“I’m going to see The Needle. Why don’t you come with me?” Joona asks.
“Right now?”
“I have to be there in twenty minutes.”
“Damn, I can’t.” Nathan gestures to the class. “I’ll keep my phone on in case you have to get back about something.”
“Thanks,” Joona says, and turns toward the door.
“Hey… could you just say hi to this gang for a second?” Nathan asks.
The entire class has already turned to look at them. Joona waves.
Nathan raises his voice. “May I introduce Joona Linna? He’s the one I was telling you about. I’m trying to talk him into giving you some insight into hand-to-hand combat.”
The room is silent and everyone is staring at Joona.
“Most of you know more about hand-to-hand combat than I do,” Joona says with a small smile. “But one thing I do know is when you’re in a fight for your life, no rules apply. It’s not a game-it’s a real fight.”
“Listen up,” Nathan says, his voice hard.
“In a real fight, you’ll only win if you keep thinking. Be flexible. Take advantage of anything and everything that comes your way,” Joona continues calmly. “Maybe you’re in a car or on a balcony. Maybe in a room filled with tear gas. Maybe there’s broken glass covering the floor. There could be weapons all around. Is it a short fight? Or will you have to conserve your strength? Don’t waste time with fancy jump kicks or be cool with round kicks.”
A few laugh.
“And accept the idea of pain. When you’re in close combat without a weapon, you may have to take a real pounding to win as quickly as you can.” Joona finishes. “That’s about it… I really don’t know much more than that about this stuff.”
He bows his head faintly and turns to leave the lecture hall. Two of the officers clap. The door closes and the room falls silent. Nathan Pollock is smiling to himself as he comes back to the table.
“I originally meant to save this for another class,” he says as he taps on the computer. “This film is a classic- it’s the hostage drama from Nordea Bank headquarters on Hamngatan nine years ago. There are two robbers. Joona Linna has already gotten the hostages out. He’s also already taken down one of the robbers, the one who had an Uzi. There’d been a violent firefight. The other robber is hiding and still has a knife. They had spray-painted all of the security cameras, but missed one. Anyway, I’ll play it in slow motion because the whole thing happens in just a few seconds.”
Pollock clicks again, and the film starts in slow motion. It’s a grainy video shot from directly overhead and showing the interior of the bank. At the bottom right of the image, a counter ticks off the seconds. Joona moves smoothly sideways with his arms out, holding his pistol high. It almost looks like he’s underwater, his movements are so slow. The robber is hiding behind the open door to the safe. He holds a knife. Suddenly he rushes out with long, fluid strides. Joona points his service pistol toward the robber, directly at his chest. The robber doesn’t hesitate. Joona is forced to pull the trigger. “The pistol clicks but a faulty bullet is lodged in the barrel,” narrates Pollock.
The grainy film flickers. Joona retreats as the man with the knife leaps at him. The whole thing is spooky and silent. Joona ejects the magazine and reaches for a new one. There is no time. Swiftly he reverses the useless gun until the barrel becomes an extension of his forearm.
“I don’t get it,” says a female officer.
“He’s transforming the pistol into a tonfa,” Pollock explains.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a kind of stick or baton. American police use something similar.
Obviously, your reach is lengthened and if you must strike, the impact is intensified.”
The man with the knife has reached Joona. Almost in slow motion, he strikes at Joona’s abdomen, the blade glittering in a half arc. His other arm is up and turns with his body. Joona does not look at the knife at all. He moves straight into the robber and instantly strikes him in the throat, right under the Adam’s apple, with the shaft of his gun.
As if in a dream, the knife falls slowly, swirling to the ground. The man goes to his knees, clutching his throat, and then falls forward.
10
Joona Linna is in his car, driving toward the Karolinska Institute, the medical research center in Solna, a suburb north of Stockholm. He’s thinking about Carl Palmcrona’s hanging body, the tight laundry rope, the urine on the floor.
To the picture in his mind, Joona adds two sets of shoe prints on the floor circling the dead man.
This case is not over.
The department of forensic medicine is in a redbrick building set among the well-tended lawns on the large campus of the Karolinska Institute.
Joona swings into the empty visitors’ parking lot. He sees that the chief medical officer, Nils Ahlen, The Needle, has driven his white Jaguar over the curb and right onto the manicured lawn next to the main entrance.
Joona waves at the woman sitting in reception, who answers with a thumbs-up. He continues down the hallway, knocks at The Needle’s door, and goes right in. As usual, The Needle’s office is completely barren of anything extraneous. The blinds have been drawn but sunshine still filters in between the slats. The light is bright on white surfaces but disappears into the gray areas of brushed steel.
As if to match his environment, The Needle wears white aviator glasses and a white polo shirt underneath his lab coat.
“I just put a parking ticket on a white Jaguar outside,” Joona says.
“Good for you.”
Joona pauses in the middle of the room, his serious gray eyes darkening.
“So how’d he really die?”
“You’re talking about Palmcrona?”
“Right.”
The telephone rings and The Needle hands the autopsy report to Joona.
“You didn’t need to come all the way here to find that out,” The Needle says before he picks up the phone.
Joona sits down on a white leather chair. The autopsy on Carl Palmcrona’s body is complete. Joona flips through the file and eyes a few entries at random:
74. Kidneys weigh 290 grams together. Surfaces are smooth. Tissues are gray-red. Consistency is firm and elastic. Renal capsule is clear.
75. The ureters have normal appearance.
76. The bladder is empty. Mucous membrane is pale.
77. The prostate is normal size. Tissues are pale.
The Needle pushes his glasses up his narrow, hooked nose and finishes his phone call. He looks up.
“As you see,” he says, yawning, “nothing unusual. Cause of death is asphyxiation, that is, suffocation… but with a successful hanging we’re not talking about your typical meaning of suffocation. Rather, here we have closure of artery supply.”
“So the brain dies when the flow of oxygenated blood is stopped.”
The Needle nods. “That’s right. Artery compression, bilateral closure of the carotids. It happens unbelievably quickly, of course. Unconsciousness within seconds-”
“But he was alive before the hanging?” Joona asks.
“Right.”
