by Arne Dahl
“CIA?” said Hultin.
Hjelm widened his eyes in surprise.
Jennings shook his head. “We’ll hold off on that,” he said. “In any case, I suddenly realized what was expected of me. At this point, in the late seventies, the Cold War was moving into a new phase—I can’t go into it in detail, but it was truly war. There was an immediate threat—they needed information, lots of information. The same thing was happening on the other side. One by one I picked up the agents who were under surveillance. Professional spies and traitors alike. Academics who sold state secrets. Soviet agents. KGB. I got an incredible amount of vital information out of them.
“Someone got the brilliant idea that it would be handy if it looked like the work of a madman, I don’t know who, so I had to play serial killer, even if it meant I got caught. And that’s how I got Larner on my case. You have no idea how hard that man worked to find out about Commando Cool. He was a threat to national security.
“On the political front, the Cold War started to calm down. Brezhnev died, the Soviet Union was on its way to dissolution, and other enemies were emerging. I would be more useful in some border state between east and west, where the trade exchange of the future would take place, and in my escape I would bring down Larner, make a laughingstock of him.”
“So it was time to escape. Your teeth and someone’s remains were in the car.”
“It took weeks of preparation. A lot of night work out there in the wilderness. Colleagues who were ready to go at any time. Rigged equipment. A perfect set of teeth. A disguised Soviet agent whose teeth had been extracted. A concealed hole in the ground that I could roll into, along with some colleagues, and stay for a day or two. Everything is possible; the impossible takes a bit longer.”
Hjelm, satisfied, still had to ask, “What kind of ideal are you working toward? What does the life that you’re defending with all this violence look like?”
“Like yours,” said Wayne Jennings without hesitation. “Not like mine, like yours. I have no life. I died in Vietnam. Do you believe that you live this freely and with this much privilege at no cost? Do you believe that Sweden is alliance-free and neutral?”
He paused and looked at the wall, then moved his gaze toward Norlander. He met eyes filled with hate. It was hardly the first time. He ignored it.
“Where is Gunnar Nyberg?” he asked.
“Taking care of his broken hand. Why?”
“No one has ever taken me out before. And no one has ever fooled me like that. I thought he was an idiot.”
“He identifies with Benny Lundberg. He sat with him as he was going through the worst of his suffering. His warmth saved Benny’s life. Is that something you can understand?”
“Warmth saves more than cold. Unfortunately, cold is also necessary. Otherwise we would have an eternally cold earth.”
“Is that what the Lindberger story is about—eternal cold? Nuclear weapons? Chemical or biological ones? Or is it LinkCoop? Computers, or control devices for nuclear weapons? Saudi Arabia?”
He smiled inwardly. Maybe he was even a little impressed by the Swedish police—and by Paul Hjelm. “I’m still thinking about it. I could ask you to contact a certain authority, but I don’t know. There are risks.”
“Are you aware that you are sitting here because you committed twenty murders and one attempted murder? That you are a criminal? An enemy of humanity? Someone who destroys all the human worth that we have spent several thousand years building up? Or do you think you can get out at any time? Do you think you can just choose the right second to get up from the chair, free yourself from the handcuffs, and tear my head off?”
Jennings smiled again, that smile that never reached his eyes. “People should never make murder machines out of other people.”
Hjelm looked at Hultin. Suddenly they began to feel threatened. After all, the only thing that separated them from a murder machine was a set of handcuffs.
“You don’t kill police officers,” Hultin said with bombproof certainty.
“I weigh the pros and cons of every situation. The alternative with the most pros wins. If I had killed that policeman”—he nodded toward Norlander—“you wouldn’t have handled me this mildly today. And then we would have had a problem.”
“You were counting on being caught? You’re joking!”
“It was in fifteenth place in the list of possibilities. It went down to seventeenth after Nyberg’s visit. That was why I wasn’t on my guard. That was an excellent tactic.”
Jennings closed his eyes and weighed the pros and cons. Then he made an extremely fast movement and was out of the handcuffs.
