“Yes.” Søren permitted himself the hint of a smile. Killing a man, however important, in a refrigeration truck in Copenhagen certainly wouldn’t be the ultimate goal of any terrorist group. They would want the whole world to watch while they did it. To have the recording played on as many TV screens as possible, thus getting attention, instilling fear, and changing people’s behavior. Without a video recording, there was precious little point to the act as far as the terrorists were concerned. They might even suffer the affront of having another group claim responsibility.
Suddenly Gitte sat up in her chair. She was a tall woman, as tall as most men and had the shoulders of an Olympic swim star. When Gitte straightened up, people noticed.
“What is it?”
“The traffic,” she said, pointing to the screen that gave them the aerial overview. “It’s stopped.”
She was right. The sparse a-little-past-six-in-the-morning trickle of cars had completely dried up. Rovsingsgade was deserted.
“Shit.” This time Søren did say it out loud. What the hell was going on here? Who was the idiot that had blocked off the road without checking with them first? And how long would it take before the group in there realized it? Seconds, maybe, if they really did have another lookout outside the truck. “Now!” he said into the earpiece in Berndt’s ear. “We’re going in now!”
LIGHTS, COLD, MOVEMENT. The still-faint daylight felt like a birth shock after the dark incubator of the surveillance van. He hit the asphalt running, crossed the first parking lot, and jumped over the low beech hedge into the next. The refrigeration truck wasn’t his goal; Berndt and the strike team would take care of that, and Søren had no intention whatsoever of getting in the way of people trained for that sort of thing. His goal was a man with a radio, standing on the roof of the four-story residential building their bird’s eye view was coming from, a radio that could hopefully communicate with the rest of the emergency services, so he could find out what the hell was going on. He burst through the back door—considerately taped so the latch couldn’t click into the strike plate—and sprinted up the smooth terrazzo stairs. First floor, second floor, third floor … past the fourth and up the last narrow service stairwell to the roof. There was an uncomfortable burn in his knee where he had had surgery on his cruciate ligament, and his lungs were on overtime. But he had enough breath left to snarl “Give me that radio!” at a startled young officer, uniformed police. In his own earpiece he could hear static and breathing and short, terse statements, but no shots. Thank God, no shots yet.
He snatched the radio—or “terminal” as they were supposed to call them now—out of the officer’s hand and stood frozen for a second, staring at the unfamiliar keys. Then information he knew, but which had yet to become second nature, coalesced, and he entered the sequence that was supposed to put him in touch with on-site command.
At that moment a hard, flat bang resonated—both inside and outside his earpiece. In three quick steps, Søren moved over to the half wall that ran around the edge of the roof, and now for the first time in the cool, sharp reality of morning, he had the same bird’s eye view of the area that he had had earlier on the screen in the surveillance van. The back end of the refrigeration truck was hanging open and a diffuse cloud of grayish-white smoke was wafting out over the railway yard.
“Berndt?” he said quietly into his microphone headset.
Twenty-eight seconds passed. Søren counted them. Then Berndt’s voice responded with the unnatural intimacy that came with in-ear receivers:
“It’s okay. We’re in, and we have control.”
BY THE TIME Søren made it down to the refrigeration truck, they had the handcuffs off the hostage and a blanket around his shoulders. Apparently Gitte was the one charged with the thankless task of removing the flat, black object that was attached to his chest. The man made a face as she tried to tug the wide tape off.
“Do we have any rubbing alcohol?” Søren asked. “That’ll make it come off a little easier.”
“Never mind,” said the former hostage. “Just get it over with.”
His naked torso was too muscular for him to be completely believable in the role of a captured head of state, and although Søren could see him flexing his fingers in a pumping rhythm to get the blood flowing to his hands again, he didn’t otherwise look like a man who had been bound and helpless for more than four hours. Torben Wahl—deputy director of PET’s counterterrorism section and Søren’s immediate supervisor—was not a man who was easily rattled.
“How did it go?” he asked.
“Not that great,” Søren admitted. “The intelligence side of things went okay, and Berndt and the SWAT team went in like they were supposed to. However, liaising with the rest of the emergency services was a total failure. Someone had better get a handle on that before the summit, because if this had been the real deal.…”
“Well, that’s why we drill,” Torben said, but he didn’t look happy.
DESPITE THE SHOWER, a fresh shirt, and four hours of sleep with the curtains drawn, the effects of the training exercise were still lingering in his body as Søren parked in front of PET’s headquarters in suburban Søborg late that afternoon. He yawned on his way up the stairs. He could have used a couple more hours of downtime, but he had to check in to see what had turned up on his desk while he had been off playing cops and robbers in Rovsingsgade. His mood was not improved when he was forced to skirt around several young men in yellow T-shirts struggling with a giant, cube-shaped monstrosity and a plastic drum of drinking water that were apparently destined for the little niche in front of the lavatories farther down the hallway.
A water cooler. He had seen machines identical to this popping up throughout the building. They might keep the water cold, but they also gave off a constant irritating hum. Personally, he managed just fine with water from the tap in the men’s room, but in recent years the younger people, especially the women, had insisted on the phthalate-saturated energy wasters. Now it appeared that their bit of the corridor would have one, too. Of all the frivolous, useless fads—and he could reel off quite a few without even trying—water coolers ranked among the very worst, on par with the spider catchers he had recently seen in Kvickly, followed closely by patio heaters and ceiling fans. But apparently this was what the younger people wanted these days. Søren sighed. “The younger people?” When had he begun to call them that? Of course the majority of the eighty men and women who worked in the Danish Security and Intelligence Service’s counterterrorism branch were younger than him, but still—“the younger people”? He was going to have to stop using that expression. It made him sound like a world-weary old fart. Especially when he was also ranting about newfangled water coolers.
Søren ducked into the little kitchenette at the end of the hall and selected a mug from the cupboard. The coffee left in the machine was jet black and tasted like charcoal; it had probably been sitting there since lunch. A few other people from the group had also drifted in even though they weren’t on duty again until the next morning. He could hear someone typing and quiet laughter coming from the large, open-plan office. Gitte Nymand was leaning over Mikael Nielsen’s shoulder and pointing to something or other on the screen in front of them. She had a small wrinkle of concentration on her brow, but she was smiling, and her voice bubbled with excitement. Søren allowed himself to stand there for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, enjoying the view. Gitte wasn’t beautiful in the traditional sense. Her short-cropped hair framed a face that was just as distinctive as her gold-medalist swimmer’s shoulders and muscular legs. Wide cheekbones, strong jaw, bushy eyebrows that were astonishingly dark despite her standard Scandinavian blonde hair and blue-green eyes. But what rendered her one of his best personnel finds of late was the calm, natural authority she radiated, even though she was only in her late twenties. Also, she got along well with Mikael, who could be a little prickly to work with. Søren seemed to remember they had been at the police academy together. It did something to the cadets’ relationships, those months of standing side by side in riot gear, in yet another interminable attempt to clear Christiania’s cannabis market.