The Boy in the Shadows

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  Angela had been murdered by Joel Klingberg, Katz thought as he linked the computer to the hacked server chain that went via Montreal, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw. Out of jealousy, because she had had an affair with his uncle. After that he had shot Julin outside the hunting cabin in Sörmland and brought the corpse to the house in Djursholm, where he murdered his uncle to get revenge.

  But why Julin? Had they ended up in a dispute over something, or had Klingberg wanted him out of the way to be on the safe side? Or was there a completely different reason?

  At least he knew where he would start looking.

  It took him less than an hour to find a way in through Project Prio, the armed forces’ new IT system. The program was built on solutions from the German systems supplier SAP, and it had authorization issues. The operating system was from Sun Microsystems. Viraltech, a large British antivirus company, had created the shield against malicious code. From what Katz had heard, there were security holes that hadn’t been patched.

  He’d gotten authorization via a logged-in computer at the Material Administration. Trotsky’s program had no problem hijacking the computer. He clicked his way on, typing in commands, moving quickly through the flow.

  He found an internal search engine and typed in Julin’s name. He was allowed through, to the Defense Recruiting Authority. He typed the name into another search box and found Julin’s wartime posting in the register. On Lovön, he saw, with FRA, the National Defense Radio Establishment. No details about the post, not even his rank. But there was a strange addendum: Legba. Like that voodoo spirit Hammarberg had mentioned.

  Katz went back to the database and found another search path. Like a digital ghost, he thought, a phantom that could go through walls, thanks to Trotsky. He typed in “Legba” and got a hit at a department within MUST, the Military Intelligence and Security Service. Project Legba. Classified information. His search ended in a dead end.

  He descended deeper and deeper into the flow of information, interpreting what he saw, executing more commands, letting the exploit program do his work for him. It was like a sort of dance, or acrobatics, and he made decisions based on intuition.

  He found another hole, a computer that had just logged in from FRA. With full permission, he realized, but still he hesitated.

  It’s a honeytrap . . . someone’s trying to make it easy for me . . . putting it out there in the system to see if it will be attacked.

  He was still hesitant, but he didn’t want to abort the hack. He was being paranoid. He ought to take the chance.

  Her phone rang again; it was on the desk next to the computer. He looked at the screen: it was Ola, her ex. He didn’t want to wake her, didn’t want to know any more about her problems with her former husband. He grunted in irritation and set the phone to silent.

  There was no activity on the logged-in computer; it was just there, free for the taking. Too easy, he thought, moving his search to another part of the system.

  All at once, things became more interesting. There was a large cluster of password-protected files. It was MUST’s database at Gärdet. He didn’t know how he’d suddenly ended up there.

  He could see traces of old botnets, hackers, or maybe another defense establishment that had tried to infect the database with malicious code. Unless it was a simulation the techs had done. The shadow of a zombie network. He shuddered at the thought of the word and let Trotsky’s new program look for a hole.

  Then he found it and was in. The files were encrypted, but there was an open register. He typed in both “Legba” and “Julin” and got hits in about ten files that were linked to SSI, the Section for Special Collection, which was the predecessor of KSI, the Office for Special Collection, a secret intelligence bureau within the armed forces.

  Project Legba. He copied them to the computer.

  There were strange traffic flows in the server; he knew it was a sign of anxiety. He was more or less certain that the open FRA computer had been a honeytrap. One or more sysops were on his trail; they’d found the logs in the firewall and were trying to trace where he’d come from and how he’d gotten in. There were more techs out there; he’d set off major alarms.

  He felt a cold sweat running down his spine, as if the ghosts in the server were real, as if they might climb out of the computer screen at any moment. He transferred the last few files, heard the whir of the CPU fan, the sound of Eva mumbling something in her sleep, and the buzzing of the mobile phone he’d put on silent, someone calling again and again. A person walking in the stairwell; Katz felt panicked, imagining things: that they’d already found him, that they were faster than he was, with resources he hadn’t counted on.

  He dragged the last encrypted file to the hard drive and shut down the computer. He listened for sounds from the stairwell. Just my imagination, he thought.

  Project Legba had been initiated by Julin in the late ’70s, as part of the armed forces’ effort to modernize the intelligence agency. But Julin hadn’t worked alone. Superiors had helped and supported him.

  Katz didn’t understand it all yet, how all the threads were connected, because he had only been able to restore parts of the files. He would need help with them later; maybe Trotsky could create a better decryption program for him.

  The documents mentioned a certain “L” or “Lynx” at SSI, a separate entity that was loosely connected to MUST. Was Lynx Julin’s boss? Katz had learned what little he knew about SSI from his time at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The employees, all of whom worked under aliases, dealt with human intelligence, infiltrating foreign spy organizations and doing security analyses on behalf of the defense staff. Project Legba had been partially financed with funds from SSI.

  “G” was another initial that popped up in several places. A person from the business world, who, as far as Katz could tell, had supported Julin with money and contacts. Gustav Klingberg? Was it that simple?

