Project Nirvana

by Stefan Tegenfalk

  Tor had promised her at least thirty thousand as soon as he sold the ring. He had already screwed her for most of that money and she could not live on fresh air, even if Tor’s money would be a welcome addition to her regular income.

  “Next week,” Tor said nonchalantly, changing the TV channel. He needed more time to think. Besides, it was really nice to be served with food and the occasional fuck between the TV soap operas. It was nearly time for lunch.

  “No fucking way,” Ricki snarled. “I’m tired of your ‘next week’ bullshit. You haven’t even tried to fence the ring like you said you would. If you won’t pay a visit to the Hut, I’ll do it.”

  Tor threw down the TV remote.

  “You can’t see him unless I am with you,” he growled determinedly.

  “I don’t give a fuck what you want!” Ricki yelled from the hall. Her green eyes had become as black as the mascara that encircled them. She was not a bloody bank that he could borrow money from indefinitely. Although it was extra cash, she was tired of Tor lying on her sofa watching daytime TV.

  Tor heard the front door opening and then slamming shut. He immediately jumped out of the sofa and ran into the bedroom where Ricki kept the ring. The pathetic toy safe under the bed gaped at him, empty.

  “Silly cow,” he swore loudly.

  Thinking quickly, he grabbed his jacket and set off down the stairs. Out of breath, he arrived at the ground floor just as Ricki got out of the lift. She glared at him suspiciously.

  “So now you have balls?” she said, sarcastically.

  “Let’s take a taxi,” Tor said and opened the entrance door. His eyes scanned around nervously as he went through the door. Leaving the flat made him feel naked. But it was just as well to get this done. The Hut would surely give him a decent price for the ring. Maybe eighty thousand crowns with a little luck. If that was the case, then he would have fifty grand after paying off Ricki. Fifteen would go on a new weapon and the rest for a new hide-out. What would happen after that, he did not know. In the worst-case scenario, he could start breaking into houses again. Maybe he should just bugger off with Ricki’s share. If he had to leave her flat, he might just as well blow her off. He needed cash for other stuff.

  “Sure,” Ricki said, pulling the belt of her fake-fur coat tight, “if you pay the fare.”

  “We could just leg it from the taxi?”

  “You idiot,” Ricki snapped.

  Five minutes later, they were sitting in a taxi on the way to the fence.

  The clock showed ten past seven in the morning as Martin Borg, team leader at the Security Service’s Counter-Terrorism Unit, called it a night and sat in his private Volvo V50. He punched the steering wheel with his hands in an outburst of frustration. He looked at his clenched fists in front of him. Normally, his self control was as absolute as a mathematical constant. He never lost his temper or his self control because his personal mantra was that there were no impossible situations, only degrees of difficulty to be overcome. But the latest round of setbacks had broken the constant into several fractions. And the whole equation was dependent upon the silence of a single individual.

  Getting the mastermind behind Drug-X to talk had proved more difficult than he had imagined. Despite morphine, electric shocks, kicks and punches, Leo Brageler had said nothing. It was as if he was waiting to die. And die he would, just as soon as they had got the answers they wanted.

  They had taken Brageler away and started the process to force the eccentric researcher to reveal the secret behind Drug-X, but he had clammed shut. In some strange way, he seemed to have disconnected himself from the outside world. Wave after wave of pain had hit him, yet not so much as a whisper was uttered through his mangled face. As time went by, the wounds had become deeper and the blows more brutal, but Brageler had still remained silent. Martin knew the solution to the problem. He needed Diaxtropyl-3S. But Omar was dead and without him it would be difficult to get hold of the illicit truth drug. From Omar’s hard drive, Martin needed to retrieve the identity of the CIA contact who shipped the serum. The names on the hard drive were completely unknown to Martin and could very well be code names. If it had not been for the two stooges, Tor Hedman and Jerry Salminen, Omar would still be alive and Martin would have the priceless syringes. The door to Drug-X would then be unlocked.

  The power Brageler had created would be of great help to Martin and the others. They would use it to reveal the true face of Islam by injecting the rage-inducing drug into a number of its followers. A sufficient number of crazed Muslims would shake awake the sleeping people of Europe and make them understand the dangers they were facing. Europeans would then turn against these animals. But time was running out. Right now, Martin and his fellow believers were up a creek without paddles while hordes of Muslims poured in through the wide-open gates of Europe. These animals would soon have established a bridgehead as impregnable as their twisted religion. Then it would be too late.

  He leaned backwards in the driving seat and waited for reason to overcome his anger. He needed to think clearly and arrive at logical conclusions. He must get his hands on some Diaxtropyl-3S. All else was subordinate at this time.

  Martin turned the ignition key and the engine started to warm up the car’s interior. It was freezing and the cold permeated every nook and cranny. His thoughts turned to Tor’s sudden disappearance. He had tried to call him, but had got only his voicemail. Martin suspected, with good reason, that he had reneged on their agreement. The dimwitted ex-con could become a problem. A big problem, actually.

