Siren Song: A Different Scandinavian Crime Novel (23 page)

She rises and walks up the stairs unsteadily. On the first floor, the receptionist opens a door and leads John into an office. John closes the door behind them and looks around.

A long corridor, five doors on either side. Wooden floor, white walls, framed art posters. At the far end of the corridor is another door; above it, an emergency exit sign.

Keeping the receptionist in front of him, John walks down the corridor and peers inside the rooms he passes. Broad desks, computer monitors, unplugged cables and coffee cups. The air smells of beer and Xerox machines. All lights are off. No people in sight. Outside, sirens howl, car doors slam, and people shout, all against the backdrop of the manic car alarm.

When they reach the door at the end of the corridor, John tells the receptionist to stop.

“Is this the way out?” he asks.

She nods and swallows. “The stairs behind the door lead to an exit to the plaza on the other side of the building.”

“Step aside.” John looks through the window in the door. Inside is a spiral staircase in matte metal. Below the stairs, he glimpses another windowed door, and beyond that, the streets outside. He sees no police officers.

He closes the door, looks around the corridor, and finds what he is looking for. Lowering his bag to the floor, he turns back to the receptionist.

“Close your eyes,” John says.

*

Frenetic shouts surround Lena while she peers through the car’s shattered side window.

“Drop your weapon and come out–”

“Too much blood. Get a bandage–”

“Watch his finger. It’s going to–”

“I got it. Hold still–”

“Keep your head down–”

Her head rings from screams, car alarms, sirens, clanging alarm bells, radio calls and the metallic rustle of weapons. Breathing is difficult; her lungs feel as stiff as concrete.

“Fucking hell,” a Piket team officer next to her growls. “He’s armed.”

“Really?” Lena lets out a shuddering breath. She grimaces and wipes fragments of the car’s window from her clothes. Slivers of glass protrude up from the snow around her.

She turns away from the side window and slides down, her back pressed against the car door. Her hands are sweaty around the black metal of her gun. Tasting iron in her mouth, she spits blood on the ground. She must have bit her tongue when she took cover.

The Piket had beaten Lena and the other police officers to the scene by seconds. Their bulky blue and white van stopped right outside the entrance. Agnes parked right behind it, so close she had to reverse to let them open the back doors of the van. Three more police cars stopped at haphazard angles in the snow behind Lena and Agnes’s car.

Lena spotted trouble straight away: the entrance to Tom’s office looked like white glass, but the whiteness was moving, shifting and rolling like a pale cloud behind the windows.

Car doors opened and shut as police filled the street, equipment was readied, radios hissed and cracked, voices snapped commands. The noise cut Lena’s eardrums; she sensed a tremendous headache building up. She tried to ask the Piket team leader if they had surrounded the building, but her questions went unheard in the cacophony.

Then someone had fired at them.

Bullets zipped out of the white cloud, cut clean through windows, and smashed into the brickwork around the police officers. One shot tore straight through the window of a police car. Another hit an officer’s hand and left one finger dangling by threads. Shattered glass and pulverized mortar rained down.

The bangs were almost inaudible over the racket; Lena felt rather than heard the impacts. She threw herself on the ground and half-dragged Agnes down with her. There had been at least seven or eight shots, and there could easily be more. The ringing around her seems to have tripled in volume.

The Piket officer next to Lena curses again. “We didn’t expect this. I was told the suspect was likely to run.”

“Pity no one asked me,” Lena says. John is unpredictability personified. She might be able to track him, but there is no knowing what he will do next.

“Did you know he has a gun?” the Piket officer asks, looking at her.

Lena does not reply. She is not even sure it was John who fired at them, but the timing and her gut feeling agree: This is no coincidence. Somewhere in the depth of the white cloud are John and a weapon. She does not know where he found it, what type it is, or how much ammunition he has.

One thing is clear: he is not afraid to use it. In a way, it is a good sign; perhaps they have him cornered.

Agnes crouches next to Lena and leans against the car, her gun in her hands. The strange white cloud still conceals the interior of the entrance. Calls for the shooter to stand down and come out have had no result. Huddled together behind their van, the Piket team put on gas masks while two groups of police officers move to each side of the entrance, weapons drawn and aimed at the ground.

Lena overhears the Piket team leader as he gives orders: His team will fire tear gas into the entrance and enter through nearby windows in hope of cutting off the shooter’s escape routes. A round of nods later, they dash away from behind the van.

One Piket officer leans around the van and levels a tear gas rifle at the entrance. He squints and begins to pull the trigger, but the team leader jumps back, bats the tear gas rifle to the side, and points to the entrance.

