CHAPTER 12
Sunday, 15.v – Monday,
16.v
Superintendent Torsten Edklinth, Director of Constitutional
Protection at the Security Police, slowly twirled his glass of
red wine and listened attentively to the C.E.O. of Milton
Security, who had called out of the blue and insisted on his
coming to Sunday dinner at his place on Lidingö.
Armansky’s wife Ritva had made a delicious casserole.
They had eaten well and talked politely about nothing in
particular. Edklinth was wondering what was on Armansky’s
mind. After dinner Ritva repaired to the sofa to watch T. V.
and left them at the table. Armansky had begun to tell him
the story of Lisbeth Salander.
Edklinth and Armansky had known each other for twelve
years, ever since a woman Member of Parliament had
received death threats. She had reported the matter to the
head of her party, and parliament’s security detail had
been informed. In due course the matter came to the
attention of the Security Police. At that time, Personal
Protection had the smallest budget of any unit in the
Security Police, but the Member of Parliament was given
protection during the course of her official appearances.
She was left to her own devices at the end of the working
day, the very time when she was obviously more
vulnerable. She began to have doubts about the ability of
the Security Police to protect her.
She arrived home late one evening to discover that
someone had broken in, daubed sexually explicit epithets
on her living-room walls, and masturbated in her bed. She
immediately hired Milton Security to take over her personal
protection. She did not advise Säpo of this decision. The
next morning, when she was due to appear at a school in
next morning, when she was due to appear at a school in
Täby, there was a confrontation between the government
security forces and her Milton bodyguards.
At that time Edklinth was acting deputy chief of Personal
Protection. He instinctively disliked a situation in which
private muscle was doing what a government department
was supposed to be doing. He did recognize that the
Member of Parliament had reason enough for complaint.
Instead of exacerbating the issue, he invited Milton
Security’s C.E.O. to lunch. They agreed that the situation
might be more serious than Säpo had at first assumed, and
Edklinth realized that Armansky’s people not only had the
skills for the job, but they were as well trained and probably
better equipped too. They solved the immediate problem
by giving Armansky’s people responsibility for bodyguard
services, while the Security Police took care of the criminal
investigation and paid the bill.
The two men discovered that they liked each other a good
deal, and they enjoyed working together on a number of
assignments in subsequent years. Edklinth had great
respect for Armansky, and when he was pressingly invited
to dinner and a private conversation, he was willing to
listen.
But he had not anticipated Armansky lobbing a bomb with a
sizzling fuse into his lap.
“You’re telling me that the Security Police is involved in
flagrant criminal activity.”
“No,” Armansky said. “You misunderstand me. I’m saying
that some people within the Security Police are involved in
such activity. I don’t believe that this activity is sanctioned
by the leadership of S.I.S., or that it has government
approval.”
Edklinth studied Malm’s photographs of a man getting into
a car with a registration number that began with the letters
KAB.
“Dragan … this isn’t a practical joke?”
“I wish it were.”
The next morning Edklinth was in his office at police
headquarters. He was meticulously cleaning his glasses.
He was a grey-haired man with big ears and a powerful
face, but for the moment his expression was more puzzled
than powerful. He had spent most of the night worrying
about how he was going to deal with the information
Armansky had given him.
They were not pleasant thoughts. The Security Police was
an institution in Sweden that all parties (well, almost all)
agreed had an indispensable value. This led each of them
to distrust the group and at the same time concoct
imaginative conspiracy theories about it. The scandals had
undoubtedly been many, especially in the leftist-radical
’70s when a number of constitutional blunders had
certainly occurred. But after five governmental – and
roundly criticized – Säpo investigations, a new generation
of civil servants had come through. They represented a
younger school of activists recruited from the financial,
weapons and fraud units of the state police. They were
officers used to investigating real crimes, and not chasing
political mirages. The Security Police had been modernized
and the Constitutional Protection Unit in particular had
taken on a new, conspicuous role. Its task, as set out in the
government’s instruction, was to uncover and prevent
threats to the internal security of the nation. i.e. unlawful
activity that uses violence, threat or coercion for the
purpose of altering our form of government, inducing
decision-making political entities or authorities to take
decisions in a certain direction, or preventing individual
citizens from exercising their constitutionally protected
rights and liberties.
