Prologue1
That has to be a bloody woman up there, he thinks, and accelerates, passing the nearest EV, shooting the slowpoke driving it a dirty look. He chooses to save the finger for later.
You have to pick your battles.
Division Head Alf Stiernström woke up on the wrong side of the bed this spring morning. Granted, it’s been a long time since he woke up on any other side. And of course the first email he read on his phone—head burrowed deep into his pillow and eyes full of sand—was from his lawyer, an inveterate morning person.
These early mornings are what he hates most about the position he has strived for his entire life and finally reached. But there’s no escaping the fact that he, a top manager for one of Scandinavia’s leading companies, must embrace early mornings. In fact, managers need to go even further: early mornings need to be seen as a sign of having the upper hand, as though they’ve already taken a solid lead by the time the competition wakes up. It’s about beating the enemy to the battlefield, as legendary strategist Sun Tzu once said.
Stiernström had tried to embrace that management philosophy while he read the email from his lawyer, but when he realized his ex-wife-to-be was demanding even more money, the philosophy instantly evaporated. He’d made concession after concession, but nothing was ever enough. The bitch wouldn’t be happy until she’d taken every penny he’d ever made.
Feminism has gone too bloody far.
Now, on the motorway outside Uppsala, Alf Stiernström sees one EV preparing to overtake another in the distance. He opens the throttle, sending diesel fumes swirling out across the billowing rapeseed fields, and sets his sights on the tree hugger. He notes smugly how hesitant the hippie in the passing lane becomes when he finds himself staring at the elegant, fast-approaching grille of Stiernström’s BMW in his rearview mirror. The artificially accelerating EV gadget shudders, unable to sustain any power. Stiernström sees the no-doubt-overpaid, immigrant IT nerd cut in front of the slower driver in the inside lane with terror in his eyes.
When Stiernström overtakes the so-called car, he’s a fraction too slow getting his middle finger up. He’s already passed the driver, who’ll barely be able to see it, but he flips him off anyway.
He has picked his battle.
Just as Stiernström reaches peak acceleration, he notices the BMW handling oddly.
The binoculars find the cars just as the overtaking happens. They watch from an elevated angle. Watch as the car in the outside lane loses control almost immediately after passing the EVs, watch it veer the wrong way when it reaches the bend in the road, watch it catch fire before it has even started to pull back into the inside lane, watch it careen into the bright-yellow rapeseed field instead, ploughing through it in a ball of flame.
They watch a raised middle finger burning like a torch behind the windscreen. Then, the binoculars are lowered, and the remote control.
The universe hears a deep exhalation. It has begun.a deep exhalation. It has begun.
2
It’s a beautiful spring day in a typical Swedish forest. Tentative rays of pale light trickle down between tall trees. The small pond is like a dark mirror, as though it’s hiding the deepest of secrets. The air is humming, chirping, purring, suffused with all kinds of odors, smells, scents. A swell of melancholia ripples through the forest as it comes back to life after a long winter.
As if it knows it’s doomed.
On one side of the large pond, the trees open into a clearing. Another side is bordered by dense thicket. There’s unnatural movement in the thicket, but even once it becomes clear a human is crouched next to the shrubbery, the contrast with the surrounding nature is still not particularly stark. Not only because the man’s clothing is khaki but also because he simply looks as though he belongs. This is his world.
He finishes shearing gray handfuls of hair from his scalp, rinses his freshly shaven face with water from a wooden bucket, stands up, and slips his large hunting knife into the waistband of his trousers. He appears to be in his fifties, sinewy, flinty faced, and weatherworn, and when he turns his face toward the pale blue sky and sniffs the air, it’s clear his precision- trained olfactory sense picks up everything it needs to.
He’s grateful it’s not another bear, but rather two or more deer that have moved within range of the trap. Thankfully, he has already removed the explosives.
Because he’s leaving this place too. He has made a life-altering decision. He has followed the path of his conviction as far as it would take him, and it’s time.
It has begun.
