The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

his office. She had been at Constitutional Protection for less than three years, which meant that she was still more of a real police officer than a fully fledged desk warrior.

She was dressed that day in tight blue jeans, turquoise sandals with a low heel, and a navy blue jacket.

“What are you working on at the moment, Monica?”

“We’re following up on the robbery of the grocer’s in Sunne.”

The Security Police did not normally spend time investigating robberies of groceries, and Figuerola was the head of a department of five officers working on political crimes. They relied heavily on computers connected to the incident reporting network of the regular police. Nearly every report submitted in any police district in Sweden passed through the computers in Figuerola’s department. The software scanned every report and reacted to 310 keywords, nigger, for example, or skinhead, swastika, immigrant, anarchist, Hitler salute, Nazi, National Democrat, traitor, Jew-lover, or nigger-lover. If such a keyword cropped up, the report would be printed out and scrutinized.

The Constitutional Protection Unit publishes an annual report, Threats to National Security, which supplies the only reliable statistics on political crime. These statistics are based on reports filed with local police authorities. In the case of the robbery of the shop in Sunne, the computer had reacted to three keywords – immigrant, shoulder patch, and nigger. Two masked men had robbed at gunpoint a shop owned by an immigrant. They had taken 2,780 kronor and a carton of cigarettes. One of the robbers had a mid-length jacket with a Swedish flag shoulder patch. The other had screamed “fucking nigger” several times at the manager and forced him to lie on the floor.

This was enough for Figuerola’s team to initiate the preliminary investigation and to set about enquiring whether the robbers had a connection to the neo-Nazi gang in Varmland, and whether the robbery could be defined as a racist crime. If so, the incident might be included in that year’s statistical compilation, which would then itself be incorporated within the European statistics put together by the E.U.’s office in Vienna.

“I’ve a difficult assignment for you,” Edklinth said. “It’s a job that could land you in big trouble. Your career might be ruined.”

“I’m all ears.”

“But if things go well, it could be a major step forward in your career. I’m thinking of moving you to the Constitutional Protection operations unit.”

“Forgive me for mentioning this, but Constitutional Protection doesn’t have an operations unit.”

“Yes, it does,” Edklinth said. “I established it this morning. At present it consists of you.”

“I see,” said Figuerola hesitantly.

“The task of Constitutional Protection is to defend the constitution against what we call ‘internal threats’, most often those on the extreme left or the extreme right. But what do we do if a threat to the constitution comes from within our own organization?”

For the next half hour he told her what Armansky had told him the night before.

“Who is the source of these claims?” Figuerola said when the story was ended.

“Focus on the information, not the source.”

“What I’m wondering is whether you consider the source to be reliable.”

“I consider the source to be totally reliable. I’ve know this person for many years.”

“It all sounds a bit… I don’t know. Improbable?”

“Doesn’t it? One might think it’s the stuff of a spy novel.”

“How do you expect me to go about tackling it?”

“Starting now, you’re released from all other duties. Your task, your only task, is to investigate the truth of this story. You have to either verify or dismiss the claims one by one. You report directly and only to me.”

“I see what you mean when you say I might land in it up to my neck.”

“But if the story is true… if even a fraction of it is true, then we have a constitutional crisis on our hands.”

“Where do you want me to begin?”

“Start with the simple things. Start by reading the Bjorck report. Then identify the people who are allegedly tailing this guy Blomkvist. According to my source, the car belongs to Goran Martensson, a police officer living on Vittangigaten in Vallingby. Then identify the other person in the pictures taken by Blomkvist’s photographer. The younger blond man here.”

Figuerola was making notes.

“Then look into Gullberg’s background. I had never heard his name before, but my source believes there to be a connection between him and the Security Police.”

“So somebody here at S.I.S. put out a contract on a long-ago spy using a 78-year-old man. It beggars belief.”

“Nevertheless, you check it out. And your entire investigation has to be carried out without a single person other than me knowing anything at all about it. Before you take one single positive action I want to be informed. I don’t want to see any rings on the water or hear of a single ruffled feather.”

“This is one hell of an investigation. How am I going to do all this alone?”

“You won’t have to. You have only to do the first check. You come back and say that you’ve checked and didn’t find anything, then everything is fine. You come back having found that anything is as my source describes it, then we’ll decide what to do.”

Figuerola spent her lunch hour pumping iron in the police gym. Lunch consisted of black coffee and a meatball sandwich with beetroot salad, which she took back to her office. She closed her door, cleared her desk, and started reading the Bjorck report while she ate her sandwich.

She also read the appendix with the correspondence between Bjorck and Dr Teleborian. She made a note of every name and every incident in the report that had to be verified. After two hours she got up and went to the coffee machine and got a refill. When she left her office she locked the door, part of the routine at S.I.S.

The first thing she did was to check the protocol number. She called the registrar and was informed that no report with that protocol number existed. Her second check was to consult a media archive. That yielded better results. The evening papers and a morning paper had reported a person being badly injured in a car fire on Lundagatan on the date in question in 1991. The victim of the incident was a middle-aged man, but no name was given. One evening paper reported that, according to a witness, the fire had been started deliberately by a young girl.

Gunnar Bjorck, the author of the report, was a real person. He was a senior official in the immigration unit, lately on sick leave and now, very recently, deceased – a suicide.

The personnel department had no information about what Bjorck had been working on in 1991. The file was stamped Top Secret, even for other employees at S.I.S. Which was also routine.

It was a straightforward matter to establish that Salander had lived with her mother and twin sister on Lundagatan in 1991 and spent the following two years at St Stefan’s children’s psychiatric clinic. In these sections at least, the record corresponded with the report’s contents.

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.