Anger Mode

by Stefan Tegenfalk

  “We’ll establish the backgrounds of the detainees and turn over every stone. Sooner or later, I’m convinced that we’ll find a connection,” Martin said, reading the mood around the table. He had to avoid losing his temper.

  “Very possibly, but we need to have other options,” Uddestad replied and threw up his hands. “Personally, I think this is far-fetched – terrorist princes notwithstanding.”

  Uddestad was apparently going to question every decision and suggestion from Martin’s direction. He felt his blood boil, but controlled himself and decided to let Julén deal with the problem.

  “SÄPO’s in charge of this investigation from an operational perspective,” Martin said respectfully. “And I’ve been appointed to advise the head of the investigation. I therefore have a mandate – after consultation with my superior, Åsa Julén, of course – to make the necessary decisions regarding activities, strategies and other matters that may move the investigation forwards.” He looked at Julén, who fidgeted uneasily.

  Julén felt uncomfortable caught in the crossfire between the County Police Commissioner and the investigation team leader from SÄPO. That there was friction in the investigation team was, in itself, nothing unusual. When this happened, it was usually between the prosecutor and the police. It could sometimes be a healthy dynamic that produced new ideas, since the friction usually developed when the investigation was not making any progress. But this situation was more or less unique: a police commissioner and the Security Service more or less in open confrontation. She had known for some time that Commissioner Folke Uddestad did not have a high regard for the Security Service. She knew less about Martin Borg. She had heard some rumours that he possibly had some difficulties working with female colleagues, but he was not alone in that. This dispute could blow up into something messy. She discreetly scratched behind her ear.

  “Yes, that is so,” she began, with some hesitation in her voice. “But the Minister for Justice himself also made it very clear that the Commissioner should participate in the investigation, and neither the Prosecutor-General nor myself have any objection to that. What role the Commissioner has in this context is perhaps not entirely clear yet and, until that is clarified, SÄPO leads, quite rightly, the operational part of the investigation. But regardless of that, I am, in fact, in my role as Chief Prosecutor, still in charge of the investigation. And as I see things right now, there’s no reason to allocate our resources other than on the group of individuals that’s currently being detained and their associates. Until someone can convince me of the contrary, we shall continue as SÄPO proposes.”

  Everyone nodded in agreement, except Folke Uddestad.

  Martin added that he would gladly accept ideas and suggestions, especially from the Commissioner who, with his extensive experience in law enforcement, certainly would make a valuable contribution to the investigation.

  Uddestad was the first person to leave the room.

  Martin assessed his situation directly after the meeting. He was now faced with three different challenges. To begin with, he had an operational problem in the form of the uncommunicative gentlemen with the beards. After the initial interrogations, he realized that it would be difficult to get them to open up. However, he believed that, with some creative thinking and a slightly unorthodox technique, he had a solution to that problem, a solution that he had often used successfully on previous occasions.

  The second challenge was more of an internal one and had so far had not been a problem, but it could eventually become one. That problem was Åsa Julén. Martin had two reasons to be concerned about her. To start with, she was a woman and women were, by definition, weak and naive. The second reason was her unwillingness to take risks. She would need persuading before she went ahead with a prosecution. Anything to protect herself in the event of a possible failure. Her record consisted almost exclusively of prosecutions in which the burden of evidence was so much to her advantage that a not-guilty verdict was as likely as a pathological liar telling the truth. Yet no battle could be won without taking risks; any soldier would testify to that fact.

  So Martin and his team would have to present a mountain of conclusive evidence that would make it impossible for Julén to lose in court.

  The third and final problem was also internal and its name was Folke Uddestad. While Martin believed he had a good understanding of and control over the other two cards in his hand, there was still this joker in the pack. Therefore, he would be forced to take special measures to ensure that Uddestad did not query every move in the investigation. That there was no love lost between the County Police Commissioner and the Security Service was not news. Back in the middle of the 1980s, it was discovered that Uddestad appeared in SÄPO’s top-secret list of police-authority personnel who could pose problems, because of so-called “strongly dissenting views on police activities”. Consequently, Uddestad regarded SÄPO as a snake in the grass. The top-secret list, however, was not sufficiently secret to prevent it from ending up in the public limelight, just a few months after it had been created. Rumours of a mole deep within the Security Service grew stronger after that happened. In the beginning, many believed that it was a political decision from the government to create the list and to monitor individual officers with the police authorities. This quickly proved to be incorrect. The initiative had been taken by some high-level SÄPO officials, who believed that a certain moral decay prevailed within the police force. Therefore, they felt forced to act and identified individual police officers, to prepare for a “cleansing” of those who represented the decay. These moral guardians still were firmly entrenched within SÄPO, despite a media storm of hurricane proportions.

