She had been a top-level gymnast in her teens and almost qualified for the Olympic team when she was seventeen. She had given up classic gymnastics but still worked out obsessively at the gym five nights a week. She exercised so often that the endorphins her body produced functioned as a drug that made it difficult for her to stop training. She ran, lifted weights, played tennis, did karate. She had cut back on bodybuilding, that extreme variant of bodily glorification, some years ago. In those days she was spending two hours a day pumping iron. Even so, she trained so hard and her body was so muscular that malicious colleagues still called her Herr Figuerola. When she wore a sleeveless T-shirt or a summer dress, no-one could fail to notice her biceps and powerful shoulders.
Her intelligence too intimidated many of her male colleagues. She had left school with top grades, studied to become a police officer at twenty, then served for nine years in Uppsala and studied law in her spare time. For fun, she said, she had also studied for a degree in political science.
When she left patrol duty to become a criminal inspector, it was a great loss to Uppsala street safety. She worked first in the violent crimes division and then in the unit that specialized in financial crime. In 2000 she applied to the Security Police in Uppsala, and by 2001 she had moved to Stockholm. She first worked in Counter-Espionage, but she was almost immediately hand-picked by Edklinth for the Constitutional Protection Unit. He happened to know Figuerola’s father and had followed her career over the years.
When at long last Edklinth concluded that he had to act on Armansky’s information, he called Figuerola into his office. She had been at Constitutional Protection for less than three years, which meant she was still more of a real police officer than a desk warrior.
She was dressed that day in tight blue jeans, turquoise sandals with a low heel, and a navy blue jacket.
“What are you working on at the moment, Monica?”
“We’re following up on the robbery of the grocer’s in Sunne.”
Figuerola was the head of a department of five officers working on political crimes. They relied heavily on computers connected to the incident-reporting network of the regular police. Nearly every report submitted in any police district in Sweden passed through the computers in Figuerola’s department. The software scanned every report and reacted to 310 keywords—nigger, for example, or skinhead, swastika, immigrant, anarchist, Hitler salute, Nazi, National Democrat, traitor, Jew-lover, or nigger-lover. If such a keyword cropped up, the report would be printed out and scrutinized.
The Constitutional Protection Unit publishes an annual report, “Threats to National Security,” which supplies the only reliable statistics on political crime. These statistics are based on reports filed with local police authorities. The Security Police did not normally spend time investigating robberies of groceries, but in the case of the robbery of the shop in Sunne, the computer had reacted to three keywords: immigrant, shoulder patch, and nigger. Two masked men had robbed at gunpoint a shop owned by an immigrant. They had taken 2,780 kronor and a carton of cigarettes. One of the robbers had a mid-length jacket with a Swedish flag shoulder patch. The other had screamed “Fucking nigger” several times at the manager and forced him to lie on the floor.
This was enough for Figuerola’s team to initiate the preliminary investigation: to inquire whether the robbers had a connection to the neo-Nazi gang in Värmland, and whether the robbery could be defined as a racist crime. If so, the incident might be included in that year’s statistical compilation, which would then itself be incorporated within the European statistics put together by the EU’s office in Vienna.
“I have a difficult assignment for you,” Edklinth said. “It’s a job that could land you in big trouble. Your career might be ruined. But if things go well, it could be a major step forward for you.”
“I’m all ears.”
“I’m thinking of moving you to the Constitutional Protection operations unit.”
“Forgive me for mentioning this, but Constitutional Protection doesn’t have an operations unit.”
“Yes, it does,” Edklinth said. “I established it this morning. At present it consists of you.”
“I see,” said Figuerola hesitantly.
“The task of Constitutional Protection is to defend the constitution against what we call ‘internal threats,’ most often those on the extreme left or the extreme right. But what do we do if a threat to the constitution comes from within our own organization?”
For the next half hour he told her what Armansky had told him the night before.
“Who is the source of these claims?” Figuerola said when the story was ended.
“Focus on the information, not the source.”
“What I’m wondering is whether you consider the source to be reliable.”
“I consider the source to be totally reliable. I’ve known this person for many years.”
“It all sounds a bit … I don’t know. Improbable?”
“I know. It’s the stuff of a spy novel.”
“How do you expect me to go about tackling it?”
“Starting now, you’re released from all other duties. Your task, your only task, is to investigate the truth of this story. You have to either verify or dismiss the claims one by one. You report directly and only to me.”
“I see what you mean when you say I might land in it up to my neck.”
“But if the story is true—if even a fraction of it is true—then we have a constitutional crisis on our hands.”
“Where do you want me to begin?”
“Start with the simple things. First, read the Björck report. Then identify the people who are allegedly tailing this guy Blomkvist. According to my source, the car belongs to Göran Mårtensson, a police officer living on Vittangigatan in Vällingby. Then identify the other person in the pictures taken by Blomkvist’s photographer. The younger blond man here.”
Figuerola was making notes.
“Then look into Gullberg’s background. I’d never heard his name before, but my source believes there’s a connection between him and the Security Police.”
