Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [119]
How now to handle the situation? Technically, that answer was simple. If Armansky’s account was true, Lisbeth Salander had at the very least been deprived of the opportunity to exercise her constitutionally protected rights and liberties. From a constitutional standpoint, this was the first can of worms. Decision-making political bodies had been induced to take decisions in a certain direction. This too touched on the core of the responsibility delegated to the Constitutional Protection Unit. Edklinth, a policeman, had knowledge of a crime and thus he had the obligation to submit a report to a prosecutor. In real life, the answer was not so simple. It was, on the contrary and to put it mildly, decidedly unsimple.
Inspector Monica Figuerola, in spite of her unusual name, was born in Dalarna to a family that had lived in Sweden at least since the time of Gustavus Vasa in the sixteenth century. She was a woman who people usually paid attention to, and for several reasons. She was thirty-six, blue eyed, and one metre eighty-four tall. She had short, light-blonde, naturally curly hair. She was attractive and dressed in a way that she knew made her more so. And she was exceptionally fit.
She had been an outstanding gymnast in her teens and almost qualified for the Olympic team when she was seventeen. She had given up classic gymnastics, but she still worked out obsessively at the gym five nights a week. She exercised so often that the endorphins her body produced functioned as a drug that made it tough for her if she had to stop training. She ran, lifted weights, played tennis, did karate. She had cut back on bodybuilding, that extreme variant of bodily glorification, some years ago. In those days she was spending two hours a day pumping iron. Even so, she trained so hard and her body was so muscular that malicious colleagues still called her Herr Figuerola. When she wore a sleeveless T-shirt or a summer dress, no-one could fail to notice her biceps and powerful shoulders.
Her intelligence, too, intimidated many of her male colleagues. She had left school with top marks, studied to become a police officer at twenty, and then served for nine years in Uppsala police and studied law in her spare time. For fun, she said, she had also studied for a degree in political science.
When she left patrol duty to become a criminal inspector, it was a great loss to Uppsala street safety. She worked first in the Violent Crime Division and then in the unit that specialized in financial crime. In 2000 she applied to the Security Police in Uppsala, and by 2001 she had moved to Stockholm. She first worked in Counter-Espionage, but was almost immediately hand-picked by Edklinth for the Constitutional Protection Unit. He happened to know Figuerola’s father and had followed her career over the years.
When at long last Edklinth concluded that he had to act on Armansky’s information, he called Figuerola into 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