  He looked at the old stone building. It stood next to a waterfall and was perfect for its purpose. An abandoned safe house from the Cold War. Isolated and accessible only from a barely driveable gravel road. The last part of the track was almost invisible from the road. The noise from the waterfall drowned any sounds that might come from the building. As Brageler was in a windowless cell, this was somewhat superfluous to requirements.

  Many of his brothers-in-arms could not attend the interrogation. Although they had agile minds, their aging bodies could not sustain them. The organization’s rejuvenation strategy had failed and only a few youngsters had been recruited in the past few years. Recruiting was difficult and involved a great deal of risk. A problem that they increasingly had to battle against was the naivety of the younger generations and their misguided belief that Islam was like any other religion. Someday, they would be forced to see the truth.

  As soon as the Diaxtropyl-3S was procured, he would get to grips with the Tor Hedman problem. First, he needed to prepare himself for today’s debriefing with Thomas Kokk.

  The head of the Counter-Terrorism Unit, Thomas Kokk, carefully scrutinized Martin Borg across his desk. However much he wanted to, he could no longer trust the team leader. After the fatal shootout in Gnesta and the incident with the Islamic terrorist suspect who had died in custody, everything indicated that Ove Jernberg had not been solely responsible.

  The polygraph tests, after the death in custody of the Muslim suspect, had not shown any discrepancies. It was possible to improve the odds by focusing one’s thoughts on something else or by secretly pinching oneself hard. The questions that the polygraph operator asked demanded a great deal of concentration. Also, the subject was constantly observed during the interview to deter attempts at self-inflicted pain. Strangely enough, both Borg and Jernberg had passed the tests.

  There was no doubt in Kokk’s mind that they had both been guilty. They had drugged the detainee with an illegal truth drug that had later been discovered during the autopsy. Borg had claimed that the escaped killer in Gnesta was short and of foreign appearance. The prime suspect was tall and had a Scandinavian appearance. In other words, Tor Hedman, the hand-picked partner of Jerry Salminen. What Kokk did not understand was why Ove Jernberg would have had a confidential informant called Omar Khayyam. Jernberg had not even been authorized to handle confiden
tial informants.

  During the minor confusion that reigned after the Gnesta incident, Internal Affairs had suddenly lost interest in Borg. This had come as a complete surprise, even for the Security Service Agency Director, Anders Holmberg, who had already marked Borg and Jernberg as the scapegoats for the failure of the SÄPO operation. After Kokk had been given a direct order by Holmberg to not lift any more stones, Kokk had made a decision.

  After long and painful consideration, he had contacted the Deputy Agency Director, Chief Inspector Sten Gullviksson, as well as the head of the Constitution Protection Division of SÄPO. He had described to them the orders given to him by Anders Holmberg but, much to his surprise, they had both concurred with Holmberg’s request to not stir up a scandal for the sake of national security. The Security Service had suffered enough controversy and enough bad blood had been shed this time.

  Thomas Kokk had stared at his colleagues in silence, as his belief in the system he was charged with protecting evaporated with every breath he took.

  Months later, here he was, still sitting in his post as head of the Counter-Terrorism Unit, and utterly disillusioned. He was trapped in a world where the truth was a liability, instead of being empowering. He ironically recalled the inscription in the entrance of the CIA’s Langley headquarters: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

  “Still nothing on Brageler, Hedman, or the accomplices who created Drug-X?” Thomas Kokk began.

  The weekly meetings with Martin Borg were becoming a tedious formality. Always the same answer.

  “No, no progress,” Borg replied, shaking his head dourly.

  Kokk wondered – yet again – how much truth there was in that answer. What did Borg really know? Kokk had no proof on which to base his suspicions. Despite the fact that he had known Borg for many years and was personally responsible for making Borg a team leader, Kokk now felt only contempt for him. Deep down he hoped he was wrong. But when he listened to his intuition, he knew he was right.

  Borg had passed the lie-detector test because of his conviction. He believed that his actions were justified, and this made it impossible for the key questions to yield any abnormal results. His comrades had trained him well and had reinforced an already implacable fanaticism.

  Ove Jernberg had managed to pass because his knowledge of what Martin was involved in was limited, despite the truth serum question giving an abnormal result on his polygraph test. It was, however, not sufficient for Jernberg to fail the test.

  Martin sensed that Thomas Kokk was suspicious. Something in his voice and his eyes had changed after Jernberg’s death in Gnesta.

  Chapter 2

  Mjasník marvelled over the openness of Swedish society. Using only the internet and Directory Enquiries, it was possible to find out almost anything about a citizen. Annual income, residential address, personal identity number, the type of car they owned, and so on. In Russia, this kind of public monitoring of citizens would be unthinkable. After three weeks of searching, however, he had not managed to locate the fifth, and penultimate, name on his list. Mjasník had been forced to contact his Moscow go-between for more information. He needed something that could point him in the right direction. But the go-between had no more information from the client. It was as if the target had disappeared from the face of the planet.

  The bank funds released on completion of the contract would make Mjasník financially independent and enhance his reputation back home in Moscow. He had never failed on a mission and this was not going to be the first time. Mjasník exhaled the last of the smoke and flicked the cigarette butt in a wide arc. A seagull dived quickly down into the dark water and checked out the remains of the cigarette.

