yanking open the door and standing on the trigger mechanism for the bomb that someone had
concealed in the entrance to keep enemies away.

But why had no one told the boy he must never, ever use that door?

The whole thing was insane, and Eden couldn’t get her head around it.

And now two more boys had died. Ten years later and in a different part of the world.

The fate of the Palestinian boy was the key to the mystery into which the police investigation had developed, she was sure of it.

She left her hotel at five thirty in the morning and travelled out to Heathrow. She was hoping that Fred would have more to tell her, that he would call.

And he did.

The plane had barely touched down at Arlanda when Eden switched on her phone. Fred called as the plane taxied in.

‘Can we meet?’ he said.

‘No, I’ve just landed in Stockholm.’

‘We need to talk. I have more information for you.’

She closed her eyes. Thought for a moment.

A plane wasn’t the best place to conduct a top secret conversation, but she had no choice. She tried to remember what the missing child was called.

Polly Eisenberg.

Time was running out for her.

It was for Polly, and for those who had already died, that they had to bend the rules.

‘It will have to be now,’ she said.

‘I’ve checked the minutes from meetings on the joint operation with Mossad. On one occasion a couple of representatives from Efraim Kiel’s special team were there; I have
their names here.’

Eden had spent her waking hours during the night trying to piece together the puzzle.

The boy who died in the explosion was important.

So was the secret source who led them to the suspected terrorist.

The source known as the Paper Boy.

Even before Fred told her the names of the other team members, she knew what he was going to say.

‘Saul Goldmann and Gideon Eisenberg. I’ve read one or two articles online; they’re the fathers of the boys who were murdered, aren’t they?’

‘They are,’ Eden said.

The plane had arrived at its gate and the passengers were beginning to disembark. Eden stayed where she was in her window seat.

This was nothing but pure revenge.

An eye for an eye.

The most classic principle of all, which never seemed to go out of fashion.

‘We have to find out the name of the boy who died on the West Bank,’ she said. ‘Otherwise we’ll never find the murderer.’

‘I know,’ Fred said. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t help you there. His name isn’t in any of the records, nor any explanation as to why he was in that house in the
first place.’

‘Could he have been the suspect’s son?’

‘More than likely. But he died in the explosion.’

‘Who else was in the house?’

‘It doesn’t say; it just says that three bodies were found inside, the boy and two adult males. As far as MI5 were concerned the matter was resolved, however tragic the outcome.
We have no information about how Mossad chose to follow up what had occurred.’

Eden worked through what she had heard.

Efraim Kiel had led a team recruiting sources in the Palestinian enclave of the West Bank. Saul Goldmann and Gideon Eisenberg had been part of that team. After the disaster of the
boy’s death, both Saul and Gideon had immediately left the country and moved to Sweden. That was back in 2002. And now, ten years later, when their own sons had reached the same age as that
Palestinian boy, at a guess, someone was taking revenge.

It was hardly surprising that the Goldmanns and Eisenbergs weren’t co-operating, according to Alex. They were keeping quiet because they weren’t allowed to talk about what had happened. An episode that still haunted them, a decade later.

The question was what she should do now. Because officially the information she had been given did not exist.

‘They must realise what’s going on,’ Fred said.

‘Of course.’

‘I imagine the most likely scenario is that they’ll get in touch with their parent organisation in Israel and ask for help.’

Eden didn’t think that was going to happen. By leaving Israel, Saul and Gideon had turned their backs on their former employer. There had to be a concrete reason why those two, but not
Efraim who had also been there, had felt compelled to move.

It was painful to think of Efraim’s name.

You fucking lunatic, you
’
re not mixed up in all this, are you?

She didn’t believe he was. Not as a killer, anyway.

Nor did she think that he just happened to be in Stockholm when everything kicked off. Could Mossad have sent him to keep a watchful eye on his former colleagues? Could they have had some
kind of warning about what was going to happen?

If so, then Efraim had failed spectacularly.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Fred asked.

The anxiety in his voice gave him away.

There would be devastating consequences for his career if it emerged that he had passed on classified information, particularly as he had given it to a woman who had once been accused of
working as a double agent.

Eden had never been good at gratitude or being in someone’s debt, but she would never forget this.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

Honest and gentle.

‘Don’t burn me,’ he said.

‘Not for anything in the world.’

She was the last to get off the plane. She called GD and told him she was on her way in. She tried to assemble far too many fragments to form a whole. If the motive was revenge, then who was the
avenger?

The Paper Boy, she thought. Is that what this is all about?

A little while later, in a cab on the way from the airport, she realised that there were only three people who could answer that question:

Saul, Gideon and Efraim.

If they even knew.

Because something was missing from this story. She felt strongly that it was all related to the boy who had died in the house, but could there be alternative scenarios? She didn’t know how
many men had made up Efraim’s team; were there more men and women who had been punished by having their children murdered? Could there be more victims in Israel? If so, the Israelis should
have made the connection by this stage, and got in touch with the Swedish police.

Eden shifted impatiently in the back of the cab.

It was through the victims that the perpetrators were found. If her basic theory was correct, if Simon and Abraham had been murdered in revenge for what had happened in that Palestinian village,
then none of those involved were safe. Unless they were childless. Could Efraim have a family, and if so, where were they? Eden had no idea what kind of life he led. Perhaps he had already had a family back in the day, when he and she first met.

Bastard.

It wasn’t until the cab was driving through the city streets that she realised what she had ignored. Consciously or unconsciously.

Because of course Efraim Kiel had children.

At least two of them.

Eden’s daughters.

