She turned away and looked at the thugs again. Her old friends Jorma and Krille from Svavelsjö M.C., and also Peter Kovic, he was the one who had been injured. He was the weak link, and Krille wasn’t in very good shape either. Was he the one she had ridden into?
A little further away there was a blue door leading into an annexe. There’ll be more of them in there, she thought, and she could hear the man she had headbutted groaning behind her. That must be Galinov. He hadn’t been put out of action either, and now blood was pumping out of her arm. It became increasingly clear that she was done for. One careless movement and they would shoot her. But she refused to give up. Her brain went into overdrive. What sort of electronics did they have in the place? A camera, of course, and a computer and an internet connection, and maybe also an alarm system. But no…she had no access to all that right now. In any case there was no power.
Her only option was to play for time, and she looked at Blomkvist again. She needed him. She needed all the help she could get, and she needed to think positively now. At least she had saved Blomkvist, even if it was only temporarily. Everything else had been a monumental failure. Ever since her hesitation on Tverskoy Boulevard, she had caused nothing but trouble and suffering, and she berated herself even as her brain searched for solutions.
She studied the men’s body language and measured the distance to the hole in the window and her motorcycle and an iron rod, a glassblowing tool which was lying on the floor. She considered and rejected various plans of action. It was as if she were photographing every detail of the building, and she listened for sounds and anything that stood out, but also felt a strange premonition. A moment later, the blue door flew open and an all-too-familiar figure came towards her, footsteps resounding with triumph, but also with hopelessness. Tension and gravity filled the air, and behind her a weary voice said in Russian:
“For Christ’s sake, Kira, are you still here?”
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SEPTEMBER 30, 2017, KATHMANDU
Nima Rita was squatting on his haunches in a backstreet not far from the Bagmati River, where the dead are cremated, and he was sweating in his down jacket, the same one he had worn the last time he saw Luna in the crevasse up on Cho Oyu. He could see her there in front of him; how she had been lying on her stomach with arms spread wide as if she were flying, calling from beyond the world of the living:
“Please, please don’t leave me!”
Her cry sounded the same as Mamsahib’s. She was just as desperate, and the thought of it was unbearable. Nima Rita downed his beer. Not that the alcohol silenced the cries—nothing could—but it did dampen them, and the world would sing a softer tune. Looking down, he saw that he had three bottles left and that was good. He would drink them. And then go back to the hospital to meet Lilian Henderson, who had travelled all the way from the United States to see him, and that was something really big, probably the only thing in ages that had given him hope, although of course he was afraid that she too would end up turning away from him.
He had been struck by a curse. Nobody listened to him now. His words just whirled away, as the ash is blown from the riverside. He was like a disease people shunned. Someone stricken by the plague. Yet he prayed to the gods on the mountain that someone like Lilian would understand. And he knew exactly what he wanted to tell her. He was going to say that he had been wrong, Mamsahib was not a bad person. The bad people were those who had said that she was, Sahib Engelman and Sahib Lindberg, the ones who wanted her dead, who had tricked him and whispered terrible words in his ears. It was they who were evil, not she, that is what he was going to say—but would he be able to? He was ill. He knew that himself.
It was getting muddled, all of it. It felt as if he had not only left Mamsahib to die in the snow but also his Luna, and therefore he had to grieve for and love Mamsahib in the same way that he grieved for and loved Luna, every day, and that made his unhappiness twice as great. A hundred times greater. But he would steel himself and try to distinguish between the voices and not get them all mixed up and risk frightening Lilian, the way he had frightened off the others, and so he drank his beer, quickly and methodically and with his eyes shut. The smell of spices and sweat was all around him. Crowds of people were milling about, but now he could hear footsteps coming very close and he looked up. He saw two men, an older and a younger one. And they said, in English with a British accent:
“We are here to help you.”
“Have to tell Mamsahib Lilian,” he said.
“You’ll have your chance to talk,” they said.
He was not sure what happened after that, only that he found himself in a car on the way to the airport, and that he never did meet Lilian Henderson. Nobody found out what really happened, and it did not matter how many times he prayed to the gods for forgiveness. He was lost.
He would die a doomed man.
* * *
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Catrin Lindås leaned forward and looked Forsell in the eye.
“If Nima wanted to speak to journalists, how come he wasn’t allowed to?”
“It was decided that his condition was too poor.”
“You said that he got lousy care. That he spent most of his time locked up. Why didn’t somebody help him sort out his story?”
Forsell looked down. His lips moved nervously. “Because—”
“—because you didn’t really want him to,” she interrupted, sounding sharper than she had intended. “You didn’t want anything to spoil your happiness, did you?”
“For heaven’s sake,” Kowalski said. “Have some mercy. Johannes is not the villain in this piece and, as we know, his happiness did not last all that long.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry,” she said. “Keep going.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Forsell said. “It’s true that my behaviour was deplorable. I put Nima out of my mind, and I had my hands full dealing with my own life and my work.”
“That whole wave of hatred?”
“It never affected me all that badly. I saw it for what it was—bluff and disinformation. No, the disaster came only a few weeks ago.”
“What happened?”
“I was in my office at the Ministry. I had known for some days that Nima Rita had disappeared from the South Wing, and I was worried and thinking about it when Lindberg came in. Something was obviously wrong. You see, I had never told him that we brought Nima over here. Never mentioned it. Those were the orders from Janek here, and his group. But then I just couldn’t contain myself. Even though I knew perfectly well how manipulative he could be, in times of crisis I relied on him for support. It was something I had taken with me from Everest, and so I told him everything. It just came out.”