'That's us done for this evening.'
The loudspeakers were positioned just below the huge floodlights. The president had survived this evening, once again. Wilson stretched, listened. The birds had returned. A strange place. It was the third time he had visited the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, or the FLETC, as it was called. It was as far south in the state of Georgia as it was possible to go; a military base owned by the American state, a training ground for American police organizations-the DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals, Border Patrol, and the people who had just saved the nation once more: the Secret Service. He was sure of it as he studied the floodlit asphalt: it was their vehicle, their people and they often practiced here at this time of day.
He carried on walking along the fence, which was the boundary to another reality. It was easy to breathe-he'd always liked the weather here, so much lighter, so much warmer than the run-up to a Stockholm summer, which never came.
It looked like any other hotel. He walked through the lobby toward the expensive, tired restaurant, but then changed his mind and carried on over to the elevators. He made his way up to the eleventh floor which for some days or weeks or months was the shared home of all course participants.
His room was too warm and stuffy. He opened the window that looked out over the vast practice ground, peered into the blinding light for a while, then turned on the TV and flicked through the channels that were all showing the same program. It would stay on until he went to bed, the only thing that made a hotel room feel alive.
He was restless.
The tension in his body spread from his stomach to his legs to his feet, forcing him up off the bed. He stretched and walked over to the desk and the five mobile phones that lay there neatly in a row on the shiny surface, only centimeters apart. Five identical handsets between the lamp with the slightly overlarge lampshade and the dark leather blotting pad.
He lifted them up one by one and read the display screen. The first four: no calls, no messages.
The fifth-he saw it before he even picked it up.
Eight missed calls.
All from the same number.
That was how he'd set it up. Only calls from one number to this phone. And only calls to one number from this phone.
Two unregistered, pay-as-you-go cards that only phoned each other, should anyone decide to investigate, should anyone find their phones. No names, just two phones that received and made calls to and from two unknown users, somewhere, who couldn't be traced.
He looked at the other four that were still on the desk. All with the same setup: they all were used to call one unknown number and they were all called from one unknown number.
Eight missed calls.
Erik Wilson gripped the phone that was Paula's.
He calculated in his head. It was past midnight in Sweden. He rang the number.
Paula's voice.
Number five.
Vulcanusgatan 15 and Sankt Eriksplan 17.
'We can't.'
'Can't do it. I'm abroad.'
Deep breath. Very close. And yet hundreds of miles away.
'Abort.'
Erik Wilson sat down on the edge of the bed, in the same place as before, where the bedspread was crumpled.
A major deal.
Paula had penetrated deep into the organization, deeper than he'd ever heard of before.
'Get out. Now.'
The silence when someone hangs up mid-conversation is always deeply unnerving. Wilson had never liked that electronic void. Someone else deciding that the call was over.
He went over to the window again, searching in the bright light that seemed to make the practice ground shrink, nearly drown in white.
The voice had been strained, almost frightened.
Erik Wilson still had the mobile phone in his hand. He looked at it, at the silence.
Paula was going to go it alone.
Monday
He had stopped the car halfway across the bridge to Lidingo.
The sun had finally broken through the blackness a few minutes after three, pushing and bullying and chasing off the dark, which wouldn't dare return now until late in the evening. Ewert Grens rolled down the window and looked out at the water, breathing in the chill air as the sun rose into dawn and the cursed night retreated and left him in peace.
He drove on to the other side and across the sleeping island to a house that was idyllically perched on a cliff with a view of the boats that passed by below. He stopped in the empty parking lot, removed his radio from the charger, and attached a microphone to his lapel. He had always left it in the car when he came to visit her-no call was more important than their time together-but now, there was no conversation ro interrupt.
Ewert Grens had driven to the nursing home once a week for twenty-nine years and had not stopped since, even though someone else lived in her room now. He walked over to what had once been her window, where she used to sit watching the world outside, and where he sat beside her, trying to understand what she was looking for.
The only person he had ever trusted.
He missed her so much. The damned emptiness clung to him, he ran through the night and it gave chase, he couldn't get rid of it, he screamed at it, but it just carried on and on… he breathed it in, he had no idea how to fill such emptiness.
'Superintendent Grens.'
Her voice came from the glass door that normally stood open when the weather was fine and all the wheelchairs were in place around the table on the terrace. Susann, the medical student who was now, according to the name badge on her white coat, already a junior doctor. She had once accompanied him and Anni on the boat trip around the archipelago and had warned him against hoping
'Hello.'
'You here again.'
'Yes.'
He hadn't seen her for a long time, since Anni was alive.
'Why do you do it?'
He glanced up at the empty window.
