CHAPTER 16
Friday, 27.v – Tuesday, 31.v
Blomkvist left the Millennium offices at 10.30 on Friday
night. He took the stairs down to the ground floor, but
instead of going out on to the street he turned left and
went through the basement, across the inner courtyard,
and through the building behind theirs on to Hökens Gata.
He ran into a group of youths on their way from
Mosebacke, but saw no-one who seemed to be paying him
any attention. Anyone watching the building would think
that he was spending the night at Millennium, as he often
did. He had established that pattern as early as April.
Actually it was Malm who had the night shift.
He spent fifteen minutes walking down the alleys and
boulevards around Mosebacke before he headed for
Fiskargatan 9. He opened the entrance door using the
code and took the stairs to the top-floor apartment, where
he used Salander’s keys to get in. He turned off the alarm.
He always felt a bit bemused when he went into the
apartment: twenty-one rooms, of which only three were
furnished.
He began by making coffee and sandwiches before he
went into Salander’s office and booted up her PowerBook.
From the moment in mid-April when Björck’s report was
stolen and Blomkvist realized that he was under
surveillance, he had established his own headquarters at
Salander’s apartment. He had transferred the most crucial
documentation to her desk. He spent several nights a week
at the apartment, slept in her bed, and worked on her
computer. She had wiped her hard drive clean before she
left for Gosseberga and the confrontation with Zalachenko.
left for Gosseberga and the confrontation with Zalachenko.
Blomkvist supposed that she had not planned to come
back. He had used her system disks to restore her
computer to a functioning state.
Since April he had not even plugged in the broadband
cable to his own machine. He logged on to her broadband
connection, started up the I.C.Q. chat program, and pinged
up the address she had created for him through the Yahoo
group [Idiotic_Table].
Ping.
Blomkvist smiled.
Blomkvist logged in to I.C.Q. and went into the newly
created Yahoo group [The_Knights]. All he found was a link
from Plague to an anonymous U.R.L. which consisted
solely of numbers. He copied the address into Explorer, hit
the return key, and came to a website somewhere on the
Internet that contained the sixteen gigabytes of Ekström’s
hard drive.
Plague had obviously made it simple for himself by copying
over Ekström’s entire hard drive, and Blomkvist spent more
than an hour sorting through its contents. He ignored the
system files, software and endless files containing
preliminary investigations that seemed to stretch back
several years. He downloaded four folders. Three of them
several years. He downloaded four folders. Three of them
were called [PrelimInv/Salander], [Slush/Salander], and
[PrelimInv/Niedermann]. The fourth was a copy of
Ekström’s email folder made at 2.00 p.m. the previous day.
“Thanks, Plague,” Blomkvist said to himself.
He spent three hours reading through Ekström’s
preliminary investigation and strategy for the trial. Not
surprisingly, much of it dealt with Salander’s mental state.
Ekström wanted an extensive psychiatric examination and
had sent a lot of messages with the object of getting her
transferred to Kronoberg prison as a matter of urgency.
Blomkvist could tell that Ekström’s search for Niedermann
was making no headway. Bublanski was the leader of that
investigation. He had succeeding in gathering some
forensic evidence linking Niedermann to the murders of
Svensson and Johansson, as well as to the murder of
Bjurman. Blomkvist’s own three long interviews in April had
set them on the trail of this evidence. If Niedermann were
ever apprehended, Blomkvist would have to be a witness
for the prosecution. At long last D.N.A. from sweat droplets
and two hairs from Bjurman’s apartment were matched to
items from Niedermann’s room in Gosseberga. The same
D.N.A. was found in abundant quantities on the remains of
Svavelsjö M.C.’s Göransson.
On the other hand, Ekström had remarkably little on the
record about Zalachenko.
Blomkvist lit a cigarette and stood by the window looking
out towards Djurgården.
Ekström was leading two separate preliminary
investigations. Criminal Inspector Faste was the
investigative leader in all matters dealing with Salander.
Bublanski was working only on Niedermann.
When the name Zalachenko turned up in the preliminary
investigation, the logical thing for Ekström to do would have
been to contact the general director of the Security Police
to determine who Zalachenko actually was. Blomkvist could
find no such enquiry in Ekström’s email, journal or notes.
But among the notes Blomkvist found several cryptic
sentences.
The Salander investigation is fake. Björck’s original doesn’t
match Blomkvist’s version. Classify TOP SECRET.
