“Where is he now?” Blomkvist said as they turned on to Kungsgatan.
“Opposite P.U.B. department store. He’s walking fast. Whoops, he’s turned up Drottninggatan heading north.”
“Drottninggatan heading north,” Blomkvist said.
“Right,” Figuerola said, making an illegal turn on to Klara Norra and heading towards Olof Palmes Gata. She turned and braked outside the S.I.F. building. Jonas crossed Olof Palmes Gata and turned up towards Sveavägen. Cortez stayed on the other side of the street.
“He turned east –”
“We can see you both.”
“He’s turning down Holländargatan. Hello… Car. Red Audi.”
“Car,” Blomkvist said, writing down the registration number Cortez read off to him.
“Which way is he facing?” Figuerola said.
“Facing south,” Cortez reported. “He’s pulling out in front of you on Olof Palmes Gata… now.”
Monica was already on her way and passing Drottninggatan. She signalled and headed off a couple of pedestrians who tried to sneak across even though their light was red.
“Thanks, Henry. We’ll take him from here.”
The red Audi turned south on Sveavägen. As Figuerola followed she flipped open her mobile with her left hand and punched in a number.
“Could I get an owner of a red Audi?” she said, rattling off the number.
“Jonas Sandberg, born 1971. What did you say? Helsingörsgatan, Kista. Thanks.”
Blomkvist wrote down the information.
They followed the red Audi via Hamngatan to Strandvägen and then straight up to Artillerigatan. Jonas parked a block away from the Armémuseum. He walked across the street and through the front door of an 1890s building.
“Interesting,” Figuerola said, turning to Blomkvist.
Jonas Sandberg had entered a building that was only a block away from the apartment the Prime Minister had borrowed for their private meeting.
“Nicely done,” Figuerola said.
Just then Karim called and told them that Teleborian had gone up on to Klarabergsgatan via the escalators in Central Station and from there to police headquarters on Kungsholmen.
“Police headquarters at 5.00 on a Saturday afternoon?”
Figuerola and Blomkvist exchanged a sceptical look. Monica pondered this turn of events for a few seconds. Then she picked up her mobile and called Criminal Inspector Jan Bublanski.
“Hello, it’s Monica from S.I.S. We met on Norr Mälarstrand a while back.”
“What do you want?” Bublanski said.
“Have you got anybody on duty this weekend?”
“Modig,” Bublanski said.
“I need a favour. Do you know if she’s at headquarters?”
“I doubt it. It’s beautiful weather and Saturday afternoon.”
“Could you possibly reach her or anyone else on the investigative team who might be able to take a look in Prosecutor Ekström’s corridor… to see if there’s a meeting going on in his office at the moment.”
“What sort of meeting?”
“I can’t explain just yet. I just need to know if he has a meeting with anybody right now. And if so, who.”
“You want me to spy on a prosecutor who happens to be my superior?”
Figuerola raised her eyebrows. Then she shrugged. “Yes, I do.”
“I’ll do what I can,” he said and hung up.
Sonja Modig was closer to police headquarters than Bublanski had thought. She was having coffee with her husband on the balcony of a friend’s place in Vasastaden. Their children were away with her parents who had taken them on a week’s holiday, and they planned to do something as old-fashioned as have a bite to eat and go to the movies.
Bublanski explained why he was calling.
“And what sort of excuse would I have to barge in on Ekström?” Modig asked.
“I promised to give him an update on Niedermann yesterday, but in fact I forgot to deliver it to his office before I left. It’s on my desk.”
“O.K.,” said Modig. She looked at her husband and her friend. “I have to go in to H.Q. I’ll take the car and with a little luck I’ll be back in an hour.”
Her husband sighed. Her friend sighed.
“I’m on call this weekend,” Modig said in apology.
She parked on Bergsgatan, took the lift up to Bublanski’s office, and picked up the three A4 pages that comprised the meagre results of their search for Niedermann. Not much to hang on the Christmas tree, she thought.