In short, to defend Swedish democracy against real or
presumed anti-democratic threats. They were chiefly
concerned with the anarchists and the neo-Nazis: the
anarchists because they persisted in practising civil
disobedience; the neo-Nazis because they were Nazis and
so by definition the enemies of democracy.
After completing his law degree, Edklinth had worked as a
prosecutor and then twenty-one years ago joined the
Security Police. He had at first worked in the field in the
Personal Protection Unit, and then within the Constitutional
Protection Unit as an analyst and administrator. Eventually
he became director of the agency, the head of the police
forces responsible for the defence of Swedish democracy.
He considered himself a democrat. The constitution had
been established by the parliament, and it was his job to
see to it that it stayed intact.
Swedish democracy is based on a single premise: the
Right to Free Speech (R.F.S.). This guarantees the
inalienable right to say aloud, think and believe anything
whatsoever. This right embraces all Swedish citizens, from
the crazy neo-Nazi living in the woods to the rock-throwing
anarchist – and everyone in between.
Every other basic right, such as the Formation of
Government and the Right to Freedom of Organization, are
simply practical extensions of the Right to Free Speech. On
this law democracy stands or falls.
All democracy has its limits, and the limits to the R.F.S. are
set by the Freedom of the Press regulation (F.P.). This
defines four restrictions on democracy. It is forbidden to
publish child pornography and the depiction of certain
violent sexual acts, regardless of how artistic the originator
believes the depiction to be. It is forbidden to incite or
exhort someone to crime. It is forbidden to defame or
slander another person. It is forbidden to engage in the
persecution of an ethnic group.
Press freedom has also been enshrined by parliament and
is based on the socially and democratically acceptable
restrictions of society, that is, the social contract that
makes up the framework of a civilized society. The core of
the legislation has it that no person has the right to harass
or humiliate another person.
Since R.F.S. and F. P. are laws, some sort of authority is
needed to guarantee the observance of these laws. In
Sweden this function is divided between two institutions.
The first is the office of the Prosecutor General, assigned
to prosecute crimes against F. P. This did not please
Torsten Edklinth. In his view, the Prosecutor General was
too lenient with cases concerning what were, in his view,
direct crimes against the Swedish constitution. The
Prosecutor General usually replied that the principle of
democracy was so important that it was only in an extreme
emergency that he should step in and bring a charge. This
attitude, however, had come under question more and
more in recent years, particularly after Robert Hårdh, the
general secretary of the Swedish Helsinki Committee, had
submitted a report which examined the Prosecutor
submitted a report which examined the Prosecutor
General’s want of initiative over a number of years. The
report claimed that it was almost impossible to charge and
convict anyone under the law of persecution against an
ethnic group.
The second institution was the Security Police division for
Constitutional Protection, and Superintendent Edklinth took
on this responsibility with the utmost seriousness. He
thought that it was the most important post a Swedish
policeman could hold, and he would not exchange his
appointment for any other position in the entire Swedish
legal system or police force. He was the only policeman in
Sweden whose official job description was to function as a
political police officer. It was a delicate task requiring great
wisdom and judicial restraint, since experience from far too
many countries has shown that a political police
department could easily transform itself into the principal
threat to democracy.
The media and the public assumed for the most part that
the main function of the Constitutional Protection Unit was
to keep track of Nazis and militant vegans. These types of
group did attract interest from the Constitutional Protection
Unit, but a great many institutions and phenomena also fell
within the bailiwick of the division. If the king, for example,
or the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, took it into
their hearts that parliamentary government had outlived its
role and that parliament should be replaced by a
role and that parliament should be replaced by a
dictatorship, the king or the commander-in-chief would very
swiftly come under observation by the Constitutional
Protection Unit. Or, to give a second example, if a group of
police officers decided to stretch the laws so that an
individual’s constitutionally guaranteed rights were
infringed, then it was the Constitutional Protection Unit’s
duty to react. In such serious instances the investigation
was also assumed to come under the authority of the
Prosecutor General.
The problem, of course, was that the Constitutional
Protection Unit had only an analytical and investigative
function, and no operations arm. That was why it was
generally either the regular police or other divisions within
the Security Police who stepped in when Nazis were to be
arrested.
