Bad Blood

30

The rain had not ceased. Some of Stockholm’s streets had been closed off due to flooding. A few historic buildings had been destroyed and had to be evacuated. It was worse in some suburbs. Entire neighborhoods were under water. The storm had taken out electricity and phone service in parts of Sweden. Now they were approaching a state of disaster.

Police headquarters, however, was still intact. But “Supreme Central Command” had reclaimed its quotation marks. They flapped like scoffing vampires through the room.

“I should have aimed for his head,” said Gunnar Nyberg. “I could have put a single shot in his head. Fuck, that was dumb.”

“You couldn’t have known that the guards were wearing bulletproof vests,” said Hultin, “or that he had taken one of them.”

“I should have stopped them from going in.”

“There’s a lot we should have done,” Hultin said somberly from his lectern. “And above all, there’s a lot we shouldn’t have done.”

Nyberg looked like hell. In addition to his nose cone and the cast on his hand, he now had a large bandage on the back of his neck. Of course, Gunnar Nyberg shouldn’t have been there; he should have been on sick leave, sleeping off his double concussion. But no one could get him to leave.

Hultin’s owl glasses were in place, but other than that he was hardly himself. His neutrality had been all but blown away. Age seemed to have caught up with him. He looked smaller than usual; the era of this Father of His People was at an end. Perhaps he would be able to pull himself together before he retired.

He spoke with a slow, thick, almost old-man’s voice. “Both Gunnar and the guards escaped without permanent injuries. Jennings used Gunnar’s police ID to get out of the building-it was found a few hours later in a garbage can at Arlanda. It was a little signal for us. A ‘thanks for the help,’ I suppose.”

He paused and paged slowly through his papers, then continued. “What we saw was the effects of at least three identical high-precision automatic weapons with exceedingly effective ammunition. We can assume that they followed us by helicopter to Visby, came to the harbor, and took up suitable positions in the city heights. It may have been a productive collaboration between the CIA and Saddam; we’ll never know. Nor will we ever know what the three deserting army officers had to reveal about the Gulf War.

“Above all, we have to forget this case. The corpses have been taken care of. As you know, we had to use Säpo-they’ll take the case from here.

“Nothing has reached the media, but even if we wanted to talk to the press, what would we say? The case will appear unsolvable; people will keep buying weapons and hiring security firms. And maybe they’re right to do so. And you all know what Fawzi Ulaywi said when we released him-I’ll never forget it: ‘Fucking murderers!’ He was right, of course. And now his identity has probably been revealed. Maybe he’ll go underground and avoid being assassinated, maybe not. He, Herman Bengtsson, and the Lindbergers were the Swedish branch of Orpheus Life Line. Now there’s nothing left of that branch.”

He fell silent. He appeared old and tired. They had solved the case, in all its aspects, but now he was going to be hung out to dry, like a failed Olof Palme-murder detective. The demands for his resignation could become loud. And they would be justified-but for completely different reasons.

“Is there anything else?” he said.

“Justine Lindberger’s bank account was emptied a few hours after her death,” said Arto Söderstedt. “We can only hope that the emptier was Orpheus Life Line, saving what was left of their capital. Otherwise it went toward Wayne Jennings’s salary. The Lindbergers’ large apartment will go to their already-rich family; Orpheus will lose its Swedish headquarters and central office, in addition to four of its most loyal members. And everything else.”

Söderstedt looked up at the ceiling. He, too, seemed very tired.

“I treated her like shit,” he said quietly, “and she turned out to be a hero.”

“Lagavulin was empty,” said Chavez, looking small and insignificant. “It contained no control devices for nuclear warheads. And LinkCoop is an ordinary, computer-oriented import-export company, totally legitimate. The CEO, Henrik Nilsson, was very sorry that its excellent chief of security Robert Mayer had disappeared. He took the opportunity to report it to the police.”

“Benny Lundberg died this morning,” said Kerstin Holm. “His father turned off the respirator. He’s been arrested-he’s one floor down.”

Gunnar Nyberg suddenly got up and bolted from the room. They watched him go. They hoped he wasn’t planning to go down and kill the unfortunate Lasse Lundberg.

Hjelm had nothing to say. He was thinking about the concept of “pain beyond words.”

“We know that Lamar Jennings shadowed his father for more than a week,” Hultin continued. “It can’t have been too hard for him to find Robert Mayer-he’s in the phone book. Lamar copied the key to the warehouse the day after he arrived in Sweden. He must have followed Wayne Jennings to LinkCoop; maybe Wayne had already committed a murder; maybe there are hordes of dead people we’ll never discover. Anyway, something caused Lamar to copy the key-and something enabled him to glean the information that his father would show up on that fateful night with Erik Lindberger in tow. We don’t know how-or why-Lindberger followed Jennings to Frihamnen after their meeting at Riche, and we don’t know why they met there. Maybe Lindberger thought it was about Orpheus; the members do remain secret, after all. In general, there’s a lot we don’t know.”

Hultin paused, then continued in a more intense tone. “The Cold War is over. What has replaced it almost feels worse, because we don’t understand what it is. The world is shrinking, and above all, we seem to be shrinking. We did fantastic police work-I suppose that can be of comfort among all the grief, but it’s not enough. We made political and psychological misjudgments that show that we’re not really up to par with the rest of the world. Violent crime of an international character is slipping through our fingers. This blind violence is a mirror of the goal-oriented crime. Lamar Jennings was a funhouse-mirror version of his father. ‘Bad blood always comes back around,’ as they say.”

Paul Hjelm laughed, filled with scorn for himself. He hadn’t even got the saying right. Wayne Jennings had corrected him. “It’s ‘what goes around comes around,’ ” he said, drying his tears.

They only seemed like tears of laughter.

The others looked at him for a moment. They understood how he felt, and at the same time they understood how impossible it was to ever understand even the tiniest thing about another person.

“Do any of you have anything to add?” said Hultin.

“Well, at least the United States has one less serial killer,” Kerstin Holm said, smiling bitterly. “He was serial-killed by another serial killer. Once again Wayne Jennings shows us he’s the good guy.”

“It’s the result that counts,” said Hjelm. None of his words were his own any longer. Nothing was his own. Everything had been occupied. He was a little model train going around in a circle.

“Well then.” Jan-Olov Hultin rose to his feet. “I have to go take a piss. We can only hope that God stops all of this soon.”

They didn’t really want to disperse. It was as though they needed to be close to one another. But at last they were dismissed out into the world, as alone as they had come into it and as alone as they would leave it.

Hjelm and Holm were last to go. Paul stopped Kerstin just inside the door.

“I have something of yours.” He dug in his wallet, found the photo of the old pastor, and handed it to her. When she looked at him, he couldn’t tell what she was thinking-sorrow, pain, and a strength that pushed through the darkness.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Wipe it off,” he said. “He has Wayne Jennings’s fingerprints on his nose.”

“Yalm & Halm.” She smiled. “In another world we could have been a real comedy duo.”

He bent forward and kissed her on the forehead.

“We are in this one,” he said.