Invisible Murder by Lene Kaaberbøl Read Free Book Online Page A

three different buses just for a chance to chat online with her. Surely there was a computer somewhere closer? Didn’t they have Internet cafés in Miskolc?
    Maybe the girl lived in Budapest. Maybe that’s why Tamás was suddenly in such a hurry to leave.
    Or maybe there was another reason. Sándor suddenly noticed that one of his desk drawers was ajar. It hit him like a punch to the stomach, because even though he had been afraid that Tamás would make a mess or knock something over or pour soda on his computer, at no point had he been afraid that his little brother would take something that was his. You didn’t steal from your own people.
    And his wallet was still there. It was his passport that was gone.

 
    NSIDE THE SURVEILLANCE van, the smell of nervous sweat and coffee-induced flatulence had grown intense over the past couple of hours. Søren leaned forward, and then back, in an attempt to focus on the screen. Recently his optician had begun to mutter something about “bifocals.”
    “Any chance of a better picture?” he asked.
    “Not while he’s moving,” the technician said. “It’s not exactly broad daylight out there.”
    The image was jumping and shaking as the man outside made his way across the abandoned railway yard. Søren’s eyes wandered over to one of the other screens, the one that gave him a bird’s eye view of the area. They had two men stationed on the roof of the closest residential building on Rovsingsgade. The beat-up blue Scania refrigeration truck that was the object of the whole operation was parked more or less in the middle of the derelict triangle of no-man’s land between Rovsingsgade and the old railway junction tracks. A little farther away, on the other side of the strip of straggling allotment gardens, a train rattled past in a flicker of lit windows. Darkness had given way to half-light. Luckily, a mass of leaden clouds delayed true dawn a little, but it was still light enough for the inhabitants of the refrigeration truck to spot Berndt if he wasn’t careful.
    But he was. Currently the little camera mounted on his headset was showing nothing except close-ups of stiff, yellow grass and nettle stalks from last year.
    “Come on, come on.…” mumbled a voice on the far side of the technician—Mikael Nielsen, an intense young man with a very high IQ, one of the new people Søren had personally helped recruit to counterterrorism from the surveillance force. With his crew-cut and ruddy complexion,he could be mistaken for the head of one of the more violent soccer fan clubs, and he gave off a vibe that made people reluctant to share a taxi with him. He had been part of Søren’s group for a year and a half now, but Søren wasn’t sure he would last. Yes, he had a sharp mind and a head filled with astonishing facts, but there was a restlessness in him that he struggled to control during moments like this, when all they could do was wait. And wait. And wait some more. Caution took time.
    Suddenly the camera advanced with a bump. They could hear Berndt’s breathing; it was very loud in the stuffy, oxygen-depleted atmosphere inside the van. The image got significantly darker.
    “He’s under the truck now,” Gitte Nymand said, practically into Søren’s ear. She was standing behind him and had leaned forward so she could follow the action more closely. He couldn’t help noticing the feminine scent of freshly washed hair and deodorant. Hopefully the contrast with his own sixteen-hours-on-the-body shirt wasn’t too jarring.
    Suddenly an image popped up on a screen that had so far been dark. It cut in and out and bounced and pixilated before resolving into something Søren didn’t need glasses to make out.
    The bare interior of the truck’s cargo compartment. Spotlights from primitive work lamps fell stark and cold on a single, exposed silhouette on a chair. The man’s hands were cuffed behind his back, and a black plastic package had been strapped to his bare chest with