  What had the project dealt with? An experiment in which they tried to develop better methods of forcing information out of POWs in a war zone? The documents were sketchy, as if they had been hesitant to include too much information out of security concerns. Some of the text consisted only of code words that he would need an encryption key to interpret.

  They had carried out clinical trials with psychoactive and hallucinogenic drugs. The interpreter academy had somehow been involved in the program.

  He saw his own name in one of the documents. He had belonged to “Unit B.” A small group of recruits who had, without their knowledge, been selected as “special interrogators.” Joel Klingberg was another member, and there were two more from the class ahead of theirs. All of them had been diagnosed as psychopaths by a military psychologist, and they had been classified as extremely gifted with languages. Unit B had never been activated.

  What had they been planning to do with them? Seeing what they were capable of under the influence of specially prepared drugs? Creating totally callous torturers and murderers?

  Julin and Lynx had been in contact with the interpreter academy for several years. Katz was starting to see how it was all connected: Julin had made sure that he was selected to serve in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and that he eventually ended up in St. Petersburg so he could be placed in any conflict situation that might come up. But there had never been such a situation. Instead, the Soviet empire had collapsed like a house of cards. Julin had made sure to keep him within the armed forces like some sort of sleeper cell, without Katz knowing it.

  Experiments had been done on coastal commandos. The recruits had been required to sign documents stating that they would never leak the details of what they’d experienced to outsiders. Fragments of a document were attached. The experiment had taken place under the supervision of a small team of military psychologists. A few doctors had also been present: experts in toxicology from the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Berlin, experts on natural drugs, antivenom, and antitoxins.

  One soldier said that the intoxication made him lose all his w
ill. He became apathetic and only did what others told him to, “no matter how absurd or dangerous it seemed.”

  What had they done? Subjected one another to torture? To interrogations while drugged?

  So they had done experiments with a drug, but which drug was it?

  He searched on, looking for more pieces of the puzzle. One document mentioned something about “the amount of tetrodotoxin that was to be modified.” It was a very potent neurotoxin, one of the German toxicologists had added in a report, and there was no known antidote. The name was derived from Tetraodontiformes, the order of fish that includes pufferfish, porcupine fish, sunfish, and triggerfish. “May produce a state of apparent death. Cardiac activity cannot be appreciated with a stethoscope, but can of course be measured by EKG.”

  Katz remembered a television program he’d seen about the Pacific fish called fugu that was a delicacy in Japan. Only specially licensed chefs were allowed to clean and prepare it, otherwise there was a risk that the restaurant patrons would die.

  More illegible text, until he got to a part about Datura, nightshade, and a hallucinogenic substance called bufotenin. “The test subject hallucinates and becomes very violent,” the doctors had written.

  Next came some chemical notations that didn’t mean anything to him, and then a list of ingredients for a kind of tincture that was called “Legba” and contained Caribbean porcupine fish, nightshade, animal fats from a particular kind of toad, and “bone powder from a child’s cranium.”

  This information had come from sources close to “G.” Gustav Klingberg, he thought again. He had been familiar with that sort of thing; he believed in voodoo.

  More tests and evaluations had been done on select people. But the results had not been satisfactory. The project had been put on ice.

  What had they been looking for? The ingredients for the drug that voodoo sorcerers had used to make people appear dead? The very drug he had been subjected to in the Klingberg family’s hunting cabin?

  Katz sat in the kitchen and read, vaguely aware of the mobile that kept buzzing out in the living room. The experiments involved trying to change personalities, to make people ignore all the rules, give up all personal morals. He and Klingberg and a few other military interpreters had been part of this project in some way, although he didn’t understand how.

  And the other man in the hunting cabin, the zombie-like one—the person who didn’t seem to feel pain, the person who had tried to kill Jorma . . . was he another result of these experiments?

  He went back to the living room and picked up Eva’s phone. Eight missed calls from her ex-husband. Plus messages on voicemail and several texts. He brought up the most recent one and felt an icy chill flow through his body.

  The seconds it took for him to walk over to the bedroom felt like an eternity.

  She was still lying in bed, just about to wake up.

  “What is it?” she said sleepily.

  “You have to call your ex. Something happened with your daughter.”

  She had never felt anything like this before. Animal terror—it ached within her. She couldn’t combine her thoughts into a functioning whole; there were only fragments, sketches of thoughts. She felt like she was going to throw up.

  She was sitting on the designer sofa in Ola’s apartment, listening but not understanding.

  “Start from the beginning,” she said. “You dropped her off near the school . . .”

  He explained again, for which time in a row she didn’t know, that he had dropped her off at the bus stop, from the car, at twenty minutes past eight that morning, a hundred meters from the schoolyard gate. She had walked toward the schoolyard, throwing him a kiss before he made a U-turn and drove into the city. Waved until he was out of sight.

  Why hadn’t she said it the last time she saw him, she thought, that she didn’t like it, that Lisa was too little to walk by herself? But she had no say in situations like that; Ola was the organized one, the one who knew what to do and could set limits.

  “No one has seen her since—none of her classmates, none of the staff. Ida—you know, her friend—usually waits for her at the door, and she was waiting yesterday, too, up until the bell rang.”

