The Bucket List Page 3

  He glanced at his watch, which showed him the first kilometer had been quick. His body was responding well today, despite his thoughts about Emelie. Or perhaps because of it. Worry drove him forward across the terrain. He needed to torment himself, to hover as close to his breaking point as possible. It was the only way he could silence his thoughts.

  Once he conquered the hill, the wide path turned left and continued alongside the water. This was Emelie’s favorite part of the route. She said it was because of the views of Lake Vänern below. He liked to tease her and say it was more to do with the fact that it was an easy stretch to run so she could catch her breath after the climb.

  He loved their conversations while they were running. In the beginning, he had had to twist her arm. Every kilometer on the trail could be exchanged for twenty minutes at her computer. She had accepted the arrangement in exchange for him promising to watch her for a while every day when she was playing.

  It was an eye-opener for him. He hadn’t had a clue what Counter-Strike was before Emelie introduced him to the secrets of the game. The premise was simple. Two teams of five. One team played the terrorists, the other the counter-terrorists. Everything was played online and at a pace that had initially given him a headache, but had then fascinated him. He quickly realized that Emelie and her teammates in Striker Chicks were talented and had earned their reputation on the e-sports sites.

  “What do you think Mom would do if I was as good at tennis as I am at Counter-Strike?” Emelie had said, the first time she managed to run two whole laps with him, earning almost five hours of game time.

  The words had hit him. He knew exactly what Sissela would have done—she would’ve let the whole world know that her daughter was a rising star and she would have flown in a private coach from America.

  From that moment, Heimer had decided to reappraise the gaming. His daughter had found something she loved to do, and his job was to support her. After showering, he told her to call her friends in Striker Chicks and invite them to the house. Then he drove them all to the computer store and instructed them to fill the car with everything they needed to get better at the game. He would pay the bill.

  The look Emelie had given him when he had closed the trunk on a mountain of new computers and gaming gear! He had saved that look and treasured it as his dearest possession. But that was then. This summer, she hadn’t come out on the trail with him even once.

  His watch beeped again and drew his attention to his kilometer time. Three minutes and fifty-eight seconds. It wasn’t good enough. The thoughts of Emelie had made him lose his rhythm. He forced himself to increase his pace.

  When he returned after his run, he saw that Sissela had a visitor. Hugo Aglin was standing next to her by the kitchen island, pointing at a laptop. Perhaps it was just the light from the screen, but he thought his wife’s face looked unusually pale.

  “Sorry if I don’t say hello properly, Hugo, but I’m dripping in sweat,” Heimer said, holding his arms in the air to show his clammy hands.

  “You have to see this,” Sissela said, her lips so tightly pursed that her voice assumed a hissing tone.

  “It’s a photo on Emelie’s Facebook page,” Hugo explained. “Magnus showed it to me when I asked if he knew where she was.”

  Heimer had only a vague understanding of what Facebook was. He had heard Emelie talk about it and grasped that it was some kind of online notice board for friends. He approached the kitchen island and saw that his socks were leaving sweaty footprints on the parquet.

  Hugo turned the screen toward him so that he could see the photo. It showed Emelie’s forearm, with the strange tattoo that she had been so secretive about. The motif consisted of three squares, of which two had a V-shaped tick in them.

  Heimer saw it by accident just after his daughter had returned from Björkbacken and he’d tried to get her to explain what it meant. She had been reluctant, but eventually she had said it was a bucket list. Three things she promised herself she would do before she died. When he had asked what these were she had merely shaken her head and said she wasn’t going to tell anyone.

  “Look,” said Sissela, pointing at the third square, which had previously been empty. “She’s cut herself here. She’s carved the final tick right into her skin.”

  5

  BALTIMORE, 2019

  It struck him that he didn’t know the name of the man who’d saved his life. To John, he had been Abaeze—Ganiru’s right-hand man and obedient foot soldier in Baltimore’s Nigerian drug cartel. But the truth was different. He realized that in the port, seconds after the pistol had been fired. He waited for the bullet to drill its way through his skull, taking his life with it on its way out the other side. Instead, the loud bang left his ears ringing. It was then, when the loud noise hadn’t stopped, that he realized he was still alive.

  The next moment, John had seen Ganiru lying on the asphalt clutching his kneecaps. Apparently his protector had fired not just one but two shots at their leader.

  Then Abaeze had ordered him to run. The first steps had been the hardest, but the connection between his head and his feet was soon re-established and John’s legs started to move more and more quickly.

  That was when the first shot had rung out behind them. The men in the container must have figured out what was going on when they heard Ganiru’s shouting. They started in pursuit of the traitors, with no hesitation about using their weapons. If the SWAT team hadn’t arrived just a few minutes later, the two of them would be dead.

  “How’re things, son?” Abaeze said, shifting himself into a slightly more upright position on his pillows so that his face rose above the side rail of the bed.

  He seemed to be wide-awake—not disoriented, as John had been after his surgery. Abaeze was at least fifteen years older than he was, but the fact that he had used the word “son” was overdoing it. John would be thirty-five next year and people rarely got his age wrong—they certainly didn’t underestimate it.

