She looks on in silence as he reaches for the bottle of vodka and takes a deep swig. Close up, she can see that his eyes are bloodshot, and she realises that the dead look on his face is because he’s drunk.
His fat, naked torso is dirty and on his shoulders and arms there are a number of tattoos. There’s a snake coiled around his right arm, and on the other barbed wire loops around women’s heads. ‘Eto konets, devotchka,’ he says, stroking her cheek.
She shuts her eyes and feels his thick fingers fumble over her face before they pull the tape from her mouth with a sharp tug. It hurts badly, but she swallows her scream.
She can feel a hot trickle of blood running over her lips, and realises that the strong tape has torn her skin.
‘Devotchka …’ he mutters quietly while she coughs, and she feels him stroke her hair. She can hardly speak a word of Russian, but she knows that word. Devotchka means ‘little girl’, she learned that from watching A Clockwork Orange, when she wanted to know what the young women who were raped in the film were being called.
‘You drink,’ he says, and she hears the glass bottle scraping on the floor.
Is he going to rape her? And what’s he going to do with that drill apart from make a hole in the ceiling?
She slowly shakes her head, but his fingers grab hold of her chin and force her to open her mouth. His hands smell of machine oil.
When she feels the bottle hit her teeth she looks up, and as the alcohol stings the wounds around her mouth she can see that he’s attached a hook to the ceiling. And he seems to be holding something that looks like a thin nylon rope in the same hand as the bottle of vodka.
A noose, she thinks. He’s going to hang me.
‘Drink, devotchka … Drink!’ His voice is soft, almost friendly.
Like hell I will. Drink your fucking vodka yourself.
She peeps through her eyelashes and watches as he drinks more from the bottle, then shakes his head. He lifts her head and puts the noose around her neck. Then he lets out a short laugh and pats her lightly on the cheek. ‘Hey, me Rodya …’ He grins and points at himself. ‘And you?’
‘Rodya … Go fuck yourself,’ she says. The first words she’s spoken since they locked her up.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I fuck you.’
He begins to tighten the noose around her neck. He pulls it so tight that it forces her larynx down. She groans and the urge to vomit returns.
He grabs hold of her body and rolls her over onto her side. He takes something out of his pocket, and when he grabs her wrists and the pressure on them eases she realises that it’s a knife, and that he’s freed her hands.
‘I fuck you dead. Eto konets, devotchka.’
He pulls her up by the rope, which tightens even more, and her vision starts to flicker as he leans her back against the concrete wall.
Soon she’ll be dead, and she doesn’t want that.
She wants to live.
If she’s allowed to live, she’ll never go back to the life she lived before. She’ll realise her dreams. Not hide away or be scared of failure, and she’ll show everyone that she deserves to be taken seriously.
But now she’s going to die.
She thinks about everything she didn’t know she knew. The coastline of Europe and the fifty states of America. She knows all their names now, they come to her all at once, and the four she had trouble remembering were Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey, and that’s because they’re so small on her world map. She feels her arm fall slack to the floor as the cord burns into her neck.
Kronoberg – Police Headquarters
THE SWEDISH POLICE have access to six helicopters, model EC135, manufactured by Messerschmitt, best known for supplying the Luftwaffe with fighter planes during World War II.
Jeanette Kihlberg and Jens Hurtig are standing on the roof of police headquarters waiting to be picked up. Jeanette demanded that the prosecutor organise a helicopter so that they can get to the north of Norrland as fast as possible – and that they should have backup from the response unit. Prosecutor von Kwist had agreed to her demands.
Jeanette goes over to the edge of the roof and looks out across the Stockholm night.
Hurtig comes and stands next to her, and they look at the view together in silence.
‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for,’ Hurtig suddenly proclaims solemnly.
‘How do you mean?’ Jeanette asks, looking at her colleague.
‘Hemingway,’ he explains. ‘From For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’ve always liked that line.’
‘It’s nice,’ she says back, smiling.
‘After everything I’ve seen today, I can only agree with the second part,’ he says, then turns and walks away.
Jeanette watches him go, and wonders what he’s thinking about. Probably the same thing she is, Viggo Dürer’s subterranean chamber of horrors.
How sick can a person get? she wonders. And what made him like that?
God, it’s big, Jeanette thinks as the helicopter approaches. It looks like a small passenger plane, with two engines on the roof, and she realises that it won’t be able to land just anywhere, as she had imagined. Even though it’s more than fifteen metres away from them, they crouch down instinctively when the helicopter lands on the roof. They hurry over, under the shrieking rotor blades, and are met at the door by the first pilot and the head of the response unit.
‘Jump in!’ the unit head shouts. ‘We can do the safety procedures once we’re in the air.’
In total there are eleven people sitting on long benches running along the sides of the helicopter. Full combat gear, and an almost devout atmosphere if you didn’t count Hurtig’s persistent questions. ‘Seven hundred and fifty kilometres, as the crow flies,’ he says. ‘How long’s that going to take? Three hours?’
‘No, longer than that,’ the unit head says. ‘We haven’t got the weather or the wind in our favour. Say four hours. We’ll be there sometime around half past four, so you should probably try to get some sleep.’
Kiev
HE’S TRAVELLED UNDER a false name many times before. But this time it’s different.
This time the name on his travel documents is a woman’s. His real name.
Gilah Berkowitz.
There hadn’t been any problems at the Swedish or Latvian border controls, and the Ukrainian customs officers aren’t usually interested when a Swedish passport is presented. Real or fake, it doesn’t matter, all they see are the stars of the EU logo.
Before she goes out to the waiting car she buys a pack of cigarettes from a tobacco seller with wrinkled hands whose dark blue veins stand out from the skin.