He feels it’s important to remember his name now. Living in nature, he didn’t have one. There are no names in nature, only scent trails, distinctive calls, changes in behavior. But it’s time for him to reclaim his name, and everyone will know it.
He raises his binoculars and peers down at the water. Nothing there. When he moves toward the pond, its surface like tar, he has a name again.
Lukas Frisell.
He remembers it.
With the name comes civilization, a history, a life that should have turned out differently. He takes down the empty trap at the water’s edge, detaching it from the trees, doing his best to brush the traces of explosives from their trunks before letting the trap drop into a burlap sack. Then he gazes out across the black water.
He has to return to the ruins of destruction.
Which he left once, intending to never see again.
Lukas Frisell slings the burlap sack over his shoulder and takes in the world he has been allowed to be part of for so long. Nature let him in, made him a participant.
His gratitude will always be without end.
He starts walking, to stave off the melancholy. He’s only partially successful. The time has come to revisit the ruins, to take the next inevitable step in life.
Nature keeps him company as he walks, as if to say goodbye. As if to make sure he knows what he’s doing. He feels overwhelmed by the richness of the planet, and for a moment it seems as though nature is trying to stop him, trying to keep him from taking the drastic step he feels forced to take.
Lukas Frisell has never been alone here. Through all the long years with no human contact, he never once felt lonely in earnest.
It takes experienced forest eyes to recognize the vague outline next to the hill before him as anything other than constantly shifting nature. But it’s something else. Where the hill turns into a ravine, the foliage has taken on a faintly unnatural shape. That’s where he’s going.
To
his house.
As he slides down the slope, another knife’s edge of melancholy slices through his leathery skin. His dwelling, his refuge. The center of his life for so many years. Until he finally came to the only viable conclusion after witnessing the increasingly visible devastation of his surroundings.
He passes through his large garden. Vegetables, herbs—everything is sprouting, straining toward the sun once more. But this year, he’ll leave the harvesting to the animals.
He has almost reached his heavily camouflaged dwelling when instinct strikes.
Something’s different. He grabs the heavy hunting knife hanging from his belt. And then he sees it. There’s a fresh carving in one of the doorposts.
A circle inside another circle.
Once more, he turns his bright blue eyes to the sky and inhales. The only unfamiliar smell is so fleeting he can’t be sure it was really there. It may have been the smell of horse chestnut, but there are no chestnut trees nearby.
A gust of wind sweeps through Lukas Frisell’s part of the forest; fresh shavings from his doorpost whirl on the ground.
3
Autumn 2008
In the dimly lit interview room, two people are seated on the same side of the interview table. The chair across from them is empty. And there’s no one in the observation room behind the one-way mirror on the wall.
Eva Nyman is a detective inspector at the National Criminal Investigation Department and her boss’s right hand. She slowly smooths her unusually elegant designer clothes, and when she meets the gaze of her aforementioned boss, she can tell he’s trying hard to contain his impatience.
Patience has never been Chief Inspector Lukas Frisell’s forte. “Any word from Peter?” he asks.
Eva Nyman shakes her head, her thick brown hair billowing when she adds a shrug. “He said he was chasing down a lead. That he’d check in.”
Frisell lets out a derisive snort, then nods, swipes at his wispy medium-blond hair, and taps his pen against the table. It’s the same case as always. Everything in the autumn of 2008 revolves around the kidnapping of Liselott Lindman, a photograph of whom was sent to the press a week ago, tied up on a dirt floor next to a copy of that day’s paper. She was visibly emaciated and clearly no more than semiconscious at that point. The perpetrator had celebrated the one-month anniversary of her kidnapping by sending a fresh photograph of his victim to the media.
The worst part is that they know who the kidnapper is. They’re all but certain the man who pulled off the spectacular abduction a month ago, in public and broad daylight, is Liselott’s ex-husband Dick. It’s just that they don’t know where he is.
A person who in all likeliness does know is Dick’s best friend Robban Svärd, who was recently arrested for tax crimes in the Maldives. But he’s late. This is their second day interviewing him, and he’s annoyingly late.
