by Jon Stenhugg
Shoreman poured himself another whisky. “If he didn’t have one then there’s nothing to worry about, we’ll just pretend we found it and have taken care of it. If he did have one, then we simply have to find it before it finds us. Otherwise Stockholm, and everyone who lives there, could be annihilated.”
“So you think the threat is real?” The PM was now clearly worried.
“I think the NSS and the NBI have to get their act together on this right now,” said Shoreman, “and you have to make them see the dangers of not solving the real crime: the attempted murder of thousands of Stockholm citizens.”
*
Sara drove out to Stallarholmen on Saturday morning. She remembered her journey a week ago. This time the road was almost empty of traffic, and the storm had washed the surface to a clear black line against the frosty autumn colours of the trees lining the highway. God out with his paintbrush again, doing up the trees in yellow, red and green.
She parked in the driveway and Kristina Hoffberg opened the door before she’d even left the car. Kristina had something to tell her, and the preliminaries of tea and biscuits disappeared as she motioned for Sara to sit down at the kitchen table. Sara noticed Forensics had returned the kitchen chair Leo Hoffberg had been tied to, and hesitated before she sat down in it.
Kristina pushed over a pile of bank statements. “This came in the post yesterday.” She was clearly irritated, and pointed to a line on Leo Hoffberg’s bank statement for the last three months. “It looks like my husband was robbed when he was in Tallinn during the summer,” said Kristina, pointing to a line that included a single bank transfer of 50,000 euros translated to Swedish kronor, an amount that left the account nearly empty.
“Is there anything your husband could have bought for this amount? A luxury car? It’s close to half a million kronor,” asked Sara.
“No,” said Kristina. “We’d been saving this money for improvements to the house. He must have been robbed.”
Sara looked at the statement again; saw the hotel bill for Hoffberg and Spimler that Ekman had spoken of. She could see from the date that 50,000 euros had left the account the day before Leo had paid his hotel bill. There were a few other small amounts for meals and some cash at an ATM, making it look like an ordinary trip to a European capital, except for the cash withdrawal of fifty grand.
“Mrs Hoffberg, this may not be the best time to ask, but I’d like to talk to you about your husband’s health up until, uh, the time he died.”
“Health? What do you mean? He was as healthy as a horse – always ate well, barely drank unless it was the weekend, and even then only if the wine was from organic vineyards. I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well, I was looking at some of the tapes of your husband’s television appearances. He seemed to be under some stress or strain recently. I was wondering if you’d noticed that too.”
Kristina Hoffberg swallowed once, then again. Her eyes had been fixed on Sara as she’d spoken of Leo’s health, but they suddenly wandered to view the wall of green cypress trees separating their lawn from the channel.
“Do you have a garden?” asked Kristina.
“No,” said Sara, “I live in a flat. Was Leo under stress recently?” She wouldn’t let Kristina run the show.
“We lost almost every rose bush we had this year. The deer ate them all up. Our poor roses never get a chance to bloom. I asked Leo to call the game warden to have them shot, but he wouldn’t. A friend of nature, you know. He’d have hand-fed them with rosebuds if they’d have let him come that close. There was a time during the spring – about May, I can’t be too sure – but from then on he seemed to become a recluse. Hard to reach. Before that he’d watch the news on TV and go on and on about how the government was making the same old mistakes, that he’d told them so. You know, the usual complaining. After May he just wouldn’t listen anymore, he seemed to have lost interest. No, I wouldn’t say stress or strain, actually. Just different: introverted, colder than usual.”
“Did he ever mention another person? Someone who might have been pressuring him in any way?”
“No, never. The only close contact he had was with that man across the channel, Spimler. From the looks of the bank statement Leo paid for his trip to Tallinn. He didn’t even tell me it was Tallinn. He told me he was going to speak at a conference on world peace in the south and had to be away a couple of days. It wasn’t unusual, he was always going away on conferences,” she said, “but it wasn’t usual for him to lie about where. Do you think maybe Leo and Spimler were like, you know, friends?”
“We’re still trying to find Mr Spimler so we can ask him a few questions. I’ll include that question if you like.” Then she threw a final question at Mrs Hoffberg. “And then there’s this telephone number you gave me, the one for your cleaning lady, Magdalena. We’ve tried to reach her using that, but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Could you look into your records for the right number?”
“Of course.” Kristina Hoffberg rose to fetch a small black book, paging through it until she reached a page in the middle. “Silly me,” she said, “I must have reversed the last two numbers. Here, look for yourself.”
Sara wrote down the new number, then pulled out her cell phone. Kristina Hoffberg watched her punch in the number and both women waited for someone to answer. There was no answer, and Sara thought she saw the widow Hoffberg crack a slight smile as she thanked her.
*
Sara got into her car. She hesitated at the crossroad which would take her out to the freeway, and then turned her car towards Sela Island and the Spimler home.
Mrs Spimler answered the door and let Sara in. “I was just sitting here,” she said, motioning to a vacant space on the floor among a circle of binders, suspension files and boxes of photographs. “I have to figure out what happened to him.”