In Edklinth’s opinion, this state of affairs was deeply
unsatisfactory. Almost every democratic country maintains
an independent constitutional court in some form, with a
mandate to see to it that authorities do not ride roughshod
over the democratic process. In Sweden the task is that of
the Prosecutor General or the Parliamentary Ombudsman,
who, however, can only pursue recommendations
forwarded to them by other departments. If Sweden had a
constitutional court, then Salander’s lawyer could instantly
charge the Swedish government with violation of her
constitutional rights. The court could then order all the
constitutional rights. The court could then order all the
documents on the table and summon anyone it pleased,
including the Prime Minister, to testify until the matter was
resolved. As the situation now stood, the most her lawyer
could do was to file a report with the Parliamentary
Ombudsman, who did not have the authority to walk into
the Security Police and start demanding documents and
other evidence.
Over the years Edklinth had been an impassioned
advocate of the establishment of a constitutional court. He
could then more easily have acted upon the information he
had been given by Armansky: by initiating a police report
and handing the documentation to the court. With that an
inexorable process would have been set in motion.
As things stood, Edklinth lacked the legal authority to
initiate a preliminary investigation.
He took a pinch of snuff.
If Armansky’s information was correct, Security Police
officers in senior positions had looked the other way when
a series of savage assaults were committed against a
Swedish woman. Then her daughter was locked up in a
mental hospital on the basis of a fabricated diagnosis.
Finally, they had given carte blanche to a former Soviet
intelligence officer to commit crimes involving weapons,
narcotics and sex trafficking. Edklinth grimaced. He did not
narcotics and sex trafficking. Edklinth grimaced. He did not
even want to begin to estimate how many counts of illegal
activity must have taken place. Not to mention the burglary
at Blomkvist’s apartment, the attack on Salander’s lawyer –
which Edklinth could not bring himself to accept was a part
of the same pattern – and possible involvement in the
murder of Zalachenko.
It was a mess, and Edklinth did not welcome the necessity
to get mixed up in it. Unfortunately, from the moment
Armansky invited him to dinner, he had become involved.
How now to handle the situation? Technically, that answer
was simple. If Armansky’s account was true, Lisbeth
Salander had at the very least been deprived of the
opportunity to exercise her constitutionally protected rights
and liberties. From a constitutional standpoint, this was the
first can of worms. Decision-making political bodies had
been induced to take decisions in a certain direction. This
too touched on the core of the responsibility delegated to
the Constitutional Protection Unit. Edklinth, a policeman,
had knowledge of a crime and thus he had the obligation to
submit a report to a prosecutor. In real life, the answer was
not so simple. It was, on the contrary and to put it mildly,
decidedly unsimple.
Inspector Monica Figuerola, in spite of her unusual name,
was born in Dalarna to a family that had lived in Sweden at
least since the time of Gustavus Vasa in the sixteenth
least since the time of Gustavus Vasa in the sixteenth
century. She was a woman who people usually paid
attention to, and for several reasons. She was thirty-six,
blue eyed, and one metre eighty-four tall. She had short,
light-blonde, naturally curly hair. She was attractive and
dressed in a way that she knew made her more so. And
she was exceptionally fit.
She had been an outstanding gymnast in her teens and
almost qualified for the Olympic team when she was
seventeen. She had given up classic gymnastics, but she
still worked out obsessively at the gym five nights a week.
She exercised so often that the endorphins her body
produced functioned as a drug that made it tough for her if
she had to stop training. She ran, lifted weights, played
tennis, did karate. She had cut back on bodybuilding, that
extreme variant of bodily glorification, some years ago. In
those days she was spending two hours a day pumping
iron. Even so, she trained so hard and her body was so
muscular that malicious colleagues still called her Herr
Figuerola. When she wore a sleeveless T-shirt or a
summer dress, no-one could fail to notice her biceps and
powerful shoulders.
Her intelligence, too, intimidated many of her male
colleagues. She had left school with top marks, studied to
become a police officer at twenty, and then served for nine
years in Uppsala police and studied law in her spare time.
For fun, she said, she had also studied for a degree in
For fun, she said, she had also studied for a degree in
political science.
When she left patrol duty to become a criminal inspector, it
was a great loss to Uppsala street safety. She worked first
in the Violent Crime Division and then in the unit that
specialized in financial crime. In 2000 she applied to the
Security Police in Uppsala, and by 2001 she had moved to
Stockholm. She first worked in Counter-Espionage, but was
almost immediately hand-picked by Edklinth for the
Constitutional Protection Unit. He happened to know
Figuerola’s father and had followed her career over the
years.
