Geiger

by Gustaf Skördeman

Genres: Spy Thrillers; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

The landline rings as Agneta is waving off her grandchildren. Just one word comes out of the receiver: 'Geiger'. For decades, Agneta has always known that this moment would come, but she is shaken. She knows what it means.

Retrieving her weapon from its hiding place, she attaches the silencer and creeps up behind her husband before pressing the barrel to his temple.

Then she squeezes the trigger and disappears - leaving behind her wallet and keys.

The extraordinary murder is not Sara Nowak's case. But she was once close to those affected and, defying regulations, she joins the investigation. What Sara doesn't know is that the mysterious codeword is just the first piece in the puzzle of an intricate and devastating plot fifty years in the making.

Release date: May 10, 2022

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

The Royal Copenhagen coffee cups were still on the table, with just the dregs in the bottom; the cake dishes were cleaned out and the glasses of juice empty. Blue polka-dot napkins—both fresh and soiled—were lying all over the place. The tablecloth was covered in coffee stains and crumbs, and here and there were red rings left by the glassware. The youngest children had rushed off, leaving the chairs pulled out from the table.

Half of the children were now on the Josef Frank sofa. The other half were running around shrieking, caught up in a heated sugar rush. A tennis ball came out of nowhere, fortunately hitting a gap between the souvenir plates hanging on the wall depicting different cities in Europe: Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Paris, Rostock, Leipzig, Bonn.

During the last week of school, the grandchildren had stayed with their grandparents so that their parents could take a holiday to Brittany. Sisters Malin and Lotta wanted to do it before the summer holidays began, and half of Sweden went down to France.

During the past week, Grandpa Stellan had taken refuge in the study while Grandma Agneta had made breakfast and dinner and driven the kids to and from school and their leisure activities. Not to mention keeping an eye on them as they bathed off the jetty in the unusually warm early summer evenings. It was also Grandma who’d gathered up and packed away the snorkels, flippers, swimwear, goggles, toys and what was left of the sun cream. As well as all the clothes, tablets, chargers and schoolbooks.

And now both of the sisters were there with their husbands, to take their children home again. It was almost as if the house was breathing a sigh of relief at the fact that peace would soon reign supreme and everything would return to normal.

The garden door was open and Lotta was outside, walking by her aging father’s side while he pointed out the latest additions to the flower beds and planters. She knew most of the flowers, but some had been added. Her dad liked to have a few ever-present favorites while varying the rest.

He thought the flowers were at their most beautiful just before they came into bloom. When the buds were beginning to burst open. On this, father and daughter differed.

Lotta listened attentively to her father as he enthusiastically exhibited his floral splendor: coneflowers, hollyhocks, blue delphiniums, bittersweets that had germinated by themselves, oregano, mint, yarrow and lady’s slipper. He loved his flowers, and Lotta thought about how much time he’d spent in the garden during her childhood. Dad was not to be disturbed out here—but you always knew where he was.

While Dad stopped to catch his breath, Lotta turned around discreetly and pretended to size up the house—the stylish, functionalist home that she knew inside out and really had no good reason to stand looking at. The large windows and the two terraces with the amazing views over Lake Mälaren and Kärsön Island.

Then her gaze settled on the garden path, the twelve heavyset stone slabs that she and her sister had run along so many times. Their dad jokingly called them the twelve-step model to a better life, because they led to the garden shed. Inside it, he could dedicate himself to what he loved most, undisturbed.

The stone slabs had been so awkward to lay that Stellan had decreed that they would remain there forever. And they already had forty years on the clock, so her father’s prophecy was probably going to be borne out.

She looked at her father. He was eighty-five years old, and just as lucid as ever, but his body was tired, and advanced in years, so much so that he missed parts of his throat while shaving. He had always been tall, but now he was stooping. The big pair of spectacles that had been his distinctive attribute for as long as she could remember often ended up crooked, and the eyes behind the frames were cloudy.

Lotta was almost as tall as Stellan, but they were otherwise not particularly alike in appearance. Her father’s hair had been ash-blond, while his daughter’s was black—a legacy from her strong-willed grandmother, according to Stellan. And if his gaze was friendly and warm, then Lotta’s was scrutinizing and skeptical.

