Last Will (9 page)

“During dinner they were spaced out across the balcony outside the Golden Hall and along the pillared walkway down toward the courtyard. When the dancing started they spread out, there were a lot of them in the Prince’s Gallery with the royal couple. There were more down by the entrance, I suppose. There were hardly any by the dance floor. But once Caroline had fallen as well they came running from all directions, getting
hold of those of us who had been standing closest. We weren’t allowed to leave until we’d been questioned.”

“So you saw when the man was shot—did you see her get hit as well?”

Annika ran her fingers through her hair, pushing it back.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I was looking at her when she realized she’d been shot. Blood was jetting out from her chest, like this …”

She demonstrated with her hand.

“And then I fell over—someone knocked me and I ended up on the floor right next to Caroline. There was a man next to her with his hands over her heart and blood was bubbling up between his fingers, sort of bright-red, with bubbles of air in it …”

She put her hands over her eyes for a moment to block out the sight.

“God, how horrible,” Berit said. “Don’t you think you ought to talk to someone about this?”

“What, like group therapy?” Annika said, straightening up. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not? A lot of people find it helpful.”

“Not me,” Annika said, and a moment later her cell phone rang.

It was Spike, the head of news.

“Were you thinking of coming in today, or are you on vacation?”

“I’m sitting here working,” Annika said.

“Good. Then you already know what’s happened?”

Annika went completely cold.

“What?”

“The terrorist group Neue Jihad have claimed responsibility for the Nobel killings.”

The newsroom was almost empty. Annika Bengtzon and Berit Hamrin came running in from the staff cafeteria, clutching their bags and coats. Patrik Nilsson was sitting reading telegrams at the main news desk; Spike was talking animatedly on the phone as he gestured simultaneously to Picture Pelle over at the picture desk.

Anders Schyman was brushing some snow from his shoulders, then he pulled off his duffel coat and tossed it onto an empty office chair.

“Shall we go through all of this one more time?” he said, hearing how tired he sounded. “This attack is a type of crime we haven’t seen in Sweden before. Which means that we have to be extremely conscious of where the ethical boundaries lie, and very careful to see that Swedish law is upheld.”

He glanced quickly across the open-plan office. None of his colleagues had slept more than a couple of hours, so he was hardly in a position to complain.

This is a new age, he thought, sitting down heavily on the sofa.

Spike slammed the phone down and grabbed at a pile of printouts.

“Neue Jihad,” he said. “A Muslim terrorist group based in Germany. The security police have been waiting for something like this. Half an hour ago the terrorists released a statement through a server in Berlin in which they claimed responsibility for ‘the murder of the Jewish fascist and Zionist Aaron Wiesel, an infidel who deserved to die.’ They seem to be a fairly creative bunch, and considering what they’ve managed to do so far they’ll probably be a force to reckon with in the future. Patrik’s been in touch with Ranstorp, the terrorism expert; we’re trying to put together an outline of the group’s previous attacks, and see if they can be linked to al Qaeda.”

“There’s one thing wrong, though,” Annika Bengtzon said.

Annika and Berit Hamrin had put their coats on top of his wet duffel coat and had sat down in a couple of free chairs at the end of the news desk.

“What?” Patrik said.

“Wiesel didn’t die,” Berit said.

Spike lost his train of thought and looked at them with a mixture of surprise and resentment.

“Yes, but for God’s sake,” he said, “that’s just details.”

“Not for Wiesel,” Annika said, “I can guarantee you that.”

Schyman was watching them from the corner of his eye, and decided not to get involved.

Spike made a sweeping gesture.

“What do I know? Maybe they wrote the message before the attack took place, then couldn’t change it. And they did actually manage to carry out their plan, to get in and shoot him during the Nobel banquet itself.”

“Before,”
Berit said. “‘Before the attack took place?’”

Spike looked smug.

“Precisely. The police are holding a press conference at 2:00
PM
, I thought Patrik could take it, if you’re not doing anything else, Patrik?”