Then a series of notes claiming that Salander was
paranoid and a schizophrenic.
Correct to lock up Salander 1991.
He found what linked the investigations in the Salander
slush, that is, the supplementary information that the
prosecutor considered irrelevant to the preliminary
prosecutor considered irrelevant to the preliminary
investigation, and which would therefore not be presented
at the trial or make up part of the chain of evidence against
her. This included almost everything that had to do with
Zalachenko’s background.
The investigation was totally inadequate.
Blomkvist wondered to what extent this was a coincidence
and to what extent it was contrived. Where was the
boundary? And was Ekström aware that there was a
boundary?
Could it be that someone was deliberately supplying
Ekström with believable but misleading information?
Finally Blomkvist logged into hotmail and spent ten minutes
checking the half-dozen anonymous email accounts he had
created. Each day he had checked the address he had
given to Criminal Inspector Modig. He had no great hope
that she would contact him, so he was mildly surprised
when he opened the inbox and found an email from
ressallskap9april@hotmail.com>. The message consisted
of a single line:
Café Madeleine, upper level, 11.00 a.m.
Saturday.
Plague pinged Salander at midnight and interrupted her in
the middle of a sentence she was writing about her time
the middle of a sentence she was writing about her time
with Holger Palmgren as her guardian. She cast an irritated
glance at the display.
She sat up in bed and looked eagerly at the screen of her
Palm.
Plague gave her the U.R.L. of the server where he kept
Teleborian’s hard drive.
>
Salander disconnected from Plague and accessed the
server he had directed her to. She spent nearly three
hours scrutinizing folder after folder on Teleborian’s
computer.
She found correspondence between Teleborian and a
person with a hotmail address who sent encrypted mail.
Since she had access to Teleborian’s P.G.P. key, she easily
decoded the correspondence. His name was Jonas, no last
name. Jonas and Teleborian had an unhealthy interest in
seeing that Salander did not thrive.
Yes … we can prove that there is a conspiracy.
But what really interested Salander were the forty-seven
folders containing close to nine thousand photographs of
explicit child pornography. She clicked on image after
image of children aged about fifteen or younger. A number
of pictures were of infants. The majority were of girls. Many
of them were sadistic.
She found links to at least a dozen people abroad who
traded child porn with each other.
Salander bit her lip, but her face was otherwise
expressionless.
She remembered the nights when, as a twelve-year-old,
she had been strapped down in a stimulus-free room at St
Stefan’s. Teleborian had come into the room again and
again to look at her in the glow of the nightlight.
She knew. He had never touched her, but she had always
known.
She should have dealt with Teleborian years ago. But she
had repressed the memory of him. She had chosen to
ignore his existence.
After a while she pinged Blomkvist on I.C.Q.
Blomkvist spent the night at Salander’s apartment on
Fiskargatan. He did not shut down the computer until 6.30
a.m. and fell asleep with photographs of gross child
pornography whirling through his mind. He woke at 10.15
and rolled out of Salander’s bed, showered, and called a
taxi to pick him up outside Södra theatre. He got out at
taxi to pick him up outside Södra theatre. He got out at
Birger Jarlsgatan at 10.55 and walked to Café Madeleine.
Modig was waiting for him with a cup of black coffee in front
of her.
“Hi,” Blomkvist said.
“I’m taking a big risk here,” she said without greeting.
“Nobody will hear of our meeting from me.”
She seemed stressed.
“One of my colleagues recently went to see former Prime
Minister Fälldin. He went there off his own bat, and his job
is on the line now too.”
“I understand.”
“I need a guarantee of anonymity for both of us.”
“I don’t even know which colleague you’re talking about.”
“I’ll tell you later. I want you to promise to give him
protection as a source.”
“You have my word.”
She looked at her watch.
“Are you in a hurry?”
“Yes. I have to meet my husband and kids at the
Sturegalleria in ten minutes. He thinks I’m still at work.”
“And Bublanski knows nothing about this?”
“No.”
“Right. You and your colleague are sources and you have
complete source protection. Both of you. As long as you
live.”
“My colleague is Jerker Holmberg. You met him down in
Göteborg. His father is a Centre Party member, and Jerker
has known Prime Minister Fälldin since he was a child. He
seems to be pleasant enough. So Jerker went to see him
and asked about Zalachenko.”
Blomkvist’s heart began to pound.