“Can’t we sit down for a bit?” said Lotta, because she noticed that her dad was tired and knew he would never acknowledge it.

They sat down on the flaking green bench outside the garden shed. Stellan fanned himself with a paper plate that had been heaped with bulbs, and Lotta wiped the sweat from her brow. The heat felt almost unnatural. It had had the whole country in its grip throughout May, and showed no signs of dissipating now it was June.

How many times had they sat here together? A bench for rest, but with all the tools within reach—a place where one recovered while also being ready to get working.

That was the theory, at any rate.

Inside the shed were stacks of garden furniture and tools that hadn’t been used in decades: weed hoes, sprinklers, a copper watering can, a now-moldy striped hammock and the creakingly old sunbeds that the sisters had loved playing with when they were little. They had sunbathed between the snowdrifts on the very first days of spring, “cloudbathed” on cloudy summer days, and spent entire summers pretending the sunbeds were boats, cars, planes, space rockets or jetties from which they could jump into imaginary water.

When the sisters had got too big to play, the sunbeds had gone into the garden shed, and there they had remained ever since. Instead, Dad had secretly used them for resting during his gardening, but had been given away by the light squeaking audible through the walls.

Now the shed was more of a monument to a bygone era. Only the garden table was brought out each year by the gardener, Jocke, who continued to put in appearances as regularly as clockwork, despite having retired many years ago. He wouldn’t accept any payment, either. He’d been coming weekly ever since Stellan and Agneta had moved into the house as newlyweds in the early seventies, and he’d carried on after retirement without either asking or being asked to. Perhaps he needed the steady routine to maintain his sanity.

Lotta nudged the door to the shed ajar and the heat struck her. The warm summer meant it was like an oven inside.

“Aren’t you going to open up that window again?” she said, pointing at the plywood board nailed to the back wall. “We’re not little anymore—there’s no risk of us spying.”

“No, but now there are new small spies,” Stellan said with a smile.

“They only care about their screens.”

“I’ll ask Jocke to take it down. The window looks on to a lovely beauty bush, but I don’t come in here as much as I used to.”

“Not at all, I’d say,” said Lotta, her gaze lingering on the rusty sunbeds.

“This is for you,” said Stellan Broman to his daughter, holding out a flower.

Every time she visited, he gave her a plant or a bulb from his garden for her small kitchen garden, and she was grateful to receive them.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Clarkia, I think. Jocke planted it.”

“You always blame him.”

Lotta smiled at her father.

Joachim—“Jocke”—had always been a natural part of her life, and he and Dad had always bickered gently over who knew the most about flowers. If she were honest, she’d probably learned more about plants and flowers from Jocke than she had from Dad. But she still had very affectionate memories of her father’s passion for gardening during her childhood, since it had meant he had been at home. Not at work, not in the house surrounded by friends and colleagues. No grandiose partying, no job, just quietly pottering about in the flower beds.

His life must have been much calmer over the last thirty years. Did he miss the old days? Being at the center of attention?

If nothing else, it had provided her and Malin with a different childhood—an existence that all their friends had envied. And what difference would it have made if Dad had been at home more—if he hadn’t shut himself away in the recreation room or fled into the garden as soon as he came through the door? They’d always had Mum.

And it had all been very exciting without a doubt: all the well-known faces that had turned up at the house, all the parties and frolics, and all the grown-ups doing strange things.

Perhaps it was their parents’ intense social life that had made her into such a recluse? The workaholic within her was definitely thanks to Dad, but even when she wasn’t working she preferred not to see people. She just wanted to settle down with a book. Or perhaps meet a friend to talk. One friend.

The shrill cry of a child signaled that it was time to go back inside to the others.

As usual, Malin had stayed inside with their mum. She had never liked the garden. “Urgh, worms and woodlice,” had been her judgment as a six-year-old—and she’d stuck to it.

Dark-haired Lotta and blonde Malin. The responsible big sister and the spoiled little princess.

Like a parody of a typical little sister, Malin hadn’t helped her mother with the cleaning, packing or dishes, Lotta noticed. Instead, she’d fetched a box of old clothes from the attic and was hunting for vintage treasures for her children.

