The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,11

of gunfire mixed with the piercing siren of a police car apparently driving directly at her. She could actually feel the noise and the din booming throughout her body, and although Lisbeth was no longer visible—people were milling around in front of her—she imagined her sister dying in a hail of bullets, falling to the street covered in blood.

But no…there was something wrong. Those were no pistol shots, they were…what?…a bomb, an explosion? A deafening racket that swept towards them from the restaurant, and even though Camilla did not want to miss a single second of Lisbeth’s humiliation and destruction, she stared at the crowd inside. But she could make no sense of what she was seeing.

The violinists had stopped playing and were gaping in terror at the party crowd in front of them. Many of the guests were rooted to the spot, their hands clapped to their ears. Others were clutching at their chests, or screaming in fear. But most were rushing towards the exit in a state of panic, and only when the doors to the restaurant flew open and the first people came running out into the rain did Camilla understand. This was no bomb. It was music, turned up to such an insane volume that it was barely recognizable as sound. This was more like a high-frequency sonic attack.

An elderly bald man was yelling: “What’s going on? What’s going on?” A woman in a short, dark-blue dress, barely twenty years old, fell to her knees with her hands over her head, as if afraid the ceiling was about to collapse on her. Kuznetsov, standing right next to her, mouthed something which was drowned out by the cacophony, and in that instant Camilla realized her mistake. She had allowed her concentration to lapse, and furiously she looked back at the street, past the red carpet, past the police car, and her sister was no longer there.

It was as if the earth had swallowed her and Camilla looked about the pandemonium in desperation, at the guests screaming in confusion, and only just had time to let out a roar of frustration when a savage blow to the shoulder knocked her down. She banged an elbow and her head on the pavement. As her forehead throbbed with pain and her lip bled, and as feet were stamping all around her, she heard an icily familiar voice directly above her—“Just wait, sister, I will have my revenge”—and she was much too dazed to react.

By the time she raised her head and could see properly, there was no sign of Lisbeth, only a stream of people stampeding out of the restaurant. Again she shouted: “Kill her,” but even she no longer believed it.

* * *

—

Vladimir Kuznetsov did not notice Kira falling to the ground. He was all but oblivious to the madness around him. In the midst of all the racket he had picked up something which terrified him more than everything else, a sequence of words bawled out with a pulsating, staccato rhythm, and at first he refused to believe his ears.

He shook his head and muttered “No, no,” trying to dismiss it as a horrible figment of his imagination, a trick played by his fevered fantasy. But it really was that tune—that nightmare tune—and he wanted only to sink into the ground and die.

“It can’t be true, it can’t be true,” he groaned as the chorus blared at him, like the pressure wave from a grenade:

Killing the world with lies.

Giving the leaders

The power to paralyze

Feeding the murderers with hate,

Amputate, devastate, congratulate.

But never, never

Apologize.

No song on earth had petrified him like this one, and compared to that it did not matter that the party he had so been looking forward to had been sabotaged, or that he was likely to be sued by livid oligarchs for bursting their eardrums. All he could think of was the music. That it was being played here, right now, told him that someone had penetrated his darkest secret. He was in danger of being disgraced before the whole world. His chest seized up in panic and he could hardly breathe, but he made every effort to look as if nothing were untoward. When his men finally managed to turn off the racket, he even pretended to breathe a sigh of relief.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I do beg your pardon,” he announced above the hubbub. “This just goes to show you should never rely on technology. I apologize profusely. But let’s get on