Phantom

‘Mm.’

‘Perhaps he taught himself to lie. It happens to us all.’

Harry nodded. A gust of wind made him shiver. When was it he had taught himself to lie? Was it when Sis asked if their mother could see them from heaven? Had he learned so early? Was that why he found it so easy to lie when he pretended he didn’t know what Oleg had been doing? Oleg’s lost i

Fly Emirates.

Dubai is in the United Arab Emirates.

There are no Arabs, only pushers in Arsenal shirts selling violin. Shirts they had been given along with instructions on how to sell dope in the right way: one money man, one dope man. A conspicuous and yet run-of-the-mill shirt showing what they sold and to which organisation they belonged. Not one of the standard ephemeral gangs who were always brought down by their own greed, stupidity, torpor and foolhardiness, but an organisation that took no u

There was a good reason for Oleg talking to neither him nor the police. He was working for someone or something no one knew anything about. Someone or something that made everyone stay shtum. That was where Harry had to begin.

Rakel had started crying and buried her face in his neck. The tears warmed his skin as they ran down inside his shirt, over his chest, over his heart.

Darkness fell quickly.

Sergey was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

The seconds passed, one by one.

This was the slowest part: the waiting. And he did not even know for sure if it was going to happen. If it was going to be necessary. He had slept badly. Dreamed badly. He had to know. So he had rung Andrey, asked if he could talk to Uncle. But Andrey had answered that ataman was not available. No more than that.

That was how it had always been with Uncle. And, for the majority of his life, Sergey had not even known that he existed. It was only after he — or his Armenian straw man — had appeared and created order that Sergey had begun to make enquiries. It was an eye-opener how little the others in the family knew about this relation. Sergey had established that Uncle had come from the west and married into the family in the 1950s. Some said he came from Lithuania, from a kulak family, the peasant landowning class that Stalin had actively deported, and that Uncle’s family had been sent to Siberia. Others said he was part of a small group of Jehovah’s Witnesses that had been transported to Siberia from Moldavia in 1951. An ageing aunt said that although Uncle had been a well-read, linguistically talented and courteous man he had adapted immediately to their simple lifestyle and had espoused ancient Siberian urka traditions as if they were his own. And that perhaps it was precisely his ability to adapt, along with his obvious business acumen, which soon enabled other urkas to accept him as a leader. Within a short time he was ru

Sergey checked his watch. And confirmed that exactly twelve minutes had passed since he last checked. He closed his eyes and tried to visualise him. The policeman.

In fact, there was another detail about the story of his uncle’s alleged death. The officer who had stolen his knife had been found soon afterwards in the Taiga forest, what was left of him, that is — the rest had been eaten by a bear.

It was dark both outside and inside when the telephone rang.

It was Andrey.

10

Tord Schultz unlocked the door to his house, stared into the darkness and listened to the dense silence for a while. Sat down on the sofa without switching on the light and waited for the reassuring roar of the next plane.

They had let him go.

A man who introduced himself as an inspector had entered his cell, crouched in front of him and asked why the hell he had hidden flour in his trolley bag.

‘Flour?’

‘That’s what the Kripos lab say they’ve found.’

Tord Schultz had repeated the same thing he said when he was arrested, the emergency procedure, he didn’t know how the plastic bag had come into his possession or what it contained.

‘You’re lying,’ the inspector had said. ‘And we’re going to keep an eye on you.’

Then he had held the cell door open and nodded as a signal that he should leave.

Tord gave a start as a piercing ring filled the bare, darkened room. He got up and groped his way to the telephone on a wooden chair beside the training bench.

It was the operations manager. He told Tord that he had been taken off international flights for the foreseeable future and moved to domestic flights.

Tord asked why.

His boss said there had been a management meeting to discuss his situation.

‘You must appreciate we ca

‘So why don’t you ground me?’

‘Well.’

‘Well?’

‘If we suspend you and the arrest leaks out to the press they’ll immediately conclude we think you’re guilty and it will be grist to their mill… no pun intended.’

‘And you don’t?’

There was a silence before the answer came.

‘It would damage the airline if we admitted we suspected one of our pilots of being a drug smuggler, don’t you think?’

The pun was intended.