ERNE MIKSON SQUATS next to the body lying on the concrete floor and wipes the sweat from his brow. The flames from the wall torches are making the low-ceilinged room warm. Despite the chills shuddering through his body, the heat has glued Erne’s shirt to his back. He doesn’t even want to guess the reading the thermometer would give if he stuck it under his armpit now.
One of the men from the SWAT team walks up to Erne. “It’s going to take a while to clear the mouth of the tunnel.”
“They’re not in the tunnel anymore.”
“No, they’re not,” the man replies, rogers a short radio message, and makes for the far wall. A three-foot-tall chasm yawns at the center of it. Leaning against the wall next to the hole is the enormous oil painting of the young Camilla Adlerkreutz.
Erne shuts his eyes and opens his nostrils to inhale the cloying scent of gunpowder. He hears the chatter of the dozens of police officers, medics, and CSIs, as well as a pair of uncertain footsteps dragging themselves down the stairs.
“Erne.”
Erne hears Rasmus’ voice but doesn’t immediately respond.
“Erne,” Rasmus says again.
“What?”
Rasmus steps into the room, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his brown parka. “The ambulance took off.”
Erne sighs and opens his eyes. “And Jessica has security with her this time?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Rasmus shifts his gaze to the tips of his shoes. “I don’t think . . . I mean . . . if they wanted to kill Jessica, they would have done it while they had the chance.”
Erne slowly rises to his feet and looks at Rasmus. He feels like telling his subordinate to knock it off with the hypothesizing, but deep down he knows Rasmus is right. Adlerkreutz had her reasons for going through so much trouble to first lure Jessica into her trap and then decide to release her unharmed. Jessica must have some understanding of what’s going on; Erne has been too shocked to reflect on the matter himself. They’ll have time to get to that later—alone. Just he and Jessica.
“I managed to get drawings from the city—”
“Of the tunnel?”
“Yes. There are no official documents, just a blueprint and a building permit from the nineteen fifties. The city has no record of the tunnel actually being built, no year, no builder—”
“Which is why we didn’t know to look for it in the first place.”
“According to the blueprint, it runs under the bay bridge to the bomb shelter at Kulosaari. The SWAT team just checked it out, but they’re gone. There must have been a car waiting for them.”
“Cameras?”
“Negative,” Rasmus says, scratching the back of his head.
“Under the bay bridge . . . ,” Erne says softly. “That explains how Laura Helminen popped to the surface right off the Koponens’ property.”
“And how Maria Koponen’s killer vanished without a trace.” Rasmus pulls a tiny jar out of his pocket. Erne looks on in disbelief as his subordinate, otherwise impressively negligent in matters of personal hygiene, dabs his fingertips in the ointment and spreads it reverently across his dry lips. “The cold dries them out—”
Erne cuts him off and takes a few steps toward the other body. Just like the first corpse: a bloody stab wound in the chest. There’s no sign of a knife.
“Any other news from the outside world?”
“Bättre Morgondag—the Better Tomorrow movement—has set off a social media frenzy. Instagram has taken down the video Helminen streamed from her hospital room, but it’s already living a life of its own on the Internet. The manifesto uploaded to Roger Koponen’s YouTube account is one of the most-viewed videos today—in the world.”
“What does it say?”
“It’s pretty long—”
“In a nutshell, Rasmus.”
“I’d like to say it’s anarchism, if not in the most traditional sense. But it’s actually just hypocrisy disguised as anarchism.”
“What do you mean?”
Erne looks at Rasmus and sees something rare on his face: an expression of anger and disgust.
“It’s pretty obvious,” Rasmus starts after a brief pause and continues: “That Camilla Adlerkreutz has been taking advantage of these people. She has been controlling neuroatypical individuals by making them believe that she has their best interests at heart. Many of them from a very early age.”
“And not just any individuals,” Erne sighs.
“Exactly. People in positions of power. She is taking advantage of them with her so-called philosophy. Rather than them being helped by medication, standard treatment, they are enslaved by her to change the ‘world order.’ And think about all the money these people would otherwise spend on treatment and medication.”
“It all went into her pockets,” Erne says. He speaks in a low voice as he squats next to the second body: “If Roger Koponen was in on this the whole time, is it possible he wrote the books with this plan in mind?”
Rasmus responds quietly: “I don’t think so. If that were the case, he would have had to have been able to predict their enormous success.”
Erne nods and pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
“Or else he just hoped for it.”
Erne plucks a cigarette from the pack, places it between his lips, leaves it unlit. He looks at the two dead men lying side by side on the ground. And now Erne can’t help thinking there’s always been something damn peculiar about the faces of Roger Koponen and Mikael Kaariniemi, some inscrutable message written on them. As if they’d always been concealing some big secret within.