“We should be working with Interpol and the foreign intelligence services. The Americans, to begin—we have to find out who the hell Edmund Deadmarsh is. The man is clearly at the center of it all, but he’s a damned enigma. All the information we have on him has either been disproved or vaporized in the last twenty-four hours.”

Sanderson kept talking for five minutes, rattling off what was essentially a dress rehearsal for his afternoon meeting. He saw Sjoberg actually taking notes. When he was done, he said, “Anything else?”

“No, Arne, that’s all for now. Carry on.”

Chapter 15

FIFTEEN

The man they were looking for was, at that moment, thirty miles southwest on an express train paralleling the E4. The window at Slaton’s shoulder framed an interlaced mesh of freshly turned fields and conifer forest, brown leaves tumbling across land that was done with the business of summer and preparing for another season of survival. The kidon noticed none of it, his eyes a blank as they floated over the ever-changing portrait. His lost gaze was in part due to distraction, his thoughts managing the next few hours, but it also served to disengage the passengers around him. Happily, they all seemed similarly inclined, silently grappling ill-timed investments, marital disharmony, or whatever crisis had turned up on the threshold of their lives.

Everyone had problems. It was simply a matter of degree.

The train arrived after an hour in Nyköping, and there Slaton bore a ninety-minute layover at a station-side restaurant, taking espresso and a robust Smörgåstårta of ham, cucumber, and caviar on rye, before stepping onto his connection. The second train arrived at the village of Oxelösund, by the station clock, at 4:21.

Outside the terminal, Slaton stopped to get his bearings. To his right he saw an expansive iron mill fronting the Baltic Sea, acre upon acre of piping and machinery, mountains of ore rising from the scarred ground, all of it burnt rust-red by a windswept sea. Adjacent to the mill were working neighborhoods that had sprung up to house the attendant workforce. The homes reflected the mill—dated and worn, but soldiering on tenaciously in a changing world.