JAN HESK HAD felt like a deer. A terror-stricken deer standing petrified on a road in the middle of the night, staring into the headlights of an oncoming lorry.
Putting the so-called admission in front of Swedish detective inspector Fabian Risk and asking him to sign it had been a new low point in his police career. But he’d done it. Even though the shame of it would haunt him for the rest of his life, he’d followed Sleizner’s explicit order.
But when the Swede had shaken his head, stood up and made clear he was about to walk out since there was a suspected terrorist out there to arrest, he’d been unable to do anything other than stand there in the middle of the road, staring into the headlights.
And now he was sitting at his desk in the open-plan office with his phone to his ear, overcome with anxiety. He, who was usually always hungry, hadn’t been able to get so much as a bite down since breakfast. Even a few sips of water had necessitated a dash to the bathroom, where he’d thrown them back up along with a lot of bile.
His body was on strike. But then, he was in deep shit and about to drown. And yet he would have done the same thing again if given the chance.
He gave up on his fifth attempt to get hold of Sleizner to inform him about what had happened and cracked his neck to try and dispel his headache. Making up a story in which the Tivoli guards hadn’t managed to apprehend the Swede or in which he’d pulled his weapon to get away from them would only make matters worse once the truth came out.
No one could sniff out a lie like Sleizner, and then he could forget about promotions and having his own office, more money and, above all, being in charge of the interesting cases. They were going to have to put off redoing the kitchen, too, and he would have to have that conversation with Lone about closing her plastic-free baby shop and finding a real job instead.
She would obviously fly off the handle and launch right into her well-practised diatribe about how she’d stayed home with the children so his career wouldn’t suffer, and it was her turn now, even if she had to divorce him to get it.
And that was just the Sleizner aspect of the problem. The real meltdown would happen if the information the Swedes had given them turned out to be correct. Then it wasn’t just a lost promotion he needed to worry about, he was going to have to find a new job.
The best he could hope for now was that all of it would amount to nothing. That it would turn out to have been conjecture, like Sleizner had said. At the end of the day, most alarms were in fact false. Ninety-six per cent of the time, the fire department was called out needlessly, for instance.
The same was true of terror attacks. How many false rumours to each one with substance? At the same time, every last one of their recent big terror attacks had been preceded by warnings of some kind, that was undeniable. Warnings that had been played down, overlooked and for various reasons consigned to the spam folder.
The question was whether this was going to be yet another in a series of attacks where it was revealed afterwards that they’d been aware of the threat but hadn’t taken it seriously. If that happened, his head would be the one to roll. Especially when it came out that he’d put all his energy into trying to arrest the one police officer who had actually tried to stop the attack.
But the whole thing was just a bunch of flimsy suppositions. He didn’t really know anything. Not until he spotted his colleague Morten Heinesen’s stressed yet restrained gait as he made his way through the open-plan office towards his desk.
It was no longer flimsy supposition.
The Swedes had been right.
It was really happening.
Whatever it was, it was happening right now.