“So somebody here at SIS put out a contract on a former spy using a seventy-eight-year-old man. I don’t believe it.”
“Nevertheless, check it out. Your entire investigation has to be carried out without a single person other than me knowing anything at all about it. Before you take any action I want to be informed. I don’t want to see any rings on the water.”
“This is one hell of an investigation. How am I going to do all this alone?”
“You won’t have to. You have to do only the first check. If you come back and say that you didn’t find anything, then everything is fine. If you come back having found anything as my source describes it, then we’ll decide what to do.”
Figuerola spent her lunch hour pumping iron in the police gym. Lunch consisted of black coffee and a meatball sandwich with beet salad, which she took back to her office. She closed her door, cleared her desk, and started reading the Björck report while she ate.
She also read the appendix with the correspondence between Björck and Dr. Teleborian. She made a note of every name and every incident in the report that had to be verified. After two hours she got up, went to the coffee machine, and got a refill. When she left her office she locked the door, part of the routine at SIS.
Back at her desk, the first thing she did was check the report’s protocol number. She called the registrar and was informed that no report with that protocol number existed. Her second check was to consult a media archive. That yielded better results. The evening papers and a morning paper had reported a person being badly injured in a car fire on Lundagatan on the date in question in 1991. The victim of the incident was a middle-aged man, but no name was given. One evening paper reported that, according to a witness, the fire had been started deliberately by a young girl.
Gunnar Björck, the author of the report, was a real person. He was a senior official in the immigrat
ion unit, lately on sick leave and now, very recently, deceased—a suicide.
The personnel department had no information about what Björck had been working on in 1991. The file was stamped TOP SECRET, even for other employees at SIS. Which was routine.
It was a straightforward matter to establish that Salander had lived with her mother and twin sister on Lundagatan in 1991 and spent the following two years at St. Stefan’s children’s psychiatric clinic. In these sections at least, the record corresponded with the report’s contents.
Peter Teleborian, now a well-known psychiatrist often seen on TV, had worked at St. Stefan’s in 1991 and was today its senior physician.
Figuerola then called the assistant head of the personnel department.
“We’re working on an analysis here in CP that requires evaluating a person’s credibility and general mental health. I need to consult a psychiatrist or some other professional who’s approved to handle classified information. Dr. Peter Teleborian was mentioned to me, and I was wondering whether I could hire him.”
It took a while before she got an answer.
“Dr. Teleborian has been an external consultant for SIS in a couple of instances. He has security clearance, and you can discuss classified information with him in general terms. But before you approach him, you have to follow the bureaucratic procedure. Your supervisor must approve the consultation and make a formal request for you to be allowed to approach Dr. Teleborian.”
Her heart sank. She had verified something that could be known only to a very restricted group of people. Teleborian had indeed had dealings with SIS.
She put down the report and focused her attention on other aspects of the information that Edklinth had given her. She studied the photographs of the two men who had allegedly followed the journalist Blomkvist from Café Copacabana on May 1.
She consulted the vehicle registry and found that Göran Mårtensson was the owner of a grey Volvo with the registration number legible in the photographs. Then she got confirmation from the SIS personnel department that he was employed there. Her heart sank again.
Mårtensson worked in Personal Protection. He was a bodyguard. He was one of the officers responsible on formal occasions for the safety of the prime minister. For the past few weeks he had been loaned to Counter-Espionage. His leave of absence had begun on April 10, a couple of days after Zalachenko and Salander had landed in Sahlgrenska hospital. But that sort of temporary reassignment was not unusual—covering a shortage of personnel here or there in an emergency situation.
Then Figuerola called the assistant chief of Counter-Espionage, a man she knew and had worked for during her short time in that department. Was Göran Mårtensson working on anything important, or could he be borrowed for an investigation in Constitutional Protection?
The assistant chief of Counter-Espionage was puzzled. Inspector Figuerola must have been misinformed. Mårtensson had not been reassigned to Counter-Espionage. Sorry.
Figuerola stared at her receiver for two minutes. In Personal Protection they believed that Mårtensson had been loaned out to Counter-Espionage. Counter-Espionage said that they definitely had not borrowed him. Transfers of that kind had to be approved by the chief of Secretariat. She reached for the phone to call him, but stopped short. If Personal Protection had loaned out Mårtensson, then the chief of Secretariat must have approved the decision. But Mårtensson was not at Counter-Espionage, which the chief of Secretariat must be aware of. And if Mårtensson was loaned out to some department that was tailing journalists, then the chief of Secretariat would have to know about that too.
Edklinth had told her he didn’t want any rings in the water. To raise the matter with the chief of Secretariat might be to chuck a very large stone into a pond.
Berger sat at her desk in the glass cage. It was 10:30 on Monday morning. She badly needed the cup of coffee she had just gotten from the machine in the cafeteria. The first hours of her workday had been taken up entirely with meetings, starting with one lasting fifteen minutes in which Assistant Editor Fredriksson presented the guidelines for the day’s work. She was increasingly dependent on Fredriksson’s judgement due to her loss of confidence in Anders Holm.