“Jerker asked what he knew about the defection, but
Fälldin didn’t reply. When Holmberg told him that we
suspect that Salander was locked up by the people who
were protecting Zalachenko, well, that really upset him.”
“Did he say how much he knew?”
“Fälldin told him that the chief of Säpo at the time and a
colleague came to visit him very soon after he became
Prime Minister. They told a fantastic story about a Russian
defector who had come to Sweden, told him that it was the
most sensitive military secret Sweden possessed … that
there was nothing in Swedish military intelligence that was
anywhere near as important. Fälldin said that he hadn’t
known how he should handle it, that there was no-one with
much experience in government, the Social Democrats
having been in power for more than forty years. He was
advised that he alone had to make the decisions, and that
if he discussed it with his government colleagues then
Säpo would wash their hands of it. He remembered the
whole thing as having been very unpleasant.”
“What did he do?”
“He realized that he had no choice but to do what the
gentlemen from Säpo were proposing. He issued a
directive putting Säpo in sole charge of the defector. He
undertook never to discuss the matter with anyone. Fälldin
was never told Zalachenko’s name.”
“Extraordinary.”
“After that he heard almost nothing more during his two
terms in office. But he had done something extremely
shrewd. He had insisted that an Undersecretary of State be
let in on the secret, in case there was a need for a go-
let in on the secret, in case there was a need for a go-between for the government secretariat and those who
were protecting Zalachenko.”
“Did he remember who it was?”
“It was Bertil K. Janeryd, now Swedish ambassador in the
Hague. When it was explained to Fälldin how serious this
preliminary investigation was, he sat down and wrote to
Janeryd.”
Modig pushed an envelope across the table.
Dear Bertil,
The secret we both protected during my administration is
now the subject of some very serious questions. The
person referred to in the matter is now deceased and can
no longer come to harm. On the other hand, other people
can.
It is of the utmost importance that answers are provided to
certain questions that must be answered.
The person who bears this letter is working unofficially and
has my trust. I urge you to listen to his story and answer his
questions.
Use your famous good judgement.
T.F.
“This letter is referring to Holmberg?”
“No. Jerker asked Fälldin not to put a name. He said that
he couldn’t know who would be going to the Hague.” “You
mean …”
“Jerker and I have discussed it. We’re already out on ice so
thin that we’ll need paddles rather than ice picks. We have
no authority to travel to Holland to interview the
ambassador. But you could do it.”
Blomkvist folded the letter and was putting it into his jacket
pocket when Modig grabbed his hand. Her grip was hard.
“Information for information,” she said. “We want to hear
everything Janeryd tells you.”
Blomkvist nodded. Modig stood up.
“Hang on. You said that Fälldin was visited by two people
from Säpo. One was the chief of Säpo. Who was the other?
”
“Fälldin met him only on that one occasion and couldn’t
remember his name. No notes were taken at the meeting.
He remembered him as thin with a narrow moustache. But
he did recall that the man was introduced as the boss of
he did recall that the man was introduced as the boss of
the Section for Special Analysis, or something like that.
Fälldin later looked at an organizational chart of Säpo and
couldn’t find that department.”
The Zalachenko club, Blomkvist thought.
Modig seemed to be weighing her words.
“At risk of ending up shot,” she said at last, “there is one
record that neither Fälldin nor his visitors thought of.”
“What was that?”
“Fälldin’s visitors’ logbook at Rosenbad. Jerker
requisitioned it. It’s a public document.”
“And?”
Modig hesitated once again. “The book states only that the
Prime Minister met with the chief of Säpo along with a
colleague to discuss general questions.”
“Was there a name?”
“Yes. E. Gullberg.”
Blomkvist could feel the blood rush to his head.
“Evert Gullberg,” he said.
Blomkvist called from Café Madeleine on his anonymous
mobile to book a flight to Amsterdam. The plane would take
off from Arlanda at 2.50. He walked to Dressman on
Kungsgatan and bought a shirt and a change of
underwear, and then he went to a pharmacy to buy a
toothbrush and other toiletries. He checked carefully to see
that he was not being followed and hurried to catch the
Arlanda Express.
The plane landed at Schiphol airport at 4.50, and by 6.30
he was checking into a small hotel about fifteen minutes’
walk from the Hague’s Centraal Station.
