Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [159]
The relatively limited technology to which Trinity had access meant that he had to park his van on Bergsgatan or one of the nearby streets and laboriously calibrate the equipment until he had identified the fingerprint that represented Ekström’s mobile number. Since he did not know Swedish, he had to relay the conversations via another mobile back home to Plague, who did the actual eavesdropping.
For five days Plague, who was looking more and more hollow-eyed, listened in vain to a vast number of calls to and from police headquarters and the surrounding buildings. He had heard fragments of ongoing investigations, uncovered planned lovers’ trysts, and taped hours and hours of conversations of no interest whatsoever. Late on the evening of the fifth day, Trinity sent a signal which a digital display instantly identified as Ekström’s mobile number. Plague locked the parabolic antenna on to the exact frequency.
The technology of R.F.T.S. worked primarily on incoming calls to Ekström. Trinity’s parabolic antenna captured the search for Ekström’s mobile number as it was sent through the ether.
Because Trinity could record the calls from Ekström, he also got voiceprints that Plague could process.
Plague ran Ekström’s digitized voice through a program called V.P.R.S., Voiceprint Recognition System. He specified a dozen commonly occurring words, such as “O.K.” or “Salander”. When he had five separate examples of a word, he charted it with respect to the time it took to speak the word, what tone of voice and frequency range it had, whether the end of the word went up or down, and a dozen other markers. The result was a graph. In this way Plague could also monitor outgoing calls from Ekström. His parabolic antenna would be permanently listening out for a call containing Ekström’s characteristic graph curve for one of a dozen commonly occurring words. The technology was not perfect, but roughly half of all the calls that Ekström made on his mobile from anywhere near police headquarters were monitored and recorded.
The system had an obvious weakness. As soon as Ekström left police headquarters, it was no longer possible to monitor his mobile, unless Trinity knew where he was and could park his van in the immediate vicinity.
With the authorization from the highest level, Edklinth had been able to set up a legitimate operations department. He picked four colleagues, purposely selecting younger talent who had experience on the regular police force and were only recently recruited to S.I.S. Two had a background in the Fraud Division, one had been with the financial police, and one was from the Violent Crimes Division. They were summoned to Edklinth’s office and told of their assignment as well as the need for absolute secrecy. He made plain that the investigation was being carried out at the express order of the Prime Minister. Inspector Figuerola was named as their chief, and she directed the investigation with a force that matched her physical appearance.
But the investigation proceeded slowly. This was largely due to the fact that no-one was quite sure who or what should be investigated. On more than one occasion Edklinth and Figuerola considered bringing Mårtensson in for questioning. But they decided to wait. Arresting him would reveal the existence of the investigation.
Finally, on Tuesday, eleven days after the meeting with the Prime Minister, Figuerola came to Edklinth’s office.
“I think we’ve got something.”
“Sit down.”
“Evert Gullberg. One of our investigators had a talk with Marcus Erlander, who’s leading the investigation into Zalachenko’s murder. According to Erlander, S.I.S. contacted the Göteborg police just two hours after the murder and gave them information about Gullberg’s threatening letters.”
“That was fast.”
“A little too fast. S.I.S. faxed nine letters that Gullberg had