She took the stairs up to the next floor and stopped at the door to the corridor. Headquarters was almost deserted on this summer afternoon. She was not exactly sneaking around. She was just walking very quietly. She stopped outside Ekström’s closed door. She heard voices and all of a sudden her courage deserted her. She felt a fool. In any normal situation she would have knocked on the door, pushed it open and exclaimed, “Hello! So you’re still here?” and then sailed right in. Now it seemed all wrong.
She looked around.
Why had Bublanski called her? What was this meeting about?
She glanced across the corridor. Opposite Ekström’s office was a conference room big enough for ten people. She had sat through a number of presentations there herself. She went into the room and closed the door. The blinds were down, and the glass partition to the corridor was covered by curtains. It was dark. She pulled up a chair and sat down, then opened the curtains a crack so that she would have a view of the corridor.
She felt uneasy. If anyone opened the door she would have quite a problem explaining what she was doing there. She took out her mobile and looked at the time display. Just before 6.00. She changed the ring to silent and leaned back in her chair, watching the door of Ekström’s office.
At 7.00 Plague pinged Salander.
– Done. I'm controlling S.M.P.
– Where?
He sent over a U.R.L.
– We have twenty-four hours. Although we have the emails for all eighteen persons, we need days to hack all their home computers. It is very likely that most do not even have hooked up on a Saturday afternoon.
– Plague, take care of their computers at home and I'll take care of the S.M.P.
– It's what I intended to do. Your Palm is a bit limited. Is there anyone in particular I should focus on?
– No. Any of them.
– Agreed.
– Plague.
– Yes.
– If you find anything by tomorrow, I want you to go on.
– Agreed.
– In that case, I'll pay.
– Bah. Okay. This is fun.
She logged out and went to the U.R.L. where Plague had uploaded all the administrator rights for S.M.P. She started by checking whether Fleming was online and at work. He was not. So she borrowed his identity and went into S.M.P.’s mail server. That way she could look at all the activity in the email system, even messages that had long since been deleted from individual accounts.
She started with Ernst Teodor Billing, one of the night editors at S.M.P., forty-three years old. She opened his mail and began to click back in time. She spent about two seconds on each message, just long enough to get an idea of who sent it and what it was about. After a few minutes she had worked out what was routine mail in the form of daily memos, schedules and other uninteresting stuff. She started to scroll past these.
She went through three months’ worth of messages one by one. Then she skipped month to month and read only the subject lines, opening the message only if it was something that caught her attention. She learned that Billing was going out with a woman named Sofia and that he used an unpleasant tone with her. She saw that this was nothing unusual, since Billing took an unpleasant tone with most of the people to whom he wrote messages – reporters, layout artists and others. Even so, she thought it odd that a man would consistently address his girlfriend with the words fucking fatty, fucking airhead or fucking cunt.
After an hour of searchi
ng, she shut down Billing and crossed him off the list. She moved on to Lars Örjan Wollberg, a veteran reporter at fifty-one who was on the legal desk.
Edklinth walked into police headquarters at 7.30 on Saturday evening. Figuerola and Blomkvist were waiting for him. They were sitting at the same conference table at which Blomkvist had sat the day before.
Edklinth reminded himself that he was on very thin ice and that a host of regulations had been violated when he gave Blomkvist access to the corridor. Figuerola most definitely had no right to invite him here on her own authority. Even the spouses of his colleagues were not permitted in the corridors of S.I.S., but were asked instead to wait on the landings if they were meeting their partner. And to cap it all, Blomkvist was a journalist. From now on Blomkvist would be allowed only into the temporary office at Fridhemsplan.
But outsiders were allowed into the corridors by special invitation. Foreign guests, researchers, academics, freelance consultants… he put Blomkvist into the category of freelance consultant. All this nonsense about security classification was little more than words anyway. Someone decides that a certain person should be given a particular level of clearance. And Edklinth had decided that if criticism were raised, he would say that he personally had given Blomkvist clearance.
