‘Yep,’ Annika said.
‘Hello, you’ve reached Thomas Samuelsson at the …’
She clicked to end the call, trying to work out what she felt. The main question was who he was sleeping with that night. She no longer felt any anger at the thought, just resignation.
That summer, when the family had returned to Sweden, Thomas had got a job as fact-finding secretary at the Agency for Guidance in Migration Issues. It wasn’t a particularly glamorous appointment and he had been pretty grumpy about it. He’d been expecting something better after his years in Washington. Maybe he’d consoled himself with the thought of all the conferences he’d be able to go to.
Annika thrust the thought aside and called the public prosecutors’ office that had responsibility for crimes committed in the area covered by Nacka Council – they answered calls round the clock.
But the operator was unable to help her find out which prosecutor was in charge of the investigation into a murder that had taken place in a car park in Fisksätra in August. ‘I can only go by what I’ve got on the screen,’ the woman said apologetically. ‘I’d have to transfer you to the office, but they close at three p.m.’
Oh, well, it had been worth a try.
She called the prosecutors’ offices in the Northern and Western Districts as well, but they couldn’t tell her who was in charge of the investigations into the murders at the beach in Arninge or the residential street in Hässelby. (But, in marked contrast, everyone always knew who was responsible for the sexy investigations, like security vans held up by a helicopter, or sports stars taking drugs.)
‘And now Frontex have started chartering planes,’ Berit said. ‘They gather up immigrants with no official papers from all over Europe and dump them in Lagos or Ulan Bator. Sweden’s got rid of people like that several times.’
‘I think I’m going to pack it in for the day,’ Annika said.
She closed down her laptop, folding it away with practised movements and putting it into her bag, then pulled her jacket on and headed towards the door.
‘Hey, Bengtzon!’ came a cry from the caretakers’ desk, as she was on her way out through the revolving doors.
Shit, she thought. The car keys.
She followed the door round and emerged back in the entrance hall with a strained smile. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said, putting the keys to TKG 297 on the reception desk.
But the caretaker, who was new, just took the keys without shouting at her or asking if she’d filled the car up again or made a note in the logbook (she hadn’t done either).
‘Schyman’s looking for you,’ the new caretaker said. ‘He’s in the Frog conference room. He wants you to go and see him at once.’
Annika stopped mid-stride. ‘What for?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Even worse working hours?’ he suggested.
Maybe there was hope for the caretakers after all.
She set off for the conference room. Why on earth was it called ‘Frog’?
The editor-in-chief opened the door for her. ‘Hello, Annika, come in and sit down.’
‘Are you relocating me?’ she asked.
Three serious-looking men in dark overcoats stood up as she walked through the door. They had spread out around the small birch-wood table. The reflection of a halogen spotlight off the whiteboard on the far wall dazzled her. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked, raising a hand to shield her eyes.
‘We’ve met before,’ the man closest to her said, holding out his right hand.
It was Jimmy Halenius, Thomas’s boss, under-secretary of state at the Department of Justice. She shook it, unable to think of anything to say.
‘Hans-Erik Svensson and Hans Wilkinsson,’ he said, gesturing towards the other two men. They didn’t move.
She felt her back stiffen with wariness.
‘Annika,’ Anders Schyman said, ‘sit down.’
Fear appeared out of nowhere and dug its claws into her with a force that left her breathless. ‘What?’ she managed to say, and remained standing. ‘Is it something to do with Thomas? What’s happened to him?’
Jimmy Halenius took a step closer to her. ‘As far as we know, Thomas isn’t in any danger,’ he said, looking her in the eye.
His eyes were quite blue. She remembered being struck by the intensity of the colour before. I wonder if he wears contact lenses, she thought.
‘You know that Thomas is attending the Frontex conference in Nairobi about increased co-operation concerning European borders?’ the under-secretary of state said.
Our new Iron Curtain, Annika thought. Land of the free, and all that.
‘Thomas attended the first four days of the conference at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre. Yesterday morning he left the conference to act as Swedish delegate on a reconnaissance trip to Liboi, close to the Somali border.’
For some reason an image of the snow-covered body behind the nursery school in Axelsberg came into her mind. ‘Is he dead?’
The dark-clad men behind Halenius exchanged a glance.
