Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [147]
Neither Teleborian nor Faulsson – especially not Faulsson – had any position inside S.I.S. And yet through their assignments they were connected to … to what?
The conspiracy was intimately linked to the late Alexander Zalachenko, the defected G.R.U. agent who had apparently turned up in Sweden on Election Day in 1976. A man no-one had ever heard of before. How was that possible?
Edklinth tried to imagine what reasonably would have happened if he had been sitting at the chief’s desk at S.I.S. in 1976 when Zalachenko defected. What would he have done? Absolute secrecy. It would have been essential. The defection could only be known to a small group without risking that the information might leak back to the Russians and … How small a group?
An operations department?
An unknown operations department?
If the affair had been appropriately handled, Zalachenko’s case should have ended up in Counter-Espionage. Ideally he should have come under the auspices of the military intelligence service, but they had neither the resources nor the expertise to run this sort of operational activity. So, S.I.S. it was.
But Counter-Espionage had not ever had him. Björck was the key; he had been one of the people who handled Zalachenko. And yet Björck had never had anything to do with Counter-Espionage. Björck was a mystery. Officially he had held a post in the Immigration Division since the ’70s, but in reality he had scarcely been seen in the department before the ’90s, when suddenly he became assistant director.
And yet Björck was the primary source of Blomkvist’s information. How had Blomkvist been able to persuade Björck to reveal such explosive material? And to a journalist at that.
Prostitutes. Björck messed around with teenage prostitutes and Millennium were going to expose him. Blomkvist must have blackmailed Björck.
Then Salander came into the picture.
The deceased lawyer Nils Bjurman had worked in the Immigration Division at the same time as the deceased Björck. They were the ones who had taken care of Zalachenko. But what did they do with him?
Somebody must have made the decision. With a defector of such provenance the order must have come from the highest level.
From the government. It must have been backed by the government. Anything else would be unthinkable.
Surely?
Edklinth felt cold shivers of apprehension. This was all conceivable in practice. A defector of Zalachenko’s status would have to be handled with the utmost secrecy. He would have decided as much himself. That was what Fälldin’s administration must have decided too. It made sense.
But what happened in 1991 did not make sense. Björck had hired Teleborian effectively to lock Salander up in a psychiatric hospital for children on the – false – pretext that she was mentally deranged. That was a crime. That was such a monstrous crime that Edklinth felt yet more apprehensive.
Somebody must have made that decision. It simply could not have been the government. Ingvar Carlsson had been Prime Minister at the time, and then Carl Bildt.* But no politician would dare to be involved in such a decision, which contradicted all law and justice and which would result in a disastrous scandal if it were ever discovered.
If the government was involved, then Sweden was not one iota better than any dictatorship in the entire world.
It was impossible.
And what about the events of April 12? Zalachenko was conveniently murdered at Sahlgrenska hospital by a mentally ill fanatic at the same time as a burglary was committed at Blomkvist’s apartment and Advokat Giannini was mugged. In both latter instances, copies of Björck’s strange report dating from 1991 were stolen. Armansky had contributed this information, but it was completely off the record. No police report was ever filed.
And at the same time, Björck hangs himself – a person with whom Edklinth