“We’ll get him today,” Lukas Frisell says, and stops tapping his pen, moving on to turning his wedding ring round and round his finger instead. Eva Nyman watches his fidgeting, aware of everything contained in it, then counters by putting her new phone down on the table in front of her.
It doesn’t look like any other phone in the year 2008. It’s an iPhone, only just launched on the Swedish market.
Frisell glances at it, pulls a face, sticks his hands in under the table, and instead fixates on the carving in the wood next to the smartphone. He interprets the four crudely carved letters as F-R-E-E. Free. Perhaps an aspiration carved by a prisoner who was still clinging to hope, although he’d be damned if he knew how someone managed to get a sharp enough implement into the interview room.
Maybe that’s the freedom it refers to. Then, he says: “This new technology is going to have us all brainwashed.”
“It’s the future,” Nyman replies, “whether we like it or not.”
Neither one of them really wants to argue about this. They just want to get the interview started and use anything they can drag out of Robban Svärd to find Liselott Lindman. But for now, they have only each other.
“You know how all this started,” Frisell continues.
Eva Nyman nods. With Facebook, yes, she knows. Liselott had been in the protected persons program. Then, someone posted a picture of a neighborhood party on a new social media platform called Facebook. Liselott was visible in the background. Two days later, she was taken from the street outside her new, top-secret home.
Eva Nyman is glad there’s no discussion this time. Lately, they’ve been ending up in that particular dead end far too often. The way she sees it, at the end of the day, Frisell is her boss—simple as that. His word goes. But not everyone shares that sentiment. Peter, for instance, most definitely does not.
“So, he’s chasing down a lead?” Frisell says, reading her mind the way he tends to a bit too often for comfort. “Peter, he was going to be in touch?”
Nyman
shrugs. She knows there’s more coming.
“We can’t outsource our police work to untested and integrity-violating technologies. Besides, triangulation is a bloody unsafe method that promises to turn our mobile phones into unreliable informants. We forget the tried and tested investigative methods, in the same way we’re pulling away from nature. We’re moving through the ruins of destruction, straying further and further from our origin. Securing crime scenes, conducting interviews, that’s what solves a case, not computers and … those things …” Frisell points contemptuously at Nyman’s brand-new iPhone.
“Just wait until those things reach their full potential,” he adds, falling silent when he hears the familiar sound of footsteps in the hallway outside the small interview room.
The tension rises markedly. Two guards escort Robban Svärd into the room. A sarcastic smile is once again curling the left corner of his mouth. His lawyer enters behind him. Svärd throws himself onto a chair.
Just then, a clear but discordant alarm sounds. A few moments of confusion follow. Lukas Frisell is struck by the fact that he’s never heard an iPhone ring before. More to the point, however, is that the thing should obviously be turned off in here.
Eva Nyman answers the device.
“Eva. Bloody hell, Peter, you can’t call me … What? Okay, hold on.”
Frisell has already sprung into action. He physically shoves the guards, the suspect, and his lawyer out the door and slams it shut. Nyman has managed to turn the iPhone to “Speaker,” and she puts it back down on the table as Peter’s voice rings out in the room. It sounds different from usual, and the information it relays is cryptic.
“Start over from the beginning,” Frisell cuts in sharply.
They can clearly hear Peter composing himself, taking a few deep breaths. “The triangulation finally turned up something,” he says.
Frisell turns to Nyman, frowning. She just shakes her head. Sure, she suspected Peter and his team may have been secretly running a triangulation search behind Frisell’s back, but she didn’t know it for a fact.
Peter continues: “It led us to an address outside Järna. A house in the middle of nowhere. We went in. There was no one there—at least no one with a mobile phone. But there was a basement. When we got down there, we noticed it had a dirt floor.”
An unarticulated sound escapes Lukas Frisell. He already knows what’s coming. In her heart of hearts, Eva Nyman probably does too.