If something went wrong, that is. He sat down and looked at Figuerola.
“How did you find out about the meeting?”
“Blomkvist called me at around 4.00,” she said with a satisfied smile.
Edklinth turned to Blomkvist. “And how did you find out about the meeting?”
“Tipped off by a source.”
“Am I to conclude that you’re running some sort of surveillance on Teleborian?”
Figuerola shook her head. “That was my first thought too,” she said in a cheerful voice, as if Blomkvist were not in the room. “But it doesn’t add up. Even if somebody were following Teleborian for Blomkvist, that person could not have known in advance that he was on his way to meet Jonas Sandberg.”
“So… what else? Illegal tapping or something?” Edklinth said.
“I can assure you,” Blomkvist said to remind them that he was there in the room, “that I’m not conducting illegal eavesdropping on anyone. Be realistic. Illegal tapping is the domain of government authorities.”
Edklinth frowned. “So you aren’t going to tell us how you heard about the meeting?”
“I’ve already told you that I won’t. I was tipped off by a source. The source is protected. Why don’t we concentrate on what we’ve discovered?”
“I don’t like loose ends,” Edklinth said. “But O.K. What have you found out?”
“His name is Jonas Sandberg,” Figuerola said. “Trained as a navy frogman and then attended the police academy in the early ’90s. Worked first in Uppsala and then in Södertälje.”
“You’re from Uppsala.”
“Yes, but we missed each other by about a year. He was recruited by S.I.S. Counter-Espionage in 1998. Reassigned to a secret post abroad in 2000. According to our documents, he’s at the embassy in Madrid. I checked with the embassy. They have no record of a Jonas Sandberg on their staff.”
“Just like Mårtensson. Officially moved to a place where he doesn’t exist.”
“The chief of Secretariat is the only person who could make this sort of arrangement.”
“And in normal circumstances everything would be dismissed as muddled red tape. We’ve noticed it only because we’re specifically looking for it. And if anyone starts asking awkward questions, they’ll say it’s confidential or that it has something to do with terrorism.”
“There’s quite a bit of budget work to check up on.”
“The chief of Budget?”
“Maybe.”
“Anything else?”
“Sandberg lives in Sollentuna. He’s not married, but he has a child with a teacher in Södertälje. No black marks on his record. Licence for two handguns. Conscientious and a teetotaller. The only thing that doesn’t quite fit is that he seems to be an evangelical and was a member of the Word of Life in the ’90s.”
“Where did you find that out?”
“I had a word with my old chief in Uppsala. He remembers Sandberg quite well.”
“A Christian frogman with two weapons and offspring in Södertälje. More?”
“We only I.D.’d him about three hours ago. This is pretty fast work, you have to admit.”
“Fair enough. What do we know about the building on Artillerigatan?”
“Not a lot yet. Stefan went to chase someone up from the city building office. We have blueprints of the building. A housing association block since the 1890s. Six floors with a total of twenty-two apartments, plus eight apartments in a small building in the courtyard. I looked up the tenants, but didn’t find anything that stood out. Two of the people living in the building have police records.”
“Who are they?”
“Lindström on the second floor, sixty-three. Convicted of insurance fraud in the ’70s. Wittfelt on the fourth floor, forty-seven. Twice convicted for beating his ex-wife. Otherwise what sounds like a cross-section of middle-class Sweden. There’s one apartment that raises a question mark though.”
“What?”
“It’s on the top floor. Eleven rooms and apparently a bit of a snazzy joint. It’s owned by a company called Bellona Inc.”
“And what’s their stated business?”
“God only knows. They do marketing analyses and have annual sales of around thirty million kronor. All the owners live abroad.”
“Aha.”
“Aha what?”
“Nothing. Just ‘aha’. Do some more checks on Bellona.”