He spent two hours trying to locate the Swedish
ambassador and made contact by telephone at around
9.00. He used all his powers of persuasion and explained
that he was there on a matter of great urgency. The
ambassador finally relented and agreed to meet him at
10.00 on Sunday morning.
Then Blomkvist went out and had a light dinner at a
restaurant near his hotel. He was asleep by 11.00.
Ambassador Janeryd was in no mood for small talk when
he offered Blomkvist coffee at his residence on Lange
Voorhout.
“Well … what is it that’s so urgent?”
“Alexander Zalachenko. The Russian defector who came to
Sweden in 1976,” Blomkvist said, handing him the letter
from Fälldin.
Janeryd looked surprised. He read the letter and laid it on
the table beside him.
Blomkvist explained the background and why Fälldin had
written to him.
“I … I can’t discuss this matter,” Janeryd said at last.
“I think you can.”
“No, I could only speak of it with the constitutional
committee.”
“There’s a great probability that you will have to do just
that. But this letter tells you to use your own good
judgement.”
“Fälldin is an honest man.”
“I don’t doubt that. And I’m not looking to damage either
you or Fälldin. Nor do I ask you to tell me a single military
secret that Zalachenko may have revealed.”
“I don’t know any secrets. I didn’t even know that his name
was Zalachenko. I only knew him by his cover name. He
was known as Ruben. But it’s absurd that you should think I
would discuss it with a journalist.”
“Let me give you one very good reason why you should,”
Blomkvist said and sat up straight in his chair. “This whole
story is going to be published very soon. And when that
happens, the media will either tear you to pieces or
describe you as an honest civil servant who made the best
of an impossible situation. You were the one Fälldin
assigned to be the go-between with those who were
protecting Zalachenko. I already know that.”
Janeryd was silent for almost a minute.
“Listen, I never had any information, not the remotest idea
of the background you’ve described. I was rather young …
I didn’t know how I should deal with these people. I met
them about twice a year during the time I worked for the
government. I was told that Ruben … your Zalachenko,
was alive and healthy, that he was co-operating, and that
the information he provided was invaluable. I was never
privy to the details. I had no ‘need to know’.”
Blomkvist waited.
“The defector had operated in other countries and knew
nothing about Sweden, so he was never a major factor for
security policy. I informed the Prime Minister on a couple of
occasions, but there was never very much to report.”
occasions, but there was never very much to report.”
“I see.”
“They always said that he was being handled in the
customary way and that the information he provided was
being processed through the appropriate channels. What
could I say? If I asked what it meant, they smiled and said
that it was outside my security clearance level. I felt like an
idiot.”
“You never considered the fact that there might be
something wrong with the arrangement?”
“No. There was nothing wrong with the arrangement. I took
it for granted that Säpo knew what they were doing and
had the appropriate routines and experience. But I can’t
talk about this.”
Janeryd had by this time been talking about it for several
minutes.
“O.K…. but all this is beside the point. Only one thing is
important right now.”
“What?”
“The names of the individuals you had your meetings with.”
Janeryd gave Blomkvist a puzzled look.
“The people who were looking after Zalachenko went far
beyond their jurisdiction. They’ve committed serious
criminal acts and they’ll be the object of a preliminary
investigation. That’s why Fälldin sent me to see you. He
doesn’t know who they are. You were the one who met
them.”
Janeryd blinked and pressed his lips together.
“One was Evert Gullberg … he was the top man.”
Janeryd nodded.
“How many times did you meet him?”
“He was at every meeting except one. There were about
ten meetings during the time Fälldin was Prime Minister.”
“Where did you meet?”
“In the lobby of some hotel. Usually the Sheraton. Once at
the Amaranth on Kungsholmen and sometimes at the
Continental pub.”
“And who else was at the meetings?”
“It was a long time ago … I don’t remember.”
“Try.”
“There was a … Clinton. Like the American president.”
“First name?”
“Fredrik. I saw him four or five times.”
“Others?”
“Hans von Rottinger. I knew him through my mother.”
“Your mother?”
“Yes, my mother knew the von Rottinger family. Hans von
Rottinger was always a pleasant chap. Before he turned up
out of the blue at a meeting with Gullberg, I had no idea
that he worked for Säpo.”
“He didn’t,” Blomkvist said.
Janeryd turned pale.
“He worked for something called the Section for Special
Analysis,” Blomkvist said. “What were you told about that
group?”
“Nothing. I mean, just that they were the ones who took
care of the defector.”