When at long last Edklinth concluded that he had to act on
Armansky’s information, he called Figuerola into his office.
She had been at Constitutional Protection for less than
three years, which meant that she was still more of a real
police officer than a fully fledged desk warrior.
She was dressed that day in tight blue jeans, turquoise
sandals with a low heel, and a navy blue jacket.
“What are you working on at the moment, Monica?”
“We’re following up on the robbery of the grocer’s in
Sunne.”
The Security Police did not normally spend time
investigating robberies of groceries, and Figuerola was the
investigating robberies of groceries, and Figuerola was the
head of a department of five officers working on political
crimes. They relied heavily on computers connected to the
incident reporting network of the regular police. Nearly
every report submitted in any police district in Sweden
passed through the computers in Figuerola’s department.
The software scanned every report and reacted to 310
keywords, nigger, for example, or skinhead, swastika,
immigrant, anarchist, Hitler salute, Nazi, National
Democrat, traitor, Jew-lover, or nigger-lover. If such a
keyword cropped up, the report would be printed out and
scrutinized.
The Constitutional Protection Unit publishes an annual
report, Threats to National Security, which supplies the
only reliable statistics on political crime. These statistics
are based on reports filed with local police authorities. In
the case of the robbery of the shop in Sunne, the computer
had reacted to three keywords – immigrant, shoulder
patch, and nigger. Two masked men had robbed at
gunpoint a shop owned by an immigrant. They had taken
2,780 kronor and a carton of cigarettes. One of the
robbers had a mid-length jacket with a Swedish flag
shoulder patch. The other had screamed “fucking nigger”
several times at the manager and forced him to lie on the
floor.
This was enough for Figuerola’s team to initiate the
preliminary investigation and to set about enquiring
whether the robbers had a connection to the neo-Nazi
gang in Värmland, and whether the robbery could be
defined as a racist crime. If so, the incident might be
included in that year’s statistical compilation, which would
then itself be incorporated within the European statistics
put together by the E.U.’s office in Vienna.
“I’ve a difficult assignment for you,” Edklinth said. “It’s a job
that could land you in big trouble. Your career might be
ruined.”
“I’m all ears.”
“But if things go well, it could be a major step forward in
your career. I’m thinking of moving you to the Constitutional
Protection operations unit.”
“Forgive me for mentioning this, but Constitutional
Protection doesn’t have an operations unit.”
“Yes, it does,” Edklinth said. “I established it this morning.
At present it consists of you.”
“I see,” said Figuerola hesitantly.
“The task of Constitutional Protection is to defend the
constitution against what we call ‘internal threats’, most
often those on the extreme left or the extreme right. But
what do we do if a threat to the constitution comes from
what do we do if a threat to the constitution comes from
within our own organization?”
For the next half hour he told her what Armansky had told
him the night before.
“Who is the source of these claims?” Figuerola said when
the story was ended.
“Focus on the information, not the source.”
“What I’m wondering is whether you consider the source to
be reliable.”
“I consider the source to be totally reliable. I’ve know this
person for many years.”
“It all sounds a bit … I don’t know. Improbable?”
“Doesn’t it? One might think it’s the stuff of a spy novel.”
“How do you expect me to go about tackling it?”
“Starting now, you’re released from all other duties. Your
task, your only task, is to investigate the truth of this story.
You have to either verify or dismiss the claims one by one.
You report directly and only to me.”
“I see what you mean when you say I might land in it up to
my neck.”
my neck.”
“But if the story is true … if even a fraction of it is true, then
we have a constitutional crisis on our hands.”
“Where do you want me to begin?”
“Start with the simple things. Start by reading the Björck
report. Then identify the people who are allegedly tailing
this guy Blomkvist. According to my source, the car belongs
to Göran Mårtensson, a police officer living on
Vittangigaten in Vällingby. Then identify the other person in
the pictures taken by Blomkvist’s photographer. The
younger blond man here.”
Figuerola was making notes.
“Then look into Gullberg’s background. I had never heard
his name before, but my source believes there to be a
connection between him and the Security Police.”
“So somebody here at S.I.S. put out a contract on a long-ago spy using a 78-year-old man. It beggars belief.”
“Nevertheless, you check it out. And your entire
investigation has to be carried out without a single person
other than me knowing anything at all about it. Before you
take one single positive action I want to be informed. I don’t
want to see any rings on the water or hear of a single
ruffled feather.”
ruffled feather.”
