Anger Mode

by Stefan Tegenfalk

  “What type of program?” he asked dubiously.

  “A program that solves puzzles.”

  “Puzzles?”

  “Listen carefully,” she said, putting the coffee mug down on the desk. “In a court hearing, a judge presides who is also the court president, together with three lay jurors and a court secretary who takes notes. Present during the trial are the accused, defending barristers, prosecutors, witnesses and, in most cases, spectators.”

  “No kidding?” said Serge, moderately enthusiastic about this lesson on “what goes on in the courtroom”.

  “Let me finish,” Jonna said. “I have the name of a district prosecutor, a lay juror and a judge. You’re going to write a program that searches through all the files and lists the documents in which all of these three names are mentioned. I suggest you start with judgment and memo files.”

  Serge wrinkled his forehead, concerned. Then he broke into a mischievous smirk. “Has this got anything to do with that Sjöstrand or whatever her name is? The one who killed her own daughter?”

  “Listen,” Jonna ordered. “You will match the following three names: Lennart Ekwall, Karin Sjöstrand and Bror Lantz. I want the documents where all three of these names are mentioned together.”

  Serge picked up the coffee mug with the NSA logo and grinned. “Gotcha,” he said and took a gulp.

  JÖRGEN SAT UP up in the bed and looked around the unfamiliar bedroom. For a short, merciful moment, he had no idea where he was.

  Seconds later, panic flooded him.

  He heard noises from the kitchen and grabbed his head. The alarm clock on the bedside table said quarter past eight. He lifted the cover and verified that he was, not unsurprisingly, naked. Clothes lay on the floor in a pile by the bed. Who had emerged as the victor during last night’s struggle?

  He stood up, but a wall of pain hit him in the head. He was forced to retire to the bed again.

  Ulrika Melin gazed at Jörgen from the doorway as he lay with his hands over his face, making remorseful noises. The night had not really developed as she had hoped. But it was not too late yet.

  “Good morning,” she said, putting down a tray of coffee and sandwiches on the bed.

  Jörgen turned towards her, squinting with his good eye. “Good morning,” he croaked.

  “Are we a little hung over today?” she laughed and handed over a cup of fresh coffee.

  He reached out his hand, but discovered that it shook so much that the cup would probably be empty before it got to his mouth.

  “A full case of the DTs as well,” Ulrika laughed and bent over Jörgen. “Do you want me to feed you?”

  “No, thank you. It’s about time for me to think about the final curtain,” he said, making a last-ditch effort to get up.

  “Speaking of final curtains,” she said, quickly putting the cup aside. “There wasn’t much of a finale last night, if you get my meaning. You went out like a candle just as the curtain was about to go up.”

  He pretended not to hear, continuing to attempt his getaway.

  With a swift movement, she pushed him back into bed and held his head firmly on the pillow.

  “Not so fast,” she smiled.

  Jörgen’s head flashed with pain and he tried to smother an urge to vomit.

  Ulrika smiled, carefully stroking his curly hair backwards. Her fingers kept getting tangled in his snake’s nest of curls. After a while, she gave up and extricated her hand, which instead made its way under the covers. Jörgen froze. Suddenly, he was wide-awake.

  He half-turned to look at the clock. “I really do have to go now,” he excused himself. “I have a job to go to …”

  “So do I,” Ulrika cut him off. “But that doesn’t stop us from staying in bed a few minutes longer.”

  She looked curiously at Jorgen while her hand slowly wandered up his leg.

  Jörgen started to flinch. Unpleasant tingles shot through his body like bolts.

  After a serpentine meander up his thigh, her hand finally covered his penis like clingfilm.

  Jörgen turned to stone. Her hands felt as if they had come directly out of the fridge.

  “What do we have here?” she giggled and met Jörgen’s gaze.

  He closed his eyes and held his breath.

  When he opened his eyes, she had already lost her dressing gown and was getting ready to straddle him; she already had one leg over him.

  He was trapped.

