The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (47 page)

The system had an obvious weakness. As soon as Ekström left police headquarters, it was no longer possible to monitor his mobile, unless Trinity knew where he was and could park his van in the immediate vicinity.

With the authorization from the highest level, Edklinth had been able to set up a legitimate operations department. He picked four colleagues, purposely selecting younger talent who had experience on the regular police force and had been only recently recruited to SIS. Two had a background in the fraud division, one had been with the financial police, and one was from the violent crimes division. They were summoned to Edklinth’s office and told of their assignment as well as the need for absolute secrecy. He made plain that the investigation was being carried out at the express order of the prime minister. Inspector Figuerola was named as their chief, and she directed the investigation with a force that matched her physical appearance.

But the investigation proceeded slowly. This was largely due to the fact that no-one was quite sure who or what should be investigated. On more than one occasion Edklinth and Figuerola considered bringing Mårtensson in for questioning. But they decided to wait. Arresting him would reveal the existence of the investigation.

Finally, on Tuesday, eleven days after the meeting with the prime minister, Figuerola came to Edklinth’s office.

“I think we’ve got something.”

“Sit down.”

“Evert Gullberg. One of our investigators had a talk with Marcus Erlander, who’s leading the investigation into Zalachenko’s murder. According to Erlander, SIS contacted the Göteborg police just two hours after the murder and gave them information about Gullberg’s threatening letters.”

“That was fast.”

“A little too fast. SIS faxed nine letters that Gullberg had supposedly written. There’s just one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Two of the letters were sent to the justice department—to the minister of justice and to the deputy minister.”

“I know that.”

“Yes, but the letter to the deputy minister wasn’t logged in at the department until the following day. It arrived with a later delivery.”

Edklinth stared at Figuerola. He felt very afraid that his suspicions were going to turn out to be justified. Figuerola went implacably on.

“So we have SIS sending a fax of a threatening letter that hadn’t yet reached its addressee.”

“Good Lord,” Edklinth said.

“It was someone in Personal Protection who faxed them through.”

“Who?”

“I don’t think he’s involved in the case. The letters landed on his desk in the morning, and shortly after the murder he was told to get in touch with the Göteborg police.”

“Who gave him the instruction?”

“The chief of Secretariat’s assistant.”

“Good God, Monica. Do you know what this means? It means that SIS was involved in Zalachenko’s murder.”

“Not necessarily. But it definitely does mean that some individuals within SIS had knowledge of the murder before it was committed. The only question is: who?”

“The chief of Secretariat . . .”

“Yes. But I’m beginning to suspect that this Zalachenko club is out of house.”

“How do you mean?”

“Mårtensson. He was moved from Personal Protection and is working on his own. We’ve had him under surveillance around the clock for the past week. He hasn’t had contact with anyone within SIS as far as we can tell. He gets calls on a mobile that we cannot monitor. We don’t know what number
it is, but it’s not his normal number. He did meet with the fair-haired man, but we haven’t been able to identify him.”

Edklinth frowned. At the same instant Anders Berglund knocked on the door. He was one of the new team, the officer who had worked with the financial police.

“I think I’ve found Evert Gullberg,” Berglund said.

“Come in,” Edklinth said.

Berglund put a dog-eared black-and-white photograph on the desk. Edklinth and Figuerola looked at the picture, which showed a man that both of them immediately recognized. He was being led through a doorway by two broad-shouldered plain-clothes police officers. The legendary double agent Colonel Stig Wennerström.
*

“This print comes from Åhlén and Åkerlund Publishers and was used in
Se
magazine in the spring of 1964. The photograph was taken in the course of the trial. Behind Wennerström you can see three people. On the right, Detective Superintendent Otto Danielsson, the policeman who arrested him.”

“Yes . . .”

“Look at the man on the left behind Danielsson.”

They saw a tall man with a narrow moustache who was wearing a hat. He reminded Edklinth vaguely of the writer Dashiell Hammett.

“Compare his face with this passport photograph of Gullberg, taken when he was sixty-six.”