Patrik Nilsson clicked to close the news agency website and yawned loudly.

“Well,” he said, “I was going to concentrate on Ranstorp, and check my sources at the National Defence College.”

“Okay, Annika, you take the press conference,” Spike said, getting ready to move on.

“Well,” Annika mimicked, “I was going to concentrate on von Behring, and check my sources at the Karolinska Institute.”

Berit started to giggle, and Anders Schyman felt himself getting annoyed.

“Are we going to cover the press conference or not?” he said, slightly too loudly.

“I can take it,” Berit said, swallowing her laughter.

“Are we going to talk to the family?” Schyman asked. “Caroline von Behring must have some sort of background? Husband, children, parents?”

“I haven’t had any answer yet,” Patrik said.

Spike did his best to share out the rest of the work, but as usual it was the reporters themselves who decided what they were going to do.

This newspaper needs a bit more discipline, Anders Schyman thought. The organization doesn’t work anymore, it needs an overhaul. Nothing’s going to be the same in the future.

“Think of the online edition when you’re out in the field,” he said as his colleagues were getting ready to go. “There are no deadlines anymore, just continual updates. This is about teamwork, remember! Annika, can I have a word?”

The reporter stopped, her arms full of clothes and papers and notes.

“What?” she said.

He walked up close to her so the others wouldn’t hear.

“Do you still maintain that you can’t write about what you saw?”

She was pale, with dark rings under her eyes.

“I’m not the one maintaining anything,” she said, “the paper’s lawyer is. He seems to think that Swedish law is worth upholding.”

She turned her back on him and headed off toward her corner room, a mess of uncombed hair down her slender back.

Annoyance rose from his gut and burned in his throat. The thought ran through his brain before he had time to stop it:

I’ve got to get rid of her.

Annika shut the door of her glass office with a soft thud. Schyman had become unbearable. Last night he had seemed unbalanced, and now he was handing over all responsibility to Spike, the man with the worst judgement in Sweden. Thank God Spike was so easy to manipulate.

I’ve got to keep out of this, she thought, switching on her computer.

Berit took the press conference in police headquarters, and was going to go on to visit the wounded security guard in the hospital. He’d regained consciousness and was keen to tell his story.

Another wannabe celebrity, Annika thought, then felt mean for thinking it.

The families of the other two guards had declined to cooperate with the paper. Berit had already taken flowers and passed on their condolences, but neither of them had been interested. The paper’s medical correspondent was going to try to track down Wiesel, who was still in a pretty poor way. Sjölander in the US was looking into the right-wing Christian nuts, and Patrik and a couple of the web-edition staff were keeping in touch with the police and the investigating team.

She went into the paper’s archive, then onto the net, looking for information about Caroline von Behring.

Considering she was such an influential woman, she was extremely anonymous, Annika thought.

She’d never worked anywhere apart from the Karolinska Institute. Never appeared in the media except in connection with her work. Short reports about promotions, little quotes whenever the winners of the medicine prize were announced.

Only in the past few weeks had her name been linked to any form
of controversy: the fact that Wiesel and Watson had been awarded that year’s prize.

She quickly looked up some of the contributions to the debate about W&W’s stem-cell research.

Some suggested that the Karolinska Institute was the very devil’s work, corrupt and biased and completely immoral. On one American site she found a caricature of von Behring with horns and a tail, and on another Alfred Nobel appeared as Frankenstein’s monster with the caption:
Is this what the Committee wants?

There were also impassioned articles defending the decision from other researchers, self-proclaimed heroes who were fighting to wipe out all human disease.

The question was whether it was acceptable to use eggs left over from artificial insemination, to adapt their stem cells and use them for research. That was the technique, known as therapeutic cloning, that scientists had used to come up with Dolly the Sheep.

