Chapter 120
A BOX HAD APPEARED against a gray background, with the message
Dessie typed “sola” for Society of Limitless Art in the box and pressed Enter. The screen flickered.
Sorry - wrong password.
“I didn’t think it would be that easy,” she said.
Suddenly an idea came into Jacob’s head. There was a key with no lock in the report. Here was a lock but no key.
“We could be onto something here,” he said. “Try ‘Rudolph.’ Maybe it is that easy.”
Sorry - wrong password.
Jacob stared at Dessie. He remembered the last conversation he’d had with Lyndon Crebbs: What if there are other killers?
He heard his own reply echo in his head
“If the Rudolphs have got an accomplice,” Jacob said slowly, “then they need some way of contacting him, them, whoever it is. Could they be using this site to communicate with one another?”
Dessie tried a hundred other possibilities. Again and again: Sorry - wrong password.
“We’re lucky the site is still letting us try new ones. Most sites will block you after three tries,” Dessie said.
“Where are the postcards?” Jacob asked.
Dessie reached for her knapsack on the floor beside the bed. She tipped out the copies, letting them fan across the bed.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Let’s try all the words on the cards,” Jacob said. “What’s this one here?”
He picked up a photograph he hadn’t seen before. It was of two dead or seriously wounded people in a room that showed clear evidence of a struggle.
“That’s the picture from Salzburg,” she said. “I spoke to the reporter. She mailed it to me.”
Dessie tried word after word: “Rome,” “Paris,” “Madrid,” “Athens.”
Sorry - wrong password.
“What are these numbers?” Jacob asked, pointing at the back of the Salzburg envelope.
“The phone number of a pizzeria in Vienna. The reporter already checked it. Nothing to do with the case,” Dessie said.
Next she went through all the sites on the postcards: “Tivoli,”
“Coliseum,” Las Ventas.”
Jacob picked out the pictures from Copenhagen and Oslo. Oslo was done by the Rudolphs.
Copenhagen was the copycat.
“What if they’ve got a password that isn’t a word but something else?” he said.
Dessie looked at him intently.
“When would you need that information?” Jacob asked. “When are you most in need of instructions? The moment you’re about to carry out your task, wouldn’t you say?”
Dessie stared at him. “I don’t know, I’ve never been a murderer. I’ve been tempted a couple of times.”
“Where would you write the password you need to get your instructions for the kills? On the nearest thing available maybe?”
He picked up the copy of the back of the envelope from Salzburg.
“The Rudolphs had an alibi for the murders in Austria,” he said. “So that must have been carried out by their accomplice. Try these numbers.”
Dessie picked up the laptop again and carefully typed in the nine numbers. She pressed Enter.
The screen flickered.
A new image appeared.
“Holy fucking Christ,” Dessie said.
Chapter 121
THE INVESTIGATING TEAM HAD gathered in Mats Duvall’s office. Their faces were pale and drawn.
“Do we have any idea where the hell the Rudolphs have gone?” Jacob asked, sitting down opposite Sara Hцglund.
The head of the unit shook her head. She looked to be in utter despair. As she ought to be.
“They were let out the back door of the Grand Hotel this morning. No one’s seen them since then.”
“And the key? The key that no one on the team paid much attention to?”
“We know it belongs to a left-luggage locker.”
Jacob slammed his fist on the table so hard that the coffee cups jumped.
“We’ve put out a national alert and informed Interpol,” Mats Duvall added quickly. “Arlanda, Skavsta, Landvetter, Vдsterеs, Sturup, and every other airport with international connections is on increased alert. The Цresund Bridge to Denmark is blocked and every vehicle is being searched. The ports have been informed. The border posts are on the alert. Surveillance of all highways and European routes has been intensified. They won’t get out of Sweden.”
Jacob stood up.
“For fuck’s sake, they’ve just gotten hold of three and a half million dollars! They can buy their own
“The whole amount is in an account in the Cayman Islands,” Gabriella said, reading from a document in front of her. “The transfer has been confirmed by the bank they used here in Stockholm.”
Jacob was close to upending the table and all the useless paperwork on it.
“So they haven’t got much cash at the moment,” Dessie said, just to be clear.
Jacob leaned back in his chair, pressing the palms of his hands to his forehead.
Dessie had already given him the hopeless details. The Rudolphs were free and had vanished, in a country with fewer inhabitants than New York and an area almost as big as Texas. There were thousands of miles of unguarded borders with both Norway and Finland, and just as much coastline. A couple of hours in a fast boat would get them to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Denmark, or Germany.
Silence fell around the table.
Gabriella Oscarsson was concentrating on a bundle of papers, Mats Duvall was fiddling with his BlackBerry. Evert Ridderwall, the hotshot prosecutor, was staring blankly out the window.
Jacob clenched his fists at the sight of the fat little man. He was the one who had let the bastards out in the first place.
“What does the analysis of the website tell us?” Dessie eventually asked. Sara Hцglund leaned forward.
“Your first assumption turned out to be correct,” she said. “The Rudolphs have set themselves up as masters of their own universe. Their project aims to integrate life, death, and art, to find the ultimate form of expression. The Society of Limitless Art is their own university. As far as we can make out, they’ve got about thirty- five followers around the world. There could be more. Other art students who share their worldview and admire their ambitions.”
Dessie looked down at her hands. “Three other couples have taken the
‘exam’ that the Rudolphs provide. Hard to believe, isn’t it? So many crazies out there.”
The pages of the website contained detailed instructions on how to pass the exam, or “graduate,” as the Rudolphs called it, in the special project of the Society of Limitless Art. By causing death in a particularly artistic way, humankind could become a creating divinity, and thus immortal. The procedure of “the Work” was described in detail, from the dialogue to be spoken when the victims were seduced, to how the champagne, eyedrops, and knife