“Do they really want old clothes?” Agneta asked.

“They’re lovely,” said Malin, holding up a pale blue plush playsuit from her own childhood.

With her blonde hair and dark eyebrows, Malin was a copy of her mother. It was obvious that Agneta had been a stunning beauty, and despite being almost seventy she still attracted glances when out and about. Even if she didn’t notice them herself. Both mother and daughter were beautiful in a way that made the people they met instinctively wish them well. It was as if their beauty radiated from within, and people therefore didn’t begrudge them anything.

While Malin and Lotta had spent time with their parents and the kids had run around, the sisters’ respective other halves had—as usual—withdrawn. There was always something about work or the car or a bathroom renovation that they could discuss to one side: Christian, in his neatly pressed shirt and patent leather shoes, Petter in shorts and sandals. They weren’t altogether comfortable with each other—a financier and a cultural bureaucrat—but neither of them was at all comfortable with their great father-in-law, the legendary TV presenter, so they sought each other out. Neither of them was especially invested in the issues that interested Stellan: TV in the 1970s and 1980s, European travel or how classical culture, entertainment and public education were connected. Neither of them could quote Schiller.

After noting that the brothers-in-law had followed their usual pattern, Lotta noted that the kids were following theirs. Her own sons were sitting staring at their mobiles, and Malin’s two kids were fighting. Molly was screeching because Hugo had thrown a tennis ball at her forehead and told her to head it. The ball had bounced against the wall and then on the table between two coffee cups.

It was high time to drive the boys to training and get away from Malin’s badly brought-up brats. She had masses of meetings—being away for a whole week was a long time in her job. It was lucky that Petter could manage his own hours, and that the kids had activities all summer.

“Time to go. Say thank you to Grandma and get dressed.”

Leo shook back his fringe. He went to his grandmother, took her hand and thanked her. Sixten needed telling again, but then he went and thanked her too.

Malin rifled through the remainder of the clothes, threw a few garments into a bag and put the box to one side. She didn’t take it back up to the attic again, Lotta noted. And she was convinced that the bag of old clothes from their childhood that her sister had taken would remain untouched for years to come.

Lotta opened the front door and let her sons out. Petter took the hint immediately, came inside and thanked his parents-in-law and then went out to sit in the car. In the meantime, Lotta helped Malin’s children to get dressed. Her sister had to find Christian and tell him to come inside and offer his thanks, then Lotta herded them all out to the two cars on the driveway, while Malin hugged her mother.

Stellan returned to the armchair in the living room, a well-used Pernilla from Dux, with a protective auditory accompaniment in the form of the St. Matthew Passion: John Eliot Gardiner’s classic recording from 1988 with Barbara Bonney.

Agneta came out onto the front step to wave off the retreating hordes. Then the sound of the telephone ringing inside the house cut through the air, and she told her daughters she had to take it. Malin couldn’t help but comment with a smile that her mother and father were the only people she knew who still had a landline at home. She said she would never be able to explain to her children what a landline was.

“It’s your father,” Agneta said apologetically. “He absolutely wants to keep it.”

Then she went back inside the house, while her younger daughter joined her waiting family.

Agneta went into the study and picked up the big receiver attached to a spiral cable that led to an old Ericsson Dialog phone with a dial. She answered with her surname, just as she always had done.

“Broman.”

On the other end of the line, a man’s voice spoke in heavily accented German.

“Geiger?”

It was as she’d feared.

Good God.

The grandchildren.

But she heard the cars start outside, and realized she didn’t have much choice.

She quickly calculated, then she answered curtly “Yes” and hung up.

Then she went upstairs and into the bedroom, opened the drawer in her bedside table, pulled out the instructions for the clock radio and the bathroom scales, and then got out a big, black Makarov pistol and a silencer that she screwed onto it.

On the way back to the living room, she cocked the weapon and noted that it seemed to be functional, despite having lain unused for so long. At least it had been cleaned and oiled.

She approached her husband diagonally from behind, pressing the muzzle against the side of his head.

And then she squeezed the trigger.

Blood spattered onto the book, which fell out of Stellan’s hands: Goethe’s Faust in the original German.