  Martin stroked his chin, deep in thought. Everybody has a weak point, a secret they would not want to see the light of day. He needed only to find Uddestad’s weak spot. He was not concerned about getting sponsors for such a project within SÄPO. Together with the head of SÄPO, Anders Holmberg, and the National Police Board, Uddestad was pushing hard for the creation of a Swedish-style FBI, and the establishment of RSU was the first part of the process. This idea was shunned like the bubonic plague among officers within SÄPO. First, he needed to start with his immediate superior Thomas Kokk and his network of contacts higher up in SÄPO’s hierarchy. That would also resolve the third and final problem.

  A smile found its way onto his troubled face and, all of a sudden, he felt elated. It was as if he had had a small epiphany. Now, he needed only to schedule all the steps in his plan. He took out his personal laptop and started up Microsoft Office Project. He christened the project “Three Crowns” and began to input the variables.

  WALTER GRÖHN OPENED his eyes at Karolinska University Hospital one hour after the brain surgeon Täljkvist had completed the operation. Walter had insisted that he was unconscious during the operation. For the life of him, he could not understand why they wanted to operate on his brain under only local anaesthetic and while he was fully awake, although it was routine. The removal of the tumour lying inside Walter’s head had gone as planned, despite the complexity of the procedure. The medical profession deserved a certain recognition after all, even if he thought the majority of those practising it consisted of snotty brats who each earned the salaries of twenty nurses. After having tried to use his recently operated-on brain to reconsider the facts of the drug and the murders, he was finally forced to give in to the ensuing fatigue. It was as if someone had slowly dimmed the lights.

  The following day, Walter woke up early. The clock stood at five-thirty. With some surprise, he looked around the room. He must have been moved during the night, because he was in the company of three other patients. Faint breathing was the only sound that he could hear. Opposite him was a young girl with red hair, who apparently had a broken leg. It was in plaster from her thigh down to her toes. Across from him and to the right was a foreign woman, about forty, with her mouth half open. Her blanket had fallen off and he noticed she was bandaged around one breast under her nightgow
n. An amputated breast. Probably cancer. The bed directly to the right, however, Walter could not see. A screen separated the bed from the rest of the room. However, he could hear deep snoring at regular intervals, revealing that he had a man as his closest neighbour. Just before eight, the nurses came in with breakfast. A blonde assistant nurse bade good morning to Walter and placed a tray with sandwiches, orange juice and coffee on the bedside table. Walter took a big bite of a cheese sandwich and drank the glass of orange juice. The nurse went behind the screen and woke up the snoring man. He was lying with his back facing Walter. The man wearily cleared his throat and remained still for a minute before he finally sat up on the edge of the bed and started picking at his breakfast. Walter said hello to the girl and the one-breasted lady, who had also started to wake up. As if on cue, the man turned around. At first, Walter could not see who it was because of his battered face. But then the curly-haired man started talking and Walter choked on his coffee.

  “Well, if it isn’t the detective!” Jörgen Blad burst out, so loudly that the others in the room could not help hearing. The one-breasted woman and the redhead directed their gazes first at the man with a face like a colour chart and then at the new patient with the bandaged head.

  Walter cleared the coffee from his nose and put his coffee cup on the bedside table. “What’s happened to you then?” he asked, carelessly. “Have you stuck your nose in one time too many?”

  Jörgen’s grin remained on his face.

  “What about you?” he asked and drew a halo in the air around his head.

  “Had some rubbish in my head that needed to be removed,” Walter answered.

  “A bullet?” Jörgen quickly became serious.

  “Hardly that,” Walter said dryly. “A tumour.”

  Jörgen’s face looked concerned. “Is it serious?”

  Walter shook his head in denial.

  “I had a ladder fall on me, myself,” Jörgen said, sighing melodramatically.

  “Sounds feasible,” Walter answered, equally melodramatically, and turned his back. With all the sick people in the country, the odds must have been one in a million that he would end up with Jörgen Blad in the bed next to his. Nonetheless, there he lay. One of them was going to have to change rooms.

  Jörgen looked thoughtfully at Walter’s back for a long while. An idea had popped out of nowhere and refused to get out of his head. Suddenly, he saw everything clearly. Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? There was actually an alternative and a possible way out despite everything that had happened.

  “Are you interested in a win-win deal?” Jörgen asked, after pondering for a moment. Walter did not answer, but became more and more irritated by the reporter’s presence.

  “If I were you, I would listen,” Jörgen continued. Walter did not bother to reply. If he was quiet long enough, the wretch would perhaps tire, at least until one of them switched rooms. But then a twinge of curiosity appeared like a piece of spam email in his inbox. What could a journalist offer that would benefit both himself and the police?

  Walter was no stranger to cutting a deal with criminals, as long as the payoff was greater than the cost of the favour. But to bargain with journalists was a completely different business. The crooks were actually a better bet, because they were relatively predictable, but you never knew where you were with journalists and the media. I suppose it couldn’t do any harm to listen to what the scumbag has to say, Walter thought.

  “Listening never killed anyone,” Jörgen grumbled.

  Walter turned around. “What is it you want to say?”

  “I can give you something if you give me something in return,” Jörgen explained.

