The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium #0)

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium #0) Page 37

Peter Teleborian, now a well-known psychiatrist often seen on T.V., 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 C.P. 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 some while before she got an answer.

"Dr Teleborian has been an external consultant for S.I.S. 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 S.I.S.

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 Cafe Copacabana on May 1.

She consulted the vehicle register and found that Goran Mårtensson was the owner of a grey Volvo with the registration number legible in the photographs. Then she got confirmation from the S.I.S. 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 Goran 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 telephone 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: no 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 got from the machine in the canteen. 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 in the light of her loss of confidence in Anders Holm.

The second was an hour-long meeting with the chairman Magnus Borgsjo, S.M.P.'s C.F.O. 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 C.F.O. were both determined on action to cut the newspaper's overheads.

"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 at the beginning of the year. 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?" Borgsjo 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 Borgsjo. "How long can the paper continue to bleed? How big a deficit can we take before we hit the limit?"

Borgsjo pursed his lips. "Since the early '90s S.M.P. has eaten into a great many old consolidated assets. We have a stock portfolio that has dropped in value by about 30 per cent compared to ten years ago. A large portion of these funds were used for investments in I.T. We've also had enormous expenses."

"I gather that S.M.P. has developed its own text editing system, the A.X.T. What did that cost?"

"About five million kronor to develop."

"Why did S.M.P. go to the trouble of developing its own software? There are inexpensive commercial programs already on the market."

"Well, Erika... that may be true. Our former I.T. chief talked us into it. He persuaded us that it would be less expensive in the long run, and that S.M.P. would also be able to license the program to other newspapers."

"And did any of them buy it?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, a local paper in Norway bought it."

"Meanwhile," Berger said in a dry voice, "we're sitting here with P.C.s 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 costcutting was what counted, which was understandable enough from the point of view of a budget chief and a C.F.O., but 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 towards her an attitude that was so antediluvian it was almost comical. You shouldn't worry your pretty head over complex matters, little girl.

Borgsjo was not much help. He was biding his time and letting the other participants at the meeting say their piece, but she did not sense the same condescension from him.

She sighed and plugged in her laptop. She had nineteen new messages. 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 drivel.

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 check on the implications of her move from Millennium to S.M.P., 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

[email protected]

/* */ › with the subject line [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 telephone and called Peter Fleming, the I.T. manager.

"Good morning, Peter. Who uses the address

[email protected]

/* */ ›?"

"That isn't a valid address at S.M.P."

"I just got an email from that address."

"It's a fake. Does the message contain a virus?"

"I wouldn't know. At least, the antivirus program didn't react."

"O.K. That address doesn't exist. But it's very simple to fake an apparently legitimate address. There are sites on the Net that you can use to send anonymous mail."

"Is it possible to trace an email like that?"

"Almost impossible, even if the person in question is so stupid that he sends it from his home computer. You might be able to trace the I.P. number to a server, but if he uses an account that he set up at hotmail, for instance, the trail will fizzle out."

Berger thanked him. She thought for a moment. It was not the first time she had received a threatening email or a message from a crackpot. This one was obviously referring to her new job as editor-in-chief. She wondered whether it was some lunatic who had read about her in connection with Morander's death, or whether the sender was in the building.

Figuerola thought long and hard as to what she should do about Gullberg. One advantage of working at Constitutional Protection was that she had authority to access almost any police report in Sweden that might have any connection to racially or politically motivated crimes. Zalachenko was technically an immigrant, and her job included tracking violence against persons born abroad to decide whether or not the crime was racially motivated. Accordingly she had the right to involve herself in the investigation of Zalachenko's murder, to determine whether Gullberg, the known killer, had a connection to any racist organization, or whether he was overheard making racist remarks at the time of the murder. She requisitioned the report. She found the letters that had been sent to the Minister of Justice and discovered that alongside the diatribe and the insulting personal attacks were also the words nigger-lover and traitor.

By then it was 5.00 p.m. Figuerola locked all the material in her safe, shut down her computer, washed up her coffee mug, and clocked out. She walked briskly to a gym at St Eriksplan and spent the next hour doing some easy strength training.

When she was finished she went home to her one-bedroom apartment on Pontonjargatan, showered, and ate a late but nutritious dinner. She considered calling Daniel Mogren, who lived three blocks down the same street. Mogren was a carpenter and bodybuilder and had been her training partner off and on for three years. In recent months they had also had sex as friends.

Sex was almost as satisfying as a rigorous workout at the gym, but at a mature thirty-plus or, rather, forty-minus, Figuerola had begun to think that maybe she ought to start looking for a steady partner and a more permanent living arrangement. Maybe even children. But not with Mogren.

She decided that she did not feel like seeing anyone that evening. Instead she went to bed with a history of the ancient world.

CHAPTER 13

TUESDAY, 17.V

Figuerola woke at 6.10 on Tuesday morning, took a long run along Norr Malarstrand, showered, and clocked in at police headquarters at 8.10. She prepared a memorandum on the conclusions she had arrived at the day before.

At 9.00 Edklinth arrived. She gave him twenty minutes to deal with his post, then knocked on his door. She waited while he read her four pages. At last he looked up.

"The chief of Secretariat," he said.

"He must have approved loaning out Mårtensson. So he must know that Mårtensson is not at Counter-Espionage, even though according to Personal Protection that's where he is."

Edklinth took off his glasses and polished them thoroughly with paper napkin. He had met Chief of Secretariat Albert Shenke at meetings and internal conferences on countless occasions, but he could not claim to know the man well. Shenke was rather short, with thin reddish-blond hair, and by now rather stout. He was about fifty-five and had worked at S.I.S. for at least twenty-five years, possibly longer. He had been chief of Secretariat for a decade, and was assistant chief before that. Edklinth thought him taciturn, and a man who could act ruthlessly when necessary. He had no idea what he did in his free time, but he had a memory of having once seen him in the garage of the police building in casual clothes, with a golf bag slung over his shoulder. He had also run into him once at the Opera.