A Death in Sweden(30)

So he spent the night alone in the hotel on Skeppsholmen, almost as quiet and removed from the world as the cabin they’d been sharing the last few days. The hotel itself wasn’t one he’d have chosen if it hadn’t been for the location, so he went to bed early and spent an hour listening to the wind blowing the leaves from the trees, and the faint sounds of the very few cars that came onto the island.

He woke once in the night, knocked into high alert by a noise nearby, probably only a door closing in the corridor. He could still hear the breeze working through the branches outside, but nothing else of the city beyond. And as he lay, slowly yielding to sleep again, he thought of Inger, somewhere else in the city, sleeping in her own bed, a million miles away from him.

The next day was clear and sunny but there was a stiff breeze now, chopping up the water in the harbor, a cold bite to it. Seeing the island in the daylight, he realized he’d been here before. The hotel and the few other buildings had been part of some historic garrison, so the whole island had that leafy campus quality he’d often seen in military installations. Most of those leaves now lay thick on the ground and more skittered and whipped through the air on the wind.

He crossed over to the mainland and left a message for Patrick White in the reception at the Grand Hotel, telling him simply to cross the bridge to Skeppsholmen at eleven. The location was perfect in that sense, in that it allowed him to make sure Patrick was on his own and not being followed.

He went back, spent an hour in the modern art museum, then got into position with a decent view over the long bridge to the island. Despite the cold there were a fair number of people strolling across it, but he saw Patrick from some distance away.

Once Dan had spotted him, he let him go again, focusing instead on all the other people on the bridge. He wasn’t expecting to see someone tailing Patrick in an obvious way, and he knew that the overweight guy leaning looking out over the water was just as likely to be part of a surveillance operation as anyone else.

But these guys usually gave themselves away in some other fashion, in much the same way that actors always seemed to find it impossible to play “real” people. There were tells, things that Dan could spot, sometimes without even being able to define it. So he was fairly confident, so far at least, that no one was following Patrick White.

Once he’d crossed the bridge, Patrick kept walking casually, as if he were heading somewhere specific but at no great speed. Dan shadowed him for a little while longer and finally caught up with him.

Patrick didn’t turn at the sound of approaching footsteps, but just before Dan reached him, he said, “It’s a little brisk, this morning, isn’t it?”

“Brisk? I suppose so.”

As Dan drew level, Patrick said, “Charlie killed Jack Carlton and Rob Foster, wounded Alex Robinson.”

“I don’t know Robinson.” He didn’t want to know him, either, figuring he was the coward who’d made a run for it. And he had to hand it to Charlie, he’d been insistent that he’d hit him and it turned out he had.

“I don’t know him well, but he seems to be marked for greatness.” He was certainly marked for survival, which Dan guessed was half the battle. After a pause, Patrick said, “He said Charlie had other people at his place, that he and the others were ambushed.”

Dan gave Patrick a look, as if to ask if he was really that gullible, and said, “I liked Jack Carlton, I like him even more now that he’s not trying to kill me, so I don’t want you to infer that he or Foster fell short in any way that night, but there was no ambush and there was only one other person. Robinson wouldn’t have known that because he abandoned his team without even trying to help. If he hadn’t, they’d have had the edge on us because Foster came close on his own. Charlie took a bullet.”

“Serious?”

“Messed his hand up, but probably not too bad. I hope not, anyway, because the bullet was meant for me.”

Patrick nodded and said, “You might have told me all this at Café Florence.”

“I might.”

“Yes, I understand why you didn’t. But either way, Brabham’s used Robinson’s report as justification for upping the game.”

“I’m sure he has.” There was nothing more to add. From the point of view of Dan and Charlie, it couldn’t get much higher than having targets on their backs. He pointed ahead, and said, “Let’s turn here. We’ll take a ferry ride.”

“You seem to know the place pretty well.”

“Yeah, I spent a couple of weeks here some years back, researching a job for you—which my local escort asked me about, by the way.”

“Did she? You tell her what happened?”

“Of course.”

“She take it alright?”

“I think so.” Patrick nodded and they walked in silence for a few paces before Dan said, “Who was Jack Redford?”

“Redford?” He sounded surprised, not as if he didn’t recognize the name but as if he was struggling to work out the connection, perhaps thinking it related in some way to the Habibi case. “Redford. Where to begin? I never met him, very few people did, but he did a lot of work for us, a long time back. Ex-Special Forces, but he became a phenomenal one-man tiger team, usually testing the security of our own facilities, which is why very few people ever got to meet him. Sometimes he’d do other kinds of work . . .” He laughed. “Essentially stealing things for us from places we couldn’t get to, breaking into secure facilities to plant surveillance equipment, that kind of thing. He was something else. One of a kind.”