The button or the fire extinguisher.
She counted silently to herself.
One, two, three.
Then she saw it. Just inches away.
A fork.
Not a plastic fork like the ones they handed out to the passengers in economy, but a real fork made of stainless steel. The kind you got if you were travelling first class. Or if you were a member of the crew.
Slowly, Fatima reached out and grasped the shiny metal.
She had to act right now, because she wouldn’t have this opportunity again. She would try to reach the button, then hurl herself at Karim. And say a prayer that Erik would move fast.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Gripped the fork as tightly as she could and felt the pain in her head roll backwards and forwards like ocean waves.
She was ready now.
Now.
Now.
64 STOCKHOLM, 23:05
A sister and a brother. A woman and the love of her life. Unbreakable bonds and an act of desperation. In one way so simple, in so many others completely incomprehensible. And still so many missing answers to the questions they wanted to ask.
In any other investigation, everything they had found out over the last couple of hours would have been regarded as a breakthrough, but not this time.
The passengers were still in a hostage situation up in the sky, and the Americans were still intending to shoot down the plane. And they were almost out of time. It was a matter of minutes rather than hours before the disaster would become a reality.
‘Please don’t let there be a bomb on board,’ Alex said, as he stood beside Fredrika, looking out of the window.
Darkness and rain. Not a glimmer of light. Nowhere.
Fredrika took Alex’s hand.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said.
‘Do you really believe that?’
No.
Nothing was as it should be. The government had recently issued a statement, saying that it had revised its decision to deport Zakaria Khelifi, and this had unleashed a storm of questions and reactions in the media. And in the middle of this inferno, the plane continued its journey towards destruction.
‘Absolutely.’
‘But how can it be all right, Fredrika? They’ll run out of fuel in half an hour.’
‘We still don’t know how Erik has got on.’
Our last hope.
Alex glanced over his shoulder.
‘The others will think we’re an item if we carry on standing here like this.’
She squeezed his hand.
‘Who cares. We’re police officers, after all. We’re supposed to screw around more than other people.’
Alex’s jaw dropped, and Fredrika smiled.
‘Don’t you remember Peder saying that?’
Alex pulled his hand away when she mentioned the name of their former colleague.
‘I remember.’
The strain felt like a physical pressure in Fredrika’s chest. That was one of the reasons why she had left the police – the fact that the job demanded such terrible sacrifices. All the time. Non-stop.
Forgive me for deserting you when you had already lost Peder, but I just couldn’t cope any more.
‘Is Spencer at home with the kids?’ Alex asked.
The question surprised Fredrika.
‘No, he’s in Café Opera, drinking himself under the table.’
Alex laughed quietly.
‘Sorry. I’m old and stupid. Of course he’s at home with the kids.’
Spencer had called not long ago, and Fredrika had rejected the call. She didn’t have time for him right now. Nor for the children. God knows what state she would be in when a new day dawned, bringing the drama to an end one way or another.
‘Am I interrupting something?’
Eden was standing behind them. Fredrika got the feeling she had been there for a while.
‘No,’ Alex said.
Eden asked them to come along to one of the meeting rooms, where Dennis and Sebastian were already waiting.
‘I heard back from the Germans,’ Eden began. ‘They said they definitely have no knowledge of Sofi.’
Dennis adjusted his collar. He was wearing a khaki shirt that Fredrika thought would have suited Spencer.
‘In that case, I can only conclude that they’ve missed what this girl has been up to, because you don’t embark on an operation like this unless you know what you’re doing. If she is involved, of course.’
This could well be true, and there were other aspects of what they had learned that frightened Fredrika.
‘It doesn’t matter whether or not they know who she is. Sofi lives in Germany. The man we assume was her boyfriend was held in an American detention facility in Afghanistan after travelling to Pakistan to attend terrorist training camps. And the Swedish government recently decided to deport her brother Zakaria,’ Eden summarised.
All day – all day – Fredrika had been on Zakaria’s side, but now she didn’t know what to think.
They had to get hold of Sofi. Without delay.
‘How are we going to find her?’ she said.
‘We contacted the airport police and they found Zakaria’s car in the long-stay car park, on the same level as the waste bin where the mobile phones were,’ Eden said. ‘Do you know where it was parked?’
‘You just said it was in the long-stay car park,’ Alex said.
‘I meant more specifically. It was also on the same level as Karim Sassi’s car.’
‘But how the hell did we miss it, in that case?’ Dennis said. ‘We were there, for God’s sake, taking fingerprints from Sassi’s car!’
‘Yes,’ Eden said. ‘But at the time we didn’t know we needed to look at the cars nearby, did we?’
‘Could that have been where they met?’ Fredrika said. ‘Is that how she got Karim’s fingerprints on the phone?’
Eden made a note on the pad in front of her.
‘We don’t know that, and at the moment I don’t think we should waste any time on finding out.’
Her phone rang and she answered.
‘I haven’t got time to talk now, I’ll call you later.’
Fredrika guessed it was a personal call, and this was confirmed when Eden went on:
‘Well, if she’s got a temperature, give her some Alvedon. Seriously, Mikael, this will have to wait until I get home. No, I have no idea when I’ll be back. If I’m not going to make it before morning, I’ll call you. Bye.’
She ended the call and slipped the phone back in her pocket.
Fredrika couldn’t take her eyes off Eden. There was something about her posture and her tone of voice that sent shivers down Fredrika’s spine. It wasn’t just that Eden was under pressure; she sounded as if she couldn’t give a damn about her children. But surely that couldn’t be true. Could it?
‘However, we do need to find out how Karim Sassi fits into all this,’ Eden said.
At last.
‘That’s the only major question we don’t have an answer to as yet,’ Dennis said.
‘And ironically, it’s the only one that interests us right now,’ Alex said.
‘There’s something else I find strange about all this,’ Fredrika said. ‘The timing. There’s no way the person behind the hijacking only got to work yesterday. This has taken an enormous amount of preparation.’
‘Exactly,’ Alex said. ‘And the Germans received that email several weeks ago.’
‘I think we all feel the same,’ Eden said. ‘And I’m wondering if this is what happened: the hijacking was originally planned only as an act of revenge, with the aim of getting Tennyson Cottage shut down. But then Zakaria was unexpectedly detained, and the perpetrator then set the wheels in motion earlier than he or she had intended, with the aim of securing Zakaria’s release as well.’
Fredrika could accept that explanation; it seemed pretty credible.
‘But what about Karim Sassi?’ Sebastian said. ‘How the hell did he end up in this mess? I mean, Sofi is the one who obviously has a reason to do something like this for her brother. But where does Karim fit in?’