Edklinth frowned. “I wouldn’t be able to swear it’s the same person—”

“But it is,” Berglund said. “Turn the print over.”

On the reverse was a stamp saying that the picture belonged to Åhlén & Åkerlund Publishers and that the photographer’s name was Julius Estholm. The text was written in pencil:
Stig Wennerström flanked by two police officers on his way into Stockholm district court. In the background O. Danielsson, E. Gullberg, and H. W. Francke
.

“Evert Gullberg,” Figuerola said. “He was SIS.”

“No,” Berglund said. “Technically speaking, he wasn’t. At least not when this picture was taken.”

“Oh?”

“SIS wasn’t established until four months later. In this photograph he was still with the Security Police.”

“Who’s H. W. Francke?” Figuerola said.

“Hans Wilhelm Francke,” Edklinth said. “Died in the early nineties, but was assistant chief of the Security Police in the late fifties and early sixties.
He was a bit of a legend, just like Otto Danielsson. I actually met him a couple of times.”

“Is that so?” Figuerola said.

“He left SIS in the late sixties. Francke and P. G. Vinge never saw eye to eye, and he was more or less forced to resign at the age of fifty or fifty-five. Then he opened his own shop.”

“His own
shop?”

“He became a consultant in security for industry. He had an office on Stureplan, but he also gave lectures from time to time at SIS training sessions. That’s where I met him.”

“What did Vinge and Francke quarrel about?”

“They were just very different. Francke was a bit of a cowboy who saw KGB agents everywhere, and Vinge was a bureaucrat of the old school. Vinge was fired shortly thereafter. A bit ironic, that, because he thought Palme was working for the KGB.”

Figuerola looked at the photograph of Gullberg and Francke standing side by side.

“I think it’s time we had another talk with Justice,” Edklinth told her.

“Millennium
came out today,” Figuerola said.

Edklinth shot her a glance.

“Not a word about the Zalachenko affair,” she said.

“So we’ve got a month before the next issue. Good to know. But we have to deal with Blomkvist. In the middle of all this mess he’s like a hand grenade with the pin pulled.”

Blomkvist had no warning that someone was in the stairwell when he reached the landing outside his top-floor apartment at Bellmansgatan 1. It was 7:00 in the evening. He stopped short when he saw a woman with short blond curly hair sitting on the top step. He recognized her right away as Monica Figuerola of SIS from the passport photograph Karim had located.

“Hello, Blomkvist,” she said cheerfully, closing the book she had been reading. Blomkvist looked at the book and saw that it was in English, on the idea of God in the ancient world. He studied his unexpected visitor as she stood up. She was wearing a short-sleeved summer dress and had laid a brick-red leather jacket over the top stair.

“We need to talk to you,” she said.

She was tall, taller than he was, and that impression was magnified by the fact that she was standing two steps above him. He looked at her arms and then at her legs and saw that she was much more muscular than he was.

“You spend a couple of hours a week at the gym,” he said.

She smiled and took out her ID.

“My name is—”

“Monica Figuerola, born in 1969, living on Pontonjärgatan on Kungsholmen. You came from Borlänge and you’ve worked with the Uppsala police. For three years you’ve been working in SIS, Constitutional Protection. You’re an exercise fanatic and you were once a top-class athlete, almost made it onto the Swedish Olympic team. What do you want with me?”

She was surprised, but she quickly regained her composure.

“Fair enough,” she said in a low voice. “You know who I am—so you don’t have to be afraid of me.”

“I don’t?”

“There are some people who need to have a talk with you in peace and quiet. Since your apartment and mobile seem to be bugged and we have reason to be discreet, I’ve been sent to invite you.”

“And why would I go anywhere with somebody who works for Säpo?”

She thought for a moment. “Well . . . you could just accept a friendly personal invitation, or if you prefer, I could handcuff you and take you with me.” She smiled sweetly. “Look, Blomkvist. I understand that you don’t have many reasons to trust anyone from SIS. But it’s like this: not everyone who works there is your enemy, and my superiors really want to talk to you. So, which do you prefer? Handcuffed or voluntarily?”