  She laid herself heavily on Jörgen’s rib cage. It felt like it would break and he had difficulty breathing.

  Breasts hung and dangled right in front of him and became two enormous evil eyes that refused to let go of him. He was expected to touch the eyes. Take them and passionately massage them with his hands. Let his thumb gently caress the pupils until they hardened.

  But Jörgen’s hands would not obey him. They were paralyzed.

  He had not been with someone of the opposite sex since the first-year party in college. That episode was the first and last time. Until now, to be exact. At eighteen years of age, he had finally given in and come out as gay, because of a sudden infatuation with a man eight years his senior. He came from nowhere and entered Jörgen’s life like a tornado. Everything was turned back to front, in the literal sense of the word, and the false lifestyle he tried so hard to pursue collapsed like a house of cards. Jörgen had seen the light at the end of a dark tunnel.

  His lover left Jörgen four months later. Despite his great feeling of loss, his time with Abbe had taught Jörgen who he really was.

  JONNA LEFT SERGE at eleven o’clock. There was nothing else to do except wait for the files to be copied and run through the matchmaker program. Besides, she was hungry, as she had not eaten breakfast, as well as curious about the contents of the memory stick that she had got from Jörgen.

  She plugged the memory stick into her laptop while taking a bite of the ham omelette that she had made using air-dried Jäger ham. It was really too salty for an omelette. Serrano, or possibly Parma, ham would have been more suitable.

  Two folders popped up after she opened “Removable disk (E:).” One folder was called “Video” and the other “Images”. She clicked on the “Video” folder and a single file with a size of 494 megabytes appeared. The file was simply named “A”. She double-clicked the file. After a few seconds, the video file started to play.

  She saw a corpulent man in a black leather mask wearing a pink thong with studs on the front. The man, whom she quickly identified as Jörgen Blad, turned the camera towards a bed and disappeared from the frame.

  After a while, he came back in the company of a tall woman in a light-green dress and high heels. She was masculine and a full head taller than Jörgen. She wore heavy make-up and a kind of blonde wig that did not fit properly.

  The woman went over to the bed and lay on her back. Then she lifted her dress and exposed an erect penis.

  Folke Uddestad, Jonna thought, pushing her plate away.

  The man said something Jonna could not make out, whereupon Jörgen crept onto the bed. He bent down and took the erection in his mouth through the hole in his leather mask. After a moment’s rough stimulation, they changed position. Uddestad went on all fours with his face unknowingly facing the camera. It was impossible not to recognize the County Police Commissioner. He looked grotesque under the wig and heavy make-up.

  Jonna shook her head. It was like a surreal nightmare.

  Jörgen was now on his knees behind the doggy pose of the Commissioner. He lifted Uddestad’s dress. Carefully, he began to penetrate him from behind with slow, strong movements. From the hole in the leather hood, Jonna saw how Jörgen’s reptilian tongue licked the open air.

  The Commissioner’s bleating became a soft rumble in the laptop speakers.

  She had seen enough. Her appetite was long gone.

  If this video were to become public knowledge, not only would Uddestad be hung out to dry, but the whole police force as well.

  Imagine if the tabloids got their
hands on the video. Images from the evidence would be waltzing through the newspapers and the internet for decades after the scandal was exposed. Somebody had actually arse-fucked their highest-ranking officer. And a journalist to top it off.

  Jonna could not help grinning. It was actually a bit comical – and tragic at the same time. People’s sexual preferences were of no interest to her as long as they did not involve her. Personally, she preferred so-called normal men, but after last night she was beginning to wonder if there were any of those left.

  One thing she could at least be sure of. Jörgen Blad was a cold-blooded, calculating and completely scruple-free scumbag. Which was roughly what she had already suspected.

  “FOUR MATCHES,” SERGE announced smugly and held up some sheets of paper.

  It had taken over five hours to download the material, but only twenty minutes to scan through it with the search engine once it was stored on Serge’s server.

  Jonna eagerly read what Serge had printed out.

