At least it won’t kill me before I can tell someone about Ida, she thought.
“You don’t need to touch it,” Sándor said. “If we take one of those and run the shaft through the handle on the can, we can carry it between us.” He pointed to the gardening tools with his healthy hand.
Tommi and Mr. Suburbia were standing behind them, at a suitable distance, now clothed in protective masks, gloves, and white hooded outfits that said ENVIRO-CLEAN in big, black capital letters across the chest on the front and back. Nina and Sándor were not afforded the same luxury.
“Let’s use the rake,” Nina said. “It looks like it has the newest handle.”
Sándor reached for it, but Nina beat him to it.
“It’s better if I do it,” she said. “I have two good hands.”
He hesitated, but then nodded. If he messed up the maneuver and the paint can tipped, they would have radioactive sand everywhere, and that would just make a bad situation worse.
She coaxed the shaft of the rake under the wire handle and carefully dragged the paint can closer. Sándor grabbed the free end of the rake. They looked at each other. Nina nodded. Then they lifted, slowly and in unison. It was a matter of holding the handle perfectly level so the can didn’t slide to one end or the other. Survive, Nina thought. Just survive.
“Nice,” Tommi said waving the pistol. “Now the pavers.”
They were perfectly standard garden pavers, sixty by sixty centimeters. Sándor couldn’t grip the thick, rough edge of the square, concrete slabs with his injured hand, but he was forced to use it for support and balance. There was no way Nina would be able to lift the pavers alone. She looked like she was holding herself upright through sheer will power.
They moved the two slabs into place on top of the pipe section. Tommi inspected their work and apparently found it satisfactory. At any rate, he gave Sándor a pat of comaraderie on the shoulder with his gloved hand.
“Cool,” he said. “Now you two hop in there, and keep it company. How do you say ‘car’ in Hungarian?”
The Finn’s strange interest in Hungarian vocabulary no longer surprised Sándor. “Autó,” he said in a monotone.
Tommi lit up behind the see-through plastic of his mask. “Hey,” he said. “That’s the same in Finnish. So it’s true after all.”
“What is?” Frederik said irritated. “What’s true?”
“That Finnish and Hungarian are related. The Finno-Ugric language family and all that stuff.”
Frederik glanced at the cement pipe in the back of the van. “You don’t think you could concentrate just a little on what’s important here?”
“There’s nothing wrong with expanding your horizons.”
“For fuck’s sake, Tommi. The word ‘auto’ doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with Finnish or Hungarian. It’s from Latin. Get those two into the van so we can get going.”
Tommi squinted. “You heard what the man said. Get in!”
The gun was pointed vaguely in their direction, but there was nothing vague about the look on the Finn’s face. It radiated a clear-as-glass intensity even through the cheap plastic of the face mask. Nina clambered in without protest and shot Sándor a look that clearly said: No drama. Don’t risk my daughter’s life.
He wasn’t so sure anymore that obedience and a low profile were their best survival strategy, but he didn’t see any other options. The rear doors slammed shut with a hollow claaaang, and a moment later the van started moving.
“Where are we going?” Sándor asked Nina. “Do you know?”
She shook her head. He could only just see her. Not much light made it in through the small window between the back of the van and the driver’s cabin.
“I heard the address,” she said. “I just don’t know where it is. Somewhere in Copenhagen, I think.”
“To meet with some filthy rich sicko who wants to buy radioactive material,” he said, not quite able to take his eyes off the makeshift cement container hiding the poisonous shit that had killed Tamás. “Nina, can we let them do it? How many people are going to end up dying the way Tamás did?”
She lowered her head so he could only see her dark hair. “Ida” was all she said. “I can’t think about anything else or anybody else.”
The van rattled its way up over some small obstacle, turned sharply to the right, and continued more smoothly. They were heading toward the city.
He still didn’t understand. Didn’t understand why a friendly, young police lady and a not-quite-as-friendly young policeman had spent more than an hour questioning him and checking out the car and the house with a Geiger counter. Or a Geiger-Müller counter, as they were now apparently called.
And it wasn’t because he hadn’t been paying attention. He’d been watching the experts on TV talking about the Summit and those dirty bombs—they always used the English words for “Summit” and “dirty bomb” even though Danish had perfectly adequate terms. He didn’t understand why everything had to be English these days. He had listened to investigative radio reports about the problem of radioactive materials from Eastern Europe. He had plodded his way through that long article in Berlingske Tidende on “Why Denmark is a Target.” He had also seen that documentary everyone was talking about—“The Making of a Terrorist” or something like that—about madrassas and training camps for suicide bombers. That video clip still stuck in his mind, the one of a young Muslim girl, no more than fourteen, talking about the greatness of Allah with a mixture of fear and pride in the dark gleam of her eyes a day before she blew herself and fourteen other people to smithereens on a street in eastern Bagdad.
He thought about the minarets in his backyard and of the dapper Mr. Hosseini and his mosque. It was hard to imagine Mr. Hosseini with an explosive belt full of TNT, but what did a terrorist actually look like?
They had asked about whether the Opel had been stolen, and he had said no. But now it suddenly occurred to him that there had been that day a few weeks ago when he’d had to adjust the seat. It was much farther forward than he cared for, which had puzzled him. Should he call the police lady and tell her that? What if someone had taken the car and put it back again without his having noticed?
Yet another stab in his chest. The pills. First he had to take one of those pills.
He trundled into the bathroom, careful not to hurry even though he was increasingly afraid that this was a heart attack coming on. Helle had put all his medications into a lunch-box-sized, white plastic crate in the cabinet over the sink. Centyl, aspirin, Fortzaar, Gaviscon, Nitromex. He shook a blister pack from the box, pressed the little tablet out of the foil, and put it under his tongue. There. Now it was just a matter of waiting. Breathing nice and easy, nice and easy. He sat down on the lid of the toilet and closed his eyes.