Sergey checked his watch. And confirmed that exactly twelve minutes had passed since he last checked. He closed his eyes and tried to visualise him. The policeman.
In fact, there was another detail about the story of his uncle’s alleged death. The officer who had stolen his knife had been found soon afterwards in the Taiga forest, what was left of him, that is – the rest had been eaten by a bear.
It was dark both outside and inside when the telephone rang.
It was Andrey.
10
TORD SCHULTZ UNLOCKED THE door to his house, stared into the darkness and listened to the dense silence for a while. Sat down on the sofa without switching on the light and waited for the reassuring roar of the next plane.
They had let him go.
A man who introduced himself as an inspector had entered his cell, crouched in front of him and asked why the hell he had hidden flour in his trolley bag.
‘Flour?’
‘That’s what the Kripos lab say they’ve found.’
Tord Schultz had repeated the same thing he said when he was arrested, the emergency procedure, he didn’t know how the plastic bag had come into his possession or what it contained.
‘You’re lying,’ the inspector had said. ‘And we’re going to keep an eye on you.’
Then he had held the cell door open and nodded as a signal that he should leave.
Tord gave a start as a piercing ring filled the bare, darkened room. He got up and groped his way to the telephone on a wooden chair beside the training bench.
It was the operations manager. He told Tord that he had been taken off international flights for the foreseeable future and moved to domestic flights.
Tord asked why.
His boss said there had been a management meeting to discuss his situation.
‘You must appreciate we cannot have you on foreign flights with this suspicion hanging over you.’
‘So why don’t you ground me?’
‘Well.’
‘Well?’
‘If we suspend you and the arrest leaks out to the press they’ll immediately conclude we think you’re guilty and it will be grist to their mill … no pun intended.’
‘And you don’t?’
There was a silence before the answer came.
‘It would damage the airline if we admitted we suspected one of our pilots of being a drug smuggler, don’t you think?’
The pun was intended.
The remainder of what he said was drowned in the noise of a TU-154.
Tord put down the receiver.
He groped his way back to the sofa and sat down. Ran his fingertips over the glass coffee table. Felt stains of dried mucus, spit and coke. What now? A drink or a line? A drink and a line?
He got up. The Tupolev was coming in low. Its lights flooded the whole living room and Tord stared for a second at his reflection in the window.
Then it was dark again. But he had seen it. Seen it in his eyes, and he knew he would see it on colleagues’ faces. The contempt, the condemnation and – worst of all – the sympathy.
Domestic. We’re going to keep an eye on you. I see you.
If he couldn’t fly abroad he would have no value for them any more. All he would be was a desperate, debt-ridden, cocaine-addicted risk. A man on police radar, a man under pressure. He didn’t know much, but more than enough to be aware that he could destroy the infrastructure they had built. And they would do what had to be done. Tord Schultz wrapped his hands around the back of his head and groaned aloud. He was not born to fly a fighter jet. It had gone into a spin, and he didn’t have it in him to regain control; he just sat watching the rotating ground getting closer. And knew his sole chance of survival was to sacrifice the jet. He would have to activate the ejector seat. Fire himself out. Now.
He would have to go to someone high up in the police, someone he could be sure was above the drug gangs’ corruption money. He would have to go to the top.
Yes, Tord Schultz thought. He breathed out and felt muscles he had not noticed were tense, relax. He would go to the top.
First of all, though, a drink.
And a line.
Harry was given the room key by the same boy in reception.
He thanked him and took the stairs in long strides. There had not been a single Arsenal shirt to be seen on the way from the Metro station in Egertorget to Hotel Leon.
As he approached room 301 he slowed down. Two of the bulbs in the corridor had gone, which made it so dark he could barely see the light under his door. In Hong Kong electricity prices were so high he had abandoned the bad Norwegian habit of leaving lights on when he went out, but he could not be sure that the cleaner had left it on. If she had, she’d also forgotten to lock the door.
Harry stood with the key in his right hand as the door opened of its own accord. In the light from the solitary ceiling lamp he saw a figure. It was standing with its back to him, bent over his suitcase on the bed. As the door hit the wall with a little thud the figure turned calmly, and a man with an oblong, furrowed face looked at Harry with St Bernard eyes. He was tall, stooped and wore a long coat, a woollen jumper and a dirty priest’s collar around his neck. His long, unkempt hair was broken up on either side of his face by the biggest eyes Harry had ever seen. The man had to be seventy, at least. They could not be more dissimilar, yet Harry’s first thought was that it was like looking at a reflection.