Chavez had his pistol up first. Holm was second, Norlander third. Söderstedt was sluggish, and Hultin and Hjelm sat still.
“Nice reaction over there in the corner,” said Jennings, pointing at Chavez. “What’s your name?”
Chavez and Norlander approached him with pistols raised. Hjelm took his out to be on the safe side. All three held Jennings in check while Holm and Söderstedt cuffed him again, considerably tighter this time.
“I’ve had a full month’s training on handcuffs,” Jennings said calmly. “And I mean a full month. We need to understand each other here.”
“Okay,” said Hjelm. “You’ve made your point. So how did the pros and cons look on April 6, 1983?”
Jennings performed a quick search of his memory bank, then he flashed a smile. It passed. “I understand,” he said.
“What is it that you understand?”
“That you’re not a bad policeman, Paul Hjelm, not bad at all.”
“Why did you write that letter to your wife?”
“Weakness,” Jennings said neutrally. “A pure con. The last one.”
“The episode with Nyberg, then?”
“We’ll see,” he said cryptically.
“We found the letter, almost completely burned up, in Lamar’s apartment.”
“Was that where you found my name?”
“Unfortunately, it wasn’t. If it had been, Benny Lundberg wouldn’t be lying half terrified to death at Karolinska right now. Why did you write your name? Surely it didn’t matter to Mary Beth what you called yourself. It was really quite infantile. And it drove Lamar to come here, which killed him.”
“It was a farewell to my last remnants of a personal life. The letter was supposed to have been burned immediately. She got her revenge by not burning it.”
“Or else she wanted one last memory of the man she had once made the mistake of loving. It’s called human emotion. For you, it’s something other people have, something you can exploit.”
“It was a final farewell,” Jennings said.
“This final farewell killed your whole family. It made your son follow you and get killed by you; it made your wife kill herself. A cute farewell.”
Was it possible to hurt him? Hjelm wondered, as Jennings looked at him with narrowed eyes. Had he found a sore spot?
“Did she kill herself? I didn’t know that.”
“Your deeds are never done in isolation. You can’t kill someone without it having a wide array of consequences. You spread clouds of evil and sudden death around you—do you really not understand that? Do you know how many serial killers you have inspired? You have a fan club on the Internet. You’re a fucking legend. There are K T-shirts, small cookies in the shape of a K that say ‘The Famous Kentucky Killer,’ badges that say ‘Keep on doing it, K,’ licorice versions of your pincers. You have actively contributed to the fact that a frightening number of serial killers are running riot in the country you think you’re protecting. You’re a madman who must be stopped. Stop yourself, for God’s sake.”
“I’m hardly alone,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. “I follow orders and receive a salary each month. If I disappear, there’ll be a job opening, and a lot of people will apply.”
“Are you finished thinking?”
“Yes,” he said abruptly. “I’ll make it short and concise—listen up. LinkCoop
is a shady company. It survives on illegal imports and exports of military computer equipment; the rest is a front. The CEO, Henrik Nilsson, is a crook. LinkCoop has gotten hold of control devices for nuclear warheads, just as you said, Hjelm. Eric Lindberger from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was the middleman between LinkCoop and the Saudi Islamist movement. I thought I had stopped the deal by taking out Lindberger. By the way, he’s the only one who hadn’t talked under pressure—I was impressed. But great sums of money have been transferred to LinkCoop’s secret accounts today. This means the equipment is in the hands of the Swedish middleman, in an unknown location, and will soon be on its way to a Swedish harbor, I don’t know which one, in order to be transported on to those in the fundamentalist movement.”
“Perhaps Eric Lindberger withstood your torture simply because he didn’t know anything. Perhaps he was innocent, and the Swedish middleman was someone else.”
“I received reliable information from … my sources. They’ve never been wrong before.”
“How did the message read, exactly?” Arto Söderstedt asked from over by the wall.
