‘Do you think they gave up?’

‘Maybe,’ Klara mutters. ‘But if they bought a last-minute plane ticket just to keep an eye on me down here, it hardly seems likely that they’d just give up.’

George takes a sip of his coffee, his eyes still on the street. She looks at him from the corner of her eye. He’s so concentrated and unexpectedly protective of her, and her overheated brain slows down when she’s near him. She doesn’t feel the constant panic. She doesn’t feel so alone.

‘Over there?’ he says. ‘In that old BMW?’

Klara leans towards the windowsill and peers down. She can just make out the silhouette of someone sitting behind the steering wheel. He seems to be drinking something out of a big cardboard cup.

‘Maybe,’ she says with a shrug. ‘But it’s not the same guy as yesterday.’

‘That’s the guy,’ George says. ‘I’m one hundred per cent sure of it. He was behind me at the bakery just now. Bought a large coffee.’ He nods down at him. ‘He’s drinking it now. Seemed Middle Eastern. Had a beard. Jeans and some short bodybuilder-type jacket that made him look like a big guy. He kept glancing behind him all the time in the direction of the apartment. Wanted to make sure you didn’t disappear while he was getting his coffee. It’s him for sure. They’ve just changed the guy, realized that you know they’re following you.’

Klara sighs. For a moment she’d allowed herself to think they might have miraculously let her go.

‘Where are your pills?’ he asks and turns to her with a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

‘My sleeping pills?’ Klara asks.

‘Yeah, unless you have more drugs you’d like to mention to me? Grab them. I have an idea.’

15–21 November

Beirut

The connection is slow and unreliable, and it’s driving him crazy, but finally the browser loads.

He starts by reading through a few articles about the scandal in Sweden this summer. The riots in the suburbs that were subsidized and even partly organized by a Russian company with links to the Kremlin. And the woman who exposed it all, whose picture he could hardly escape all through the autumn. The young Swedish lawyer with red hair and eyes so sincere and intense that they burned straight through every photograph and video clip.

Gabriella Seichelmann.

Now he skims through the story again, and it’s still unimaginable. That Säpo knew all about the Russians stirring up things in the suburbs, that the Russians paid criminals to organize the riots among bored teenage boys rejected by society. The cynicism of it all. And Säpo just let the suburbs burn in order to achieve some political advantage.