It hadn’t been a loud bang, but louder than she remembered—so for safety’s sake she lowered her weapon and went to the living-room window.

Outside, the sisters seemed to have been conferring on something, because they still hadn’t left. But now Lotta walked away from Malin’s car to her own and got in.

Lotta looked back toward the house again from the driver’s seat, caught sight of her mother peering out and waved cheerfully. Malin followed Lotta’s gaze and did the same.

The weapon concealed behind her back, Agneta waved back with her empty hand. Her daughters let down the rear passenger windows so that the kids could also wave to Grandma one last time. They did, and their grandmother smiled and reflected that with such wonderful grandchildren, she must have done something right.

“They’ve called.”

Karla Breuer looked up from her book and fixed her gaze on Strauss, who was standing in the doorway to her office. The Cannonball, as she called him. Short, rotund and deadly efficient.

She knew that he called her the White Ghost because of her long white hair, ice-blue eyes and white clothes. And because he considered her to be a remnant of the past, a specter from a forgotten time.

“Who?” said Breuer. “And where?”

“Beirut. To Stockholm,” said Strauss, who saw that the White Ghost hadn’t been expecting that.

It was one of many numbers they were monitoring, and one that no one had thought would be used again. That was probably why Strauss and Breuer’s department was going to be one of the last to be transferred: no one thought their targets were current. It felt as if when the BND had deserted Pullach for Berlin they had wanted to leave the old world behind them. But Breuer stubbornly maintained that the past never disappeared.

Breuer was the only person in the department who’d been working in intelligence when the number in Stockholm had been classified as active. And that had been many years ago. But now it was apparently active again, against all the odds.

“Then we have to go.”

Breuer got up and walked straight past Strauss without looking at him. They had never become friends during the four years they’d worked together, but now they were jointly responsible.

Although the final decision was up to Schönberg.

Strauss glanced into Breuer’s office as she swept past him. Not a single one of the monitors was illuminated; none of the computers were on. On the other hand, there were heaps of books and reports. He couldn’t grasp how a completely analogue operative was allowed to remain. Whom did she have a hold over? During her four decades in the intelligence service, she’d probably gathered all sorts. Then he turned on his heel and hurried after her.

There weren’t many people left in these buildings now, he thought to himself as he looked around the corridor. Most people had already moved to the new complex in Berlin, the country’s biggest administrative building, with a price tag of half a billion euros.

Its size and location in central Berlin should really have reminded the architects and drivers of the project of the East German Stasi’s old headquarters, but apparently that issue had had no impact—or they simply hadn’t cared.

In an open society, there was no longer such dread of activities behind closed doors.

Six doors down the corridor, Breuer knocked on Schönberg’s door and went in before Strauss could catch up.

Schönberg had a stack of files in front of him, three of them laid out side by side but with the covers closed. He must have shut them when he heard the knock. Even here on the inside, people kept secrets from each other.

“Geiger is activated,” said Breuer.

Schönberg didn’t reply, but simply gave her a look that said, So what?

“That means that Abu Rasil will be activated,” said Breuer. “We can take him now.”

“You think he’s still alive?” said Schönberg. “After more than thirty years of silence?”

“He’s alive. He withdrew, but now he’s been activated again. They wouldn’t have called Stockholm if Rasil wasn’t alive.”

“And what can he do nowadays?”

“If he’s been activated after three decades, it’s likely to be something spectacular. We need to go.”

Schönberg sat in silence.

“What’s the point of our department if we don’t take our warning systems seriously?”

Schönberg merely stared at her.

“This is exactly what they’re counting on,” Breuer continued. “That no one thinks Rasil is alive. That no one will do anything.”

“How certain are you about the indication?” Schönberg said finally.

Breuer looked at Strauss.

“Completely certain,” said Strauss, because he understood that was what Breuer wanted him to say. It was standard practice for the outgoing head of unit to recommend their successor, and Strauss was keen to take over from her. And it wouldn’t be many years until Schönberg’s post as head of department would be vacant. Strauss could see his career trajectory clearly before him.

“You’ve got four months to retirement, Breuer. Send Strauss.”

Breuer didn’t dignify that remark with a reply.

Schönberg sighed.

