‘And what do we do then?’
‘Then obviously we don’t defy the hijackers, we take the plane back up again. What do you think?’
The others exchanged glances.
‘What would the view of the police be? They have more experience of this kind of thing,’ said the investigator who had spoken earlier.
‘I’ll talk to Alex Recht as soon as we’re done here,’ Eden said. ‘Then we can speak directly to the captain on the plane.’
She thought to herself that in future she wanted Alex at these meetings. The situation was critical; there was no time to go through everything twice.
‘By the way, have we spoken to Khelifi about this?’ the investigator asked.
‘Not yet,’ Eden replied.
She looked at her colleagues.
‘So what do you say? If the National Bureau of Investigation is with us, do you agree that we should try for an emergency landing?’
Everyone nodded.
‘Good,’ Eden said.
‘Just one thing,’ Sebastian said.
‘What?’
‘Remind the pilot not to dump the fuel, otherwise we’ve lost the chance of taking the plane back up again.’
13 FLIGHT 573
Erik Recht was thinking about his son more than anything else.
He really felt as if the boy had arrived several years too early. As his father pointed out, that was the downside of getting together with a woman who was ten years older than him.
‘I don’t want to wait any longer,’ Claudia had said. ‘If I do, we might not be able to have children at all.’
What could he say to that? Not a thing. Claudia was almost forty. If he said he wasn’t ready, he would come across as being childish. And if he came across as being childish, she would leave him. So they had a baby.
‘Isn’t it all a bit quick?’ his father had said at the time.
Erik didn’t answer that kind of question. They had never been able to communicate with one another – not when Erik was a teenager and out of control, and not since then. It was as if those damned teenage years had created a barrier between them, and neither of them was capable of ignoring it. The years went by, but Erik knew that his father still regarded him as unreliable, in spite of the fact that he had now been with the same woman for several years. In spite of the fact that he had completed his training as a pilot and got a permanent post with SAS.
What was the point in trying if you were never told that you were good enough?
‘You’ve got a lot to be proud of,’ his sister had said the last time they met up. ‘Think about all the things you’ve achieved. You’ve lived abroad, for example. Lots of people dream of living your life.’
The words had cooled Erik’s overheated temperament. There were those who would have liked a part of his life. That was good enough. Erik couldn’t be responsible for the fact that his father wished things were different.
In Erik’s current situation, as co-pilot on a plane that had been hijacked, he began to wish that his relationship with his father had been different. He even caught himself longing to hear Alex’s voice. It carried with it a stability that Erik himself had never been able to conjure up. And the sound of his father’s voice made him feel safe.
Erik’s thoughts returned to his own son.
He wasn’t going to bloody well leave his son when he was still just a baby!
He glanced over at Karim. He was miles away; he almost looked as if he was in another world.
‘We’ve got to get ourselves out of this,’ Erik said.
Karim’s tense features hardened.
‘We will.’
In order to reinforce what he had said, Erik went on:
‘We have to think about our families.’
Only then did Karim turn and look at him.
‘Believe me, I’m thinking of nothing else.’
14 STOCKHOLM, 11:00
Erik was born on a Sunday. Alex remembered it well, because Lena’s labour pains had started while they were having Sunday lunch with Alex’s parents. When it was all over, Lena said it had felt as if she was pushing out a baby that was lying across the womb, as if he was resisting, refusing to come out. The image of his son lying the wrong way round had haunted Alex all his life. That was how he thought of Erik – not flexible and accommodating like his sister, but constantly hot-tempered and determined to negotiate:
‘If you do this for me, then I’ll do that for you.’
Lena had said that their son lacked direction, but Alex had seen only defiance. It wasn’t that he didn’t love Erik – he did, but he couldn’t ever remember feeling particularly close to him. The trip to South America a few years earlier had worked miracles. The journey had proved to Erik that Alex was genuinely interested in what he was doing, that he wanted to be a part of his life. It had made things easier. During the weeks he spent in South America, father and son had had conversations that Alex would never have thought possible.
Then Erik had moved back to Sweden. Alex couldn’t work out how it had happened, but suddenly everything went downhill again. Lena’s death weighed heavily on both of them, of course, but there were other factors that also had a bearing on their relationship. Erik made one dubious choice after another. Like training to be a pilot, for example, at a time when so many pilots were being made redundant, and hardly any new appointments were being made. Sometimes Alex thought that if it hadn’t been for his overt scepticism about his son’s choice of profession, Erik would never have managed to push himself and secure a permanent post.
And if he hadn’t been a pilot, he wouldn’t be sitting on that bloody plane right now. If it wasn’t for his son, Alex wouldn’t have been particularly stressed out by the bomb threat. Instead, he would have said they needed to have nerves of steel, that it was unreasonable to think there was actually a bomb on board, and that they should wait for further instructions from the hijackers. He would also have been curious to see what the government was intending to do.
He had promised Hjärpe that he would act professionally without getting personally involved, but they both knew this was highly unlikely. Therefore, the responsibility for handling the situation had been discreetly passed on to another investigator in Alex’s department. That was fine by Alex; as long as he knew what was going on, he was satisfied.
Fredrika Bergman called him and got straight to the point.
‘How’s it going? With the plane, I mean.’
Why was she asking that? They’d just been at the same meeting at Rosenbad. He had nothing new to tell her.
‘I’m going over to Säpo in a little while,’ Alex said. ‘Nothing has been decided yet. What kind of signals are you picking up at your end?’
‘We’ve got a meeting with the Minister shortly. I’ll know more after that.’
Alex wished she was working for him instead; he needed her right now.
‘Perhaps we can have a chat later, after our meetings?’ he said.
If you tell me something, then I’ll tell you something.
‘Good idea,’ Fredrika said.
He was about to end the call when he realised there was something else on her mind. How well did you know someone when you could tell how she was feeling just from her breathing?
Fredrika lowered her voice.
‘There’s something else I need to tell you,’ she said. ‘But it has to stay between us. At all costs.’
‘Absolutely.’
Alex had no hesitation in accepting those conditions when they came from Fredrika.
‘It’s about Zakaria Khelifi, the man who’s named in the note from the hijackers.’
‘What about him?’
He heard the hesitation in her voice.
‘I don’t know, Alex. But I don’t like this case. I’m the one who’s dealing with it, and… I just don’t have a good feeling about it.’
‘You don’t usually let your feelings influence your decisions.’