“Right. But isn’t it strange that they don’t appear anywhere
in Säpo’s organizational chart?”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It is, isn’t it? So how did they set up the meetings? Did
they call you, or did you call them?”
“Neither. The time and place for each meeting was set at
the preceding one.”
“What happened if you needed to get in contact with them?
For instance, to change the time of a meeting or something
like that?”
“I had a number to call.”
“What was the number?”
“I couldn’t possibly remember.”
“Who answered if you called the number?”
“I don’t know. I never used it.”
“Next question. Who did you hand everything over to?”
“How do you mean?”
“When Fälldin’s term came to an end. Who took your
place?”
place?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you write a report?”
“No. Everything was classified. I couldn’t even take notes.”
“And you never briefed your successor?”
“No.”
“So what happened?”
“Well … Fälldin left office, and Ola Ullsten came in. I was
told that we would have to wait until after the next election.
Then Fälldin was re-elected and our meetings were
resumed. Then came the election in 1985. The Social
Democrats won, and I assume that Palme appointed
somebody to take over from me. I transferred to the foreign
ministry and became a diplomat. I was posted to Egypt, and
then to India.”
Blomkvist went on asking questions for another few
minutes, but he was sure that he already had everything
Janeryd could tell him. Three names.
Fredrik Clinton.
Hans von Rottinger.
And Evert Gullberg – the man who had shot Zalachenko.
The Zalachenko club.
He thanked Janeryd for the meeting and walked the short
distance along Lange Voorhout to Hotel des Indes, from
where he took a taxi to Centraal. It was not until he was in
the taxi that he reached into his jacket pocket and stopped
the tape recorder.
Berger looked up and scanned the half-empty newsroom
beyond the glass cage. Holm was off that day. She saw no-one who showed any interest in her, either openly or
covertly. Nor did she have reason to think that anyone on
the editorial staff wished her ill.
The email had arrived a minute before. The sender was
editorial-@aftonbladet.com>. Why Aftonbladet? The
address was another fake.
Today’s message contained no text. There was only a jpeg
that she opened in Photoshop.
The image was pornographic: a naked woman with
exceptionally large breasts, a dog collar around her neck.
She was on all fours and being mounted from the rear.
The woman’s face had been replaced with Berger’s. It was
not a skilled collage, but probably that was not the point.
The picture was from her old byline at Millennium and
could be downloaded off the Net.
At the bottom of the picture was one word, written with the
spray function in Photoshop.
Whore.
This was the ninth anonymous message she had received
containing the word “whore,” sent apparently by someone
at a well-known media outlet in Sweden. She had a cyber-stalker on her hands.
The telephone tapping was a more difficult task than the
computer monitoring. Trinity had no trouble locating the
cable to Prosecutor Ekström’s home telephone. The
problem was that Ekström seldom or never used it for work-related calls. Trinity did not even consider trying to bug
Ekström’s work telephone at police H.Q. on Kungsholmen.
That would have required extensive access to the Swedish
cable network, which he did not have.
But Trinity and Bob the Dog devoted the best part of a
week to identifying and separating out Ekström’s mobile
from the background noise of about 200,000 other mobile
telephones within a kilometre of police headquarters.
They used a technique called Random Frequency Tracking
System. The technique was not uncommon. It had been
developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, and was
built into an unknown number of satellites that performed
pinpoint monitoring of capitals around the world as well as
flashpoints of special interest.
The N.S.A. had enormous resources and used a vast
network in order to capture a large number of mobile
conversations in a certain region simultaneously. Each
individual call was separated and processed digitally by
computers programmed to react to certain words, such as
terrorist or Kalashnikov. If such a word occurred, the
computer automatically sent an alarm, which meant that
some operator would go in manually and listen to the
conversation to decide whether it was of interest or not.
It was a more complex problem to identify a specific mobile
telephone. Each mobile has its own unique signature – a
fingerprint – in the form of the telephone number. With
exceptionally sensitive equipment the N.S.A. could focus on
a specific area to separate out and monitor mobile calls.
The technique was simple but not 100 per cent effective.
Outgoing calls were particularly hard to identify. Incoming
calls were simpler because they were preceded by the
fingerprint that would enable the telephone in question to
receive the signal.
The difference between Trinity and the N.S.A. attempting to
eavesdrop could be measured in economic terms. The
N.S.A. had an annual budget of several billion U.S. dollars,
close to twelve thousand fulltime agents, and access to
cutting-edge technology in I.T. and telecommunications.