  “Yep, totally okay,” he responded unconvincingly. “What about you?”

  “Complete shit. It feels like someone has shot me in the stomach,” he said, surprising John by laughing, then quickly relapsing into whimpering when his surgical wounds were stretched by the movement of his stomach muscles.

  “Fuck me, that hurts. I need more painkillers. You don’t happen to know a dealer, do you?”

  He laughed again. John had never seen a person so completely transformed. The drug dealer Abaeze and the convalescent Abaeze shared the same robust body—but apart from that they had nothing in common. One had been taciturn and serious, the other a perfect facsimile of a bedridden stand-up comic.

  “Who exactly are you?” John managed to say. Of course, he could guess the answer—but he still wanted to hear what his roommate had to say.

  Abaeze suddenly became serious.

  “Brodwick wouldn’t be happy about us talking about that. He’ll probably want to debrief us separately, first.”

  Brodwick—as in James E. Brodwick. The head of the FBI field office in Baltimore. John had guessed right. Abaeze was an undercover agent—just like he was. But why hadn’t he known there was another mole in Ganiru’s cartel? Brodwick probably had his reasons. Yet he still couldn’t help but feel hoodwinked by his own side.

  At the same time, John realized that this wasn’t the time to be touchy. Without Abaeze, everything would have ended differently. He was the one who had kept a cool head and found a solution. What had John done? Fuck all. He had been frozen, unable to move.

  “I thought I was dead. When you shot Ganiru, I mean. I had to check that my brains hadn’t been blown out.”

  “Sorry about that,” said Abaeze. “But I had to make it look real.”

  John involuntarily put his hand to the same point on the back of his head—the place where the muzzle of the pistol had been pressed against him.

  “At least tell me your name, so I know who to thank.”

  “Trevor—and if I wasn’t in so m
uch damn pain, I’d shake your hand. You?”

  “John. My name’s John.”

  It felt odd to say his real name. For almost a year he had been someone else. The Bureau had carved out an identity for him, with the kind of violent résumé that would catch the eye of Ganiru’s HR department. He’d been set up with an apartment on Belair Road and then left in peace to do his job. It had taken time, but soon enough John had won the confidence of both the underlings and Ganiru. His tasks as errand boy had become more advanced and one Sunday early last spring he had been invited to a beautiful house in the suburbs. It was then—once he had been introduced to Ganiru’s wife and test-driven his Lamborghini—that he realized he was truly inside.

  Brodwick had pushed all the right buttons when he recruited him from the Homicide squad in New York City. He told him about a unique opportunity to make a difference and how undercover agents were the FBI’s most important weapon against organized crime. John could understand why Brodwick was making an effort. It couldn’t be easy to find candidates willing to take the risk. John accepted the offer but had been naïve about what the new life would involve. The illicit drugs trade went on around the clock. Meeting anyone on the outside was out of the question. In the circles he moved in, you kept an eye on one another.

  A woman in a white coat came into the room. John didn’t recognize her. She had short hair styled into a consciously boyish, tousled look. She wore no makeup, and yet her face was so perfect it could’ve graced the pages of any fashion magazine.

  Trevor seemed much brighter all of a sudden. Despite the fact that he had just woken up after his second round of surgery, his grin stretched from ear to ear.

  “Hello,” the woman said. “Do you know where you are?”

  “In heaven with one of God’s angels,” he said, and let out his biggest laugh yet.

  Is this guy for real, John managed to wonder before remembering the debt of gratitude he owed him. The woman didn’t seem to care. She was presumably used to patients commenting on her appearance.

  “Take it easy, so you don’t ruin your stitches. You’ve had surgery on your abdomen for your gunshot wound.”

  She continued telling Trevor about his medical status. His injuries sounded worse than John’s. It would be some time before his neighbor could eat unaided.

  Trevor listened attentively and then asked whether the nurse could speak to the doctor and get him to increase the dosage on his painkillers. Now it was her turn to laugh.

  “Sorry, I didn’t introduce myself properly. I’m the doctor. I’m the surgeon from the trauma team—I performed both your surgeries.”

  “Oh, Jesus! I’m the one who should be apologizing,” Trevor said.

  “There’s no need,” she said. “And of course you can have more morphine. I’ll speak to the nurse and have her adjust the dose.”

  The conversation was interrupted by the door opening. The man who entered was wearing a dark suit and offering the usual lopsided smile. John was never able to decide whether it was friendly or just supercilious. The doctor turned around, clearly irritated.

  “I asked you to wait outside,” she said.

  “You said I could see them.”

  She sighed.

  “I said you could see them after I checked to see if they were up to it.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “They seem okay to me.”

  “And you base that observation on your many years of practicing medicine?”

  John couldn’t help enjoying the moment. It wasn’t often someone put Brodwick in his place. The boss was noticeably perturbed but still retained the smile and went for the soft touch.

  “My apologies, doctor. Of course, it’s for you to make the assessment. Five minutes are all I need.”

