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
“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
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
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 Martensson. So he must know that Martensson 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.
“There was one thing that struck me,” Figuerola said
“What’s that?”
“Evert Gullberg. He did his military service in the ’40s and became an accountant or some such, and then in the ’50s he vanished into thin air.”
“And?”
“When we were discussing this yesterday, we were talking about him as if he were some sort of a hired killer.”
“It sounds far-fetched, I know, but –”
“It struck me that there is so little background on him that it seems almost like a smokescreen. Both IB and S.I.S. established cover companies outside the building in the ’50s and ’60s.”
“I was wondering when you’d think of that,” Edklinth said.
“I’d like permission to go through the personnel files from the ’50s,” Figuerola said.
“No,” Edklinth said, shaking his head. “We can’t go into the archives without authorization from the chief of Secretariat, and we don’t want to attract attention until we have more to go on.”
“So what next?”
“Martensson,” Edklinth said. “Find out what he’s working on.”
Salander was studying the vent window in her room when she heard the key turn in the door. In came Jonasson. It was past 10.00 on Tuesday night. He had interrupted her planning how to break out of Sahlgrenska hospital.
She had measured the window and discovered that her head would fit through it and that she would not have much problem squeezing the rest of her body through. It was three storeys to the ground, but a combination of torn sheets and a ten-foot extension cord from a floor lamp would dispose of that problem.
She had plotted her escape step by step. The problem was what she would wear. She had knickers, a hospital nightshirt and a pair of plastic flip-flops that she had managed to borrow. She had 200 kronor in cash from Annika Giannini to pay for sweets from the hospital snack shop. That should be enough for a cheap pair of jeans and a T-shirt at the Salvation Army store, if she could find one in Goteborg. She would have to spend what was left of the money on a call to Plague. Then everything would work out. She planned on landing in Gibraltar a few days after she escaped, and from there she would create a new identity somewhere in the world.
Jonasson sat in the visitor’s chair. She sat on the edge of her bed.
“Hello, Lisbeth. I’m sorry I’ve not come to see you the past few days, but I’ve been up to my eyes in A.&E. and I’ve also been made a mentor for a couple of interns.”
She had not expected Jonasson to make special visits to see her.
He picked up her chart and studied her temperature graph and the record of medications. Her temperature