“This is one hell of an investigation. How am I going to do
all this alone?”
“You won’t have to. You have only to do the first check. You
come back and say that you’ve checked and didn’t find
anything, then everything is fine. You come back having
found that anything is as my source describes it, then we’ll
decide what to do.”
*
Figuerola spent her lunch hour pumping iron in the police
gym. Lunch consisted of black coffee and a meatball
sandwich with beetroot salad, which she took back to her
office. She closed her door, cleared her desk, and started
reading the Björck report while she ate her sandwich.
She also read the appendix with the correspondence
between Björck and Dr Teleborian. She made a note of
every name and every incident in the report that had to be
verified. After two hours she got up and went to the coffee
machine and got a refill. When she left her office she
locked the door, part of the routine at S.I.S.
The first thing she did was to check the protocol number.
She called the registrar and was informed that no report
with that protocol number existed. Her second check was to
consult a media archive. That yielded better results. The
consult a media archive. That yielded better results. The
evening papers and a morning paper had reported a
person being badly injured in a car fire on Lundagatan on
the date in question in 1991. The victim of the incident was
a middle-aged man, but no name was given. One evening
paper reported that, according to a witness, the fire had
been started deliberately by a young girl.
Gunnar Björck, the author of the report, was a real person.
He was a senior official in the immigration unit, lately on
sick leave and now, very recently, deceased – a suicide.
The personnel department had no information about what
Björck had been working on in 1991. The file was stamped
Top Secret, even for other employees at S.I.S. Which was
also routine.
It was a straightforward matter to establish that Salander
had lived with her mother and twin sister on Lundagatan in
1991 and spent the following two years at St Stefan’s
children’s psychiatric clinic. In these sections at least, the
record corresponded with the report’s contents.
Peter Teleborian, now a well-known psychiatrist often seen
on T.V., had worked at St Stefan’s in 1991 and was today
its senior physician.
Figuerola then called the assistant head of the personnel
department.
“We’re working on an analysis here in C.P. that requires
evaluating a person’s credibility and general mental health.
I need to consult a psychiatrist or some other professional
who’s approved to handle classified information. Dr Peter
Teleborian was mentioned to me, and I was wondering
whether I could hire him.”
It took some while before she got an answer.
“Dr Teleborian has been an external consultant for S.I.S. in
a couple of instances. He has security clearance and you
can discuss classified information with him in general
terms. But before you approach him you have to follow the
bureaucratic procedure. Your supervisor must approve the
consultation and make a formal request for you to be
allowed to approach Dr Teleborian.”
Her heart sank. She had verified something that could be
known only to a very restricted group of people. Teleborian
had indeed had dealings with S.I.S.
She put down the report and focused her attention on
other aspects of the information that Edklinth had given
her. She studied the photographs of the two men who had
allegedly followed the journalist Blomkvist from Café
Copacabana on May 1.
She consulted the vehicle register and found that Göran
Mårtensson was the owner of a grey Volvo with the
registration number legible in the photographs. Then she
got confirmation from the S.I.S. personnel department that
he was employed there. Her heart sank again.
Mårtensson worked in Personal Protection. He was a
bodyguard. He was one of the officers responsible on
formal occasions for the safety of the Prime Minister. For
the past few weeks he had been loaned to Counter-Espionage. His leave of absence had begun on April 10, a
couple of days after Zalachenko and Salander had landed
in Sahlgrenska hospital. But that sort of temporary
reassignment was not unusual – covering a shortage of
personnel here or there in an emergency situation.
Then Figuerola called the assistant chief of Counter-Espionage, a man she knew and had worked for during her
short time in that department. Was Göran Mårtensson
working on anything important, or could he be borrowed for
an investigation in Constitutional Protection?
The assistant chief of Counter-Espionage was puzzled.
Inspector Figuerola must have been misinformed.
Mårtensson had not been reassigned to Counter-Espionage. Sorry.
Figuerola stared at her receiver for two minutes. In
Personal Protection they believed that Mårtensson had
been loaned out to Counter-Espionage. Counter-Espionage said that they definitely had not borrowed him.
Transfers of that kind had to be approved by the chief of
Secretariat. She reached for the telephone to call him, but
stopped short. If Personal Protection had loaned out
Mårtensson, then the chief of Secretariat must have
approved the decision. But Mårtensson was not at
Counter-Espionage, which the chief of Secretariat must be
aware of. And if Mårtensson was loaned out to some
department that was tailing journalists, then the chief of
Secretariat would have to know about that too.