‘There’s nothing to suggest that he is,’ Jimmy Halenius went on, pulling out a chair and waving her into it. She sank down and noted the look that passed between the two men called Hans.
‘Who are they?’ she asked, gesturing at them.
‘Annika,’ Halenius said, ‘I want you to listen carefully to what I’m going to say.’
She looked around the room: no windows, just a whiteboard, an antiquated overhead projector in one corner and some sort of ventilation shaft in the ceiling. The walls were pale green, a shade that had been popular in the 1990s. Lime green.
‘The delegation consisted of representatives from seven EU member states who were going to find out more about border security between Kenya and Somalia, then report back to the conference. The problem is that the delegation has disappeared.’
Her heartbeat was pounding in her ears. The brown boot with its pointed heel was sticking straight up to the sky.
‘They were travelling in two vehicles, both Toyota Land Cruiser 100s, and there’s been no word of either vehicles or delegates since yesterday afternoon …’ The under-secretary of state fell silent.
Annika stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘What does “disappeared” mean?’
He started to speak but she interrupted him. ‘How … I mean, what does “there’s been no word” mean?’ She stood up. The chair toppled over behind her.
Jimmy Halenius got to his feet too. His blue eyes were crackling. ‘The tracking equipment from one of the vehicles has been found just outside Liboi,’ he said, ‘with the delegation’s interpreter and one of the guards. They were both dead.’
The room lurched and she grabbed the table for support. ‘This can’t be true,’ she said.
‘We haven’t had any information to suggest that anyone else in the group has been injured.’
‘It must be a mistake,’ she said. ‘Maybe they took the wrong turning. Are you sure they haven’t just got lost?’
‘It’s been over twenty-four hours now. We can dismiss the idea that they got lost.’
‘How did they die? The guard and the interpreter?’
Halenius studied her for a few seconds. ‘They were shot in the head at close range.’
She grabbed her bag, threw it on to the table and hunted through it for her mobiles, but couldn’t find one. She turned the bag out on the table. An orange rolled off and landed beneath the overhead projector. She picked up her private mobile with trembling fingers and dialled Thomas’s number, but pressed the wrong button and had to start again. The call went through, with a good deal of crackling and hissing, buzzing and clicking:
‘Hello, you’ve reached …’
She dropped the phone on to the floor, where it landed next to her gloves and a notebook. Jimmy Halenius bent down and picked it up.
‘It isn’t true,’ she said, unsure if she’d spoken aloud. The under-secretary of state said something but she couldn’t make any sense of it: his lips were moving and he took hold of one of her arms. She pushed his hand away. They had met a few times but he knew nothing about her; he had no idea about the state of her relationship with Thomas.
Anders Schyman leaned forward and said something as well; his eyelids looked swollen.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said, slightly too loudly, because everyone was staring at her. She gathered all her things back into her bag, apart from the notebook, which she really didn’t need – it was just her notes from the idiotic job at Ikea – then headed towards the door, the way out, escape.
‘Annika …’ Jimmy Halenius said, trying to stand in her way.
She slapped him across the face. ‘This is your fault,’ she said.
And then she left the Frog conference room.
The truck was lurching along slowly. There were no roads where we were going. The wheels bounced over lumps of rock and caught in holes. Plants scraped the chassis, branches brushed the truck’s covered sides, the engine roared and the gears shrieked. My tongue was swollen, and stuck to the roof of my mouth. We hadn’t had anything to drink since that morning. Hunger had subsided to a rumbling ache, and dizziness had taken over. I hoped that the others’ sense of smell had stopped working at the same time as mine – or, at least, that Catherine’s had.
Sébastien Magurie, the Frenchman, had finally shut up. His nasal whining had made me wish they’d get rid of him as well. (No, no – what am I saying? I didn’t mean that. Definitely not. But I’d found him hard to deal with before this had happened. But enough about that.)
On the other hand, I admired the Spaniard, Alvaro. He had kept his cool throughout, and hadn’t said anything unless he was spoken to. He was lying at the back of the truck, where the shaking and bouncing were worst, but hadn’t uttered a word of complaint.