“How long have you been after Abu Rasil? Forty years?”

“I was after him for ten years, then he disappeared. And I was close to catching him several times.”

“That’s what you think, anyway.”

“Are we going to let the biggest terrorist we’ve ever tracked get away?”

Schönberg took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Then he looked at his subordinates.

“Abu Rasil is a myth,” he said. “A legend that the Palestinians launched in the seventies to scare the West.”

“And that’s exactly what Abu Rasil wants you to think.”

“The superhuman terrorist. That one single brain was behind practically every terrorist attack in Europe at the time—the story’s just too good to be true.”

“As a parting gift, then?” said Breuer, locking her eyes on her boss. Both Schönberg and Strauss realized she wasn’t going to give up.

“Go,” said Schönberg. “Take Strauss and Windmüller. But you’ve only got a week.”

“We’ll leave straightaway.”

“Straightaway?” said Strauss.

“Straightaway. Rasil is naturally already en route.”

Breuer turned around and left, and Strauss ran into his own office to grab his jacket and service weapon. He could buy everything he needed on the road—except a Glock 17 and a customized Zegna in size 60.

There were no stacks of books in Strauss’s office. Instead, there were the same number of computer monitors as in all the other offices, but unlike Breuer’s, they were switched on. Plus the Nick Cave posters and Strauss’s beloved Devialet Phantom Gold—the world’s best wireless system for playing music. As his colleagues had moved across Berlin, Strauss had been able to turn up the volume more and more.

He hesitated for a second in the doorway, but then he couldn’t help himself. He turned on his Phantom with the remote control and started playing “The Good Son” from his mobile.

Heavenly.

Then he quickly left and hurried down the corridor to inform their colleague that he was coming with them to Sweden. Windmüller was one of the many well-trained operatives whose task was to guarantee security and protect their lives.

Breuer’s fixation on Abu Rasil was well known, and questioned by all at the BND. This would be her final chance to prove the legend was true and that she’d been right all along.

Strauss didn’t know what to think, but he would never dare question the White Ghost. Not openly at any rate, and certainly not while she was still on active service. Breuer knew a lot of bigwigs.

None of the three had any family to notify, so all they had to do was get moving. Windmüller got into the mobile operations van, while Strauss opened the door of the BMW for Breuer. He couldn’t judge how serious the assignment was. But if Abu Rasil existed and if he had been activated, then something big was happening right now.

Something really big.

As soon as Agneta’s daughters had left, everything became urgent.

She grabbed a rucksack from the hall and hurried upstairs. Way back when, the bathroom had felt like the safest place—for three reasons. You could lock yourself in, there was no way to see in, and no one would ask what you were up to inside. And the many visitors to the house always used the toilets downstairs.

Burying things in the garden or heading off into the woods might seem smart in the heat of the moment, but when the equipment came to be needed, it might not be possible to retrieve it at once. She’d got that far in her thoughts, even back then.

Now she didn’t have much time. Naturally, there would already be people on the way.

The only question was: how far away were they?

And who was coming?

The toilet roll holder wasn’t up to the job no matter how hard she wielded it, so she had to run down to the basement to fetch a hammer. She hadn’t given any thought to how she was going to break up the tiling—nor how noisy it would be—so long ago, when she’d deposited the package in the bathroom wall and tiled over it.

But there was no one to hear her now.

She swung the hammer as fast and hard as she could and cracked the tiling on the first attempt. She continued striking it to remove all the rest of the tile, worked at the seam of the carefully fitted damp-proof membrane underneath and then shoved in two fingers to pry out the emergency package, wrapped up in waxcloth.

A fat bundle of thousand-krona notes—but they were no longer valid, she realized. She would have to make do with the cash she had in the house. Fortunately, they’d always kept some in the metal tin in the kitchen.

Three passports in different names, but all with expiry dates long since passed.

The codeword for the radio transmitter.

Car keys—was the car still there? When had she last checked?

An instruction booklet on how to survive the collapse of civilization, which she reluctantly took.

Cyanide capsules.

Good God.

The pistol had never been hidden here—she had wanted that close to hand, and had settled on the bedside table. She’d come up with a labored story about it being passed down from her father, in case anyone found it. But no one ever had.

