The battle was one-sided. Ylva pummeled Brand with repeated blows, flinging her around the hospital room. They crashed against a utility column, an IV stand, and a computer monitor suspended on a heavy steel boom. Pieces of equipment fell atop the unconscious patient, ripping his IV tubes away and displacing the bed a few feet toward the wall.
And of course a blade came out. Ylva pulled a full-size Ka-Bar from her belt, the kind of seven-inch clip-pointed fighting knife employed by the US Marine Corps. The monstrous weapon seemed to grow longer the closer it came, until it filled Brand’s vision.
Only by an extremely lucky kick did she manage to deny her attacker the immediate advantage of the knife. As Ylva scrambled backward to retrieve it, Brand managed to reach over and trip the room’s emergency alarm.
Lights flashed and a claxon sounded. Ylva came at her again. Brand dodged. Then the biathlete turned the knife on Hammar, stabbing down at his motionless form. A terrified Brand grabbed at her, making the woman miss. She managed only a deep strike into the mattress.
The blade stuck. Ylva struggled to extract it. Brand got in her only good hit of the battle, cracking her attacker with a fist to the side of the throat.
Then the first of many hospital staffers crashed into the room, filling it with shouts and warnings. Cornered, Ylva lifted up a stainless steel supply cart that must have easily weighed eighty kilos, hurled it through a closed window, and followed it out through the shattered glass.
The medical personnel rushed to check on the patient. Brand stepped over to the broken window. In the evening darkness she saw a figure scramble across a lower-story rooftop immediately below her. Ylva Voss turned to look back once, then slipped from the edge of the roof to the ground.
The female cop who Brand had encountered in the lobby charged into the room and joined her at the window, breathing hard and half-panicked. She worked a shoulder-mounted comm unit but seemed to struggle to operate it in her fluster.
Brand left the police woman standing amid the trashed-out hospital room. She maneuvered her way through the maze of empty corridors and left the medical center without anyone stopping her.
Two minutes later she was in Hammar’s Saab. Spatters of dried and frozen blood still marked the interior from its owner’s grievous head wound, as well as from his previous nosebleed.
Even with the cold, the Saab started on the first try. Brand headed east, leaving Sveg via the main highway. She drove not knowing exactly where she was headed.
48.
After a few hours of chugging along deserted back roads, Brand broke into an empty fäbod. It wasn’t one of the made-over modern ones. The small, slope-roofed hut, one of several grouped together, displayed gray weathered siding of uneven timber. Bracken lay tangled in the snow piled up outside.
Inside, the place smelled of mouse shit, mildew and something vaguely familiar, human or animal rot, she couldn’t tell. Stained, flower-print curtains hung limply in the downstairs windows.
She chose the place from the lack of footprints or car tracks in evidence. Abandoned, she concluded, or at least unvisited. The Saab she managed to hide behind a half-collapsed outbuilding. The car was another problem.
“Oh, there are plenty of old Saabs on the roads here in northern Sweden,” Hammar had responded, when Brand complained that the vehicle stuck out like a sore thumb.
“Krister, the whole damned Saab automobile company just went tits up,” she pointed out. “They’re not making them anymore.”
“I saw a 1969 Model 96 in tan just recently, a few months back,” Hammar had responded, breezily ignoring her main point. “We always salute each other with honks of the horn.”
Recalling the conversation now, Brand felt a blast of sentiment for the owner of the Saab. She knew the car could nail her. There were any number of law enforcement entities in the hunt. The American interloper was now linked to many crimes, a chalet burning, various and sundry disruptions of the peace at a medical center—not to mention a string of murders. A BOLO or APB would have likely been issued, if Swedish police had such a system as a be-on-the-lookout or an all-points bulletin.
The Vosses, too, would pounce if they encountered an ancient blue Saab anywhere on the road. Perhaps, in the immediate area, the family and the police were much the same thing.
So she was marooned, lost during winter in the fjäll, the fell, the marches, the Swedish uplands. Alone in one of the least populated area of Europe. The Fell could just as well be Antarctica for the frozen wilderness expanse of it.
“You’ve thoroughly screwed yourself now,” Brand whispered, the words spelled out in cloudy vapor as they were swallowed by silence.
Exhausted, cold, and hungry, guilty of breaking and entering, she did what she could. Half-blind in the darkness, she made a thorough search of the shack, looking for food and weapons. She found neither, not even a stale cracker or a household hammer. Debris lay scattered on the floor. A discarded plank featured an array of evil-looking rusty nails, ready to impale Brand’s foot. She laid it carefully aside.
A woodstove stood in the corner. After a few tries she got a fire going. She worried about the smoke giving her away. But a grove of trees shielded the place from the road. Besides, the flue didn’t draw well enough to send more than a puff or two up the crumbling chimney. The major part of the smoke merely seeped into the interior.
The bed was only a wood-framed cot. The ragged foam mattress pad looked as if it would disintegrate in a cloud of toxic dust, should she lie down on it. Brand tried to make it serviceable by sweeping clean