To begin with I tried to keep track of which direction they were taking us. The sun was at its zenith when we were stopped, possibly slightly to the west, and at the start we were driven south (I think, which was good, because it meant we were still in Kenya, and Kenya is a functioning state, with maps and infrastructure and mobile phones), but after a few hours I think we turned east (which was nowhere near as good: it meant we were somewhere in southern Somalia, part of the country that had been in a state of total collapse and anarchy for the past twenty years since civil war had broken out). But today I was pretty sure we were heading north, then west, which ought to mean that we were back more or less where we had started. I realized this wasn’t very likely, but I had no way of knowing.
The first thing they did was remove our watches and mobile phones, but it had now been dark for a while, which meant it was something like thirty hours since we’d been abducted. Someone must have sounded the alarm. After all, we were an official delegation, so help should be on the way.
I worked out that it must be about six o’clock in the evening in Stockholm – Kenya is two hours ahead of Sweden. Annika must have been told by now, and was probably at home with the children.
Catherine was lying against me. She had stopped sobbing, and her cheek was pressed against my chest. I knew she wasn’t asleep. My hands were tied behind my back – they’d been numb for several hours. The men had used those narrow strips of plastic with a ridged underside that could be tightened but never undone – cable ties, I think they’re called. They cut into your skin. How important was blood circulation to your hands and feet? How long could you manage without it? Were we going to be left with lasting damage?
Then the truck hit a particularly vicious hole and my head collided with Catherine’s. The truck stopped at a severe angle and I found myself pressed up against the German clerk’s generous frame, as Catherine slipped down towards my lap. I could feel a bump growing on my forehead. Doors opened, and the angle of the vehicle’s lean intensfied. The men were yelling – it sounded as if they were arguing. After a while (five minutes? A quarter of an hour?) they fell silent.
The temperature was dropping.
Catherine started to cry again.
‘Can anyone reach anything sharp?’ Alvaro said quietly, from the back of the truck.
Of course. The cable ties.
‘This is totally unacceptable,’ the Frenchman, Magurie, said.
‘Feel around you for a protruding part of the truck,’ the Spaniard said.
I tried to feel along the floor of the truck with my fingers, but Catherine was lying on top of me, the German was pressed up against me, and my fingers had lost their agility. A moment later we heard a diesel engine approaching.
It stopped next to the truck and some men got out. I heard a clatter of metal and angry voices. The canvas roof of the truck was pulled open.
* * *
Anders Schyman was sitting in his glass box looking out over the newsroom. He preferred to think of the open-plan office as the newsroom, even if, these days, it also contained Marketing, sales analysts and the IT department.
It had been a thin day for news. No major disturbances in the Arab world, no earthquakes, no politicians or reality-TV stars making fools of themselves. They could hardly lead again tomorrow with the chaos caused by the weather. Yesterday they had warned of chaos, today they had reported on the chaos, and Anders Schyman knew his readers (or, rather, he trusted the sales analysts). They’d have to lead with something other than the snowstorm, and for the time being they were considering an emergency solution. Patrik, still annoyed that his story about Ikea’s collapsing roof hadn’t worked, had found something on an American website about a woman with something called ‘alien hand syndrome’. After an operation, the two halves of sixty-year-old Harriet’s brain had refused to co-operate, each side refusing to allow the other to dominate. One consequence was that some of her limbs no longer obeyed orders from her brain. Among other things, poor Harriet was regularly attacked by her right hand, as if it were controlled by some extra-terrestrial force (hence the name of the condition). It could hit or scratch her, give her money away or undress her, and she was unable to stop it.
Anders Schyman sighed. Here he sat, aware of a global exclusive, while his staff out in the newsroom were putting together a front page about alien hand syndrome.
He had certainly considered ignoring the Justice Ministry’s plea for secrecy and publishing the story about the missing EU delegation anyway, but a residual measure of inherited ethics from his time at Sweden’s national broadcaster had stopped him. And, to a certain extent, consideration of Annika. The blogosphere’s conspiracy theories about how the media protected their own were wildly exaggerated, and the reverse was usually the case (everyone had an unhealthy obsession with their peers and consequently went overboard on what other journalists said and did), but he could still have a modicum of common human decency. And, besides, the story was hardly going to run away from them. So far, only those most closely concerned had been informed of events, and there were no journalists among them – he had been given assurances about that.