The second was an hour-long meeting with the CEO, Magnus Borgsjö; SMP’s CFO, Christer Sellberg; and Ulf Flodin, the budget chief. The discussion was about the slump in advertising and the downturn in single-copy sales. The budget chief and the CFO were both determined to cut the newspaper’s overhead.
“We made it through the first quarter of this year thanks to a marginal rise in advertising sales and the fact that two senior, highly paid employees retired. Those positions have not been filled,” Flodin said. “We’ll probably close out the present quarter with a small deficit. But the free papers, Metro and Stockholm City, are cutting into our ad revenue in Stockholm. My prognosis is that the third quarter will produce a significant loss.”
“So how do we counter that?” Borgsjö said.
“The only option is cutbacks. We haven’t laid anyone off since 2002. But before the end of the year we will have to eliminate ten positions.”
“Which positions?” Berger said.
“We need to work on the ‘cheese plane’ principle—shave a job here and a job there. The sports desk has six and a half jobs at the moment. We should cut that to five full-timers.”
“As I understand it, the sports desk is on its knees already. What you’re proposing means that we’ll have to cut back on sports coverage.”
Flodin shrugged. “I’ll gladly listen to other suggestions.”
“I don’t have any better suggestions, but the principle is this: if we cut personnel, then we have to produce a smaller newspaper, and if we make a smaller newspaper, the number of readers will drop, and the number of advertisers too.”
“The eternal vicious circle,” Sellberg said.
“I was hired to turn this downward trend around,” said Berger. “I see my job as taking an aggressive approach to change the newspaper and make it more attractive to readers. I can’t do that if I have to cut staff.” She turned to Borgsjö. “How long can the paper continue to bleed? How big a deficit can we take before we hit the limit?”
Borgsjö pursed his lips. “Since the early nineties SMP has eaten into a great many old consolidated assets. We have a stock portfolio that has dropped in value by about 30 percent compared to ten years ago. A large portion of these funds were used for investments in IT. We’ve also had enormous expenses.”
“I gather that SMP has developed its own text editing system, the AXT. What did that cost?”
“About five million kronor to develop.”
“Why did SMP go to the trouble of developing its own software? There are inexpensive commercial programmes already on the market.”
“Well, Erika, that may be true. Our former IT chief talked us into it. He persuaded us that it would be less expensive in the long run, and that SMP would also be able to licence the programme to other newspapers.”
“Did any of them buy it?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact—a local paper in Norway.”
“Meanwhile,” Berger said in a dry voice, “we’re sitting here with PCs that are five or six years old. …”
“It’s simply out of the question that we invest in new computers in the coming year,” Flodin said.
The discussion had gone back and forth. Berger was aware that her objections were being systematically stonewalled by Flodin and Sellberg. For them, cost cutting was what counted, which was understandable enough from the point of view of a budget chief and a CFO, but it was unacceptable for a newly appointed editor in chief. What irritated her most was that they kept brushing off her arguments with patronizing smiles, making her feel like a teenager being quizzed on her homework. Without actually uttering a single inappropriate word, they displayed an attitude that was so antediluvian it was almost comical. You shouldn’t worry your pretty head over complex matters, little girl.
Borgsjö wasn’t much
help. She didn’t sense the same condescension from him, but he was biding his time and letting the other participants at the meeting say their piece.
She sighed and plugged in her laptop. She had nineteen new emails. Four were spam. Someone wanted to sell her Viagra, cybersex with “The Sexiest Lolitas on the Net” for only $4.00 per minute, “Animal Sex, the Juiciest Horse Fuck in the Universe,” and a subscription to fashion.nu. The tide of this crap never receded, no matter how many times she tried to block it. Another seven messages were those so-called Nigeria letters from the widow of the former head of a bank in Abu Dhabi offering her ludicrous sums of money if she would only assist with a small sum of start-up money, and other such junk.
There was the morning memo, the lunchtime memo, three emails from Fredriksson updating her on developments in the day’s lead story, one from her accountant, who wanted a meeting to discuss the implications of her move from Millennium to SMP, and a message from her dental hygienist suggesting a time for her quarterly visit. She put the appointment in her calendar and realized at once that she would have to change it because she had a major editorial conference planned for that day.
Finally she opened the last one, sent from
[Attn: Editor in Chief].
Slowly she put down her coffee cup.
YOU WHORE! YOU THINK YOU’RE SOMETHING, YOU FUCKING CUNT: DON’T THINK YOU CAN COME HERE AND THROW YOUR WEIGHT AROUND. YOU’RE GOING TO GET FUCKED IN THE CUNT WITH A SCREWDRIVER, WHORE! THE SOONER YOU DISAPPEAR THE BETTER.
Berger looked up and searched for the news editor, Holm. He was not at his desk, nor could she see him in the newsroom. She checked the sender and then picked up the phone and called Peter Fleming, the IT manager.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle Page 138