At that moment the officer Blomkvist knew only as Stefan entered the room.
“Hi, chief,” he greeted Edklinth. “This is really cool. I checked out the story behind the Bellona apartment.”
“And?” Figuerola said.
“Bellona Inc. was founded in the ’70s. They bought the apartment from the estate of the former owner, a woman by the name of Kristina Cederholm, born in 1917, married to Hans Wilhelm Francke, the loose cannon who quarrelled with P.G. Vinge at the time S.I.S. was founded.”
“Good,” Edklinth said. “Very good. Monica, we want surveillance on that apartment around the clock. Find out what telephones they have. I want to know who goes in and who comes out, and what vehicles drop anyone off at that address. The usual.”
Edklinth turned to Blomkvist. He looked as if he wanted to say something, but he restrained himself. Blomkvist looked at him expectantly.
“Are you satisfied with the information flow?” Edklinth said at last.
“Very satisfied. Are you satisfied with Millennium’s contribution?”
Edklinth nodded reluctantly. “You do know that I could get into very deep water for this.”
“Not because of me. I regard the information that I receive here as source-protected. I’ll report the facts, but I won’t mention how or where I got them. Before I go to press I’m going to do a formal interview with you. If you don’t want to give me an answer to something, you just say ‘No comment’. Or else you could expound on what you think about the Section for Special Analysis. It’s up to you.”
“Indeed,” Edklinth nodded.
Blomkvist was happy. Within a few hours the Section had taken on tangible form. A real breakthrough.
To Modig’s great frustration the meeting in Ekström’s office was lasting a long time. Mercifully someone had left a full bottle of mineral water on the conference table. She had twice texted her husband to tell him that she was still held up, promising to make it up to him as soon as she could get home. She was starting to get restless and felt like an intruder.
The meeting did not end until 7.30. She was taken completely by surprise when the door opened and Faste came out. And then Dr Teleborian. Behind them came an older, grey-haired man Modig had never seen before. Finally Prosecutor Ekström, putting on a jacket as he switched off the ligh
ts and locked the door to his office.
Modig held up her mobile to the gap in the curtains and took two low-res photographs of the group outside Ekström’s door. Seconds later they had set off down the corridor.
She held her breath until they were some distance from the conference room in which she was trapped. She was in a cold sweat by the time she heard the door to the stairwell close. She stood up, weak at the knees.
Bublanski called Figuerola just after 8.00.
“You wanted to know if Ekström had a meeting.”
“Correct,” Figuerola said.
“It just ended. Ekström met with Dr Peter Teleborian and my former colleague Criminal Inspector Faste, and an older gentleman we didn’t recognize.”
“Just a moment,” Figuerola said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and turned to the others. “Teleborian went straight to Ekström.”
“Hello, are you still there?”
“Sorry. Do we have a description of the third man?”
“Even better. I’m sending you a picture.”
“A picture? I’m in your debt.”
“It would help if you’d tell me what’s going on.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
They sat in silence around the conference table for a moment.
“So,” Edklinth said at last. “Teleborian meets with the Section and then goes directly to see Prosecutor Ekström. I’d give a lot of money to find out what they talked about.”
“Or you could just ask me,” Blomkvist said.
Edklinth and Figuerola looked at him.
“They met to finalize their strategy for nailing Salander at her trial.”
Figuerola gave him a look. Then she nodded slowly.
“That’s a guess,” Edklinth said. “Unless you happen to have paranormal abilities.”
“It’s no guess,” said Mikael. “They met to discuss the forensic psychiatric report on Salander. Teleborian has just finished writing it.”
“Nonsense. Salander hasn’t even been examined.”
Blomkvist shrugged and opened his laptop case. “That hasn’t stopped Teleborian in the past. Here’s the latest version. It’s dated, as you can see, the week the trial is scheduled to begin.”
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest m(-3 Page 46
