Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [217]
He had come to the conclusion that Wadensjöö was a dead weight. He was entirely unsuitable as director of the most important vanguard of Swedish national defence. He could not conceive how he and von Rottinger could ever have made such a fundamental miscalculation as to imagine that Wadensjöö was the appropriate successor.
Wadensjöö was a warrior who needed a fair wind. In a crisis he was feeble and incapable of making a decision. A timid encumbrance lacking steel in his backbone who would most likely have remained in paralysis, incapable of action, and let the Section go under.
It was this simple. Some had it. Others would always falter when it came to the crunch.
“You wanted a word?”
“Sit down,” Clinton said.
Wadensjöö sat.
“I’m at a stage in my life when I can no longer waste time. I’ll get straight to the point. When all this is over, I want you to resign from the management of the Section.”
“You do?”
Clinton tempered his tone.
“You’re a good man, Wadensjöö. But unfortunately you’re completely unsuited to shouldering the responsibility after Gullberg. You should not have been given that responsibility. Von Rottinger and I were at fault when we failed to deal properly with the succession after I got sick.”
“You’ve never liked me.”
“You’re wrong about that. You were an excellent administrator when von Rottinger and I were in charge of the Section. We would have been helpless without you, and I have great admiration for your patriotism. It’s your inability to make decisions that lets you down.”
Wadensjöö smiled bitterly. “After this, I don’t know if I even want to stay in the Section.”
“Now that Gullberg and von Rottinger are gone, I’ve had to make the crucial decisions myself,” Clinton said. “And you’ve obstructed every decision I’ve made during the past few months.”
“And I maintain that the decisions you’ve made are absurd. It’s going to end in disaster.”
“That’s possible. But your indecision would have guaranteed our collapse. Now at least we have a chance, and it seems to be working. Millennium don’t know which way to turn. They may suspect that we’re somewhere out here, but they lack documentation and they have no way of finding it – or us. And we know at least as much as they do.”
Wadensjöö looked out of the window and across the rooftops.
“The only thing we still have to do is to get rid of Zalachenko’s daughter,” Clinton said. “If anyone starts burrowing about in her past and listening to what she has to say, there’s no knowing what might happen. But the trial starts in a few days and then it’ll be over. This time we have to bury her so deep that she’ll never come back to haunt us.”
Wadensjöö shook his head.
“I don’t understand your attitude,” Clinton said.
“I can see that. You’re sixty-eight years old. You’re dying. Your decisions are not rational, and yet you seem to have bewitched Nyström and Sandberg. They obey you as if you were God the Father.”
“I am God the Father in everything that has to do with the Section. We’re working according to a plan. Our decision to act has given the Section a chance. And it is with the utmost conviction that I say that the Section will never find itself in such an exposed position again. When all this is over, we’re going to put in hand a complete overhaul of our activities.”
“I see.”
“Nyström will be the new director. He’s really too old, but he’s the only choice we have, and he’s promised to stay on for six years at least. Sandberg is too young and – as a direct result of your management policies – too inexperienced. He should have been fully trained by now.”
“Clinton, don’t you see what you’ve done? You’ve murdered a man. Björck worked for the Section for thirty-five years, and you ordered his death. Do you not understand—”
“You know quite well that it was necessary. He betrayed us, and he would never have withstood the pressure when the police closed in.”
Wadensjöö stood up.
“I’m not finished.”
“Then we’ll have to take it up later. I have a job to do while you lie here fantasizing that you’re the Almighty.”