Ларс Кеплер - The Rabbit Hunter

‘Are you drunk?’

Rex looks at the tired-looking man behind the bar.

‘No, I’m not drunk, but—’

‘You sound strange,’ she interrupts.

Rex walks a little way up the ramp towards the street in order to talk in peace.

‘I need to ask you something,’ he says.

‘Can we do this tomorrow? I’m kind of busy,’ she says impatiently.

Her voice fades as she turns to say something to someone else.

‘But I just need—’

‘Rex, my daughter’s been invited to—’

‘Listen, I just need to know what day I came to see you that night, and—’

The line goes dead as Sylvia hangs up on him.

Rex looks out at the street and sees a balloon floating between the cars. He can feel his hands shaking as he calls her again.

‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ Sylvia asks angrily.

‘I just need to know when it was,’ he persists.

‘It’s over,’ she says. ‘I want you to stop—’

‘Shut up.’

‘You’re drunk, I knew it—’

‘Sylvia, if you don’t tell me, I’m going to call your husband and ask when was the last time he got home from a trip and you were nicer than usual to him.’

There’s complete silence on the line. Sweat trickles down his back.

‘The last day of April,’ she says, and ends the call.

A student with matted hair gets out of the lift at the seventeenth floor, but Joona goes up to the top of the building, cool-box in hand. He feels like he’s trying to start a fire by gently blowing on the embers, and he knows that flames are going to leap up any minute now. He’s here to see Johan Jönson, a computer expert for the NOU, and one of the best IT analysts in Europe. Johan was known as ‘the nerd’, until he developed the Transvector decryption program that MI6 have started using.

Johan opens the door with a sandwich in his hand and invites Joona into the large room.

In return for turning down all his lucrative private sector offers, Johan demanded to have the entire top floor of the Nyponet block of student residences at the college put at his disposal.

All the internal walls have been removed and replaced by plain steel pillars. The huge room is stuffed full of electronic equipment.

Johan is a rather short man with a black moustache and a small goatee. His head is shaved, and his dark eyebrows are thick, growing together across the top of his nose. He’s wearing a tight shirt that looks like Paris Saint-Germain’s uniform, and it’s slid up to reveal his bulging stomach.

Joona takes the hard-drive containing the security-camera footage from the Foreign Minister’s home out of the cool-box, removes the bubble-wrap and hands it to Johan Jönson.

‘You can find erased material, can’t you?’ Joona says.

‘Erased sometimes means just that,’ the analyst replies. ‘But usually it just means that you say it’s been erased even though it’s still there. It’s a little like Tetris, the older material just sinks deeper and deeper.’

‘This recording is four months old.’

Johan puts the remains of his sandwich down on a dusty monitor and weighs the hard-drive in his hand.

‘I think we should try a program called Under Work Schedule, which brings everything up at the same time... it’s a little like one of those paper garlands you cut and unfold, with lots of angels or gingerbread men all joined together.’

‘Quite a long garland,’ Joona says.

It’s possible to restore deleted digital material, but given the thirteen cameras in the Foreign Minister’s home were installed seven years ago, they would effectively have to look through ninety-one years’ worth of footage.

Not even Joona could persuade Carlos to provide the resources necessary to look through that amount of material. But now that he has a precise date, nothing can stop him.

‘Look for Walpurgis Night,’ he says.

Johan sits down on a stained office chair and grabs a handful of sweets from a plastic bowl.

More than forty computers of various types are perched on top of desks, filing cabinets and kitchen tables. Bundles of cables run across the floor between crates full of old hard-drives. In one corner of the huge space is a stack of obsolete equipment: assorted circuit boards, soundcards, graphics cards, screens, keyboards, routers, consoles and processors.

Joona spots an unmade bed with no legs in one corner, behind a bench covered with spare parts and a magnifying lamp. There’s a collection of bright yellow earplugs on an upturned plastic bucket, next to an alarm clock. Johan probably has less space to live in now than he did when he was a student.

‘Move that printer and sit down,’ he says to Joona as he attaches the hard-drive to the main computer in the network.

‘We have footage from the last time Rex pissed in the swimming pool in our files already, but we’re looking for the thirtieth of April, so it’ll be material that’s been recorded over several times,’ Joona explains, moving the printer and a Thomas Pynchon book from the chair.

‘Excuse the mess, but I’ve just linked up thirty computers with the help of a new version of MPI in order to get the sort of supercomputer I need.’

The date and time are at the bottom of the screen. The image shows the first light of day hitting the front of the house and the closed front door.

‘Good cameras, good lenses, ultra-HD,’ Johan nods approvingly.

Joona lays out a map showing the location of every camera in the Foreign Minister’s property, numbered one to thirteen.

‘OK, let’s burn some rubber,’ Johan mutters as he types commands with a rapid-fire clatter of keys.

The row of computers begins to click, fans whirr into life and diodes start to flash.

‘Up comes the underworld... slowly but surely,’ the analyst says, tugging at his short beard.

A grey image appears on the large screen, like iron filings gathering around shifting magnetic fields.

‘It’s too old,’ Johan whispers.

Several layers of flickering shadows appear, and they can make out parts of the garden. Joona sees two ghostly silhouettes walk down the drive. One is the Foreign Minister, and the other is Janus Mickelsen of the Security Police.

‘Janus,’ Joona says.

‘The Foreign Minister was his first deployment with the Security Police,’ Johan murmurs as he types new commands into the main computer.

The image disappears, the house is just about visible through the grey fog, and the snow-covered garden flickers into view.

‘The garland’s still folded up, but we can start pulling the gingerbread men apart now... June fourth, June third, June second...’

Pale shapes glide to and fro at a rapid pace, passing straight through each other. It looks like an X-ray, with the outlines of figures moving inside one another, through cars reversing and driving into the garage.

‘May fifteenth, fourteenth... And here we have thirteen lovely versions of the last day of April,’ Johan Jönson says softly.

With the footage running at eight times normal speed, they watch the Foreign Minister and his wife leave the house at 7.30 in separate cars. A landscaping company appears two hours later. One man cuts the hedge and another blows leaves. The postman drives past, and at 2.00 a boy on a bike stops and looks into the garden as he scratches his leg. At 7.40 the first car returns to the double garage and lights go on inside the house. Half an hour later the second car arrives, and the garage door closes. Around 11.00 the lights start to go off, and by midnight everything is dark. Then nothing happens until 3.00 a.m., when Rex Müller climbs over the fence and weaves his way across the lawn.

‘Now let’s check the cameras in real-time, one by one,’ Joona says, moving closer.