  WITH SOME DIFFICULTY, Jörgen stood up from the sofa he had parked himself on as soon as he had arrived at Jonna’s.

  “You’ll get to read it after we have met Walter,” she told him sharply, without lifting her eyes when Jörgen approached with heavy feet. She wanted to keep a safe distance from the now even more repulsive journalist. Partly because he reeked of booze and partly to avoid sudden urges to vomit when she thought of what she had witnessed on the laptop. Even if the County Police Commssioner had consented to the sexual acts, the blackmail increased her contempt for Jörgen.

  Jörgen dragged himself back to the sofa without protesting. He lay down with a heavy sigh. His earlier, constant interest in everything that Jonna did had totally evaporated. One did not have to be a rocket scientist to see that he was suffering from the excesses of yesterday’s date. He had done his bit, even if he had chosen an unorthodox way of doing it. Jonna was not convinced that Jörgen’s “sacrifice” had been absolutely necessary, but he had obviously managed to plant the microrouter, and that was all that mattered. All he had left to do was to get it back.

  After reading through the document, Jonna logged back into the police database. In the background, she could hear anxious intakes of breath from the sofa. After going through Serge’s material and retrieving information from the police database, she was done. It took her exactly fifteen minutes and it appeared to have given her something to work with.

  “That’s it for me. We’re done with each other now,” Jonna declared, heading for the door.

  Jörgen heaved himself off the sofa.

  “So you mean we are quits now?” Serge asked, slightly incredulously.

  “We? You mean Walter?” Jonna said.

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “Since I’m unaware of the arrangement that you and Walter have with each other, I cannot promise anything. But I will ask him when we meet up.”

  “Do that,” Serge replied. “Don’t forget the return address for the microrouters. You can drop them in the postbox when it’s convenient.”

  “Rest assured. And, by the way, don’t forget to delete everything you have downloaded. You know the score,” Jonna finished off from the doorway.

  Serge did not answer.

  “Why didn’t you stay and watch him delete the content from the server?” Jörgen asked when they sat in the car. “He could cause a lot of trouble.”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference,” Jonna explained, turning onto Hornsgatan. “It’s impossible to keep track of what that guy’s doing.”

  “You could just confiscate all his computers,” Jörgen suggested with a cynical smile.

  “Even if the entire flat burned down and the computers were destroyed, I’m sure that he has a back-up somewhere on the internet. Like an octopus, he has tentacles everywhere.”

  CHAPTER 26

  THOMAS KOKK HAD difficulty seeing any link between the owner of the building, Omar Khayyam and the investigation into the Islamist terrorist group. Omar Khayyam was not registered as a known CI in any of SÄPO’s databases. Kokk toyed with the notion that Omar was Ove Jernberg’s personal informant, but that did not seem to be very believable despite Martin Borg’s claim to the contrary. All informants were meticulously registered in SÄPO’s database, so the use of unregistered informants was both forbidden and pointless. What reason could Jernberg have for keeping his own personal informants? The only connection Kokk found was Omar Khayyam’s prioritized residence visa and Swedish citizenship, which SÄPO had expedited when he defected from the Syrian intelligence agency. The more Kokk dug around Khayyam, the more confused he became about his link to Jernberg.

  Thomas Kokk had a profound and unbroken confidence in Martin Borg. They had worked together for almost ten years and the thirty-nine-year-old Borg, with roots in the Dalarna province, was extremely faithful and loyal to their employer, the National Security Service. What made Martin an exceptional policeman was his sharp, analytical personality. He was never afraid to extend his working hours and he had a special ability to see solutions despite the lack of tangible evidence. Martin also had a remarkable talent for getting information out of subjects detained for questioning. His success ratio was an excellent ten to one. Out of every ten interrogation subjects, he failed with only one.

  But Kokk could not overlook the fact that what Martin had told them about Khayyam did not seem correct. Either Martin was lying or Jernberg had a skeleton in his closet. He did not think either of these options seemed very likely.