  Walter looked carefully at Jörgen. “Such as?” he replied sarcastically.

  “How about a high-ranking policeman who leaks information like a sieve and, on top of that, is consorting with serious villains?”

  “Sounds highly unlikely,” Walter said sceptically.

  “Why do you think I’m lying here?” Jörgen said, getting up from the bed and putting on the hospital slippers.

  “Well, perhaps it was a ladder?” Walter suggested.

  Jörgen looked at Walter with a smug expression.

  CHAPTER 16

  “I CAN’T DO anything more now,” Johan Hildebrandt insisted and shook his head in resignation. “At SÄPO, they’re extremely irritated about the memo, and I’m having my head bitten off, since they think we’re spreading wild speculation with absolutely no reason or evidence. Apparently, SÄPO’s been talking to the CID, where Walter Gröhn has also submitted a similar memo. Gröhn is, of course, also suspended from duty pending an investigation by Internal Affairs. Thomas Kokk was exceedingly upset that we at RSU are undermining SÄPO.”

  “And Åsa Julén?” Jonna asked.

  “She was kind enough to forward her copy of the memo to Martin Borg at SÄPO, who in turn went with it directly to Thomas Kokk, who already had the same memo, which he had received from me,” Hildebrandt said and studied Jonna grimly with his sharp eyes.

  “I don’t understand why they’re so upset,” Jonna said. “Initially, they ignored the memo and now when you ask them to acknowledge its existence, they’re infuriated by its content. What’s the real issue here? They only have to confirm its receipt, even if they find it of no interest. As for ‘wild speculation’, what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Hildebrandt said, morosely. “But this matter lies a long way outside our area of responsibility, a fact that the security service, police and prosecution authorities have explained to me with absolute clarity.”

  “This is quite ridiculous. What are we going to do?” Jonna asked, throwing her hands up in frustration.

  “We?” Hildebrandt exclaimed, disapprovingly. “We should definitely not do anything. To be specific, ‘we’ means you.”

  JONNA LOOKED AT the huge building that was the police headquarters through the window at Rut’s café. Her latte was tasteless and, for the first time since she had started at RSU, she had doubts about the choice she had made. She began to ponder her situation in life. Instructors at the police academy had warned them. The system shapes each individual police officer. Brutal environment, brutal cops. Corrupt society, corrupt cops. And so on. But the country she was living in was neither brutal nor corrupt. It was however plagued by the envy attributable to a tall-poppy culture, popularly known as Jante’s Law; a practice that was probably not pursued so zealously anywhere else in the world. This envy-based egalitarianism was of course reflected even in the police force.

  Perhaps she would have been better off never applying to MIT and subsequently to the police academy, and instead doing as her father wished. Getting an education in business and economics and then working in the family’s shipowning company. By now, she would have been a middle manager making eighty thousand a month. In another five years, she would have been vice president and, after yet another five years, she would have taken over from her father as CEO.

  She could have been financially independent and in charge of over two thousand employees and thousands of tonnes worth of vessels. But she would also probably have died of stress before she had reached thirty-five.

  It had taken her father a long time to get over Jonna’s decision to pursue another path. Jonna was the first from many family generations not to work within the company that her ancestors had built up. He had turned his back on her and nearly banished her from the family. They had not spoken for years. Eventually, her father had given up and accepted Jonna’s decision. He had not argued even when she applied to the police academy, but acknowledged her enrolment with a reserved “how amusing for you”.

  Jonna’s brother, three years younger, was always around for last orders at the bars in the Stureplan entertainment district. With her father’s reluctant approval, he had been selected as the person to eventually take over as CEO – despite the fact that he lacked Jonna’s intellect and preferred to play with sports cars and speedboats.

&nbs
p; Jonna’s desire to be a police officer had been born from a sense of fairness she developed as a child. She had no idea where it came from, but she had poured out lemonade with exact precision and shared biscuits equally between her friends. If anyone was bullied at school, she was always the first to berate the bully, which had inevitably resulted in her becoming the target of the abuse. She had an almost compulsive need to be honest, even if this occasionally led to difficulty.

  Jonna’s thoughts were interrupted by the ringing of her mobile phone. At first, she hesitated, but then saw Walter’s number on the phone’s display.

  “It’s time to start the ball rolling,” Walter began, as if they were still in the middle of a conversation.

  Jonna took a deep breath in order to compose herself when she heard Walter’s determined voice. Well, it can’t get much worse than it is now, she thought.

  “Is the operation already over?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Walter said, as if it was a trivial thing. “With today’s technology, they can do most things in their coffee breaks.”

  “What a relief. You must feel really happy that it’s over,” she said in a cheerful voice.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “When can you go home?”

  “In about ten days, according to Darth Vader, the laser expert. He says that I can’t move about or leave the bed for at least a week. I’m already beginning to feel as if I’m strapped into a restraint bed.”

  “Darth who?” Jonna said, puzzled.

  “And I’m only allowed to go to the toilet assisted by a nurse and in a wheelchair,” he added.