Pale sunshine streams in through the bedroom window, and Klara wakes up in a panic and sits straight up. Has she slept the whole day away and missed the meeting?
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she says under her breath and bends over the edge of the bed to find her phone.
‘What is it?’ George mumbles beside her.
Klara twists around and sees his naked body beside her. They had sex again. And fell asleep in each other’s arms.
‘What’s the time?’ she says.
George turns to the bedside table and a grotesquely large watch. ‘Half past eight. Calm down, it can’t be that much of a hurry, can it?’
Klara falls back against the pillows again, less panicked, but still not calm. He puts the watch on his wrist. ‘I got this after all the bullshit in the archipelago. From my boss. It’s a limited-edition Panerai; it costs tens of thousands of dollars. Pretty sick, right?’
She looks at the huge black watch on his wrist and shakes her head. ‘What’s sick is that you walk around with that on your wrist as if it’s normal,’ she says. ‘I’ve honestly never seen anything more vulgar.’
George snorts and rolls onto his back. ‘Don’t hold back, please,’ he mutters. ‘Tell me what you really think.’
She glances over at him in all his wounded ego, wondering for a moment how she could have slept with such a person.
But then he turns to her, and his face is serious. ‘You’re going to meet the guy today. Who do you think he is?’
She shrugs, sits up and starts searching for her underwear. ‘How should I know? Even Gabi didn’t seem to know.’
‘And those men you think are following you?’ he says. ‘It has to be related, right?’
She finds her underwear balled up next to the bed and pulls it on. ‘I can’t imagine any other explanation. Did I tell you I got some kind of adrenaline rush in Stockholm and almost confronted them at Bromma?’
George nods. ‘You have to find a way to shake them off,’ he says. ‘Before you meet this Karl.’
‘I wanna know who they are,’ she says. ‘I’m so tired of being in the middle of things I don’t understand.’ She gets out of bed and turns to George. ‘Don’t you have a job to go to?’ she says.
‘Just a couple of weeks left,’ he says. ‘It’s not like I’m irreplaceable at the moment, obviously.’
*
‘Well, there’s nobody out there right now anyway,’ George says.
He’s just come in from buying croissants from a small nearby bakery, and he’s standing with a steaming espresso in each hand, half hidden behind the curtains at the window, peering down towards the crossing where he bought food yesterday. Klara sips her coffee and stretches to get a better look. He’s right. The street is empty except for a few men and women in suits on their way to work at the EU Commission or maybe at some law firm down on Avenue Louise.
‘Do you think they gave up?’
‘Maybe,’ Klara mutters. ‘But if they bought a last-minute plane ticket just to keep an eye on me down here, it hardly seems likely that they’d just give up.’
George takes a sip of his coffee, his eyes still on the street. She looks at him from the corner of her eye. He’s so concentrated and unexpectedly protective of her, and her overheated brain slows down when she’s near him. She doesn’t feel the constant panic. She doesn’t feel so alone.
‘Over there?’ he says. ‘In that old BMW?’
Klara leans towards the windowsill and peers down. She can just make out the silhouette of someone sitting behind the steering wheel. He seems to be drinking something out of a big cardboard cup.
‘Maybe,’ she says with a shrug. ‘But it’s not the same guy as yesterday.’
‘That’s the guy,’ George says. ‘I’m one hundred per cent sure of it. He was behind me at the bakery just now. Bought a large coffee.’ He nods down at him. ‘He’s drinking it now. Seemed Middle Eastern. Had a beard. Jeans and some short bodybuilder-type jacket that made him look like a big guy. He kept glancing behind him all the time in the direction of the apartment. Wanted to make sure you didn’t disappear while he was getting his coffee. It’s him for sure. They’ve just changed the guy, realized that you know they’re following you.’
Klara sighs. For a moment she’d allowed herself to think they might have miraculously let her go.
‘Where are your pills?’ he asks and turns to her with a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
‘My sleeping pills?’ Klara asks.
‘Yeah, unless you have more drugs you’d like to mention to me? Grab them. I have an idea.’