Food was delivered to Wayne Jennings. That was a worrying moment. The incongruous bowl of soup remained standing on the guards’ table for so long that the steam stopped rising from it. Their hand of blackjack seemed to be taking years. Isn’t blackjack a relatively quick game? his urge to pee said. Up to twenty-one in a few puny cards, and then you’re done?
The guards looked at him sternly. Then they picked up the tray with the soup bowl, the bread, and the mug of milk, and prepared to enter.
They went in. They locked the door behind them. Nyberg remained seated in the corridor. He took out his service weapon, took off the safety, and aimed it straight at the thick door with his healthy left hand. He feared what would come crawling out of there. He was sitting five yards from the door, and he would shoot to kill.
Time crept on. The guards were still gone. With every second, his conviction grew stronger. He pushed his urge to pee back into the wings.
The door slid open.
Wayne Jennings actually looked surprised when he saw Nyberg sitting there with the pistol aimed right at his heart.
“Gunnar Nyberg,” said Jennings courteously. “Nice to see you.”
Nyberg stood up. The chair fell with a clang that echoed through the corridor, echoing back and forth in this wild beast’s cave.
He held the weapon steady, aimed at his heart.
Jennings took a step forward.
Gunnar Nyberg shot. Two shots, right to the heart. Wayne Jennings was thrown backward through the corridor. He lay still.
Nyberg took a few steps toward him, keeping the pistol aimed straight at the body.
Then Wayne Jennings got up.
He smiled. His icy gaze did not smile.
Nyberg trembled. He was six feet away. He emptied the magazine into the Kentucky Killer’s body. It hurtled back again and lay on the floor.
Gunnar Nyberg was close now.
Wayne Jennings got up again. The bullet holes shone like black lights in his white shirt. He smiled.
Nyberg shot again. The pistol clicked. He threw it aside. Then he aimed an uppercut. This time Jennings would not get up.
He hit the air. There was no one there.
A terrible pain went through his large body. He had never imagined that his body could shake so violently. He lay on the floor; Jennings was pinching a point on the back of his neck. He stared up into Jennings’s serious face.
“Forget me now,” said Wayne Jennings. “You have to erase me from your consciousness. Otherwise you will never find peace.”
He released him. Nyberg tried to sit up, but he was still trembling.
The last thing he heard before everything went black was a voice that said:
“I am No One.”
30
The rain had not ceased. Some of Stockholm’s streets had been closed off due to flooding. A few historic buildings had been destroyed and had to be evacuated. It was worse in some suburbs. Entire neighborhoods were under water. The storm had taken out electricity and phone service in parts of Sweden. Now they were approaching a state of disaster.
Police headquarters, however, was still intact. But “Supreme Central Command” had reclaimed its quotation marks. They flapped like scoffing vampires through the room.
“I should have aimed for his head,” said Gunnar Nyberg. “I could have put a single shot in his head. Fuck, that was dumb.”
“You couldn’t have known that the guards were wearing bulletproof vests,” said Hultin, “or that he had taken one of them.”
“I should have stopped them from going in.”
“There’s a lot we should have done,” Hultin said somberly from his lectern. “And above all, there’s a lot we shouldn’t have done.”
Nyberg looked like hell. In addition to his nose cone and the cast on his hand, he now had a large bandage on the back of his neck. Of course, Gunnar Nyberg shouldn’t have been there; he should have been on sick leave, sleeping off his double concussion. But no one could get him to leave.
Hultin’s owl glasses were in place, but other than that he was hardly himself. His neutrality had been all but blown away. Age seemed to have caught up with him. He looked smaller than usual; the era of this Father of His People was at an end. Perhaps he would be able to pull himself together before he retired.
He spoke with a slow, thick, almost old-man’s voice. “Both Gunnar and the guards escaped without permanent injuries. Jennings used Gunnar’s police ID to get out of the building-it was found a few hours later in a garbage can at Arlanda. It was a little signal for us. A ‘thanks for the help,’ I suppose.”
He paused and paged slowly through his papers, then continued. “What we saw was the effects of at least three identical high-precision automatic weapons with exceedingly effective ammunition. We can assume that they followed us by helicopter to Visby, came to the harbor, and took up suitable positions in the city heights. It may have been a productive collaboration between the CIA and Saddam; we’ll never know. Nor will we ever know what the three deserting army officers had to reveal about the Gulf War.
“Above all, we have to forget this case. The corpses have been taken care of. As you know, we had to use Säpo-they’ll take the case from here.
“Nothing has reached the media, but even if we wanted to talk to the press, what would we say? The case will appear unsolvable; people will keep buying weapons and hiring security firms. And maybe they’re right to do so. And you all know what Fawzi Ulaywi said when we released him-I’ll never forget it: ‘Fucking murderers!’ He was right, of course. And now his identity has probably been revealed. Maybe he’ll go underground and avoid being assassinated, maybe not. He, Herman Bengtsson, and the Lindbergers were the Swedish branch of Orpheus Life Line. Now there’s nothing left of that branch.”
He fell silent. He appeared old and tired. They had solved the case, in all its aspects, but now he was going to be hung out to dry, like a failed Olof Palme-murder detective. The demands for his resignation could become loud. And they would be justified-but for completely different reasons.
“Is there anything else?” he said.
“Justine Lindberger’s bank account was emptied a few hours after her death,” said Arto Söderstedt. “We can only hope that the emptier was Orpheus Life Line, saving what was left of their capital. Otherwise it went toward Wayne Jennings’s salary. The Lindbergers’ large apartment will go to their already-rich family; Orpheus will lose its Swedish headquarters and central office, in addition to four of its most loyal members. And everything else.”
Söderstedt looked up at the ceiling. He, too, seemed very tired.
“I treated her like shit,” he said quietly, “and she turned out to be a hero.”
“Lagavulin was empty,” said Chavez, looking small and insignificant. “It contained no control devices for nuclear warheads. And LinkCoop is an ordinary, computer-oriented import-export company, totally legitimate. The CEO, Henrik Nilsson, was very sorry that its excellent chief of security Robert Mayer had disappeared. He took the opportunity to report it to the police.”
“Benny Lundberg died this morning,” said Kerstin Holm. “His father turned off the respirator. He’s been arrested-he’s one floor down.”
Gunnar Nyberg suddenly got up and bolted from the room. They watched him go. They hoped he wasn’t planning to go down and kill the unfortunate Lasse Lundberg.
Hjelm had nothing to say. He was thinking about the concept of “pain beyond words.”
“We know that Lamar Jennings shadowed his father for more than a week,” Hultin continued. “It can’t have been too hard for him to find Robert Mayer-he’s in the phone book. Lamar copied the key to the warehouse the day after he arrived in Sweden. He must have followed Wayne Jennings to LinkCoop; maybe Wayne had already committed a murder; maybe there are hordes of dead people we’ll never discover. Anyway, something caused Lamar to copy the key-and something enabled him to glean the information that his father would show up on that fateful night with Erik Lindberger in tow. We don’t know how-or why-Lindberger followed Jennings to Frihamnen after their meeting at Riche, and we don’t know why they met there. Maybe Lindberger thought it was about Orpheus; the members do remain secret, after all. In general, there’s a lot we don’t know.”