Jennings’s head turned the necessary fraction of an inch, no more.
Söderstedt had his turn to meet the gaze. Hard core, he thought.
“It was a coded message,” said Jennings, “and it went ‘E Lindberger M.F.A.’ It was unambiguous.”
“Elisabeth Justine Lindberger,” Söderstedt said coldly.
The eyes narrowed again. A tiny movement in the corner of one of them. “Oh,” said Jennings.
“Not ‘O’ but ‘E,’ ” said Söderstedt. “That letter subjected an innocent person to a hellish journey into death.”
“Do you have her under surveillance?” Jennings said.
Arto Söderstedt reduced everything on the tip of his tongue to “Yes.”
“Increase it right away.”
“Let me see if I understand this,” said Hultin. “You’re giving us orders? One of the worst serial killers in history has finally been caught, and he’s sitting here giving orders to the police?”
“Not me,” said Jennings. “I’m not giving any orders. I’m No One. But I can summarize the choice you have to make in two questions. One: Do you want a nuclear war or not? Two: Which world order do you prefer—American capitalism or Islamic fundamentalism? It’s a globalized world these days—that’s irreversible. So it’s more important than ever that there be a world order. And you can pick—just the seven of you.”
“I wonder if it’s that simple,” said Hjelm.
“Right now, in the next few hours, it really is that simple. After that you can do whatever you want with me.”
“What was the authority that you were debating whether we should contact?” Hultin asked.
“It won’t work now. It will take too long. There’s only one possibility, and that’s for you to make sure that that ship is not allowed to leave the harbor.”
“Does Henrik Nilsson at LinkCoop know any of this?”
“No, he makes himself ignorant as soon as he has the money. The middleman moves the materiel to a neutral place. From there it’s transported to the harbor. Both the neutral place and the harbor are unknown. The ship will leave harbor sometime today or tomorrow. That’s all the information we have. Except for Mrs. Lindberger.”
“The ship’s destination?”
“Faked. Could be anywhere at all.”
“Okay,” Hultin said. “Gather outside.”
They stood up one by one and left.
Hjelm lingered for a second and looked at Wayne Jennings. “All of this,” he said, “the whole admission and confession and everything was just a way to buy time, wasn’t it, to size up the situation? Get us over on your side? Is any of it true?”
“It’s the result that counts,” Jennings said neutrally.
“And Nyberg?” said Hjelm. “What was your assessment when he came walking toward you down the corridor? Did you already see this scenario in front of you? Was there no surprise in that uppercut?”
Jennings’s eyes bored into Hjelm’s. Hjelm thought they were like primeval darkness, the eyes of a shark.
“You’ll never know,” said Jennings.
Hjelm took a step closer and bent over him. Positioned this way, Jennings could have killed him in a tenth of a second. Hjelm didn’t know why he was purposefully sticking his head into the lion’s mouth. Had he heard a call from the other side? A siren’s song? Or did he want to sneer in the face of death?
“For the first time in my life I have some understanding of the death penalty,” he said.
Jennings smiled fleetingly. It had nothing to do with happiness. “Of course as an individual I deserve the death penalty,” he said. “But I’m not an individual, I’m an—authority.”
Hjelm left him then and joined the others out in the corridor. Arto Söderstedt was speaking into a cell phone.
“Is he telling the truth?” Kerstin Holm said. “Is it all about control devices for nuclear warheads? Or is he sending us off on some crap errand so he can find a way out?”
“He’s the devil’s right-hand man,” Hjelm said grimly. “His methods are inscrutable. What the fuck is he doing with us? What kind of game is he playing?”
“Isn’t this Säpo’s domain?” said Chavez.
“Don’t we have to take it up to the government level?” Holm said.
Hultin stood motionless. Was he thinking, or was he paralyzed to act?
“Let’s go in and kill him,” Norlander suggested eagerly.
Söderstedt hung up his phone and sighed deeply. “Justine has escaped the surveillance.”
