“His name is Alexander Zalachenko,” Bjorck said. “But officially he doesn’t exist. You won’t find him on the national register.”
“Who is he and how can I find him?”
“He’s not someone you’d want to find.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“What I’m going to tell you is top secret information. If it came out that I told you this, I’d be sent to prison. It’s one of the most deeply buried secrets we have within the Swedish defence system. You have to understand why it’s so important that you guarantee my anonymity.”
“I’ve already done that,” Blomkvist said impatiently.
“Alexander Zalachenko was born in 1940 in Stalingrad. When he was a year old, the German offensive on the eastern front began. Both of Zalachenko’s parents died in the war. At least that’s what Zalachenko thinks. He doesn’t really know what happened during the war. His earliest memories are of an orphanage in the Ural Mountains.”
Blomkvist made swift notes.
“The orphanage was in a garrison town and was, as it were, sponsored by the Red Army. You might say that Zalachenko got a military education very early. Since the end of the Soviet Union, documents have emerged which show there were experiments to create a cadre of particularly athletic, elite soldiers among the orphans who were being raised by the state. Zalachenko was one of them. To make a long story short, when he was five he was put in an army school. It turned out that he was talented. When he was fifteen, in 1955, he was sent to a military school in Novosibirsk, where together with two thousand other pupils he underwent training similar to Spetsnaz, the Russian elite troops.”
“OK, let’s get to the adult stuff.”
“In 1958, when he was eighteen, he was moved to Minsk, to specialist training with the GRU
Blomkvist nodded as he wrote. Against his will he was starting to get interested.
“In 1967 he was moved to London. There he organized the execution of a defected KGB agent. Over the next ten years he became one of the GRU’s top agents. He belonged to the real elite of devoted political soldiers. He speaks six languages fluently. He’s worked as a journalist, a photographer, in advertising, as a sailor – you name it. He’s a survival artist, an expert in disguise and deception. He commanded his own agents and organized or carried out his own operations. Several of these operations were contracts for hits, and a large number of them took place in the third world, but he was also involved in extortion, intimidation, and all kinds of other assignments that his superiors needed him to perform. In 1969 he was promoted to captain, in 1972 to major, and in 1975 to lieutenant colonel.”
“Why did he come to Sweden?”
“I’m getting to that. Over the years he became corrupt, and he squirrelled away a little money here and there. He drank too much and did too much womanizing. All this was noted by his superiors, but he was still a favourite and they could overlook the small stuff. In 1976 he was sent to Spain on a mission. We don’t need to go into the details, but he made a fool of himself. The mission failed and all of a sudden he was in disgrace and called back to Russia. He chose to ignore the order and thereby ended up in an even worse situation. The GRU ordered a military attache at the embassy in Madrid to find him and talk some sense into him. Something went wrong, and Zalachenko killed the man. Now he had no choice. He had burned his bridges and rashly decided to defect. He laid a trail that seemed to lead from Spain to Portugal and possibly to a boating accident. He also left clues indicating he intended to flee to the United States. He chose in fact to defect to the most improbable country in Europe. He came to Sweden, where he contacted the Security Police, Sapo, and sought asylum. This was well thought out, because the probability that a death squad from the KGB or the GRU would look for him here was almost zero.”
Bjorck fell silent.
“And?”
“What’s the government supposed to do if one of the Soviet Union’s top spies defects and seeks asylum in Sweden? A conservative government was coming into power. As a matter of fact, it was one of the very first matters we had to take to the newly appointed foreign minister. Those political cowards tried to get rid of him like a hot potato, of course, but they couldn’t just send him back to the Soviets – that would have been a scandal of unmatched proportions if it ever came out. Instead they tried to send him to the States or to England. Zalachenko refused. He didn’t like America and he knew that England was one of those countries where the Soviets had agents at the highest levels within military intelligence. He didn’t want to go to Israel, because he didn’t like Jews. So he decided to make his home in Sweden.”
The whole thing sounded so improbable that it occurred to Blomkvist that Bjorck might be pulling his leg.
“So he stayed in Sweden?”
“Exactly. For many years it was one of the country’s best-kept military secrets. The thing was, we got plenty of good information out of Zalachenko. For a time during the late seventies and early eighties, he was the jewel in the crown among defectors, the most senior from one of the GRU’s elite commands.”
“So he could sell information?”
“Precisely. He played his cards well and doled out information when it suited him best. We were able to identify an agent at NATO headquarters in Brussels. An agent in Rome. A contact for a whole ring of spies in Berlin. The identity of hit men he’d used in Ankara and Athens. He didn’t know that much about Sweden, but the information he did have we could pass on in return for favours. He was a gold mine.”
“So you started cooperating with him.”
“We gave him a new identity, a passport, a little money, and he took care of himself. That was what he was trained to do.”
Blomkvist sat for a while in silence, digesting this information. Then he looked up at Bjorck.
“You lied to me the last time I was here.”
“I did?”
“You said that you met Bjurman at your police shooting club in the eighties. But you met him long before that.”
“It was an automatic reaction. It’s confidential, and I had no reason to go into how Bjurman and I met. It wasn’t until you asked about Zala that I made the connection.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“I was thirty-three and had been working at Sapo for three years. Bjurman was a good deal younger and had just finished his degree. He was handling certain legal matters at Sapo. It was a kind of trainee job. Bjurman was from Karlskrona, and his father worked in military intelligence.”
“And?”
“Neither Bjurman nor I was remotely qualified to handle someone like Zalachenko, but he made contact on election day in 1976. There was hardly a soul in police headquarters – everyone was either off that day or working on stakeouts and the like. Zalachenko chose that moment to walk into Norrmalm police station and declare that he was seeking political asylum and wanted to talk to somebody in the Security Police. He didn’t give his name. I was on duty and thought it was a straightforward refugee case, so I took Bjurman with me as legal advisor.”
Bjorck rubbed his eyes.
“There he sat and told us calmly and matter-of-factly who he was, and what he had worked on. Bjurman
