THE MAN MOVED quickly, sliding past the bushes and the bare trees. The February wind seemed to come from all sides at once, feeling like thousands of little needles hitting his cheeks. He pulled at the strings on his hood so that it tightened around his face and he looked around.
There were no joggers or dog walkers out today on the grounds of Kastellet, the old seventeenth-century Citadel. The temperature had been like a buoy in the water for days, bobbing steadily up and down around the freezing point, and the strong wind made it feel like the harshest winter in decades. Copenhagen seemed deserted in the cold, like a ghost town.
The man stopped and listened.
Nothing.
No sirens to break the controlled rumble of the city, no flashing blue lights out there in the twilight.
He walked up to the top of the fortress’s old earthwork rampart and looked over at the entrance to the grounds by the parking lot at Café Toldboden and Maersk’s headquarters. He wrinkled his brows when he saw that the parking lot was empty, then looked at his watch.
Where the hell are they?
The man pulled a cigarette out of a pack in his inside pocket and squatted down in the lee of one of the cannons. He tried to light his lighter, but his hands were yellow from the cold and felt dead. He extended and bent his fingers a couple of times to get the circulation going and noticed the blood spot, a small, coagulated half-moon of purplish black substance under the tip of the fingernail on his index finger.
He made a half-hearted attempt to scrape out the congealed substance, then gave up and got his lighter lit. As soon as the fire caught, he thrust his hands back into his pockets and held the cigarette squeezed tightly between his lips as he paced back and forth on the rampart, impatiently eyeing the parking lot.
Come on, damn it!
He didn’t like waiting. It always made him feel restless and gave him a twitchy feeling in his gut. He preferred to keep busy, constantly in motion. Silence meant time for reflection and made his thoughts wander back to a smoke so thick that he had to feel his way past the dead, mangled bodies, back to the blood running out of his eyes, down his cheeks, and to the silence, the deafening silence that followed the blast, when those who were able crawled out of the dusty darkness and gathered in front of the destroyed building.
Paralyzed. In shock.
If only he could shake those images, release them like a bouquet of helium balloons and watch them float away, dancing in the sky until they were out of sight.
The man looked down at the café again and spotted the silvery gray Audi pull up in front of the building and stop. The engine was on, its exhaust warm and steamy in the cold. A single blink of the high beams told him that the coast was clear.
Finally!
He started walking down toward the car, but halfway down the earthwork, he spotted something that made him slow his pace. He scrunched up his eyes and focused on the pedestrian bridge over the moat that surrounded the Citadel.
Then he came to a complete stop.
There was a figure standing in the middle of the bridge, almost camouflaged by the twilight, a hooded person wearing an orange backpack.
It was the strange, bent-over posture of the figure that had made him slow down. But it was the child the person was holding that had made him stop.
A boy he estimated to be eight or nine years old hung limply over the side of the bridge while the person with the backpack held the fabric on the shoulders of the boy’s down jacket. The person was yelling, but the wind snatched up the words, punching holes in them, so he couldn’t hear what was being said.
He looked over at the car again and saw yet another insistent blink of the headlights. He needed to hurry now, but …
He looked down at the bridge again.
Then the figure let go of the boy.