Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [146]
“The trial has been set for July.”
“Barring the unforeseen, she should be on her feet well before then.”
Bublanski cast a sceptical glance at the muscular woman on other side of the table. They were drinking coffee in the pavement area of a café on Norr Mälarstrand. It was Friday, May 20, and the warmth of summer was in the air. Inspector Monica Figuerola, her I.D. said, S.I.S. She had caught up with him just as he was leaving for home; she had suggested a conversation over a cup of coffee, just that.
At first he had been almost hostile, but she had very straightforwardly conceded that she had no authority to interview him and that naturally he was perfectly free to tell her nothing at all if he did not want to. He asked her what her business was, and she told him that she had been assigned by her boss to form an unofficial picture of what was true and what not true in the so-called Zalachenko case, also in some quarters known as the Salander case. She vouchsafed that it was not absolutely certain whether she had the right to question him. It was entirely up to him to decide whether he would talk to her or not.
“What would you like to know?” Bublanski said at last.
“Tell me what you know about Salander, Mikael Blomkvist, Gunnar Björck, and Zalachenko. How do the pieces fit together?”
They talked for more than two hours.
Edklinth thought long and hard about how to proceed. After five days of investigations, Figuerola had given him a number of indisputable indications that something was rotten within S.I.S. He recognized the need to move very carefully until he had enough information. He found himself, furthermore, on the horns of a constitutional dilemma: he did not have the authority to conduct secret investigations, and most assuredly not against his colleagues.
Accordingly he had to contrive some cause that would legitimize what he was doing. If the worst came to the worst, he could always fall back on the fact that it was a policeman’s duty to investigate a crime – but the breach was now so sensitive from a constitutional standpoint that he would surely be fired if he took a single wrong step. So he spent the whole of Friday brooding alone in his office.
Finally he concluded that Armansky was right, no matter how improbable it might seem. There really was a conspiracy inside S.I.S., and a number of individuals were acting outside of, or parallel to, regular operations. Because this had been going on for many years – at least since 1976, when Zalachenko arrived in Sweden – it had to be organized and sanctioned from the top. Exactly how high up the conspiracy went he had no idea.
He wrote three names on a pad:
Göran Mårtensson, Personal Protection. Criminal Inspector.
Gunnar Björck, assistant chief of Immigration Division. Deceased (Suicide?).
Albert Shenke, chief of Secretariat, S.I.S.
Figuerola was of the view that the chief of Secretariat at least must have been calling the shots when Mårtensson in Personal Protection was supposedly moved to Counter-Espionage, although he had not in fact been working there. He was too busy monitoring the movements of the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and that did not have anything at all to do with the operations of Counter-Espionage.
Some other names from outside S.I.S. had to be added to the list:
Peter Teleborian, psychiatrist
Lars Faulsson, locksmith
Teleborian had been hired by S.I.S. as a psychiatric consultant on specific cases in the late ’80s and early ’90s – on three occasions, to be exact, and Edklinth had examined the reports in the archive. The first had been extraordinary – Counter-Espionage had identified a Russian informer inside the Swedish telecom industry, and the spy’s background indicated that he might be inclined to suicide in the event that his actions were exposed. Teleborian had done a strikingly good analysis, which helped them turn the informer so that he could become a