A Death in Sweden(38)

“Can you ever move on? Isn’t that what some of these other guys did, and it still caught up with them?”

She was right about that.

“I guess I’ll know soon enough. But wanting it’s a start, surely?”

She nodded and leaned in to kiss him, and that amorphous desire for something resembling a normal life seemed even more pressing now, because he realized she wanted it for him too, and that made it feel tangible. She didn’t necessarily see herself as part of his future—why would she?—but she cared about what happened to him, a rare enough occurrence in his life that he wanted to hold onto it.





Chapter Twenty-three


They woke early the next morning but lingered on in bed, and before either of them thought to check the time it had turned nine.

Inger jumped up and said, “We need to be quick if we’re catching that train.”

He smiled, even as she gathered up her clothes and walked through the connecting door into her own room, but then he lay back on the pillow. He still wasn’t quite sure what had happened, or what it signified, whether it was a one-off or whether there might be more to it than that.

But that was where his thoughts ran aground, because for all the talk of moving on, he didn’t know what the coming months held, and as much as she wanted a better life for him, he couldn’t imagine that she’d want to be a part of it.

He could hear that she’d gone into the bathroom, could hear the shower running, and finally he jumped up and went into his own bathroom. He’d been in the shower for a few minutes when he heard a door close, or what sounded like a door closing. He didn’t think much of it, though he was vigilant enough that he remained tuned in for further sounds from the room beyond.

He heard nothing more until he turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, but as he started to dry off he heard Inger say, “Dan?”

Her voice was faint, as if she was calling from her own room.

“Yeah, what is it?”

“Could you come out here, please?”

He thought again now of the closing door and the strange tone in her voice. He put the towel around his waist and looked around quickly—there was nothing he could defend himself with if she wasn’t alone out there. At a loss he picked up another towel, knowing that anything he threw might give him a moment’s edge.

He opened the door and immediately saw her sitting on the end of his bed in her underwear. In spite of knowing something was wrong, for a fleeting moment he was distracted again by her simple beauty, but then his eyes fell to what she was looking at. Between the bathroom door and the door to his room, a guy was lying crumpled on the floor.

Dan dropped to one knee behind him. There was a gun on the floor so he leaned over and slid it out of reach, then looked at the guy. He was average height but stocky, wearing what looked like a ski jacket. His hair was dark and cropped close, and Dan could see a little blood at the base of his skull and a larger area that looked misshapen.

He was unconscious at the very least. Dan pressed his fingers into the warmth of the guy’s neck, held them there for a few seconds, then turned him on his side and checked his pockets, finding nothing.

He stood again and turned, looking at her. He also saw now that one of the heavy metal bedside lamps was on the floor next to the bed.

He pointed and said, “You hit him with that?”

She turned, in shock, and looked at the lamp on the floor as if reminding herself, then nodded. He walked over and crouched in front of her, taking her hands in his.

“Dan, he had a gun. He was going to go into your bathroom, and . . .” She seemed vague, but was hit by a wave of clarity then and said, “Is he dead?”

“Yeah, he’s dead. Must have been a lucky hit.”

“Lucky?”

“Yeah, lucky. You might have hurt him but not killed him. You might have hurt him but just made him angry.”

She nodded, accepting the point, recovering her composure by the second, and she sounded almost her usual self as she said, “I know I had to do it. He might’ve killed you, or both of us. But . . . I never killed anyone before.”

He nodded, still holding onto her hands, and said, “It’s not an easy thing, I won’t pretend it is. But you did do the right thing. And you must have known this day might come when you joined the Security Service.”

“The Swedish Security Service,” she said, and managed a weak smile.

“Point taken.”

She looked over at the body and said, “Do you know him? I hope to God he’s not CIA.”

Dan looked behind too, though he couldn’t see his face clearly from here. “I don’t recognize him. I’m pretty certain he isn’t CIA. He looks wrong.”

He didn’t say it, but he also guessed Bill Brabham was reluctant to use his own people now that Dan and Charlie had hit back and he’d taken casualties. So he was using freelancers where he could but, of course, thanks to Bill Brabham himself, a lot of the better freelancers were now dead.

“But how did he know you were here?”

“Beats me. Either there’s a leak in your office or in Patrick White’s. I don’t have an office.”

“It must be Patrick’s, so we have to tell him. He was expecting you to be on your own, I think, so that suggests he was following you, not me.”