Ларс Кеплер: The Rabbit Hunter

Saga has trained for scenarios like this. She is expected to act independently and not be swayed by anything, even the law.

She can see the gloomy brick buildings of Karolinska Hospital ahead, and pulls onto the E4, pushing the three-cylinder, 900cc engine to its limits and hitting two hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. She passes Roslagstull and turns left towards the university.

The cold air helps her stay calm as she thinks through the information she has been given and formulates an initial operational strategy.

Saga gets off the highway and speeds along Vendevägen towards Djursholm with its lush greenery and sprawling villas. The turquoise glow of swimming pools shimmers between fruit trees and bushes.

She pulls onto a roundabout too quickly, and takes the first exit to the right. Before her brain has time to notice the parked car her muscles instinctively react and the bike swerves sharply. She almost falls, but manages to counteract the momentum using her bodyweight. The rear wheel slides across the road. There’s a muffled thud as she hits a large plastic dustbin before she regains control of the bike and accelerates hard.

Her heart is pumping.

Fortunately, her motorcycle has a low centre of gravity and extremely responsive steering.

That’s probably what saved her.

Saga sees big yachts out on the water as she follows the wide curve of the road through the imposing houses. She’s already leaning hard to her left, but accelerates further as she reaches the shore.

Saga slows down as she approaches the address she was given.

She lets the bike fall sideways onto the grass beside the road, drops her helmet and pulls on her bulletproof vest and holster.

Thirteen minutes have passed since her phone woke her up.

The alarm is shrieking inside the house.

For a moment, she wishes Detective Joona Linna was there. She has worked alongside him in all her biggest cases so far. He’s the best police officer she’s ever met.

She let him down once, but will never do it again.

They lost touch after he received his prison sentence. She would have liked to visit him, but she knows he needs to construct a new life for himself. It’s going to take a lot to win the trust of the other prisoners.

Now a Code Platinum has been declared, and Saga is on her own.

No one else from the Security Police has arrived yet.

She climbs over the gate and runs up to the main entrance of the villa. She inserts an opener into the lock, then the thin end of her lock-pick. She moves the pick slightly to the right inside the mechanism until the catch releases.

The lock opens with a dull click.

Dropping her tools on the ground she draws her Glock, releases the safety and opens the door. The sound of the howling alarm drowns out everything else.

Saga quickly checks the entrance and large hallway beyond it, then hurries back to the alarm control panel and taps in the code she memorised.

Silence sweeps through the house. It feels foreboding.

With her pistol raised and her finger on the trigger she goes through the hallway, past the staircase, and reaches a large living room. She checks behind the doors and along the wall to the right, then continues in a crouch.

One of the big windows at the back of the house has been broken. A chair is lying overturned on the floor, surrounded by sparkling fragments of glass.

Saga moves on, towards the door to the kitchen, and sees herself reflected in the glass surfaces.

Blood and fragments of skull are splattered across the floor, sofa and coffee table.

She sweeps the room with her pistol then keeps moving slowly as more and more of the kitchen comes into view. She sees white cupboards and stainless steel countertops.

She stops and listens.

She can hear a low ticking, as if someone is tapping a fingernail on a tabletop.

Aiming her gun at the door to the kitchen, Saga moves silently to one side of it, and sees a man lying on his back on the floor.

He’s been shot through his chest and both eyes.

The back of his head is gone.

A dark puddle has spread out beneath him.

His hands are lying by his sides, as if he’s sunbathing.

Saga raises her pistol again and checks the rest of the kitchen.

The curtains in front of the patio doors are swaying, billowing into the room. The rings on the curtain rod are tapping against each other.

Blood from the first shot to the man’s head has sprayed far across the floor, and been trodden about by bare feet.

The prints lead directly towards Saga.

She quickly turns and sweeps her pistol around the room before walking back towards the double doors leading to the living room.

Saga startles when, from the corner of her eye, she sees a person crawling out from their hiding place behind one of the sofas.

She spins around just as the person stands up. It’s a woman in a blue dress. Saga points her pistol between the woman’s breasts as she takes an unsteady step.

‘Hands behind your head!’ Saga calls out. ‘Get on your knees, get down on your knees!’

Keeping the pistol raised, Saga runs forward.

‘Please,’ the woman whispers, dropping the personal alarm on the floor.

She barely has time to show that her hands are empty before Saga kicks her from the side, just below her knee, so hard that both her legs are knocked out from under her and she falls to the floor with a thud, hip first, then her cheek and temple.

Saga is on her instantly. She punches her in her left kidney, then presses the pistol to the back of her head, holding her down with her right knee as she scans the room again.

‘Is there anyone else in the house?’

‘Only the gunman, he went into the kitchen,’ the woman replies, gasping for breath. ‘He fired and then went—’

‘Quiet!’ Saga interrupts.

Saga quickly rolls her onto her stomach and pulls her arms behind her. The woman submits to everything in a disconcertingly calm way. Saga handcuffs her with a zip tie, then gets to her feet and hurries into the kitchen, past the dead man.

The curtains are still billowing, blown by the wind.

Aiming the pistol ahead of her, she steps over a soot-smeared poker, checks the left-hand side of the kitchen, then moves behind the island unit towards the sliding doors.

There’s a round hole in the glass, made by a diamond cutter, and the door is open. Saga goes out onto the deck, and sweeps the lawn and flowerbeds with her pistol.

The water is still, the night silent.

Someone who broke into a house and carried out such a clean execution would never stay at the scene of the crime.

Saga goes back inside to the woman. She ties her ankles with more zip ties, but keeps one knee on the small of her back.

‘I need some answers,’ she says quietly.

‘I have nothing to do with this, I just happened to be here, I didn’t see anything,’ the woman whispers.

Saga pulls the woman’s dress down to cover her bare backside before she gets up. Soon five SUVs will pull up outside and the Security Police will pour into the house.

‘How many gunmen?’

‘Just one, I only saw one.’

‘Can you describe him?’

‘I don’t know. He had a mask over his face, I didn’t see anything, black clothes, gloves, it all happened so quickly. I thought he was going to kill me too, I thought—’

‘OK, just wait,’ Saga interrupts.

She goes over to the dead body. The man’s round face is intact enough that she has no trouble identifying him. She pulls out her phone, moves a short distance away and calls the head of the Security Police. It’s the middle of the night, but he’s been waiting for the call and answers immediately.

‘The Foreign Minister’s dead,’ she says.