Edklinth had told her: no rings in the water. To raise the
matter with the chief of Secretariat might be to chuck a very
large stone into a pond.
Berger sat at her desk in the glass cage. It was 10.30 on
Monday morning. She badly needed the cup of coffee she
had just got from the machine in the canteen. The first
hours of her workday had been taken up entirely with
meetings, starting with one lasting fifteen minutes in which
Assistant Editor Fredriksson presented the guidelines for
the day’s work. She was increasingly dependent on
Fredriksson’s judgement in the light of her loss of
confidence in Anders Holm.
The second was an hour-long meeting with the chairman
Magnus Borgsjö, S.M.P.’s C.F.O. Christer Sellberg, and Ulf
Magnus Borgsjö, S.M.P.’s C.F.O. Christer Sellberg, and Ulf
Flodin, the budget chief. The discussion was about the
slump in advertising and the downturn in single-copy sales.
The budget chief and the C.F.O. were both determined on
action to cut the newspaper’s overheads.
“We made it through the first quarter of this year thanks to
a marginal rise in advertising sales and the fact that two
senior, highly paid employees retired at the beginning of
the year. Those positions have not been filled,” Flodin said.
“We’ll probably close out the present quarter with a small
deficit. But the free papers, Metro and Stockholm City, are
cutting into our ad. revenue in Stockholm. My prognosis is
that the third quarter will produce a significant loss.”
“So how do we counter that?” Borgsjö said.
“The only option is cutbacks. We haven’t laid anyone off
since 2002. But before the end of the year we will have to
eliminate ten positions.”
“Which positions?” Berger said.
“We need to work on the ‘cheese plane’ principle, shave a
job here and a job there. The sports desk has six and a
half jobs at the moment. We should cut that to five full-timers.”
“As I understand it, the sports desk is on its knees already.
What you’re proposing means that we’ll have to cut back
What you’re proposing means that we’ll have to cut back
on sports coverage.”
Flodin shrugged. “I’ll gladly listen to other suggestions.”
“I don’t have any better suggestions, but the principle is
this: if we cut personnel, then we have to produce a smaller
newspaper, and if we make a smaller newspaper, the
number of readers will drop and the number of advertisers
too.”
“The eternal vicious circle,” Sellberg said.
“I was hired to turn this downward trend around,” said
Berger. “I see my job as taking an aggressive approach to
change the newspaper and make it more attractive to
readers. I can’t do that if I have to cut staff.” She turned to
Borgsjö. “How long can the paper continue to bleed? How
big a deficit can we take before we hit the limit?”
Borgsjö pursed his lips. “Since the early ’90s S.M.P. has
eaten into a great many old consolidated assets. We have
a stock portfolio that has dropped in value by about 30 per
cent compared to ten years ago. A large portion of these
funds were used for investments in I.T. We’ve also had
enormous expenses.”
“I gather that S.M.P. has developed its own text editing
system, the A.X.T. What did that cost?”
“About five million kronor to develop.”
“Why did S.M.P. go to the trouble of developing its own
software? There are inexpensive commercial programs
already on the market.”
“Well, Erika … that may be true. Our former I.T. chief talked
us into it. He persuaded us that it would be less expensive
in the long run, and that S.M.P. would also be able to
license the program to other newspapers.”
“And did any of them buy it?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, a local paper in Norway bought it.”
“Meanwhile,” Berger said in a dry voice, “we’re sitting here
with P.C.s that are five or six years old …”
“It’s simply out of the question that we invest in new
computers in the coming year,” Flodin said.
The discussion had gone back and forth. Berger was
aware that her objections were being systematically
stonewalled by Flodin and Sellberg. For them costcutting
was what counted, which was understandable enough from
the point of view of a budget chief and a C.F.O., but
unacceptable for a newly appointed editor-in-chief. What
irritated her most was that they kept brushing off her
arguments with patronizing smiles, making her feel like a
teenager being quizzed on her homework. Without actually
uttering a single inappropriate word, they displayed
towards her an attitude that was so antediluvian it was
almost comical. You shouldn’t worry your pretty head over
complex matters, little girl.
Borgsjö was not much help. He was biding his time and
letting the other participants at the meeting say their piece,
but she did not sense the same condescension from him.