Trinity had a van with thirty kilos of electronic equipment,
much of which was home-made stuff that Bob the Dog had
set up. Through its global satellite monitoring the N.S.A.
could home in highly sensitive antennae on a specific
building anywhere in the world. Trinity had an antenna
constructed by Bob the Dog which had an effective range
of about five hundred metres.
The relatively limited technology to which Trinity had
access meant that he had to park his van on Bergsgatan
or one of the nearby streets and laboriously calibrate the
equipment until he had identified the fingerprint that
represented Ekström’s mobile number. Since he did not
know Swedish, he had to relay the conversations via
another mobile back home to Plague, who did the actual
eavesdropping.
For five days Plague, who was looking more and more
hollow-eyed, listened in vain to a vast number of calls to
and from police headquarters and the surrounding
buildings. He had heard fragments of ongoing
investigations, uncovered planned lovers’ trysts, and taped
hours and hours of conversations of no interest
whatsoever. Late on the evening of the fifth day, Trinity
whatsoever. Late on the evening of the fifth day, Trinity
sent a signal which a digital display instantly identified as
Ekström’s mobile number. Plague locked the parabolic
antenna on to the exact frequency.
The technology of R.F.T.S. worked primarily on incoming
calls to Ekström. Trinity’s parabolic antenna captured the
search for Ekström’s mobile number as it was sent through
the ether.
Because Trinity could record the calls from Ekström, he
also got voiceprints that Plague could process.
Plague ran Ekström’s digitized voice through a program
called V.P.R.S., Voiceprint Recognition System. He
specified a dozen commonly occurring words, such as
“O.K.” or “Salander”. When he had five separate examples
of a word, he charted it with respect to the time it took to
speak the word, what tone of voice and frequency range it
had, whether the end of the word went up or down, and a
dozen other markers. The result was a graph. In this way
Plague could also monitor outgoing calls from Ekström. His
parabolic antenna would be permanently listening out for a
call containing Ekström’s characteristic graph curve for one
of a dozen commonly occurring words. The technology was
not perfect, but roughly half of all the calls that Ekström
made on his mobile from anywhere near police
headquarters were monitored and recorded.
The system had an obvious weakness. As soon as Ekström
left police headquarters, it was no longer possible to
monitor his mobile, unless Trinity knew where he was and
could park his van in the immediate vicinity.
With the authorization from the highest level, Edklinth had
been able to set up a legitimate operations department. He
picked four colleagues, purposely selecting younger talent
who had experience on the regular police force and were
only recently recruited to S.I.S. Two had a background in
the Fraud Division, one had been with the financial police,
and one was from the Violent Crimes Division. They were
summoned to Edklinth’s office and told of their assignment
as well as the need for absolute secrecy. He made plain
that the investigation was being carried out at the express
order of the Prime Minister. Inspector Figuerola was named
as their chief, and she directed the investigation with a
force that matched her physical appearance.
But the investigation proceeded slowly. This was largely
due to the fact that no-one was quite sure who or what
should be investigated. On more than one occasion
Edklinth and Figuerola considered bringing Mårtensson in
for questioning. But they decided to wait. Arresting him
would reveal the existence of the investigation.
Finally, on Tuesday, eleven days after the meeting with the
Prime Minister, Figuerola came to Edklinth’s office.
“I think we’ve got something.”
“Sit down.”
“Evert Gullberg. One of our investigators had a talk with
Marcus Erlander, who’s leading the investigation into
Zalachenko’s murder. According to Erlander, S.I.S.
contacted the Göteborg police just two hours after the
murder and gave them information about Gullberg’s
threatening letters.”
“That was fast.”
“A little too fast. S.I.S. faxed nine letters that Gullberg had
supposedly written. There’s just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Two of the letters were sent to the justice department – to
the Minister of Justice and to the Deputy Minister.”
“I know that.”
“Yes, but the letter to the Deputy Minister wasn’t logged in
at the department until the following day. It arrived with a
later delivery.”
Edklinth stared at Figuerola. He felt very much afraid that
his suspicions were going to turn out to be justified.
Figuerola went implacably on.
“So we have S.I.S. sending a fax of a threatening letter that
hadn’t yet reached its addressee.”
“Good Lord,” Edklinth said.
