A Death in Sweden(58)

It was still dark when he arrived, and bitterly cold, but he could tell why Brabham had chosen this location. It was a quiet, anonymous street in Charlottenburg, a mixture of offices and residential, the odd store or bar, a cobbled road surface. No one would ever suspect it.

In fact, the neighborhood was so ordinary that the hotel, small and incredibly stylish, looked as if it had been transplanted from somewhere else. The room he was given faced outwards, but the view was obscured by the trees that lined both sides of the street and had not yet shed all their leaves.

So he went back out and took a stroll until he was standing opposite the building. It was a nondescript-looking place, probably built in the 1950s, a pharmacy at street level and a door to the left for the lobby that served the two floors above.

There was no one about at this hour so he took a closer look, a keypad on the door, a plaque for name plates, but none on there—maybe Brabham had both floors. He turned and looked at the building facing. It was older, or looked older, an ornate fin-de-siècle quality with little balustrades outside each of the windows on the upper floors. He could also see that it was empty, with mail lying on the floor just inside the lobby door.

He went back to the hotel and picked up one of his bags. He worked the door of the empty building, then made his way to the top floor and set himself up in one of the rooms, clearly a former office, with phone and modem points dotting the floor. He lowered the blinds too, enough to give him cover should one of Brabham’s people choose to look out of the window.

And then he settled in for the wait. They were looking for him, had been searching for him for weeks, and he knew, because he knew the mindset of these people, that it would never occur to them that he was right here, right now.

They’d have increased their security levels, but they still wouldn’t expect him to actually show up here. And for all their knowledge of his history, they wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t in his character to play the part they imagined for him. Whether they knew it or not, whether they were ready for it or not, they were the targets now.





Chapter Thirty-six


The first to arrive came just before eight. It was light but the street still had a sickly pallor, as if a real sunrise wasn’t guaranteed for the day ahead. The guy looked in his late twenties, suit and overcoat, carrying a coffee and some sort of breakfast food in a bag. He moved the bag into the same hand as the coffee and nonchalantly hit the numbers on the keypad.

Dan was looking through his binoculars and scribbled the number down as it went in. He waited a few minutes then, and watched as the lights flickered into life behind the top floor windows, though the blinds prevented him seeing anything beyond.

The next two arrived about twenty minutes later, one in office clothes, the other dressed like someone who worked at some Internet start-up in Seattle. He couldn’t see the keypad clearly as the formally dressed one punched in, but the pattern looked the same for the numbers he’d written down.

Within minutes, a man and woman came along, both in office clothes, and he realized now that this whole office was on the young side. He guessed they were all in their late twenties or early thirties. The last to arrive was a guy in a heavy sweater and padded jacket, a scarf wrapped around his neck, a lanyard hanging outside the jacket—so they probably needed to swipe the card to get through the inner door.

Even from Dan’s position, he could see this guy was struggling with a heavy cold. He sneezed two or three times in quick succession before finally managing to key in the number. He was slow doing it and once again, Dan got a pretty good view and was certain he’d got it right now.

No one else arrived before nine o’clock and Dan relaxed a little, doubting there’d be much to see for the next few hours. He also knew this wasn’t the full outfit. These were backroom people, though he’d show them no more mercy for that.

The first movement came at lunchtime. The man and woman who’d arrived together went out, strolling along the street and coming back after half an hour with what looked like a lunch order.

He was average build and height, with the kind of boy-next-door good looks that had almost run their distance—he was beginning to look doughy, his hair receding. She was attractive, dark hair pulled back, possibly Hispanic, and she was clearly the more observant of the two, glancing around, even taking in the building where Dan was hiding, though never reaching up to his floor.

Not long after lunch, he saw a black BMW pull into the street. It stopped outside the building as if the driver was searching for a place to park, then reversed, and turned into a narrow gateway that led behind the buildings on that side.

There obviously wasn’t a back entrance because, a few minutes later, the two guys strolled from the same turning and down to the building. Dan recognized them right away, the two guys who’d been parked outside the Vergoncey.

One was fair and, once again, late twenties. The other was a little darker, and closer to Dan’s age, though he didn’t know him. Both of them had a restrained swagger, a misplaced confidence that set them apart from all the other people who’d headed into that office.

Dan watched for a while, but after an hour he guessed they weren’t coming back out. Would they usually spend the day in the office, he wondered, or had they been sent there for additional protection? Brabham would know by now that there had been a death at the Vergoncey and a bloodbath in the countryside near Auxerre, and he’d possibly also heard that Dan was no longer in Paris, so perhaps this was just a precaution, and a half-hearted one at that.