  The youth-hostel room in the old sailboat was a good choice of accommodation. Anonymous and out of the way, yet still central. For twenty days, he had lived there and slowly familiarized himself with the city. It was beautiful here, not unlike Saint Petersburg. Stockholm was built on a number of small islands interconnected by bridges. The water surrounding the city came from the Baltic Sea and a vast, freshwater lake that extended a long distance inland. Numerous floodgates now partitioned these two water sources from each other. In the early 1980s, Spetsnaz (special forces) units from the Soviet Marines had visited most of the jetties in Stockholm. While the Swedish navy hunted seals with anti-submarine bombs in the ocean depths, the special forces’ mini-subs penetrated the Stockholm estuary. It soon became a popular pastime to trick the Swedes, and the commanders tried to surpass each other in audacity.

  Such thoughts reminded him of another time. A time when his country was a superpower and still played a crucial role in international politics.

  Nowadays, his decadent motherland was ruled by wealthy oligarchs and power-hungry politicians, whose only goal was to protect their power and wealth.

  Only two years after he had completed his training in the Spetsnaz GRU, the elite special forces unit of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate, he had applied for a posting in Chechnya. He had asked for a location where only the strongest survived. He had always been a hunter. When he was eleven, he had shot small game in the forests outside Sotji. A few years later, he had preferred to track bears and shoot them at close range. He had learned this from the best hunter he knew, his father. His best memory was of when he had successfully tracked a mother bear with cubs. The aggression displayed by the huge beast when it attacked had exhilarated him, with an adrenaline rush that made his body shake. He had waited until the charging predator was just a few metres away from him before he shot. His rifle was loaded with only a single round.

  He had sat for hours and studied the dead animal, contemplating its strength and how it even so could be killed by a lead bullet the size of a fingernail. Man was indeed the ultimate predator.

  As part of a so-called clean-up unit, known as the GSO, he had dressed as a Chechen guerilla, on a mission to discredit the enemy.

  They had pretended to recruit men to the guerillas, but instead killed them. He and his comrades in the platoon had murdered and spread terror like common criminals. At first, he had felt a great deal of confusion about their methods. Wiping out unarmed men with their high-tech, automatic rifles, the latest AN-94 models, was overkill. Eventually, he had adapted to the killing and it became second nature.

  He had convinced himself that it was like shooting bears. Soon, he had switched to the commando knife. Shooting a defenceless Chechen had lost its thrill. The knife which on one day sliced his Moskovskaya salami cut Chechen throats the next. His first nickname had been “the Vampire”, because of the blood thirst he displayed. As the killings continued, his nickname had become Mjasník, or “the Butcher”.

  The ambush had happened early one September morning, when they were cut off from their own forces. They had requested air support, but had been abandoned by their military commander. Thirteen comrades died in the ensuing battle. For each fallen comrade, they had taken at least three of the enemy with them. But they had been outnumbered and surrounded by Chechens. The Chechen warrior code and willingness to die was just as deadly as the full-metal-jacket bullets the Russians fired at them. After two days, they had been forced to concede defeat. They were out of ammunition. There were only five rounds left. One for each of the survivors. Surrender was not an option. They would be strung up like calves for slaughter, first mutilated, and then skinned alive.

  They had proceeded to shoot themselves. All except Mjasník. The powder in the bullet was damp. The weapon clicked as he pulled the trigger and he was taken alive. He faced a terrifying realization. He was not going to die a quick and painless death, like the bears he had used to hunt back home in the forests. His death was going to be drawn out and tortured. The Chechens were more skilled in this cruel art than even the GSO.

  Miraculously, he had been saved. One of his captors had been careless with a grenade and suddenly he fou
nd himself free again. Bodies lay all around and there was total chaos in the camp. The earth cellar that had been his prison saved his life. He had escaped, naked, and ran as fast as he was able into the thick forest that then swallowed him up. He had kept running until his legs could no longer carry him . . . .

  Mjasník was breathing heavily and he realized that the palm of his hand was bleeding. He had squeezed the sharp blade, cutting across two lifelines on his palm. He rinsed off the blood in the sink and wrapped a towel around his hand. In ten minutes, the blood would coagulate. Unlike the wounds in his soul, which would never heal. He switched off the light in his small cabin. Then his mobile phone rang.

  “Mjasník?” a monotonous voice asked.

  “Da,” he responded, just as emotionlessly.

  “The person you seek is wanted by Interpol,” the voice said.

  Mjasník said nothing. He didn’t need to. He recognized the voice. His go-between had dug deep. The Federal Security Service, or FSB, in Russia had contacts everywhere and was now apparently willing to share this information. He did not know why, nor was he interested. His time with the GRU had taught him one important lesson: do not ask questions. He took care of his business and did not concern himself with anyone, except those that he was instructed to assassinate.

  “Our counterpart in Sweden is leading the hunt for him,” the voice continued.

  He was listening.

  Then he spoke two names, which Mjasník memorized.

  Detectives Cederberg and Jonsson of Stockholm County CID inspected Jonna as she came into County CID’s smallest conference room at ten o’clock sharp. She had a notepad and a ballpoint pen embellished with the letters “RSU”.