  She shook her head.

  “Go home and get some sleep. If there are no complications, then a conversation might be in the cards tomorrow morning. At the earliest.”

  Brodwick raised his hands in a disarming I-give-up gesture. In one hand he had a blue plastic folder and in the other a laptop.

  “Okay, fine. But surely you can give him these for the time being,” he said, nodding toward John’s bed.

  The doctor took the folder and put it together with the laptop on the bedside table as Brodwick vanished back into the corridor. Then she turned her attention to John.

  “I read in your notes that you’ve been having issues with headaches and that you’ve lost consciousness.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said John, putting his hand to the back of his neck again.

  “Does it hurt now?”

  “No, it comes and goes.”

  The doctor wrote something in her notebook. John didn’t like the concerned expression.

  “We’ll have to X-ray your skull tomorrow morning. But now I want you both to try to rest.”

  Trevor was asleep within minutes. John reached for the folder that Brodwick had left behind. The movement hurt his chest and he hoped that the surgical drain hadn’t been dislodged from its position. The ceiling lights had been dimmed, so he had to use the reading lamp to see.

  The folder contained mail addressed to his real identity, John Adderley—sent to his old apartment in New York. The Bureau had made sure it was forwarded and had held on to it for him.

  He glanced through mail from his dentist, the bank, and the IRS, before focusing on the two letters that stood out because they had handwritten addresses on them. He saved these for last. One of them was a thin envelope containing nothing but a photograph. The picture was of him together with his colleagues from Homicide back in New York. Several of them were wearing Santa hats. The bar’s dark wooden fixtures and the Irish flag in the background indicated that the photo had been taken at their regular haunt just a block from the police precinct.

  John turned the photo over and read the greeting. “Don’t know if you’ll get this—don’t have your new address. Anyway: good luck in the private sector, you damn deserter.”

  That was the official version—he had moved to Baltimore to take a job with a private security company that provided personal protection for CEOs.

  John smiled. He hadn’t thought about life in New York City for a long time. He examined himself in the picture. The arms around his colleagues’ shoulders looked so puny. Ahead of infiltrating the cartel, he had worked out like a madman to fit into his new criminal life. John now felt no shame about admiring his reflection in the mirror after his morning shower. He liked his new biceps and six-pack.

  His face was also different in the picture. He’d still had his hair then—dark and curly. It came from one half of his genes. When Brodwick had suggested he shave it off, John at first hesitated. He was worried about whether Ganiru would think he looked sufficiently African, with his light brown skin. Brodwick had dismissed that as nonsense and handed him a trimmer. He hadn’t looked back. The shape of his face was more defined and more masculine without hair on his head. He was never going to look like the guy in that picture from the bar again.

  John put the photo back in the folder and opened the last letter. It was a brown padded envelope with foreign stamps. He reached inside for the contents and put them on his lap: a newspaper clipping, a flash drive, and a handwritten letter.

  It was a greeting from a parallel universe that he knew existed, but which he had become so good at suppressing that it had almost faded away.

  The letter was from his mother, whom John hadn’t seen in twenty years. She had stayed in Sweden when his father brought him to New York after the separation.

  Reluctantly, he picked it up and began to read.

  John!

  This time you have to come home.

  He got no further than that before his guilty conscience got the better of him. He could hear his mother’s voice through the messy handwriting and his eyes immediately filled with tears. The words went straight to his heart and made him see himself in a new light. What he saw wasn’t flattering: a spineless person who had stuck h
is head in the sand and chosen the truth that best suited his own purposes.

  John considered whether to read the rest of the letter, but decided not to. Instead, he looked at the newspaper article. It was from Nya Wermlands-Tidningen, from just a few weeks ago. He started with the caption beneath a photo of two serious men looking into the camera.

  The Chief Commissioner of the Värmland County Police together with Bernt Primer, the recently appointed head of the force’s new unsolved cases team. “Cold case initiatives like this have been tried and tested both abroad and elsewhere in Sweden with good results,” says Bernt Primer, of the new project. The team will start work this autumn and their first task will be to re-examine the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of AckWe heiress Emelie Bjurwall ten years ago.

  John understood their choice of this as the first case—they picked the one that would ensure the greatest media exposure. The police in Sweden seemed just as anxious about public opinion as the organizations he had worked for. The FBI and NYPD never missed a chance for good publicity and were willing to go a long way to avoid bad publicity.

  He put down the article, realizing how tired he was. The doctor had ordered him to rest. At the same time, he knew that it would be hard to sleep. It would be better to try to stay awake for a little longer. He reached for the computer that Brodwick had brought. If he couldn’t face reading the letter from his mother, he might as well browse the contents of the flash drive she sent.

  It was an extensive investigation, which was reflected by the large number of files and documents on the tiny gadget. The media had devoured the story, which always meant the police added more resources. The company that the missing girl was to have inherited was an international Swedish success story, even ten years ago. Nowadays, there were several stores in every major American city selling AckWe jeans and casual fashion. It was presumably the same everywhere else in the world.