  To discover any irregularities, SÄPO employees were forced to undergo routine lie-detector tests. Both Borg and Jernberg had passed the test without a problem. And yet there was something about the whole story that did not feel right. The deadly shootout at the warehouse was riddled with far too many question marks.

  CHIEF PROSECUTOR ÅSA Julén anxiously watched Thomas Kokk after he had informed her of the changes to the investigation.

  The operational leader had been replaced and he was himself appointed as the successor, which indicated a certain degree of desperation within SÄPO.

  One Security Service agent was dead and another was injured and removed from active duty. A potential terrorist had been killed in a gun battle and a second suspect had died in police custody. As if that was not enough, yet another person had died, possibly a personal informant of the deceased policeman, Ove Jernberg. Furthermore, one of the perpetrators was still at large.

  “I can hardly say that the investigation is going in the right direction,” Julén began. “Since our last meeting, three people have died in separate circumstances. You seem to be taking one step forwards and ten steps backwards, to put it mildly.”

  Kokk cleared his throat, embarrassed. “So it seems,” he said, looking down at his papers as if he had some new information. He did not have any, at least not of a positive nature. The atmosphere was extremely tense.

  “Seems?” Julén cried. “These are established facts, unless I’m mistaken. Or is there something else that you haven’t told me?”

  “Of course not,” he apologized. “What I meant was that from this temporary, small setback, there are new leads we can follow. We’re already following up on them.”

  “What leads?”

  “Omar Khayyam.”

  “The personal informant?”

  Kokk nodded. “There’s no direct link yet, but we are working hard to find one. According to Martin Borg, Omar had some information on the detainees and wanted to pass it on to Jernberg. We don’t know what it was.”

  “Is that the only lead we have?” Julén asked.

  Because he had read both Gröhn’s and Hildebrandt’s memos, Kokk thought for a moment about the leads from RSU and County CID.

  “For the time being, yes. But I am hoping to get an answer from SKL regarding the compound. It may point towards the terrorist prince,” he said.

  “It’s important that this Hisham fellow died of natural causes in the detention cell. The slightest doubt would complicate t
he situation considerably,” Julén said.

  “Of course,” Kokk agreed.

  “But we’re still making no progress,” Julén said, irritated. She stood up. “We have pinned everything on the Islamist group because of a number of assumptions, based on a few hostile statements and financial transactions with that prince of terror who might eventually have the capacity to produce Drug-X. At SÄPO, you were very quick to make that link even though there’s not one single piece of evidence to support such a theory. And the interrogations have yielded poor results.” Julén felt duped by the Security Service. She had believed the presentations they had made. When SÄPO had something to say, you listened. Unfortunately, she had done so uncritically.

  “That’s the best we have at the moment,” Kokk apologized and stood up as well. “Before we have the answer from SKL, there’s not much else we can do. It’s not certain that the results will give us much to go on either. You have yourself questioned the Islamists, Karin Sjöstrand, Lennart Ekwall and Bror Lantz a number of times – not to mention how much time we’ve spent doing interviews and background checks on their relatives. Lantz is not even under arrest. The marks around the neck of the taxi driver that Forensics say originate from Lantz’s belt are not sufficient evidence by themselves. We have no other lead to investigate right now, except this gang sitting in the detention cells.”

  Åsa Julén looked searchingly at Thomas Kokk. “Even though the anti-terrorist laws allow me to detain this group in the cells for a long time, I’m not as keen to do so anymore. I have nothing to hold them on, not even to give them a ticket.”

  “To release them now would be a big mistake, if you ask me,” Kokk said.

  Julén stopped herself from groaning. “And why do you say that?”

  “I recommend that we keep them in custody for at least another month. Some of them could weaken and start to talk a little. And by then, we’ll also have more information on Khayyam and the compound that SKL is investigating.”

  “The detainees are still refusing to accept legal aid from lawyers?” Julén said, changing the topic.

  “Yes,” Kokk nodded.