in the backseat, someone who could help him?
He tries to open his mouth and sees the silhouette in the mirror do the same. He can see stubble, a tormented but familiar face. He realizes what that means. There’s no one else there, he’s all alone.
The light in the rearview mirror is blinding him, making his eyes water. The voices on the radio are still babbling, louder now – even more agitated.
The shutdown of his body is speeding up. It’s spreading from his legs and up toward his chest.
‘Police!’ one of the radio voices yells. The word forces its way in and soon fills the whole of his consciousness.
Police.
Police.
Police.
He looks away from the rearview mirror and laboriously turns his head a few centimetres. The effort makes him groan with pain.
‘Your name is David Sarac.’
And?
Some distance ahead he can see the rear lights of another car. Alongside them is a large warning sign, an obstruction of some sort, and an exit ramp. The rear lights are suddenly glowing bright red.
He ought to turn the wheel, follow the car ahead of him out of the tunnel. His every instinct tells him that would be the sensible thing to do. But the connection to his arms seems to be on the way to shutting down as well, because all he can manage is a brief, jerky movement.
The obstruction is getting closer, a large concrete barrier dividing the two tubes of the tunnel. The reflective signs are shimmering in the glare of the car’s headlights. He tries to look a few seconds into the future and work out whether he’s in danger of a collision. But his brain is no longer working the way it normally does.
The shutdown reaches his face, making his chin drop.
The distance to the barrier is still shrinking.
‘Police.’
The word is back, even more insistent this time, and suddenly he realises why. He’s the police; the blue lights are coming from his own car.
His name is David Sarac. He’s a police officer. And …?
The pain in his head eases long enough for him to be able to piece together a coherent chain of thought. What is he doing here? Who is he chasing? Or is he the one being chased?
The lights in the rearview mirror are getting closer and closer. Burning into his head.
Fear overwhelms him, sending his pulse racing. The ice-blue pain returns, even stronger this time. His eyelids flutter; all the noise around him fades away into the distance. He tries to remain conscious, fighting the shutdown process. But there’s no longer anything he can do.
A brief jolt shakes the car. But he hardly notices it. The shutdown process is almost complete and he is more or less unconscious again. Free from pain, fear, and confusion. All that remains is a stubborn, scarcely noticeable signal in his tortured brain. An electrical impulse passing between two nerve cells that refuses to let itself be shut down – not until it’s completed its task.
Just before his car crashes into the concrete barrier, the second before the vehicle goes from being an object with clearly defined parametres to a warped heap of scrap metal, the impulse finally reaches its target. In a single, crystal-clear moment he suddenly remembers everything.
Why he is in this car. What it’s all about.
Faces, names, places, amounts.
The reason why all of them, every last one of them, must die.
All because of him. Because of the secret …
An immense feeling of relief courses through his body. Followed by regret.
His name is David Sarac. He is a police officer.
And he’s done something unforgivable.
As a child, Jesper Stenberg sometimes got the feeling he could make time stop. It usually involved Christmas or birthdays. Special occasions he’d been particularly looking forward to. In the midst of everything, when things were at their height, it was as if time would slow down. Giving him the chance to suck every little nuance, every euphoric sensation out of the moment he had been looking forward to for so long, in peace and quiet.
He could still recall those occasions of being utterly in the moment, and could describe them in minute detail thirty years later: the colour of his mum’s dress, the smell of his dad’s aftershave, the way the shiny wrapping paper felt beneath his little fingers. It was all fresh in his memory, without the sad patina of pictures in a photograph album.
But the ability suddenly vanished during his early teenage years. For a long time he believed it was because of his parents’ divorce. Unless it was simply because he was growing up and losing his childish perception of time. Whatever the reason, special occasions were never the same after that. Graduation from high school, getting his law degree, his first criminal case, when he proposed to Karolina, even their extravagant wedding. It could all be summarized with just one word: disappointment.
He had worked so hard for those moments. Had longed for them, fantasized about how they would feel, taste, smell. Then, all too quickly, everything was over and all that was left were a few fuzzy memories and a nagging sense of dissatisfaction.
He would persuade himself that it would be different next time. If he could just aim a bit higher and pull the bow a bit tighter, he’d be able to feel more. When the children were born, his job in the Hague, membership in the Bar Association, the day when he was invited to become the youngest-ever partner in the prestigious law firm of Thorning & Partners.
But there was always the same feeling, the same inability to live in the moment. As if there were some sort of thin filter between him and reality.
He started to take photographs. Deluged his computer with scalpel-sharp digital images, devoting hours to putting together short films of holidays in the sun, gingham-cloth picnics and Astrid Lindgren moments with Karolina and the children. But no matter how good the resolution of the camera, or how many pixels on the screen, he still didn’t feel satisfied. It was as if he had missed something essential in those moments, some tiny, invisible nuance that could make all the difference.
But today everything was different. This was Stenberg’s greatest moment to date, the moment he had been waiting for for years, and he didn’t need to look down at the Patek Philippe watch on his wrist. He knew that the second hand of the precision-made Swiss watch had just stopped, and that this moment would be just as stylized and perfect as he had always dreamed it would be. All his hard work, all his sacrifices were finally about to pay off. The years of drudgery in the public prosecutors’ office: the fraudsters, wife beaters, petty criminals, thieves, and all the rest of the rabble. Then his time in the Hague, admittedly with bigger cases, but where a young prosecutor like him mostly got used as an errand boy. Then the move to Thorning & Partners. High-profile cases, excellent for a young, ambitious defense lawyer who wanted to make