The most famous advocate for stem-cell research in the US was the now-deceased film star Christopher Reeve, Superman, who had broken his neck in a riding accident. Together with seven scientists he had sued President George W. Bush for putting a stop to stem-cell research. Right up to the end, Reeve had hoped that the new technique could help him walk again.

Annika clicked on through the mass of information on the Internet. How on earth had she ever found out anything before it existed?

She found a feature article about a book entitled
Ethics and Genetic Technology: Philosophical and Religious Perspectives on Genetic Technology, Stem-Cell Research and Cloning,
which clarified that the most obstinate resistance to the research came from Catholic and Protestant groups. Western culture had become so individualized that embryos were regarded as having human rights.

Judaism, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any great problem with the modification of human embryos. The possibility of saving lives was seen as more important than the embryo’s human rights. Human beings acted as God’s assistants in order to improve creation; our duty was to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and to
subordinate it. And if genetic research could help us do that, so much the better.

Even Islam seemed to think that stem-cell research was entirely reasonable. Most religious experts would permit such research if it benefited humanity. In their world, the embryo only becomes a complete human being when it gains a soul, which happens 120 days after conception.

So if al Qaeda was involved, the motivation wasn’t what Wiesel had in his test tubes, Annika thought, going back to Caroline von Behring.

The dead woman was in the telephone directory, with three different numbers. She was listed alongside her husband, Knut Hjalmarsson. Their home address was in Lärkstan, in the Östermalm district of Stockholm. A pretty smart part of town.

Annika tried all three numbers. The first one redirected her to a switched off cell phone with the Telia network’s anonymous message service. The second one reached a fax machine. The third one rang twenty times without anyone answering.

She put the phone down and sighed; she wasn’t going to get an article out of this. She looked at her watch: twelve thirty. She was due to pick the children up by five o’clock, at the latest. And she had to go shopping, it was her turn to cook. And it was Friday, which meant that everything had to be a bit more special than on other days. She sighed again, picked up the phone and ordered a taxi.

It had gotten colder. The snow didn’t seem to be falling as heavily because the flakes had broken up a bit. Instead they swirled around on the increasing wind, making the people on the sidewalks shiver and turn up their collars and hoods. Like a gray-black mass, they slid onward through the slush. Annika leaned back in her seat and shut her eyes to avoid seeing them.

She could feel reality fading and she let it slip away; she even dozed off with her head against the headrest of the seat, as the car zigzagged its way through the city traffic. She slept, mouth open, all the way along Sankt Eriksgatan and Torsgatan, out to the Karolinska Institute in Solna, just beyond the city boundary.

The sharp turn into the university campus made her tumble over
onto the backseat, and she woke with a start. She paid, slightly groggy, and found herself standing outside a squat two-story building of brownish-red bricks with oblong windows.

The Nobel Forum, at number one, Nobels väg.

She walked over and pressed the button on the intercom.

The building seemed cool and deserted, as if it were in mourning. Annika made her way to the Nobel office and was about to knock when a disheveled woman, red-faced from crying, pulled the door open.

“What do you want?”

She was short and round, her hair henna-red, dressed in a white blouse and pale trousers.

Annika had the same uncomfortable feeling she always had when approaching the relatives and colleagues of people who had met an untimely death.

“I’d like to ask some questions about Caroline von Behring,” she said, suddenly not sure what to do with her hands.

The woman sniffed and gave her a skeptical look.

“Why? What sort of questions?”

Annika put her bag down on the floor and held out her hand.

“Annika Bengtzon,” she said, then jumped in. “From the
Evening Post
newspaper. Naturally we have to cover the events at the Nobel banquet last night, and that’s why we’d like to write about Caroline von Behring.”

The woman had taken her hand, hesitantly.

“I see,” she said. “So what sort of thing are you thinking of writing?”

“She seems to have been fairly withdrawn in her private life,” Annika said. “Obviously we’ll respect that. But she did have a very public role in her professional life, and I’d like to ask a few questions about her work and position as the chair of the Nobel Committee.”