Sara sat beside the anxious wife. “I’m still trying to find him. You mentioned something about a brochure. Do you have it?”
“No, I sent it to you as you asked me to. It was in this box, with the rest of the material for the Fish Project.”
“Sorry, the what project?”
“The Fish Project. I found a whole box of material in Martin’s closet about some kind of fish project. Would you like to see it?”
“Yes, please.” Sara tried to hide her excitement as Kristina stood to get the box. “It might give us some indication about where to locate your husband.”
Mrs Spimler handed over the orange-coloured cardboard storage box to Sara. “I didn’t look at all of it. It seemed to have something to do with something out in the Baltic. It didn’t seem to be important, so I just put it aside.”
Sara’s pulse quickened as she looked at the first few pages in the box. There was the map of the Baltic, bare except for a single dot. She’d seen that page before, and recognised it immediately. She put the lid back on the box and said she’d return it as soon as they’d finished using it in the investigation.
As the sun began to set she started the long drive to southern Sweden for her meeting with the Malmö County Police the following day. Only a few miles from the Spimler house, Sara couldn’t keep her curiosity in check and stopped at a roadside café to open the box again.
Under the map and several reports about pesticides in the water near Stockholm which had been written by Spimler, she found a large white envelope. Inside it was an orange manual with some lettering in Cyrillic. Sara couldn’t make out much of it, but as she leafed through it she could see there were several pictures of what looked to be some kind of rocket. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. She now knew Hoffberg and Spimler had been involved in something very violent.
Sara thought of Ekman’s tip about the man called Schneller, and she wondered if he knew about the Fish Project. It was something she’d have to take up with Ekman when she got back. She sent him a brief text message saying that he should call her as soon as possible, and then added the words, found rocket manual to get his attention.
*
The VA-111 Shkval was technology born of Soviet scientists, an invention which was simple and elegant, mothered by a lack of resources and the need to create something out of nothing. Instead of being able to amaze the press with achievements which would win a Nobel Prize in any of the available scientific areas, this was technology so simple a schoolchild could have produced it. But no American of any age ever did, and America was furious, and still jealous. And extremely curious.
What they’d done was to answer a simple question: “What slows the speed of a vessel in the water?” The obvious answer was “The water”, and most scientists had let it go at that. “But suppose it were possible to make something move in the water without coming into contact with the water?” the Russian geniuses had asked. “Suppose we create an air bubble around the vessel so that it doesn’t touch the water? If the bubble were extended in front of the vessel at all times then it wouldn’t come into contact with water. It would be as if the vessel were flying, but under water. All we have to do is figure out a way to make the bubble.”
As soon as satellite images had disclosed underwater speeds in excess of 250 miles an hour, the entire intelligence forces of the Western world became turbo-charged in efforts to try to get their hands on a working model. It proved to be impossible. On at least two occasions, attempts to surreptitiously purchase the technology from sources in Moscow resulted in the imprisonment of agents for at least twenty years. Even though they knew how to do it in theory, the Americans had still never achieved the practical result which threatened the future of McDonald’s hamburger stands and Texaco gas stations worldwide. This had become serious business for the intelligence community, but they were, as usual, confined to the budgetary constraints common to democratic rule.
It was the framework of a free market combined with a persistent Estonian challenge to Russian occupation which finally won out, and it was the one million US dollars paid into the Swiss bank account of an Estonian trader in war materials that made the sale.
The buyer and the seller had been careful to hide the details of what they were doing. Both would have been surprised to discover the number of people witnessing the transaction which took place, especially the agent from MI6. Captain John Peters and his elite team of US Army Criminal Investigative Officers had been watching as the deal went down.
They huddled in a car parked outside the Portus Hotel next to the Ferry Harbour in Tallinn, Estonia, with a small plastic dish aimed at a window of the Retro Restaurant. Inside, three men sat at a booth. They spoke in low voices as they discussed the details of the sale. With a final handshake followed by a transfer of funds from an account in Switzerland, the deal was done. When a call came to the cell phone of the seller, informing him that the money had been transferred to his account, he’d waved a signal to a man wearing a black leather jacket, sitting at the booth across from them.
The man in the jacket left the restaurant, walking quickly to the corner of the building, and stood in front of the pharmacy to oversee the loading of the weapon on board the MS Sally. It had been hidden in a freight truck, behind tons of bags of cement bound for Stockholm, and he watched as it was driven onto the RORO deck of the ferry.
This was a delivery that was never to take place, and a shipment which would cost the lives of hundreds of people. It was also a shipment that would determine the future of governments around the Baltic Sea.
Captain Peters had sent a message to the Pentagon that the sale had been concluded, and that the Western world had another serious threat to contend with. In the hands of a foreign army, the weapon was, of course, an uncomfortable addition to the dangers that soldiers and sailors had to deal with in wartime. There were even those that were convinced that at least the United States military forces would be able to provide a strategic answer, that there were developments which would make the weapon worthless to use. However, in the hands of a terrorist intent on creating havoc, and with a limited goal, the weapon became something else. It would provide a public demonstration of what a terrorist group was capable of, and it would be a message that few would be able to escape.