She stopped. Was that a car?

She quickly ran to the window on the upstairs landing, carefully lifted the edge of the curtain and glanced down to the street.

Nothing there.

But would they really park outside the house? Wouldn’t they park nearby and then sneak up? Although what would people think if they saw mysterious men creeping through their gardens in this well-heeled neighborhood?

No, it would clearly be easiest to drive up to the house and park on the street, looking as though one had legitimate cause to be there. Perhaps they would even use a courier’s van or a pickup truck with the word “plumber” painted on the side. Something no one would remember.

But they weren’t here yet. She had no idea whether she had hours, minutes or seconds.

She needed to get back to work.

“My banana doll!” Molly called out.

“We’ll have to get it next time we see Grandma,” said Malin.

“No!” Molly screamed.

Malin sighed.

“I think we need to go back,” she said to Christian.

She knew how fixated Molly was on her oblong, yellow plush character with its wide smile. The banana doll served as both playmate and cuddly toy, and if they didn’t fetch it at once their daughter would never stop screaming.

Christian glanced hastily at his Rolex GMT-Master II. It was the Pepsi edition, and he was more than a little proud of it.

Jesus.

This was going to take all day.

But there wasn’t much they could do about that.

They’d just gone past Brommaplan, where he could have turned around, but he’d realized too late. He had to carry on to the roundabout and do a full lap of it instead—then they were on the way back.

Bloody doll.

The clock was ticking, so Agneta went back into the bathroom, took the packet of quick-drying cement and mixed it with some water using the toothbrush mug. She spread the mixture onto the back of the spare tile that had been at the bottom of her drawer in the bathroom cabinet all these years along with the cement, and then she put the tile over the hole and pulled the basket of towels in front of it. It wouldn’t fool anyone if subjected to thorough examination, but she might win a few days and that could be enough. It was all about buying time.

She put the toothbrush mug and tile pieces in her rucksack, along with the money and the passports. Then she went down to the kitchen and made up a bag of food. A sudden impulse made her run to the garage to add the battery charger to her bag.

Good. And now what?

Confuse matters a bit.

How?

The jewelry box. Stellan’s wallet. Something else.

The little Munch painting hanging in the guest toilet.

All of it went into her rucksack.

And now to pull out some drawers and mess things up a bit.

What else?

Of course. The reason for all of it. It took her a minute to fetch it.

She checked the time.

Too much time had already passed.

She needed to go.

She couldn’t take her and Stellan’s car—she knew that much. So she went into the garden shed and tugged out the old bicycle that had been there for decades. Pink with white handlebars. It must have belonged to one of the girls, even if she couldn’t remember ever seeing either of them riding a bike.

Over the years, the bicycle had slowly disappeared behind rakes, shovels, trimmers, a wheelbarrow and various planks of wood that might come in useful one day. A broken garden hose was tangled around the frame, handlebars and front wheel. The chain wasn’t oiled and the tires were almost flat, but it could be ridden.

Were any of the neighbors watching? They would be questioned, and she didn’t want any of the operatives currently being set in motion finding out about her two-wheeled escape vehicle. Given how rarely her daughters usually got in touch, she ought to have upward of a week before one of them got worried. For that long, at least, the police would leave her in peace.

The others were more of a problem.

The ones who had called.

And the ones who might have been listening.

She had no idea how much time she had.

Hours or days?

Or perhaps they would be content with the conversation and simply await the result?

She went back inside for one final check. Then she glanced through the pane of glass in the front door. There was nothing out of the ordinary outside. She buttoned up her parka and put the hood over her head. She would be hot, but she had to disguise herself somehow.

Finally, she went over to her dead husband and kissed him on the top of his head.

“Thanks for all the years. Cross your fingers for me.”

She patted him on the cheek and then vanished outside to the bicycle, before pedaling away.

At the very moment Agneta Broman disappeared round the bend of Grönviksvägen on her old bicycle, Malin Broman-Dahl’s black BMW M550d xDrive Touring came rolling along Nockebyvägen before turning on to Grönviksvägen, with just a few hundred meters to go until it reached the parental home at number 63.

The sound was deafening. Cars honking, trucks with stude