Hjelm pulled his leather jacket over his shoulder holster and was wholeheartedly present. He and Chavez half-ran toward the room that had once gone by the name “Supreme Central Command” and that-he thought hopefully-might do so once again. On their way through the hall, a door flew open in Chavez’s face, and Viggo Norlander hurtled out. Though he had once been the group’s dependable rule follower, since the Power Murders Norlander had become their bad boy; he had replaced his old, worn-out bureaucrat suits with trendy polo shirts and leather jackets, and his slight midlife flab was upgraded to a genuine six-pack.
The rest of the group was already assembled when Norlander and Hjelm tumbled in. Chavez arrived just behind them with a handkerchief to his nose. Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin surveyed him skeptically from the desk at the front of the unexceptional little room; he was sitting there like an owl, or rather like a bored junior high school teacher who’d been forgotten by the pension board. His diminutive glasses were perched in their proper place, like a small, natural growth, on his giant nose. No newly kindled passion shone in his eyes, though something may have smoldered in their corners. He cleared his throat.
All the members of the select group were actually there; all of them had, as usual, flex-timed in early so they could go home early, and none had been loaned out to some strange posting elsewhere as punishment. Gunnar Nyberg, Arto Söderstedt, and Kerstin Holm were already sitting up front. Nyberg and Söderstedt were of the same generation as Norlander, which meant they were a few years older than Hjelm and many years older than Chavez; Holm was somewhere between the latter two. She was the only woman in the group; a short, dark-complected Gothenburger, she was the third cog in the trio of brains, along with Hjelm and Chavez.
On the other hand, she had something very important in common with the group’s purest bundle of energy, her office mate Gunnar Nyberg: both sang in a choir and weren’t ashamed to be caught singing a cappella numbers in their office. Nyberg had a colorful past as a brutal, steroid-using body builder, but nowadays he was a timid middle-aged man, a sloppily clad mountain of meat with a lovely singing voice who could still break out his old moves if necessary. During the investigation of the Power Murders, having already taken a bullet in his throat, he had tackled an accelerating car and put it out of action. Söderstedt, for his part, was one of the strangest group members, a Finland-Swedish, chalk-white former top lawyer whose conscience had caught up to him; he always worked apart from the others, following his own paths off the beaten track.
Norlander, Chavez, and Hjelm took places in the row behind the trio. Then Hultin began in his customarily neutral voice, “A Swedish citizen has been murdered in the United States. But not just anyone, not just anywhere, and not by just anyone. A relatively well-known Swedish literary critic was killed a few hours ago at Newark International Airport, outside New York. He was sadistically tortured by a serial killer whose activity goes back several decades. Up to this point, it has nothing to do with us.”
Apparently there was time for one of Hultin’s dramatic pauses, because what followed was that very thing.
“Our dilemma,” he continued, “is that this robust serial killer of a robust international character is on his way here.”
Another moment of silence, a bit more loaded.
“The information from the FBI indicates that the killer took the literary critic’s seat on the flight. At this very moment he is on flight SK 904, which will land at Arlanda in just under an hour, at 08:10. All together the plane is carrying 163 passengers, and the police in New York have chosen not to inform the crew of the situation. At present we are in a state of uncertainty as to the identity of the perpetrator, which isn’t so strange when you consider that he’s been eluding the FBI for twenty years. But they hope to find out what name he’s traveling under before the plane lands-I have an open line to a Special Agent Larner in New York. And so we need two parallel plans. One: we get the name in time, in which case there’s a risk of a scuffle. Two: we don’t get the name in time, in which case we have to try to pick out from among 163 passengers an elusive serial killer whose only known characteristics are that he is a white male, probably over forty-five years old.”
Hultin stood and pulled the zipper of his old sport jacket up over the butt of his pistol in its shoulder holster. He leaned forward.
“This whole thing is really quite simple,” he said tranquilly. “If we fail, Sweden has imported its first real American serial killer. Let’s avoid that.”
He tromped off toward the waiting helicopter, leaving behind the following words of wisdom:
“The world is shrinking, ladies and gentlemen. The world is shrinking.”
3
The immense, irreplaceable calm that always appears comes in expanding waves of bliss. He knows he will never stop.
Outside, the tremendous emptiness stretches on, with the earth as a tiny, negligible exception. A magnificent speck of fly shit on the great white page of perfection, a protocol error that has likely destroyed the limitless divinity of the divine.
A thin sheet of Plexiglas separates him from the great, sucking holes of nothingness that his serenity makes him part of. He copulates with it in divine, swaying movements.
The peaceful rocking of the clouds drives the images away. They are far away now. He can even think about them. And at no point does the peaceful smile leave his lips.
He can even think about the walk down to the cellar. It isn’t a series of images now-if it had been, he would have to conjure it away, smoke it out by the burning sacrifice-it’s a story, with a logical, coherent structure. And even if he knows it will soon be lost again and will call on its sacrificial smoke, he is able to find pleasure in its sudden, crystal-clear perfection.
He is on his way.
He is on his way down the stairs he didn’t know existed, down into the cellar he didn’t know existed. The secret passage in the closet. The unforgettable, sweet-dusted air in the stairway. The silent cement stairs that seem to go on forever. The raw, clammy cold of the handrail.
The completely self-evident logic of the initiation. When eyes can be raised and steps can follow steps on the stairs down into the pitch black, the logic is indisputable. He has been chosen.
It has to come full circle. That is what has to be done now. Then he can begin for real.
The stairs lead on. Every trace of light vanishes. He feels his way ahead, step by step.
He allows himself to pause while the calm rocks him closer to relieving sleep. He follows the imperfect wing of the plane as it swings imperfectly out into the perfect swing of eternity.
Another light becomes visible, a completely different light, and it accompanies his last steps down the staircase. Like the frame of an icon around a darkness brighter than any light, the light shoots out from behind the door. A halo showing the way. A golden frame around a future work of art.
Which will now be completed.
He cracks open the door to the Millennium.
Outside the window, the Big Dipper slides into the Little Dipper, making an Even Bigger Dipper.
“Tonight we can offer you the special SAS Swedish-American drink for a long night’s flight, sir,” he hears a gentle female voice half-singing.
But by then he is already asleep.
4
The A-Unit lifted off from the helicopter pad atop police headquarters at 07:23 on Wednesday, September 3. The seven of them were crowded together into a group that didn’t really exist anymore. For a split second, Paul Hjelm thought that they were just imitating a unit whose time had come and gone, but the second passed, and he focused on his task, like everyone else.