If the torpedo were headed for the Middle East, the centre of gravity of power would almost certainly shift. Captain Peters reviewed his options. The simplest option was to make sure that Swedish Customs were informed, so they could stop the truck, search it and impound the illegal cargo. With any luck, they could even convince the Swedish government it was expedient to sell the missile to a US company with interests in underwater technology. Months of surveillance would have had finally paid off, and Peters was certain that he could very soon celebrate the end of a successful surveillance operation.
Before he allowed himself to get carried away with premature exuberance, Peters considered another option. They had to assume others knew of this shipment, people who might be interested in making sure the torpedo ended up on the bottom of the sea where it could easily be retrieved. This was a drastic step, but the unpredictable whims of the Swedish government were well documented and there was no guarantee that knowledge of the cargo meant that it would end up in the right hands. Peters also knew they might very well have to witness the destruction of the torpedo, just to appease those within Parliament who were making it more and more difficult to conduct business within the Defence Department.
Peters knew there was too little time to use the standard channels to solve the problem. Golf-course diplomacy always took several months to put into place, and it took months to ensure that ad hoc agreements arrived at between the fifteenth and sixteenth holes would actually be put into effect.
He would have to act without the support of his superior officers. He began to worry that saving the Western world might come at the price of his own career. He thought of his predecessor, Lieutenant John Hurtree, who had never flinched when faced with such a choice. Hurtree had never made it beyond second lieutenant during his entire career, in spite of being able to crack amazing cases. He always used the grey area between military protocol and common sense to find a way to solve his cases, even though they often bordered on what was judicially correct. Hurtree had always maintained he was only close to making an error, and his proof was that he’d never been prosecuted for any of his questionable tactics. He also said it made it easier for him to sleep at night.
Peters reflected on his own career and decided he needed to work both options, so he had booked a ticket on the MS Sally for one of his field agents. He’d be providing them with real-time information, giving Peters the ace in the hole he needed if he couldn’t get the Swedish government to comply. He’d have to rely on being able to use the CID motto: Do what has to be done.
Captain Peters was unaware it was his own government making the purchase. The deep cover necessary to complete the sale demanded no one on the British MI6 team assigned to contact the Russian soldiers who had stolen the torpedo could reveal their operation to anyone outside their tight little circle. When MI6 had signalled to the CIA that they were only one ferry journey away from being the proud owners of one VA-111, they celebrated their success where two other attempts had failed. The United States would finally be in possession of the weapon most feared by navies throughout the world: a Rocketfish.
At about the same time, in an office in St. Petersburg, an agent of the FSB, the Russian Security Police, was alerted to the fact that the Shkval torpedo was now on its way to Stockholm on board the MS Sally. Russian FSB surveillance technology was somewhat less sophisticated than what the CID used, but it was just as effective. Instead of listening in on the conversation at the restaurant using a super-sensitive microphone aimed at the window next to the diners, the FSB listened using their waiter. “Old-Tech,” they called him, when they compared notes with their colleagues. “He’s old, but he still works pretty well.”
Russia had finally been given a chance to retrieve the torpedo which had been stolen from their warehouse at the submarine base in Paldiski, about thirty miles from the capital of Tallinn
, only days before they had evacuated Estonia. It was an opportunity they would not miss. They knew there was little hope they could convince Swedish Customs to turn it over if it were ever impounded. The Swedes might even sell it to the Americans, or destroy it out of spite. They had only one option, and an urgent request was sent to Moscow to use it.
This was part of the background which lay inside the folders on Ekman’s desk, and he swore when his cell phone registered Sara’s message about her finding the manual. She was beginning to find out too much. The risk she would introduce long-secret information into the publicity of criminal case files was now a real danger. He punched in a reply message, telling her he expected her to come to his office on Sunday morning before nine, and began the work of moving the Hoffberg case from the National Bureau of Investigation over to the NSS. The underwater search of the harbour on the Baltic side of the Old City would begin early tomorrow.
Chapter 12
Sara arrived in Malmö late at night, checked in at the hotel and went to a room with paint peeling off the walls and a bathroom she had to share with three others in the corridor. The list of approved hotels was a joke at work. The detectives who travelled a lot knew how to check into an unapproved hotel and still send the bill to the taxpayers.
Sara stood in various yoga positions, trying to reduce the tension in her body and the agitation in her mind without success, not even when she tried standing and holding two oranges over her head like the Buddha statue she had at home.
She didn’t know when she fell asleep, but she woke up as tired as when she’d arrived. There was no breakfast room, so she went out for a bread roll and a cup of tea around the corner.
As she jogged back to the hotel she called her contact at Malmö County Police and set up a meeting before their first coffee break. It was a day off for him, a rest from the immigrant crimes that plagued his district, and he wasn’t happy about having to meet with her. They’d depart from his office to Lemko’s house outside Trelleborg, a half-hour’s drive away.