Dozens of people are staggering out of the smoke, blinking, gaping, and coughing. Bewildered, they stop in the middle of the street and stare at the police. One of them raises his hands slowly.

“Hold your fire,” the team leader screams. He points to the people who are leaving the building. “All of you, down on the ground, now. Drop
down
, for fuck’s sake.”

Slowly, the stunned group obeys. One man pauses to arrange his jacket on the snow before he gingerly sits down. The Piket team leader sends his team in with a series of gestures, and the group of indignant, astonished people is dragged away from the street and into cover. Lena hears protests and raised voices demanding answers.

“What’s going on?” one man shouts. “Where’s the fire?”

Lena realizes that a fire alarm is blending with the din of sirens and the car alarm. She looks down the street and sees people exit from two other doors. Young women and men, smart clothes, precise haircuts. Several of them carry coffee cups. One woman holds a champagne glass. Fortunately, there are only a few dozen; had it been a weekday, the street would have been packed.

Other people crowd the street farther away, staring and pointing. An ambulance arrives, adding its wail to the cacophony as it parks well out of range of the entrance.

“We must go in,” Lena says to Agnes.

“Without the Piket team?”

“Yes. No. Goddamn it, what’s holding them back?”

“All the people coming out, I think. John’s shots must have set off the alarm.”

“Unless he set it off on purpose.” Lena suspects that he did; if the street had not been filled with confused, hungover people, the police could have searched half the building by now.

“There’s smoke inside the entrance,” Lena says, “but I can’t smell anything burning. And the smoke is too white. Do you think it’s gas?”

“No idea,” Agnes says. “Wait.” She points to the entrance. “Look, the smoke is thinning.”

Lena watches the entrance slowly emerge out of the white haze. There does not seem to be anyone inside. She turns to the Piket team leader, who is listening closely to his radio. “Is John among the people who just came out?” she asks, knowing he will not be.

The team leader shakes his head. “No one matches the suspect.”

“What about Tom?” Lena asks. “He should be here.” Unless John has found him, in which case Tom is in trouble. Or already beyond trouble.

“Who’s Tom?” the Piket officer asks.

“Another suspect. Sort of. His full name is Tom Lundberg. If you find him, detain him.”

The Piket team leader nods. “I’ll find out if he’s around.”

“We’ve got to find John before he does something worse,” Lena says. “We don’t know what happened in there before we got here. There could be people dying or dead. Any idea what that smoke is?”

“I’d guess a fire extinguisher,” he says. “I have to go.” He leaves and joins his team behind the large van.

Two police officers seal off the street with police tape to keep bystanders away from an eventual gunman’s line of fire. Three other officers take statements from the people who left because of the fire alarm.

Precious minutes pass while Lena waits behind her car and listens to calls for the gunman to surrender. More people drift from other exits and are rounded up by the Piket. Still no sign of John.

When repeated calls for the shooter to give up have no result, the Piket finally moves in. Their leader shouts a string of commands, and his team rushes into position next to the entrance. The tear gas rifle makes a hollow
chunk
as it fires a cartridge into the hall, where it detonates in a spinning whirl of smoke.

Waiting behind the car, Lena hears the sound of running boots and glass being smashed. She looks up and sees the last member of the Piket team vanish into the fading white mist. Distant calls echo as they search room after room
.
No gunshots or screams. The fire alarm keeps ringing.

This is a catastrophe in the making. If the Piket team blocks John’s way or points their guns at him, John will do what he must to keep moving. People will die. John will die. She will fail.

She rises up, runs to the back of the Piket van, and snatches a gas mask from a basket. Agnes calls out behind her, but her focus is engulfed by the idea of a stand-off between John and the Piket. They do not know, cannot begin to anticipate what they are up against.

Pressing the mask against her face with one hand, she darts to the entrance, moves up to a wall, and edges towards the stairs. In here, the fire alarm is deafening. The entrance is partially filled with smoke again, though this time, it is tear gas. One lungful can bring her to her knees in a vomiting fit in an instant. Even though she presses the mask hard against her face, her eyes water as tendrils of the chemical inferno sneak under the rubber.

Holding her gun aimed down, she runs up to the landing of the first floor. The door is open. She leans in and sees part of the Piket team working their way down the corridor, securing room after room.

She is about to walk in when she hears coughing from higher up in the stairwell. A young man in a crisp shirt walks cautiously down the stairs, blinking hard and covering his mouth with his hands. He stops when he sees Lena. Behind him, more people crowd the stairwell.

“You,” Lena shouts at the man over the alarm. “Have you seen a man heading up the stairs?” She describes John in a few words.

