CELL 8 by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström Page B

Cincinnati. He always did—the daylight irritated his eyes when he had to read onscreen and he was doing it more and more, staying in the office and communicating via the Internet. He was thirty-six years old and had worked in the FBI office in western Ohio for ten of them. The work had changed following the explosion of information in the digital world, he was special agent in charge and that was as far as you could get in a local office, and yet the jobs were not really what he’d imagined when he’d first opened the door to what was still his office. He should be out there. In reality. All this, more and more office work, sometimes he just longed to be somewhere else.
    He drank a lot of water. It was ten in the morning and he was already on his third bottle of expensive mineral water from the shop on the corner by the garage. He had put on weight with all this damn sitting, and water instead of morning coffee meant a lot of running to the toilet, but it worked.
    He had just poured a glass when the call came from the head office in Washington.
    They didn’t say much. But he realized that he should put the water to one side, that today had just taken on another dimension.
    He was given a phone number, a Marc Brock at Interpol, he was to call him, he had all the information there was.
    Having searched through all the accessible databases, a procedure he repeated three times, Marc Brock had gradually come to understand over the past hour that whatever it was that wasn’t right, was in fact right.
    The man in the photo, the man who was wanted, was a dead man. Every single time. And yet, it couldn’t be right. Not if you took into consideration where he died.
    Brock had phoned the person who had sent the information, the officer who had requested help: someone called Klövje in Sweden. He had had time to reminisce about Stockholm again, the woman whose name he still remembered, and he had envisaged the beautiful city built on islands with water everywhere while he waited for an answer—they had walked around hand in hand for several days—with the receiver to his ear, and he had wondered who he would have been now, if it had worked out, if he had stayed with her.
    The Swedish voice had been formal and spoken correct English with a Swedish accent. Brock had apologized, realized that he had no idea what time it was—the afternoon, he had suddenly remembered when Klövje answered the phone, six hours’ difference, that was it.
    The stiff smile, the uneasy eyes.
    Brock had insisted. He wanted to check the photo he had of a man who called himself John Schwarz. He wanted to compare, not with the photo stuck in a Canadian passport, but with the real thing.
    Klövje had confirmed the picture’s veracity twenty minutes later. He had been to the jail, the cell where the suspect was being held, and he had with his own eyes seen that both faces, the one in the passport and the real one, were one and the same.
    Marc Brock had thanked him, asked if he could get back to him, and lifted the receiver again as soon as he had put it down, convinced that his colleagues over at the FBI head office would think he was completely crazy.
    Kevin Hutton had been ordered to call Interpol, someone called Brock.
    He would do it in a moment.
    He swung around in his chair and looked out over Cincinnati, where he’d lived since he applied for and got the job in the local Ohio office. The tall buildings, the busy main roads.
    A few more deep breaths—he was still shaking.
    Because if the first summarized details from the FBI head office were correct, he should open the window and scream out across the noisy city.
    Because it just wasn’t possible.
    And he, if anyone, should know.
    Marc Brock confirmed everything.
    Hutton heard the anxiety in his voice and he realized that Brock also found it hard to believe, that he would happily forward what he had because then he wouldn’t need to deal with this shit anymore.
    You’re dead, for fuck’s sake