Ю Несбё - Macbeth

Caithness dreamed about Angus. He had rung her, but she didn’t dare lift the receiver because she knew someone had been tampering with her phone and it would explode. She woke up and turned to the alarm clock on the bedside table beside the ringing telephone. It was past midnight. It had to be a murder. She hoped it was a murder, an everyday murder and not... She lifted the receiver.

‘Hello?’ She heard the click which had been there ever since the meeting at Estex.

‘Sorry for ringing so late.’ It was an unfamiliar, young man’s voice. ‘I just wanted to confirm that you’re coming to 323 at the usual time tomorrow, Friday?’

‘I’m doing what?’

‘Sorry, perhaps I have the wrong number. Is that Mrs Mittbaum?’

Caithness sat up in bed, wide awake. She moistened her lips. Imagined the reels of the tape recorder in a room somewhere, perhaps the Surveillance Unit on the first floor of HQ.

‘I’m not her,’ she said. ‘But I wouldn’t worry. People with German surnames are generally punctual.’

‘My apologies. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight.’

Caithness lay in bed, her heart pounding.

323. The room in the Grand Hotel where she and Duff used to have their lunchtime trysts, booked in the name of Mittbaum.

Hecate swung the telescope on its stand. The morning light leaked between the clouds and descended like pillars into the town. ‘So Macbeth said he was planning to kill me during the meeting?’

‘Yes,’ Bonus said.

Hecate looked through the telescope. ‘Look at that. Already a queue outside the Inverness.’

Bonus looked around. ‘Are the waiters here today?’

‘The boys, you mean? I book them only when I need them, same as with this penthouse suite. Owning things is tying yourself to them. And people, Bonus. But when you notice your car is so full of junk that it’s slowing you down, you get rid of the junk, not the car. That’s what Macbeth hasn’t realised. That I’m the car, not the junk. Did you ring Macbeth, Strega?’

The tall man-woman, who had just entered the room, stepped out of the shadows.

‘Yes.’

‘And what did you arrange?’

‘He’ll come here alone tomorrow at six to meet you.’

‘Thank you.’

She merged back into the shadows.

‘I wonder how he dares,’ Bonus said.

‘Dares?’ Hecate said. ‘He can’t stop himself. Macbeth has become like a moth drawn helplessly to the light, to power.’

‘And like a moth he’ll burn.’

‘Maybe. What Macbeth has most to fear is — like the moth — himself.’

Caithness looked at her watch. Twelves minutes to twelve. Then she directed her gaze at the hotel door in front of her. She would never forget the brass numbers, however long she lived and however many men she met, loved and shared days and nights with.

323.

She could still turn back. But she had come here. Why? Because she thought she would meet Duff again and something had changed? The only thing that had changed was that now she knew she would be able to manage perfectly well without him. Or was it because she suspected that behind the door there could be another chance, a chance to do the right thing? Which she had failed to do when she walked away from Angus at Estex. She had got hold of his private phone number but there had been no answer.

She raised her hand.

The door would explode if she knocked.

She knocked.

Waited. Was about to knock again when the door opened. A young man stood there.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘Fleance, son of Banquo.’ The voice was the same as on the phone. He stepped aside. ‘Please come in, Mrs Mittbaum.’

The hotel room was as before.

Malcolm was as before.

But not Duff. He had aged. Not only in the months and years since she had last seen him sitting on the plush-covered hotel bed waiting for her like now, but in the days that had passed since he had left her flat for the last time.

‘You came,’ Duff said.

She nodded.

Malcolm coughed and cleaned his glasses. ‘You don’t seem particularly surprised to see us here, Caithness.’

‘I’m most surprised that I’m here,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘What are you hoping is going on, Caithness?’

‘I’m hoping we’re going to remove Macbeth.’

Seyton pushed down the lever on the iron door and opened it. Macbeth stepped inside and twisted the switch. The neon tubes blinked twice before casting a cold blue light on the shelves of ammunition boxes and various weapons. On the floor in the square room were a safe and two half-dismantled Gatling guns. Macbeth went over to the safe, twirled the dial and opened it. Pulled out a zebra-striped suitcase. ‘The ammo room was the only place with thick enough walls where we dared to keep it,’ he said. ‘And even then, in a safe.’

‘So it’s a bomb?’

‘Yep,’ said Macbeth, who had crouched down and opened the suitcase. ‘Disguised as a case of gold.’ He lifted out the bars covering the bottom. ‘The bars are actually iron with a gold coating, but the bomb in the space beneath—’ he opened the lid to the false bottom ‘—is genuine enough.’

‘Look at that,’ Seyton said with a low whistle. ‘Your classic IED time bomb.’

‘Ingenious, eh? The gold means no one will be suspicious about the weight. This was designed to blow up the Inverness.’

‘Aha, it’s that case. And why wasn’t the bomb destroyed?’

‘My idea,’ Macbeth said, studying the clockwork machinery. ‘It’s a fantastically intricate piece of work and we had it fully disarmed. I thought we at SWAT might find a use for it one day. And now we have...’ He touched a matchstick-size metal pin. ‘You just have to pull this, and the clock counts down. It looks easy, but it took us almost forty minutes to defuse it, and there are only twenty-five minutes and fifty-five seconds left on the clock, so if I pull this out there’s no way back.’

‘Your discussions with Hecate will have to be quick then.’

‘Oh, it won’t be a long meeting. I’ll say that the gold is proof of my gratitude for what he’s already done and there’ll be more if he helps me to be elected as mayor.’

‘Will he, do you think?’

‘I don’t know, and he’ll be dead ten minutes later anyway. The point is that he mustn’t suspect anything, and he knows that in this town you don’t get anything for nothing. I’ll ask him to think about it, look at my watch, say I have a meeting with a management group — which is true — and go.’

‘Sorry...’ They turned to the door. It was Ricardo. ‘Telephone.’

‘Tell them I’ll ring back,’ Seyton said.

‘Not for you, for the chief commissioner.’

Macbeth heard the almost imperceptible coldness in the voice. He had felt it when he came to SWAT before. How the men had dutifully mumbled a greeting but had looked away seemingly busy with other things.

‘For me?’

‘Your receptionist has put it through. She says it’s the mayor.’

‘Show me the way.’

He followed the SWAT veteran. Something about Ricardo’s narrow, aristocratic face, the shiny blackness of his skin and the suppleness of his majestic gait had always made Macbeth think the officer must be descended from a lion-hunting tribe. What was it called again? A loyal man of honour. Macbeth knew Ricardo would be willing to follow his brothers to the death if necessary. A man worth his weight in gold. Genuine gold.

‘Anything wrong, Ricardo?’

‘Sir?’

‘You seem quiet today. Anything I should know?’

‘We’re a bit worried about Angus, that’s all.’

‘I heard he’d been off colour. This job isn’t for everyone.’