The man stares at her gun and shakes his head. “No…one.” He coughs brutally and sways. “Just us,” he wheezes.

“Run down, out and right. Do not breathe. Don’t stop outside the entrance.” Lena raises her voice. “All of you. Move it, get out.”

She lets the parade of stunned and coughing people pass and walks into the corridor on the first floor. Not only is she worrying about John; she cannot get in the way of the Piket. Not because she might distract them, but if they thought she caused a problem and reported that to Gren, she knows what will happen.

*

John

Miriam kicks the front door open and drags John out into the night. The clearing in the forest is still there, but the wind has picked up to a gale. Trees and bushes bend in the merciless wind while leaves and snowflakes sting his skin. He turns in time to see the door in the tree slam shut in his face and disappear.

“Come on,” Miriam cries over the storm. “We’re running out of time.” As if to underline her point, the ground heaves with a deep tremor.

“So everyone keeps telling me,” John murmurs.

He begins to walk, but after a few steps, his walk turns into a jog. Anger gives him strength when he should have been exhausted. This last betrayal was so much crueller than the previous illusions, but he is past the watershed. His path is set.

They run back into the forest and continue uphill. The air is thick with the scents of sap and wet wood, but it is also lined with the stench of disinfectants, plastic, sweat and fuel. Shadows flicker and dart at the edge of his vision as if stalking him.

He keeps his eyes on the ground to avoid roots or sudden pits. As long as the movement around him does not try to stop him, he does not care. Only speed matters. Miriam has not said anything, but he knows they are fleeing from an entity much more dangerous than a barbed bush or a hidden crevice.

They burst through a hedge and stumble into a field of tall, dry grass. The artificial stenches are stronger here. In front of them is an open space that ends in a gentle curve. Farther away is a distant backdrop of treetops. They have reached the top of the hill.

At the top of the rise is an enormous, soaring tree, its trunk several strides wide. Its vast crown is lost in the darkness above. The sky is dark, but not black; it is alive with a muddled swirl of greys and blacks. He realizes they are clouds, churning and rolling, stretching from horizon to horizon. More scents come to him: damp textiles and coffee, electricity and gasoline, alcohol and perfume. The aromas seem to waft down from the clouds, as if pulled to the ground by the raging winds.

A new tremor racks the ground. Somewhere in the forest, a tree falls with a tremendous crash. Miriam shifts from one foot to the other and bites on a fingernail.

John looks at her. “The tree?”

“Does it feel right?” Miriam asks.

John grimaces and balls his fists. “I don’t know,” he murmurs. “What if that thing is hiding up there?”

“What if it’s not?” Miriam asks.

“I can’t face that again.”

Miriam puts a hand on John’s shoulder and squeezes. “You came out on top. Nothing pisses it off more.” She pauses. “But now, it’s after the heart of the matter.”

“I don’t understand?”

“She wants me,” Miriam says. “But that doesn’t mean you’re safe. It’ll make sure your death is collateral.”

Another tree falls behind them, the crash just audible over the wind. A crescendo of crashes follows. John turns around and sees splintered trees being pushed aside. Something unseen is advancing towards them.

John turns and runs for the tree. No matter what evils might wait for him in its top, they cannot be worse than the one chasing him and Miriam. The thick grass pricks his bare feet, and the snow lashes his skin. He can hear Miriam’s quick breaths and the clink of her lantern close behind him. The presence behind them is closing in; he can feel it like a chill against his back.

He reaches the tree and stops. Up close, it is impossibly tall. Its crown is a giant network of naked branches, faintly outlined like dark veins against the grey clouds. The dark trunk is full of knots and broken branches. He knows how they will feel under his fingers; as a child, he often climbed trees like these, driven by curiosity.

The wind is building to a roaring pandemonium. Miriam watches him in silence, and he understands her solemn expression.

“This is it, right?” John shouts over the noise. “My exit.”

She nods. “Come on, get up there. Remember what you looked for at the top when you were younger.”

“You’re not coming with me.”

“I’ll delay it if I can. It’s scared. You’ve grown strong.”

“It doesn’t sound scared to me.”

“Don’t prove me wrong. And don’t worry about me. I’ll be around.” She flashes a forced grin and pushes John towards the tree.

“It will kill you.”

Miriam shrugs. “Maybe,” she shouts. “I know its bag of petty tricks. We’ve gone toe to toe before.”

John wants to ask what she means but knows he is running out of time. He puts his hands on the stub of a branch and tries its strength. It is sturdier than he thought.

“Godspeed, John.” Miriam salutes him and bites her lip, then turns away and runs into the tempest.

Steeling himself, John starts to climb.

*