“She’s so small,” Peter says quietly. “Like a baby bird. A tied-up baby bird.”
For a long moment, there’s only silence. Dead silence. Both in the interview room at the Police HQ in Stockholm and in the basement outside Järna.
Then Peter resumes in a steadier, slightly angrier voice: “She’s still warm, Frisell. If we’d just started the triangulation sooner—”
Nyman lunges for the phone and ends the call.
But it’s too late. Frisell heard it too.
“If we’d just started the triangulation sooner, Liselott Lindman would still be alive.”
His voice is a whisper. He stares at the carved word in front of him.
Free.
Nyman gently walks over, tries to put her arm around him. As he calmly pushes her arm away, her phone dings. A photo is briefly visible before Nyman manages to get it off the screen.
The late Liselott Lindman really does look like a baby bird. With his eyes closed, Lukas Frisell whispers: “I don’t think I should be here.”
I
The First Hunt
4
Every time he turns down Dalagatan from Odengatan, he looks up at Astrid Lindgren’s windows. The fact that this is where she penned her classic children’s books lends the entire area a creative aura. These days, Jesper Sahlgren would go so far as to say that on occasion, his own desk, with its view of Vasaparken, feels like the creative heart of the neighborhood. This is one of those occasions. The company’s spring campaign is already making waves in the world of Swedish advertising.
That campaign is what prompted Jesper Sahlgren to get up uncharacteristically early this Sunday morning in May, leaving his family still sound asleep in their house in Täby as he hopped into his Tesla and drove into a Stockholm that even now, at 6:23, feels completely deserted. On the other hand, that gives him a chance to park on the left side of the street, against traffic. With his iPad Pro in hand, he heads through the front door, climbs a couple flights of stairs, and strides up to the sturdy metal door on which trendily square letters spell out “Flat Broke Ltd” and underneath, in smaller script: “Not necessarily the PR company for you.” He remembers when he pitched that slogan to the board. He remembers the moment their skeptical faces lit up with understanding.
Sahlgren punches in the code, stares into the retinal scanner, and hopes the text he received the night before is reliable, that indeed the company’s assistant, whatever her name is, really did come in to work on a Saturday from Vallentuna or Märsta or wherever it is she lives, to accept delivery of the print proofs.
When the security door finally swings open, he can’t resist the temptation anymore. As he moves through the familiar office—which he still remembers missing terribly during the pandemic—he pulls up on his iPad the series of ingenious photographs showing the leaders of every conservative party standing next to petrol pumps.
He can’t wait to see the campaign in hard copy.
Without so much as a glance in their direction, he passes window after window overlooking Vasaparken. Save for a small movement, possibly a shadow, next to one of the trees nearest the street, the world still seems uninhabited.
Jesper Sahlgren reaches his desk. His sigh of relief echoes through the office when he spots the cylindrical parcel sitting on it. The assistant came through indeed.
He allows himself to savor the moment ever so briefly. His eyes fall on his heavy wristwatch. It tells him it’s now 6:28.
He was on a wait list for over a year to get the genuine Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch Titanium, possibly the world’s most shatterproof watch. It’s the titanium version of the watch Neil Armstrong wore around his wrist when he stepped down onto the lunar surface.
A small step for mankind, but a big step for humanity, Jesper Sahlgren thinks as he starts unwrapping the cylindrical parcel.
When the binoculars catch the movements in the window, the shadow retreats behind the tree. Taking cover.
The binoculars are lowered.
The universe hears a deep exhalation followed by a deep, hollow bang, then the distorted sound of broken glass shatters the desolate morning. Something flies astronaut-like through the air, landing with a thud on Vasaparken’s lawn.
In Vasaparken’s lawn.
When the shadow silently slips away from the tree, the thing in the grass is an utterly shapeless, smoking, deformed hunk of charred flesh.
The only human thing about it is a wristwatch that stubbornly keeps ticking. It’s now 6:29.
Scattered around the roots of the tree are a number of fresh wood shavings.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
