Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [116]
Edklinth and Armansky had known each other for twelve years, ever since a woman Member of Parliament had received death threats. She had reported the matter to the head of her party, and parliament’s security detail had been informed. In due course the matter came to the attention of the Security Police. At that time, Personal Protection had the smallest budget of any unit in the Security Police, but the Member of Parliament was given protection during the course of her official appearances. She was left to her own devices at the end of the working day, the very time when she was obviously more vulnerable. She began to have doubts about the ability of the Security Police to protect her.
She arrived home late one evening to discover that someone had broken in, daubed sexually explicit epithets on her living-room walls, and masturbated in her bed. She immediately hired Milton Security to take over her personal protection. She did not advise Säpo of this decision. The next morning, when she was due to appear at a school in Täby, there was a confrontation between the government security forces and her Milton bodyguards.
At that time Edklinth was acting deputy chief of Personal Protection. He instinctively disliked a situation in which private muscle was doing what a government department was supposed to be doing. He did recognize that the Member of Parliament had reason enough for complaint. Instead of exacerbating the issue, he invited Milton Security’s C.E.O. to lunch. They agreed that the situation might be more serious than Säpo had at first assumed, and Edklinth realized that Armansky’s people not only had the skills for the job, but they were as well trained and probably better equipped too. They solved the immediate problem by giving Armansky’s people responsibility for bodyguard services, while the Security Police took care of the criminal investigation and paid the bill.
The two men discovered that they liked each other a good deal, and they enjoyed working together on a number of assignments in subsequent years. Edklinth had great respect for Armansky, and when he was pressingly invited to dinner and a private conversation, he was willing to listen.
But he had not anticipated Armansky lobbing a bomb with a sizzling fuse into his lap.
“You’re telling me that the Security Police is involved in flagrant criminal activity.”
“No,” Armansky said. “You misunderstand me. I’m saying that some people within the Security Police are involved in such activity. I don’t believe that this activity is sanctioned by the leadership of S.I.S., or that it has government approval.”
Edklinth studied Malm’s photographs of a man getting into a car with a registration number that began with the letters KAB.
“Dragan … this isn’t a practical joke?”
“I wish it were.”
The next morning Edklinth was in his office at police headquarters. He was meticulously cleaning his glasses. He was a grey-haired man with big ears and a powerful face, but for the moment his expression was more puzzled than powerful. He had spent most of the night worrying about how he was going to deal with the information Armansky had given him.
They were not pleasant thoughts. The Security Police was an institution in Sweden that all parties (well, almost all) agreed had an indispensable value. This led each of them to distrust the group and at the same time concoct imaginative conspiracy theories about it. The scandals had undoubtedly been many, especially in the leftist-radical ’70s when a number of constitutional blunders had certainly occurred. But after five governmental – and roundly criticized – Säpo investigations, a new generation of civil servants had come through. They represented a younger school of activists recruited from the financial, weapons and fraud units of the state police. They were