“It was someone in Personal Protection who faxed them
through.”
“Who?”
“I don’t think he’s involved in the case. The letters landed
on his desk in the morning, and shortly after the murder he
was told to get in touch with the Göteborg police.”
“Who gave him the instruction?”
“The chief of Secretariat’s assistant.”
“Good God, Monica. Do you know what this means? It
means that S.I.S. was involved in Zalachenko’s murder.”
“Not necessarily. But it definitely does mean that some
individuals within S.I.S. had knowledge of the murder
before it was committed. The only question is: who?”
“The chief of Secretariat …”
“Yes. But I’m beginning to suspect that this Zalachenko
club is out of house.”
“How do you mean?”
“Mårtensson. He was moved from Personal Protection and
is working on his own. We’ve had him under surveillance
round the clock for the past week. He hasn’t had contact
with anyone within S.I.S. as far as we can tell. He gets calls
on a mobile that we cannot monitor. We don’t know what
number it is, but it’s not his normal mobile number. He did
meet with the fair-haired man, but we haven’t been able to
identify him.”
Edklinth frowned. At the same instant Anders Berglund
knocked on the door. He was one of the new team, the
officer who had worked with the financial police.
“I think I’ve found Evert Gullberg,” Berglund said.
“Come in,” Edklinth said.
Berglund put a dog-eared, black-and-white photograph on
the desk. Edklinth and Figuerola looked at the picture,
which showed a man that both of them immediately
recognized. He was being led through a doorway by two
broad-shouldered plain-clothes police officers. The
legendary double agent Colonel Stig Wennerström.*
“This print comes from Åhlens & Åkerlunds Publishers and
was used in Se magazine in the spring of 1964. The
photograph was taken in the course of the trial. Behind
Wennerström you can see three people. On the right,
Detective Superintendent Otto Danielsson, the policeman
who arrested him.”
“Yes …”
“Look at the man on the left behind Danielsson.”
They saw a tall man with a narrow moustache who was
wearing a hat. He reminded Edklinth vaguely of the writer
Dashiell Hammett.
“Compare his face with this passport photograph of
Gullberg, taken when he was sixty-six.”
Edklinth frowned. “I wouldn’t be able to swear it’s the same
person—”
“But it is,” Berglund said. “Turn the print over.”
On the reverse was a stamp saying that the picture
belonged to Åhlens & Åkerlunds Publishers and that the
photographer’s name was Julius Estholm. The text was
written in pencil. Stig Wennerström flanked by two police
officers on his way into Stockholm district court. In the
background O. Danielsson, E. Gullberg and H.W. Francke.
“Evert Gullberg,” Figuerola said. “He was S.I.S.”
“No,” Berglund said. “Technically speaking, he wasn’t. At
least not when this picture was taken.”
“Oh?”
“S.I.S. wasn’t established until four months later. In this
photograph he was still with the Secret State Police.”
“Who’s H.W. Francke?” Figuerola said.
“Hans Wilhelm Francke,” Edklinth said. “Died in the early
’90s, but was assistant chief of the Secret State Police in
the late ’50s and early ’60s. He was a bit of a legend, just
like Otto Danielsson. I actually met him a couple of times.”
“Is that so?” Figuerola said.
“He left S.I.S. in the late ’60s. Francke and P.G. Vinge
never saw eye to eye, and he was more or less forced to
resign at the age of fifty or fifty-five. Then he opened his
own shop.”
“His own shop?”
“He became a consultant in security for industry. He had an
office on Stureplan, but he also gave lectures from time to
time at S.I.S. training sessions. That’s where I met him.”
time at S.I.S. training sessions. That’s where I met him.”
“What did Vinge and Francke quarrel about?”
“They were just very different. Francke was a bit of a
cowboy who saw K.G.B. agents everywhere, and Vinge was
a bureaucrat of the old school. Vinge was fired shortly
thereafter. A bit ironic, that, because he thought Palme was
working for the K.G.B.”
Figuerola looked at the photograph of Gullberg and
Francke standing side by side.
“I think it’s time we had another talk with Justice,” Edklinth
told her.
“Millennium came out today,” Figuerola said.
Edklinth shot her a glance.
“Not a word about the Zalachenko affair,” she said.
“So we’ve got a month before the next issue. Good to
know. But we have to deal with Blomkvist. In the midst of all
this mess he’s like a hand grenade with the pin pulled.”
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