MORTEN STEENSTRUP, THE COP who refused to die, was easier to find than he had initially hoped. He overheard a journalist from Politiken asking the receptionist on the first floor where Morten was in the hospital.
He followed the journalist, took a seat in the waiting room with all the other members of the media, and waited for his chance. Three hours later, he had all the information he needed to complete his task: Steenstrup’s room number, his condition and the treatment, and — most importantly — confirmation that he was under guard.
A female police officer arrived and preoccupied most of the reporters. No one even noticed when he put down the health magazine he had been pretending to read for the last hour and walked over to the bathroom as the journalist from Politiken came out. He went in, locked the door behind him, and quickly realized that the journalist was having stomach issues.
He took the opportunity to relieve his bladder and to top up his water bottle with a few cups of cold water; he was struck by how bad the tap water tasted as soon as you took one step outside of Sweden. He stuffed the legs of his pants into his socks, tightened his bootlaces, and took a rope with a hook on one end from his backpack. He then took out a pair of thin gloves, put them on, and smoothed them out until they fit like an extra layer of skin.
He was ready.
He grabbed the toilet brush, which was leaning against the wall in the corner, closed the lid of the toilet with one boot, and climbed up on the handicap bars, balancing with legs spread wide. He pushed aside one of the tiles of the drop ceiling with the toilet brush, fastened the hook onto a wire duct, hopped back down to the floor, replaced the brush, and unlocked the door, well aware that he was courting danger with his actions. He had decided that a toilet cubicle locked for an excessively long time would attract unnecessary attention and as a result could pose an even greater risk than an unlocked door.
He had no trouble climbing up the rope, thanks to the heavy physical training regime he had been doing for the past two years. Fitting through the small gap at the top was more difficult; there was less space than he had counted on between the tiles and the actual ceiling, and he had to take off his backpack in order to fit on top of the air duct. He gathered up the rope and shoved it into his outside pocket, replaced the ceiling tile, put on a mask, and cautiously began to use his hands to pull himself along the duct, which showed no signs of giving way despite his weight.
He pulled himself out so he was over the waiting room. The ceiling height was much more generous here, and he could get up and crawl along the duct on all fours, passing humming air handlers. He heard the annoyed voices of the journalists below him as they protested the scanty information they had received from the female police officer, who could do no more than repeat the response from her superiors: “In light of the ongoing investigation we have no comment at the present time, but we will hold a press conference as soon as we...” He knew exactly what that meant.
They didn’t know a goddamn thing.
He crawled on top of a dusty section of the duct and arrived at a split going ninety degrees to the left and the right. He took out his Neofab Legion II, the world’s most powerful flashlight. Despite the swirling dust that reflected most of the light back at him, he could see about sixty metres to the right and thirty to the left. In other words, he had arrived at the corridor that led out to the exit on the right and into the guarded ward on the left.
He followed the duct toward the ward. When he was directly above the entrance, he took out a spool of fishing line, which he had marked with measurements down to a half-metre, using bits of tape. While he was attaching the end of the line to the wall above the door, he heard two police officers walking just underneath him.
“Hello? Where the hell did you go?”
“Shut your trap, we’re on our way,” a voice said through a crackly two-way radio.
He left the police behind and moved into the ward. At times he had to wriggle his way through a narrow passageway or heave himself over an air handler. He lay down fishing wire as he went, noting the tape marks. He stopped at the twenty-three-metre mark, turned on the flashlight, and was met by a tangle of cables, tubes, and pipes of various sizes that branched down through the ceiling like a climbing plant that had been allowed to grow unimpeded. Whether this was a sign that he had reached his destination, he didn’t know. The air duct didn’t branch off to the left, which it should have done if there was another corridor or an examination room in that direction. All he had been able to see through the glass doors in the waiting room was that the police officers and doctors turned left somewhere around this point. He had counted their steps, starting at the door to the ward, and calculated that the turn had to come around twenty-three metres down the corridor.
He turned off his flashlight and pulled himself over to an air handler, from which he could reach a fluorescent light. He tried to lift off the casing but it was firmly attached. Why hadn’t he brought tin shears? He let out a long sigh and felt the moisture in his mask turning to drops, which ran down his chin. He needed to think and go through his options. He made his way back to the duct, lay down on his back, and closed his eyes.
He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until he heard the voices of police officers beneath him. It was uncharacteristic of him. He followed them from above, discovering that he had misjudged the distance of the left turn by two or three metres. At that point, the duct branched off as well, and he could easily follow them another ten metres or so before they stopped. On the way he heard the officers discussing Morten Steenstrup’s heroic deed; they were in agreement that it had been more foolhardy and stupid than anything else.
“Aw, shut up, he’s going to get a ton of pussy when he’s back. Hell, he could probably bathe in pussy if he wanted.”
In all probability, the officers were on their way to guard the entrance to Morten Steenstrup’s hospital room, but there were several rooms in the vicinity, and it was impossible for him to know exactly which one Morten was in. The duct split in several different directions. The only thing he could do was wait for a lead.
He overheard the policewoman from earlier standing outside one of the rooms. She was apparently going to Morten’s room for the second time, against the doctor’s wishes. The officers on duty asked for her ID, unlocked the door, and let her and the doctor in, unaware that by doing so they had just signed their colleague’s death warrant.