Joona gently lays the shotgun back on the floor. He continues past the woman and into a hallway with a low ceiling of chicken wire and fiberglass. Heavy cigar smoke hangs in the air. Intense lamplight shines right in his face, and he shields his eyes with his hand. The end of the hallway is obscured by strips of white industrial plastic. Blinded, Joona can’t see what’s going on. He can glimpse movement and he can hear an echoing voice filled with fear and terror. Someone close at hand suddenly screams loudly. It’s a deep-throated scream followed by rapid gasps. Joona makes it past the blinding lamp and now can see into the room behind the thick plastic.
Veils of smoke swirl through the air. A short, muscular woman in black jeans and a hoodie stands before a man dressed only in underwear and socks. His head is shaved, and on his forehead, there’s a White Power tattoo. He’s bitten his tongue and blood runs down his chin, throat, and thick stomach. “Please,” he begs.
The woman raises a smoking cigar overhead, then brings it down, pressing its glowing end right onto the tattoo. The man screams. His thick stomach and hanging breasts shake. He’s pissing himself. A dark spot spreads over his blue underwear and the urine runs down his naked legs.
Behind the curtain of protected plastic, Joona has pulled out his gun. He tries to spot if anyone else is in the room but he can’t see. He’s about to yell… then his gun falls from his hand to the floor.
It clatters against the concrete and slides to a stop next to the plastic. Joona looks down at his own hand, seeing it shake, and in the next moment, feeling the horrendous pain flood in. He loses all sight and feels only a heavy, breaking movement inside his forehead. He throws out a hand against the wall in an attempt to stay upright. He fears he’s about to lose consciousness. Still, he can hear the voices behind the curtain.
“Just admit what the fuck you did!” the woman with the cigar is yelling.
“I don’t remember,” the neo-Nazi cries.
“What did you do?”
“I bullied some guy.”
“Confess exactly what you did!”
“I burned his eye out.”
“That’s right! You used a cigarette to burn out the eye of a ten-year-old boy!”
“Yes, but I-”
“What did he do to you?”
“We followed him from the synagogue and down to…”
Joona doesn’t notice that what he’s grabbed is a fire extinguisher, a big one, and it’s coming down with him. He no longer has any sense of time or of where he is. The pain in his head and a fierce ringing in his ears is all he knows.
31
Behind the dark veils of pain, Joona can feel her hand on his back.
“What’s going on?” asks Saga Bauer in a low voice. “Are you hurt?”
He tries to shake his head but is in too much pain to speak. It feels as if a hook is being drawn through his brain: down through the skin, the cranium, the brain membranes, and the heavy, floating brain fluid.
He drops to his knees.
“You’ve got to get out of here,” says Saga.
He feels her lifting his face but he can’t see anything. His entire body is bathed in pearls of sweat that pour from his armpits, his neck, his back.
Saga is hunting through his clothes. She thinks he’s having an epileptic fit and is trying to find some kind of medicine in his pockets. Joona realizes she’s opening his wallet and looking for the sign of a flame, the symbol for epileptics.
The pain starts to recede. Joona wets his mouth with his tongue. He looks up. His jaws are tense and his whole body aches from the migraine attack.
“You guys can’t go in there yet,” he whispers. “I have to-”
“What the hell happened here?”
“Nothing.” Joona picks his gun up from the floor.
He gets to his feet and staggers as fast as he can through the plastic curtains and into the room. It’s empty. An emergency exit sign is lit on the other side. Saga has followed him and she questions him with a look. Joona opens the emergency door and sees a steep half set of stairs leading to a steel door at street level.
“Perkele,” he swears in Finnish.
“Talk to me!” Saga says angrily.
Joona always pushes the direct cause of his illness as far from his consciousness as possible. There was an incident many years ago… it keeps giving him this pulsing pain, this pain so severe that he almost passes out. But he refuses to think about the incident.
What the doctor says is that this is an extreme form of migraine with a physical cause. The antiepileptic drug Topiramate is the only medicine that seems to help. Joona is supposed to take it daily, but when he’s working and needs a clear head, he stops. Not only does it make him tired, it dulls his mind. He knows he’s playing a game of roulette. Without the medication, he might manage for weeks without a migraine, yet another time he’ll be hit by one after only a few days.
“They were torturing a guy… a neo-Nazi, I think, but-”
“Torturing?”
“With a cigar,” he answers as he turns around and heads back into the hallway.
“What happened?”
“I… couldn’t…”
“But Joona,” Saga says tentatively. “Maybe… if you’ve got a physical problem, you shouldn’t be working… operatively, that is…”
She puts her hand to her face.
“What a shitty situation,” she whispers.
Joona walks toward the room with the clown lamp and hears Saga’s footsteps behind him.
“And why in the hell are you even here?” she asks to his back. “Sapo’s SWAT team is going to raid this place any moment. If they see that weapon in your hand, they’ll shoot first and ask questions later… it’ll be dark, there’ll be tear gas-”
“I have to speak to Daniel Marklund,” Joona says stubbornly.
“You’re not supposed to even know about him!” she exclaims as she follows him up the spiral staircase. “Who told you about him?”
Joona starts down another hallway, but stops when he sees Saga gesture a different way. He follows her, but pulls out his gun when she starts to run. They both turn a corner, and Joona hears her yell something.
Saga has come to a halt in a room with five computers. In one corner stands a man with dirty hair and a beard. He matches the picture of Daniel Marklund in Joona’s mind. His lips look dry. He’s licking them. He holds out a Russian bayonet knife in one of his fists.
“Police,” Saga says, flashing her ID. “Put down the knife.”
The young man shakes his head and waves the knife in the air in front of him, flashing the blade in different directions.
“We just need to speak with you,” Joona says as he holsters his gun.
“So speak.”
Joona walks closer, looking into the young man’s frightened eyes, totally ignoring the knife being waved directly at him. He ignores its sharpened point.
“Daniel, you’re really not good at this,” he says with a smile.
Joona can smell the scent of gun grease on the blade.
Daniel is waving the bayonet knife in faster circles and wears a look of concentration. He growls, “Don’t think only Finns are good at-”
