This Land is no Stranger Sarah Hollister (best biographies to read .txt) 📖

chair. “Sit,” he commanded again. “And I will tell you exactly where to go to find your missing pistol.”

56.

Brand stared at Moro.

“You have the Glock?”

“I don’t,” Moro said. “But I can tell you where it is.”

“Where?”

“Take up your sword again, Veronika,” Moro whispered. “Take it and use it. You know what you have to do.”

“Goddammit, Moro!”

“Klara’s rapist is right here,” Moro said. “Loke Voss is nearby, at the cathedral for his big anniversary celebration. It will be quite easily done. Avenge Klara. See to it that poor Gustav did not kill himself in vain. An eye for an eye. A death for a death. You must murder the devil or you will never be free.”

Moro’s voice was insistent, almost teasing. It felt like it came from another world, another time. The strange thing was, the very strange thing, was that Moro’s words seemed eminently logical. Of course Veronika Brand should assassinate Loke Voss. There was a symmetry to the act that could not be denied.

Amphetamine continued to disrupt Brand’s thinking. Her thoughts stuttered and skipped. She found herself suddenly out on the street. The hordes of sun-happy citizens appeared wolfish and gross to her. She pushed along among them, shouldering happy, sun-struck Swedes out of the way.

Her mind fell into a muddle. She was having a panic attack. She was not having a panic attack. She would finally be reunited with the missing pistol. She would kill her grandfather and then shoot herself. She would do nothing of the kind.

Faces loomed up and fell away. Someone shouted. She was having a psychotic break. She was not having a psychotic break.

Brand didn’t know how long she wandered, down one impossibly narrow cobblestone street in the old town and up another, buffeted by other pedestrians. She found herself in the Stortorget, the great square, busy with people. Ahead was the stock exchange and the Nobel museum, and to the north of that Brand could see the copper-green tower of the church, a brick Gothic rockpile with a stone obelisk poking up to one side of it.

“You must go to the cathedral,” she heard a voice say. She stared wildly around. Was Moro Part here? No, it was just a tourist urging on another tourist. Brand’s mind would not stay on track. What time was it? A thought winged in from nowhere. Moro wore an expensive watch, a Rolex. Was it a knock-off? Her thinking skittered this way and that.

Brand entered a dream. A great deal of time seemed to pass. She threaded her way through the square toward the big church. St. Nicholas Cathedral, she knew—or thought she knew—was Lutheran, once the official state religion of Sweden. The Roma were, if they were anything, Catholic, Orthodox Christian or Muslim, their beliefs mixed with folklore, stretching back as far as their Hindu origins.

What was a Romani girl like Varzha Luna doing having an engagement ceremony at a Lutheran church? Given her disordered mind, the thought was strangely cogent.

“Find the engagement party,” Moro had told her. “Varzha Luna will give you your lost pistol.”

Thirty meters away, she saw a small group of Romani celebrants gathered around Varzha Luna. Beside her stood her brother Vago and a man wearing a black suit, standing stiff and awkward in a way that Brand read as “groom.”

As Brand moved forward her attention shifted from the engagement party. Another large group emerged from the direction of the cathedral. Specters in her nightmare, a whole clutch of Vosses posed for a group photograph with Stortorget as a backdrop. Most of the figures were recognizable from Brand’s research.

Jarl Voss. Elias Voss, his father. Vilgot Voss, his father. “Junior” Voss.

   And there, in the midst of them all, held up at his elbows by a pair of younger family members, stood the shuffling old man whom Brand would murder.

Loke Voss. Family patriarch. Right-wing instigator of the fire that had broken her family. Rapist. Devil.

Grandfather.

At that moment a screaming howl descended upon the whole city of Stockholm, obliterating any other noise beneath its hollow roar. Every truck in the Voss Transport fleet sounded their air horns at the same time. The awful bleating and honking, in honor of the prestigious company and its founder, echoed through the Old Town like an orchestra of air raid sirens.

Veronika Brand might have been the only creature in the whole city who didn’t hear the cacophony for what it was. She thought it might be the tinnitus roar of her own blood through her veins. The screaming urged her onward. She dream-walked toward the old man posed among his children in the square.

57.

Through the scope on her 1875F, Ylva tracked Veronika Brand’s progress. She saw the American detective move in the direction of the church, and understood that almost every member of the Voss family would be gathered there.

Ylva had difficulty getting a clear shot in the crowded square, filled with sun-worshipers and ordinary citizens enjoying the day. But she held up for another reason, which she didn’t even fully admit to herself. She wanted to drop the woman right in front of her family, at the feet of her father and uncles and nephew.

Pow! Take that, my dear idiot relations, who walk around in a daze half the time. Maybe then they would begin to take Ylva seriously. They had ignored her warnings. Now she would show them the truth.

Her target vanished briefly, obscured by a gaggle of Japanese tourists. Ylva decided as soon as she had a clear shot she would take it. She was hanging half out the window now, concentrating, the greatest short-range sniper rifle in the world held tight against her right shoulder, its scope locked in on the woman who had brought about Malte Voss’s death.

The noise of the Voss Transport air horns exploded, but Ylva was in total Zen mode, centered, impossible to distract. With the sound echoing over the square, she did not hear the door of the tower apartment