She sighed and plugged in her laptop. She had nineteen
new messages. Four were spam. Someone wanted to sell
her Viagra, cybersex with “The Sexiest Lolitas on the Net”
for only $4.00 per minute, “Animal Sex, the Juiciest Horse
Fuck in the Universe,” and a subscription to fashion.nu.
The tide of this crap never receded, no matter how many
times she tried to block it. Another seven messages were
those so-called “Nigeria letters” from the widow of the
former head of a bank in Abu Dhabi offering her ludicrous
sums of money if she would only assist with a small sum of
start-up money, and other such drivel.
There was the morning memo, the lunchtime memo, three
emails from Fredriksson updating her on developments in
the day’s lead story, one from her accountant who wanted
a meeting to check on the implications of her move from
Millennium to S.M.P., and a message from her dental
hygienist suggesting a time for her quarterly visit. She put
hygienist suggesting a time for her quarterly visit. She put
the appointment in her calendar and realized at once that
she would have to change it because she had a major
editorial conference planned for that day.
Finally she opened the last one, sent from
centraled@smpost.se> with the subject line [Attn: Editor-in-Chief]. Slowly she put down her coffee cup.
YOU WHORE! YOU THINK YOU’RE
SOMETHING YOU FUCKING CUNT. DON’T
THINK YOU CAN COME HERE AND THROW
YOUR WEIGHT AROUND. YOU’RE GOING TO
GET FUCKED IN THE CUNT WITH A
SCREWDRIVER, WHORE! THE SOONER
YOU DISAPPEAR THE BETTER.
Berger looked up and searched for the news editor, Holm.
He was not at his desk, nor could she see him in the
newsroom. She checked the sender and then picked up
the telephone and called Peter Fleming, the I.T. manager.
“Good morning, Peter. Who uses the address
centraled@smpost.se>?”
“That isn’t a valid address at S.M.P.”
“I just got an email from that address.”
“It’s a fake. Does the message contain a virus?”
“I wouldn’t know. At least, the antivirus program didn’t react.
”
“O.K. That address doesn’t exist. But it’s very simple to
fake an apparently legitimate address. There are sites on
the Net that you can use to send anonymous mail.”
“Is it possible to trace an email like that?”
“Almost impossible, even if the person in question is so
stupid that he sends it from his home computer. You might
be able to trace the I.P. number to a server, but if he uses
an account that he set up at hotmail, for instance, the trail
will fizzle out.”
Berger thanked him. She thought for a moment. It was not
the first time she had received a threatening email or a
message from a crackpot. This one was obviously referring
to her new job as editor-in-chief. She wondered whether it
was some lunatic who had read about her in connection
with Morander’s death, or whether the sender was in the
building.
Figuerola thought long and hard as to what she should do
about Gullberg. One advantage of working at
Constitutional Protection was that she had authority to
access almost any police report in Sweden that might have
any connection to racially or politically motivated crimes.
Zalachenko was technically an immigrant, and her job
included tracking violence against persons born abroad to
decide whether or not the crime was racially motivated.
Accordingly she had the right to involve herself in the
investigation of Zalachenko’s murder, to determine whether
Gullberg, the known killer, had a connection to any racist
organization, or whether he was overheard making racist
remarks at the time of the murder. She requisitioned the
report. She found the letters that had been sent to the
Minister of Justice and discovered that alongside the
diatribe and the insulting personal attacks were also the
words nigger-lover and traitor.
By then it was 5.00 p.m. Figuerola locked all the material in
her safe, shut down her computer, washed up her coffee
mug, and clocked out. She walked briskly to a gym at St
Eriksplan and spent the next hour doing some easy
strength training.
When she was finished she went home to her one-bedroom apartment on Pontonjärgatan, showered, and ate
a late but nutritious dinner. She considered calling Daniel
Mogren, who lived three blocks down the same street.
Mogren was a carpenter and bodybuilder and had been
her training partner off and on for three years. In recent
months they had also had sex as friends.
months they had also had sex as friends.
Sex was almost as satisfying as a rigorous workout at the
gym, but at a mature thirty-plus or, rather, forty-minus,
Figuerola had begun to think that maybe she ought to start
looking for a steady partner and a more permanent living
arrangement. Maybe even children. But not with Mogren.
She decided that she did not feel like seeing anyone that
evening. Instead she went to bed with a history of the
ancient world.
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