“I’ve been handcuffed by the police once already this year. And that was enough. Where are we going?”

She had parked around the corner, down on Pryssgränd. When they were settled in her new Saab 9–5, she flipped open her mobile and pressed a speed-dial number.

“We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

She told Blomkvist to fasten his seat belt and drove over Slussen to Östermalm and parked on a side street off Artillerigatan. She sat still for a moment and looked at him.

“This is a friendly invitation, Blomkvist. You’re not risking anything.”

Blomkvist said nothing. He was reserving judgement until he knew what this was all about. She punched in the code on the street door. They took the elevator to the fifth floor, to an apartment with the name Martinsson on the door.

“We’ve borrowed the place for tonight’s meeting,” she said, opening the door. “To your right, into the living room.”

The first person Blomkvist saw was Torsten Edklinth, which was no surprise since Säpo was deeply involved in what had happened, and Edklinth was Figuerola’s boss. The fact that the director of Constitutional Protection had gone to the trouble of bringing him in said that somebody was nervous.

Then he saw a figure by the window. The minister of justice. That was a surprise.

Then he heard a sound to his right and saw the prime minister get up from an armchair. He hadn’t for a moment expected that.

“Good evening, Herr Blomkvist,” the PM said. “Excuse us for summoning you to this meeting on such short notice, but we’ve discussed the situation and agreed that we need to talk to you. May I offer you some coffee, or something else to drink?”

Blomkvist looked around. He saw a dining-room table of dark wood that was cluttered with glasses, coffee cups, and the remnants of sandwiches. They must have been there for a couple of hours already.

“Ramlösa,” he said.

Figuerola poured him a mineral water. They sat down on the sofas as she stayed in the background.

“He recognized me and knew my name, where I live, where I work, and the fact that I’m a workout fanatic,” Figuerola said to no-one in particular.

The prime minister glanced quickly at Edklinth and then at Blomkvist. Blomkvist realized at once that he was in a position of some strength. The prime minister needed something from him and presumably had no idea how much Blomkvist knew or did not know.

“How did you know who Inspector Figuerola was?” Edklinth said.

Blomkvist looked at the director of Constitutional Protection. He could not be sure why the prime minister had set up a meeting with him in a borrowed apartment in Östermalm, but he suddenly felt inspired. There were not many ways it could have come about. It was Armansky who had set this in motion by giving information to someone he trusted. Which must have been Edklinth, or someone close to him. Blomkvist took a chance.

“A mutual friend spoke with you,” he said to Edklinth. “You sent Figuerola to find out what was going on, and she discovered that some Säpo activists are running illegal phone taps and breaking into my apartment and stealing things. This means that you have confirmed the existence of what I call the Zalachenko club. It made you so nervous that you knew you had to take the matter further, but you sat in your office for a while and didn’t know in which direction to go. So you went to the justice minister, and he in turn went to the prime minister. And now here we all are. What is it that you want from me?”

Blomkvist spoke with a confidence that suggested he had a source right at the heart of the affair and had followed every step Edklinth had taken. He knew that his guesswork was on the mark when Edklinth’s eyes widened.

“The Zalachenko club spies on me, I spy on them,” Blomkvist went on. “And you spy on the Zalachenko club. This situation makes the prime minister both angry and uneasy. He knows that at the end of this conversation awaits a scandal that the government might not survive.”

Figuerola understood that Blomkvist was bluffing, and she knew how he had been able to surprise her by knowing her name and bio.

He saw me in my car on Bellmansgatan. He took the registration number and looked me up. But the rest is guesswork
.

She did not say a word.

The prime minister certainly looked uneasy now.

“Is that what awaits us?” he said. “A scandal to bring down the government?”

“The survival of the government isn’t my concern,” Blomkvist said. “My role is to expose shit like the Zalachenko club.”

The prime minister said: “And my job is to run the country in accordance with the constitution.”

“Which means that my problem is definitely the government’s problem. But not vice versa.”

“Could we stop going around in circles? Why do you think I arranged this meeting?”