Hultin made a face, his first sign of life in a long time. “We’ll do it ourselves. Whatever Justine is up to, it’s illegal. Take her. And check all planned departures from all Swedish harbors in the next twenty-four hours.”
“And Jennings?” said Hjelm.
“Put him under more stringent guard. I’ll arrange for it. Arto, do you still have all Justine’s notes?”
“In my office.”
They went. Gunnar Nyberg, contemplating the cast on his right hand, stayed behind, observing their departure skeptically.
“You’ve made a pact with the devil,” he stated. “Watch out, for Christ’s sake. I won’t be a part of it.”
“You’re part of the team, Gunnar,” said Hultin. “We have to find Justine Lindberger. We’re talking about international politics here.”
“Fuck you.”
Hultin looked at him neutrally.
“He’s fooled you all,” Nyberg continued. “Can’t you see that he’s messing with you? He messed with me. He let me hit him. I saw his eyes. It was all a game. I realize that now.”
“It’s possible,” said Hultin. “But the fact is that Justine Lindberger has escaped her surveillance. We need you.”
Nyberg shook his head. “Never.”
“Then you’re on sick leave, starting now. Go home.”
Nyberg gawked at him wildly. Snorting with rage, he left the room, paused in the corridor, and then charged down to the basement where the cell was. Two powerfully built officers in civilian clothes had just taken up stations outside the door. They sat on chairs in the dark corridor, with a table and a deck of cards between them. They eyed Nyberg uncertainly as he planted himself in a third chair along the wall.
“Play your game,” he said. “I’m not here.”
He was there, and he intended to stay. He had suddenly seen it all before. The corridor in LinkCoop. His steps forward. Robert Mayer’s eyes. The tiny, tiny movement toward his jacket. The hand pulled back. The ice-cold acceptance of the blow.
Here he intended to stay.
Meanwhile Arto Söderstedt went over to his whiteboard, which was covered with cascades of writing.
“All the notes from the Lindberger couple. Justine’s on the right, Eric’s on the left.”
“Is there anything that could be the name of a ship or a date, today or tomorrow, or the name of a harbor?” Hultin ask
ed. “Or something that seems to be in code?”
Söderstedt scratched his nose. “She may have met a contact code-named S now and then. That was one of the things she chose to remove from her Filofax. She claims it’s her jogging session, S as in ‘stretching.’ Unfortunately I have no more information about that. The other thing she removed was dates with her lover Herman in Bro. I have nothing more about him. She has three friends that she seems to be close to: Paula, Petronella, and Priscilla. I have their full names and addresses. Beyond that she has a relatively large family, which also seems to be quite close-knit. This should all be checked.
“We have a few things here on the board that might be something. A little piece of paper that said ‘Blue Viking.’ That could be code for a place—a bar, for example—but I haven’t found anything. This might be something, too—I can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s a small yellow Post-it that says ‘orphlinse,’ and that’s all. Then I might also mention that it was in Östermalm-shallen that Justine disappeared from her mediocre surveillance team.”
“We’ll have to divide it up,” said Hultin. “Paul will try to find Herman in Bro. Kerstin can take the friends and family—call everyone you can find. Viggo will check with the surveillance team about exactly how and when she disappeared—bring them along to Östermalmshallen. Jorge will take on Blue Viking and the other note. Arto, you and I can check the harbors—we do have a few of them in Sweden. Let’s go.”
Hjelm discovered that Bro was a bedroom community with six thousand inhabitants between Kungsängen and Bålsta. Checking various databases from his office in police headquarters, he found eight Hermans in Bro. Two were retired; the others were possibilities, between the ages of twenty-two and fifty-eight. He called them. Three weren’t home; none of the others admitted to knowing Justine Lindberger, even though he impressed upon them how important it was and guaranteed confidentiality, which made one of them—Herman Andersson, forty-four—very angry. After more research, he found the workplaces of the other three and got hold of them at their jobs.
None of them knew Justine; all seemed genuinely surprised by the inquiry.