I
t was vital to act quickly. First of all Alex Recht drove over to Samson Security AB’s office on Torsgatan and rang the bell. He banged on the door and eventually tried the
neighbours. No one knew where the woman who usually occupied the office might be, but one man said he had seen her only the previous evening.

Alex called Mona Samson twice from the pavement outside, then drove back to Police HQ, contacted the prosecutor and asked for a warrant to search the premises of Samson Security AB.

‘Why?’ the prosecutor wanted to know.

‘Because I’m wondering if Mona Samson might have fallen victim to our killer, and I want to make sure she’s not lying there dead.’

The thought had struck him as he stood there hammering on the door.

So far he had assumed that the woman he was looking for was somehow involved in what had happened; the indentations on the roof indicated that a woman had played a part in the murders, and
Mona Samson was the only woman who had emerged as a suspect. But what was to say that she couldn’t also be a victim? In this tangle of loose ends where nothing was what it appeared to be,
wasn’t it possible that Mona Samson had somehow been drawn in and exploited?

Standing in her office a little while later, he didn’t know what to think.

The place was spartan, bordering on desolate. Or perhaps the company hadn’t been there very long. Two desks, a bookcase, a computer, a few books and brochures. And a mattress on the
floor. That was all. Cold and sparse. Alex stood in the middle of the room, the snow that had landed on his coat melting and dripping onto the floor.

‘Empty,’ said a colleague who had come with him. A technician was there too. In films the cops always had a skeleton key in their back pocket; in reality, it was the police
technician who opened doors.

They had no mandate to remove anything, so they had to leave the computer where it was. As for the next step . . . Alex gazed around despondently.

‘Let’s put the building under surveillance,’ he said. ‘See if she comes back. It looks as if she sleeps here sometimes.’

His colleague glanced up.

‘But we don’t know what she looks like.’

‘In that case we’ll put someone on the door asking everyone who goes in to show their ID,’ Alex said. ‘We have to find her.’

Fifteen minutes later he was back at Police HQ, sitting at his desk reading the latest surveillance update on Saul Goldmann’s activities. He was travelling only between home and work.
Sometimes Daphne was with him, sometimes he was alone. There was a photograph of the couple standing on the pavement outside their home; they had their arms around each other, and it looked as if Daphne was weeping on her husband’s shoulder.

Alex swallowed hard and put down the picture.

There was a certain kind of grief against which there was no defence. Daphne’s crumpled face expressed that particular sorrow, and it was painful to see.

He forced himself to look again, knowing that he had seen something important.

Saul’s face.

Barren and closed.

Not distorted with anguish like his wife’s. Alex knew he was on thin ice, that he couldn’t or shouldn’t draw conclusions from a single snapshot, a brief moment. But it actually
looked as if Saul wasn’t grieving at all. He seemed annoyed, if anything.

Alex went down to the technicians’ department and managed to get hold of Lasse, who had helped them with the Super Troopers forum.

‘Saul Goldmann’s mobile,’ he said. ‘Have we got a location for the occasions when we want to know where he was?’

‘In other words when the teacher was shot, when the boys disappeared, and on the morning when they died?’

‘Yes.’

‘No. We haven’t asked the phone company for that information.’

‘In that case I’ll fill in a request and sign it right now,’ Alex said. ‘And I want a list of calls for the relevant days.’

He was about to leave when Lasse said:

‘However, I’ve just got a GPS on Mona Samson’s phone. The guy who called her to confirm Goldmann’s alibi asked me to do it last night. He was probably worried in case you
thought he hadn’t done a good enough job.’

Too right.

‘What did you find out?’ he said, desperate to know.

Lasse waved him over, wanting him to look at the computer screen.

‘At two o’clock on the afternoon when the boys went missing, she received a call. We can see that she was definitely in Kungsholmen then, but look where she was when the phone
rang at three.’

Alex peered at the screen.

The mobile had been up by the bridge, Djurgårdsbron. In Östermalm.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

‘The teacher was shot just after three, wasn’t she?’

‘She was.’

‘But at that time Mona Samson, or her phone at least, was by Djurgårdsbron.’

‘She could have been separated from her phone,’ Alex suggested. ‘It might have been in her car, for example. Do we know if she actually has a car?’

‘I checked, but I couldn’t find one. Of course she could have hired one that day, or borrowed one from a friend.’

‘True,’ Alex said. ‘But given the location of the phone, I think we can assume that she definitely wasn’t in Kungsholmen with Saul Goldmann. Where did she go after
that? When did the next call come in?’

‘Hang on,’ Lasse said. ‘Look at this. So she had a call at two o’clock, which she didn’t answer. I don’t know who that was from. But guess who called her at
three o’clock?’

‘I haven’t time to play guessing games – just tell me.’

‘Saul Goldmann. But she didn’t answer then either.’

Alex let out a whistle.

‘Bloody hell,’ he whispered.

Lasse smiled with satisfaction.

‘The next activity is half an hour later, at three thirty. She called Goldmann, and they talked for just over two minutes.’

Alex stared at the map where Mona Samson’s trail ended. At Djurgårdsbron. Which wasn’t far from the building on Nybrogatan, where someone had lain on their stomach on the roof
and shot a teacher in the back. He thought about what the CSIs had said: that the person on the roof had been no more than one metre seventy tall.

And then he thought about the theory that the boys had been picked up by someone they knew. Perhaps Efraim Kiel, if he was the one who had sought them out online. Even if they hadn’t met
before, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the boys might have been curious and gone with him if he referred to their exchange of emails. But it could also be much simpler than that; it
could have been Saul Goldmann who had picked them up.