Lars Kepler - The Nightmare

Penelope nods slowly. Her mother reaches out her hand to touch Penelope’s cheek, but Penelope startles back and her mother jerks her hand away.

“They tell me that it will be over soon,” Penelope says. “The police think they’ll get that man… the man… who killed Viola and Bjorn.”

Claudia nods and looks at her daughter with a face so naked and unprotected that Penelope is surprised to see her smile. “Just think, you are alive!” Claudia says thickly. “Just think, I have you again! It’s all that matters now… It’s the only thing that matters.”

“Mamma.”

“My little girl.”

Claudia reaches out her hand again, and this time Penelope does not shy away.

Jenny Goransson is in charge of the stakeout. She’s positioned in the bay window of an apartment three floors up on Nybrogatan 4A. She’s waiting. The hours pass. No one has reported anything. All seems quiet. Routinely, her eyes sweep in surveillance of the square and up to the roof of Sibyllegatan 27. Some pigeons startle and fly up and away.

Sonny Jansson is positioned on that roof. He must have shifted and scared the birds.

Jenny contacts him and finds out that he had moved to look into another apartment.

“I thought they were in the middle of a fight, but then I realized they’re actually playing Wii and jumping around in front of the television.”

“Return to your position,” Jenny says drily.

She lifts her binoculars to peer at the dark area between the kiosk and the elm trees again. She’s decided it could be a potential hot spot.

Blomberg calls in. He’s undercover as a jogger running down Sibyllegatan.

“I see something in the cemetery,” he says in a low voice.

“What?”

“Someone is under the trees, about ten meters from the gate.”

“Check it out, Blomberg, but be careful,” she says.

He jogs past the horse stairs by the Military Museum’s gable and on into the cemetery. The night is warm and green. He moves silently onto the grass next to the gravel path and thinks that he’ll soon stop and pretend to stretch. Right now, he just keeps going. There’s a rustling among the leaves. The light left in the sky is blocked by branches and it’s dark between the gravestones. He is startled by seeing a face near the ground. A woman of about twenty. Her hair is stubby and dyed red and her green military backpack is lying next to her head. Blomberg begins to see more clearly as another person, a black-clad, laughing woman, pulls up the other woman’s sweater and begins kissing her breasts.

Blomberg carefully moves away and reports back to Jenny Goransson: “False alarm. Lovers.”

Three hours have passed. Blomberg shivers. It’s getting chilly. The dew is forming on the grass as the temperature drops. He rounds a corner and pulls up abruptly in front of a middle-aged woman with a well-worn face. She seems extremely drunk as she wobbles on her feet. She’s walking two poodles on a leash, jerking back angrily as the dogs eagerly sniff the ground and want to pull away.

Near the edge of the cemetery, an airline attendant passes by. The wheels on her blue carry-on clatter against the asphalt. She gives Blomberg a disinterested glance and he hardly glances back although they’ve been colleagues for more than seven years.

Maria Ristonen hears the sound of her own heels echo along the wall. She’s pulling her carry-on toward the entrance of the subway to check on someone almost hidden near the entrance. The carry-on gets stuck in a cobblestone and skitters sideways. She has to stop and as she bends down, she checks out the person in the shadows. He’s very well-dressed but he has an odd look on his face. He seems to be waiting for someone and he eyes her intently. Maria Ristonen’s heart begins to beat harder and she hears Jenny Goransson’s voice in her earpiece.

“Blomberg has seen him, too, and he’s on the way,” Jenny says. “Wait for Blomberg, Maria. Wait for Blomberg.”

Maria feels she can’t hesitate too long. The normal thing would be to walk along again. She tries to move more slowly and now she’s nearing the man with the odd look. She’ll have to walk past him and then her back would be to him. The man draws back farther in the shadows as she approaches. He has a hand inside his jacket. Maria Ristonen feels the adrenaline pump through her veins when the man suddenly steps toward her and pulls something out that he’s had hidden. Beyond the man’s shoulder, Maria sees Blomberg take a stance, weapon suddenly in his hand. Jenny shouts that it’s a false alarm. The man holds only a beer can.

“Bitch!” The man spits beer toward her.

“Oh God,” sighs Jenny in Maria’s earpiece. “Just keep on going to the subway, Maria.”

The rest of the night passes without incident. The last nightclubs close and then only a few dog owners and aluminum-can collectors go by. Then the newspaper delivery people. Then more dog owners and a few joggers. Jenny Goransson can hardly wait for her relief at eight a.m. She gazes at Hedvig Eleonora Church and then at Penelope Fernandez’s blank window. She looks down at Storgatan and then back toward the priory, where the film director Ingmar Bergman grew up. She pulls out a stick of nicotine gum and studies the square, the park benches, the trees, and the sculptures of the hunched woman and the man with the slab of meat on his shoulder.

There is a small movement near the high steel gate guarding Ostermalms Saluhall. Gourmet food stalls have reinvigorated the interior of the huge redbrick building. Now the weak shine of glass in the entrance is briefly hidden by dark movement. Jenny Goransson calls Carl Schwirt. He’s on a park bench between the trees where the Folk Theater had once been. Two garbage bags of scavenged cans sit between his feet.

“I don’t see a damn thing,” he replies.

“Stay there.”

Maybe, she thinks, maybe I should let Blomberg leave his spot next to the church and jog down Humlegardsgatan to check this out.

Jenny peers through her binoculars at the entrance again. She can now see the vague image of someone on his knees inside the black grille. An illegal taxi has driven the wrong way on Nybrogatan and swings around. Jenny watches the light from the car’s headlights slide along the redbrick wall of the Saluhall. The light flicks across the entrance, but now she sees nothing. The car stops and reverses.

Idiot, she thinks as the taxi drives backward until one wheel goes up on the sidewalk.

Then the headlights shine onto a display window farther along the street, and that window glass throws a reflection right into the entrance.

There is someone behind the high fence.

Jenny needs only a second to understand. The man is adjusting the scope on a rifle.

She drops the binoculars and radios Central Control.

“Alert! I see an armed man!” she almost shouts. “Military-grade rifle with scope, at the entrance to the Saluhall… I repeat! A sniper at ground level at the corner of Nybrogatan and Humlegardsgatan!”

The man at the entrance waits patiently behind the bars of the gate. He has been surveying the empty square for some time and waiting for a homeless collector of cans on the park bench to leave, but decided to ignore the homeless man when it appeared he was going to spend the night on the bench. Under the cover of darkness, he unfolds a tubular barrel with the absorbing shoulder support for a Modular Sniper Rifle. With precision ammunition, the sand-colored semiautomatic rifle is accurate for distances of up to two kilometers. Calmly he mounts a titanium flash suppressor on the barrels, pushes in the magazine, and lowers the tripod in front.

He had slipped inside the Saluhall just before it closed for the night. He’d hidden in a storage area until the cleaners had finished and the guards had left, and as soon as the place was locked and all the lights were off, he’d moved into the Saluhall itself.