At that moment, Hultin’s voice entered Norlander and Hjelm’s ears: “I’ve got our man’s name from the FBI now. Go immediately from Plan B to Plan A. He’s traveling under the name Edwin Reynolds. I repeat: Edwin Reynolds. If the man who has been so energetically chased through the arrivals hall is not named Reynolds and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with this case, release him immediately and return to your positions. Maybe we can still fix this.”
Norlander and Hjelm immediately released Robert E. Norton to the Arlanda police, who had come to get him. They went back into the arrivals hall through a side door and returned to Norlander’s passport control booth.
Hjelm took over. He thundered at the female immigration officer, “Fast as helclass="underline" Edwin Reynolds. Has anyone by that name passed through?”
A few quick stabs at the computer gave her the answer. “No. Randolph. Robertson. No one in between.”
Norlander sank down onto his stool. Hjelm sank to the floor.
They pulled the door closed, caught their breath, and licked their wounds. Maybe there was still hope. Barely half of the passengers had come through. If Reynolds hadn’t been among those whom Norlander trampled down, he was still back there.
Thus reasoned the two heroes in the booth and, in a haze of testosterone, forgot the group’s more estrogenic member. Kerstin Holm’s voice sounded in everyone’s ear canals. “Eleven minutes ago an Edwin Andrew Reynolds passed my booth. He was among the very first.”
It was quiet for a few endless seconds.
Then came Hultin’s voice: “Okay. Close passport control. Don’t let anyone else out. Demand ID from everyone you see in the whole fucking airport. Discreetly, of course. Officially, we’re looking for drug smugglers. We’ll use everything we’ve got now. Get going. I’ll arrange for roadblocks. Kerstin, do you have a photo of him? What does he look like?”
“The one I have is really bad. He may be blond. Unfortunately it’s a terrible photo.”
“And neither you nor the immigration officer remembers anything?”
“Unfortunately, no. He could have gotten pretty far in eleven minutes.”
“Okay. Get going-now.”
Norlander exhaled in relief-his blunder hadn’t been crucial after all. But Hjelm, as he stood up, thought Norlander’s sigh was almost criminal.
They emerged from the booth just as Holm stepped out of hers. Her intensively searching gaze met theirs.
The white middle-aged men were everywhere. Armed men poured out of the airport’s hollows like maggots out of a corpse and detained them where they were, demanding their passports.
Hjelm ran through customs. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gunnar Nyberg being showered with passports from a cluster of white, middle-aged men. His baggy lumber jacket was unbuttoned.
Hjelm hurried outside and surveyed the congested sidewalk. An airport bus came over the crest. Taxis swarmed. It was impossible to get an overview.
He sprinted along the sidewalk. He queried ten or so potential serial killers, who watched his mediocre running pace. They identified themselves without protest. As he skimmed their passports, his suspicion became a full-fledged thought.
He did another second of futile surveying. Suddenly Hultin was standing beside him. Each read his own thought in the other man’s eyes. It was Hjelm who formulated the unavoidable conclusion: “He’s out.”
Hultin held his eyes for another moment and gave an unofficial nod that was contradicted by his stern injunction: “We have to go inside and continue. Don’t stand here wasting time.”
Hultin disappeared. Hjelm stayed there for a minute, wasting time.
He fingered his lips and was surprised by the blood. He turned his face up to the darkening sky and received a chilly sprinkle of rain.
Autumn had come to Sweden.
5
That afternoon the A-Unit reconvened in the room that had once been called “Supreme Central Command,” whose quotation marks had become less and less ironic as the Power Murders investigation had gone on. Now a secret wish for a similar course of events whistled through the somewhat stale air. Otherwise the dominant atmosphere was relatively well-controlled fear; there was no question about the gravity of the situation.
Jan-Olov Hultin came out of the bathroom absorbed in some papers that looked as though he had used them and forgotten to flush them. He settled into his well-worn armchair and, after ten seconds, began. “The results of the Arlanda debacle are discouraging. The only concrete result is three complaints against officers. Two are against Viggo.”
Norlander’s expression managed to unite shame with pride.
“The first complaint is from the immigration officer at passport control,” Hultin continued without looking up. “She found your attention far too intense but says she’ll be satisfied if you are reprimanded. If we didn’t have other things to worry about, I wouldn’t have settled for that. Bonehead. The second complaint is in regard to a little girl you ran over while you were chasing the seriously drug-smuggling Robert E. Norton. You have a real flair for handling the fairer sex, one could say. Double bonehead. The third complaint is a bit hard to interpret. An officer from Märsta has been reported for having been, quote, ‘out of control’ in the concourse bar.”
Arto Söderstedt laughed shrilly and abruptly. “Sorry,” he said, calming himself. “His name is Adolfsson.”
Since further clarification was not forthcoming, Hultin continued neutrally. “So, on to the essentials. Edwin Andrew Reynolds does not exist. Naturally, the passport was a fake. And despite the laborious efforts of our data technicians, the passport photo is still not helpful.”
He turned the computer monitor around on the desk, to show an enlargement of a completely dark face. One could make out the shape of the face and a few contours; possibly he was blond. Otherwise it was unrevealing, and the man was anonymous.
“We don’t even know if he used his own picture. They will accept ten-year-old photos, of course, and it’s really not that hard to use a photo that has only some reasonable resemblance. In any case, customs’ new photo devices were wasted-all the pictures they took look about the same. They’re blaming this failure on the fact that the technology is brand new, and they didn’t have enough time to prepare properly, and so on.
“It’s a given that information about our man has gone out to hotels, Swedish Railways, airports, ferries, dung heaps, et cetera. I hardly think we should count on anything from those sources, but of course we will keep looking. One plus is that the media doesn’t know anything, even though the TV cameras showed up quickly at Arlanda. I imagine you’ll see the results tonight. Our most esteemed boss Mörner appeared and gave a statement, which guarantees some sort of quality TV, at least. Questions, anyone?”