had happened inside the tunnel had to be something serious.
A couple of the students had held their cell phones over the ice-cold railing in the hope of capturing some of the action. But when several minutes passed without anything much happening, they quickly lost interest. The intense cold and falling snow persuaded the group to carry on toward the city centre.
The snowball fight starts somewhere near halfway along Skeppsbron. One of the boys, it isn’t clear which one, stops and picks up an armful of snow from the windshield of a parked car. He quickly forms an uneven snowball and throws it at the backs of his friends, and then everything kicks off. All six of them are running along the sidewalk, dodging one another’s snowballs and stopping to make new ones.
The young woman in the red woolly hat is the one who makes the discovery.
‘Look, there’s someone sitting in here asleep,’ she cries, pointing at one of the parked cars, from whose windshield she’s just swept an armful of snow.
‘Hello, wake up! He looks like he’s passed out.’ She laughs as her boyfriend catches up with her. Through the black hole in the snow he can make out a large, fair-haired man. The man is sitting in the front passenger seat, with his head resting on the dashboard. It looks as if he’s asleep.
The young man on the sidewalk knocks on the windshield as well, and when there’s no reaction he starts clearing the snow that’s still obscuring the view. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, until at last almost the entire windshield is clear. He clears the side window as well. The man in the car still hasn’t moved.
In the distance they can hear the sound of motors and the pulsing roar of a helicopter approaching. Something makes the others stop their snowball fight and approach the car. Cautiously, as if they’re not really sure they want to see who or what is concealed inside the car. But the girl in the red woolly hat hasn’t noticed the change in mood.
‘Come on, leave it,’ she says, with laughter in her voice. ‘I’m freezing, let him sleep.’
She tugs at her boyfriend’s arm, trying to pull him with her. But the young man doesn’t move. As soon as the snow on the side window is gone he presses his nose to the glass.
‘Shit,’ he mutters.
‘What is it …?’ Suddenly the girl’s voice doesn’t sound so amused. More like scared. The noise of the helicopter’s rotor blades is getting louder.
‘Shit,’ the young man repeats, mostly to himself.
Frost on the inside of the glass is obscuring the view, and the inside of the car is dark. But the sleeping man is no more than an arm’s length away and the young man has no problem seeing enough details. The leather jacket, the embroidered logo on the back, the tribal tattoo curling up from the man’s collar like a snake, across his thick neck.
But it’s the dark patch at the back of the sleeping man’s head that catches the young man’s interest. A little hole, full of black ice crystals, each one just a millimetre across, forming a thin pattern of pearls over the stubble at the back of his neck.
The sound of the rotors is deafening, echoing between the buildings and rising to a howl as the helicopter passes straight over them.
‘Shit …’ the young man says, for the third time, without anyone hearing him. Then he takes a long step backward and starts to fumble for his cell phone.
David Sarac isn’t aware of any of the rescue effort going on around him. Not the agitated voices. Not the firemen drenching the car with foam and struggling intently with their hydraulic tools for almost a quarter of an hour before they manage to free him. Not the paramedics who use a curved piece of apparatus to force an oxygen tube into his throat and stop his lungs from collapsing at the last minute. Where Sarac is, there is no pain, no anxiety, no fear. Instead he feels an immense sense of peace.
His body is nothing more than a number of carefully bonded molecules, a temporary union that – like all other solid matter – is on its way toward its inevitable dissolution.
He can hear sounds around him, machines making warning signals, the focused discussions of the rescue team. An unpleasant gurgling sound that he gradually realizes is his own breathing.
But he isn’t scared. Not the slightest. Because he understands this is the universe’s plan. His time to be transformed. To reconnect with the universal stream.
Not until someone lifts one of his eyelids, calls his name, and shines a light directly into his brain does he get scared. Not because of the bright light or the voice calling out to him. What frightens him is the shadowy figure in the corner of his eye. A dark, threatening silhouette on the edge of his field of vision. Sarac tries to keep track of it, but the silhouette keeps evading him. He manages to see a leather jacket, a pulled-up hood whose shadow transforms the silhouette’s face into a black hole.
‘… need to get out of here now. The helicopter’s just arrived,’ someone says, presumably one of the paramedics.
But the silhouette doesn’t move, it just hovers at the corner of Sarac’s eye. Somewhere a cell phone rings. Once, then again.
The sound only exacerbates his fear. It grips Sarac’s rib cage, making his heart race and setting off a painful fusillade of fireworks in his head. Then the paramedic lets his eyelid fall and he slips back into the merciful darkness.
Jesper Stenberg flushed the condom down the toilet, showered carefully, and then dried himself with one of the thick towels in the bathroom. He inspected his appearance briefly in the bathroom mirror, checking as he always did that there were no telltale signs on his body or face. Then he quickly put his clothes back on before returning to the main bedroom.
It was 9:32 p.m.; his parents-in-law were looking after the children and Karolina had gone out to dinner with her girlfriends. She had offered to postpone it, but he had persuaded her to go. They could celebrate properly tomorrow. His father-in-law had already arranged everything. Dinner at his favorite restaurant, champagne, cognac, expensive wine. And of course his father-in-law would foot the bill and would go on about the future, and the possibilities that lay ahead of them, as long as they played their cards right.
She wasn’t lying in bed as he had been expecting. Instead she had poured herself a drink and was sitting on the sofa in the living room. She was still naked, and he couldn’t help admiring her body. Small, firm breasts, long, lithe legs, porcelain-white skin, and a toned stomach that suggested diets and an exercise regime he could barely imagine. He was going to miss her body. And the things she let him do with it …
But times were changing. From now on everything was going to be different.
‘So, Jesper, you’ve been asked the question,’ she said.
He went over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a stiff whiskey in one of the heavy crystal glasses. He shouldn’t really have any more to drink if he was going to drive. But he needed a drink; he realized that the moment she opened her mouth.
For a moment he got it into his head that she had already realized. That this wasn’t going to be as hard as he imagined. But her tone of voice instantly dashed any hopes of that nature. Obviously he should
