Hostage by Kristina Ohlsson

Author:Kristina Ohlsson [Ohlsson, Kristina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471115219
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

37

STOCKHOLM, 18:01

This day’s work would never end. The realisation came as a blow. Fredrika had no intention of going home until the hijacking was resolved one way or another. Spencer called her just after six.

‘How are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Fine, but I won’t be home for dinner. We can have an Indian another time.’

Then they talked about the children, what they should have for tea, what they should wear the following day.

How did my life turn out like this? Fredrik wondered. How did I go from a career woman with a secret lover to a married woman with two children?

Spencer’s transformation was almost as dramatic: from a married, childless professor in his sixties to a remarried father of two. And yet, Fredrika had never once doubted that he would cope, or worried that he might leave her. Their relationship was as clear as if it were etched in stone. He was hers and she was his.

And that made her feel safe.

Safe. When had she ever felt safe before?

Her thoughts turned to the passengers on Flight 573. She presumed they had been informed of the delay by now. She hoped the crew would be able to continue to maintain calm and order; it didn’t bear thinking about what could happen if chaos broke out. A scenario in which the passengers panicked and ran amok would be both dangerous and difficult to deal with.

The plane was now uncomfortably close to the US border. And anything could happen there. The Americans were noticeably stressed and seeing ghosts. She hoped Karim wouldn’t decide to defy them.

Fredrika rubbed her hands together. There were so many dimensions to the hijacking, so many sidetracks, that she felt exhausted.

First of all, there was a North African asylum seeker who was due to be deported from Sweden, because Säpo had decided that he constituted a threat to national security.

Secondly, there was a secret US detention facility in Afghanistan.

And thirdly there was a man who had followed his childhood dream and become a pilot, and was now regarded as a terrorist holding hundreds of people to ransom.

The question was how these three elements hung together, because in Fredrika’s mind these widely differing strands must have come from the same source. Her boss had called just a few minutes earlier and asked her to produce a written summary of all the information that had come to light so far, and to send it by courier to the government offices.

Fredrika wrote down her conclusions.

They still hadn’t managed to link Zakaria Khelifi to Tennyson Cottage. It was of course possible that there was no connection, but in that case they must at least have a perpetrator who could be linked to both. Many people felt that Karim could be that perpetrator, and Fredrika was one of them. However, she couldn’t believe that he had done this on his own.

What evidence did they have against Karim? A photograph of him and Zakaria Khelifi. A book by Alfred Lord Tennyson in which the photograph had been hidden.

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