  He had aged ten years in only a few hours. He looked ugly, ravaged, and vicious.

  Erika came into the room, cautiously wondering if they wanted coffee. Ola snapped at her to go away and looked at his hands, which were shaking like an old man’s.

  “And after that what happened?”

  “Anne-Marie, the class teacher, tried to get hold of me during the morning break, but I was in a planning meeting. I got the message just before ten. I called her right away. She sounded normal; she asked if Lisa was sick and if so how long she would be out of school. Because they’re going on a field trip tomorrow. To the Tom Tits museum in Södertälje.”

  He started to cry, and she was shocked. She’d never seen him cry before, not even during their divorce, not even when his mother had died the fall after they got married.

  She had taken the car to Söder as soon as she got the news, driving through the city with tunnel vision, hyperventilating at every red light until she had arrived and sank down onto Ola’s sofa, because her legs wouldn’t hold her anymore. Now she looked around as if that could alleviate her panic. Furniture from Room. Decorations from NK Interior. Tasteful, planned by people with style. A sort of negative of her own apartment. She didn’t know what she’d seen in him once upon a time. They were each other’s opposites, like water and fire.

  “What did you do after that?”

  “I panicked.”

  “Didn’t you call the police?”

  “That was the first thing I did. They sent a patrol car. I gave them Lisa’s description.”

  “There are usually natural explanations for these kinds of things. In normal cases, people show up again, children too. Maybe she ran off with a friend? Decided to do something other than go to school—just playing hooky.”

  She heard her own voice as if from a distance. Professionally calm, so as not to break down entirely. She was talking about the incident as if it were a fraud investigation. And she could hear how absurd she sounded—it would be completely unlike her dutiful little girl.

  “So you started looking for her?”

  “Yes, but at the same time I tried to get hold of you. But you didn’t answer. I thought she had gone to your place, that she missed her mom. Or that you picked her up outside the school . . . anything that resembled a simple explanation.”

  He was no longer crying. He seemed calmer and more collected.

  “And then I called the police again, three or four times, but got the same answer. Wait and see.”

  “Did you talk to her teacher again?”

  “Yes, and her classmates. They’re all worried. No one has any good idea about why she didn’t show up.”

  “Does she hang out with anyone else outside the class? Does she have friends here in the neighborhood?”

  “There’s a girl in the building she plays with sometimes. Lottie. One year younger. But they’re gone this week. Her dad is a pilot for SAS; he takes the family along on trips sometimes. They fly for free.”

  There must be someone else, she thought, another child she knew, some friend who convinced her to leave school. But to do what?

  Erika came back into the room. She’d put the baby down in the nursery; it wasn’t screaming anymore. She was walking toward Eva with her arms out in a grotesque gesture, and it wasn’t until Erika had her in her arms that Eva realized Erika wanted to hug her. She pulled away and walked over to the window.

  “You have to use your contacts,” said Ola. “You know people at the police station. You have to tell them to do more.”

  “I already called, before I came here.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “They’re doing everything they can. The patrol cars have been given the description. And I talked to the emergency center. At least no traffic accidents have been
reported downtown this morning.”

  The quiet was unbearable—the faint hum of traffic on Ringvägen, the sounds of conversation from the pavement . . . unbearable. She needed a cigarette, but she didn’t have any. She wondered why she was pretending for Ola. So that she would appear to be strong and collected for once. But, in reality, she had made over a dozen calls to the police station, screamed at people in a complete panic, begged people she knew to try to do something to find her daughter.

  “Can you show me Lisa’s room?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  She followed him down the hall to where the bedrooms were. She’d never seen the way the children lived at Ola’s. She’d never been invited to.

  The room was the exact opposite of the one the kids shared on Torsgatan. It was a girl’s dream. A pink bed with a matching child-size easy chair. A lace bed canopy. Dress-up clothes in their own wardrobe. String system shelves on the wall. Children’s books in neat rows. Her own computer. Toys arranged on shelves. A CD player on a bench. A Loreen CD was out—she noticed it was autographed.

  In the bed was her favorite doll, Engla.

  At the thought of what could have happened to Lisa, she nearly threw up.

  “Do you know if she keeps a diary? Maybe there’s something there.”

  Ola shook his head.

  “She’s seven, she just learned to write.”

  She was grasping at straws, she realized. Searching for clues to what had happened in her room. Absurd. As if there would be anything in here. As if she had written something that could help them. Engla stared at her beseechingly. The scent of her little girl lingered in the room; she could feel the warmth of her body, hear her voice.

  They spent the entire day looking for Lisa, driving around in Ola’s car, using the school as a sort of hub around which they made ever-wider circles.

  They asked about her at playgrounds, at leisure centers, outside schools; they called around to her classmates and asked them if they knew anything about other children or adults: had she ever mentioned another person she often saw, had she said or done anything strange or unusual recently, had she mentioned anything about strangers? And, during all this, Eva was in contact with the police station, pulling at threads, screaming at people, getting them to start working.