The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (34 page)

“I’m having trouble digesting it myself. Not to mention that someone saunters into Sahlgrenska and blows Zalachenko’s head off. And at the same time, Gunnar Björck, author of the report, hangs himself.”

“So you think there’s a single hand behind all this? I know Inspector Erlander, who did the investigation in Göteborg. He said there was nothing to indicate that the murder was other than the impulsive act of a sick man. And we did a thorough investigation of Björck’s place. Everything points towards a suicide.”

“Gullberg, seventy-eight years old, suffering from cancer, recently treated for depression. Our operations chief, Johan Fräklund, has been looking into his background.”

“And?”

“He did his military service in Karlskrona in the forties, studied law, and eventually became a tax adviser. Had an office here in Stockholm for thirty years: low profile, private clients . . . whoever they might have been. Retired in 1991. Moved back to his hometown of Laholm in 1994. Unremarkable, except—”

“Except what?”

“Except for one or two surprising details. Fräklund cannot find a single reference to Gullberg anywhere. He’s never referred to in any newspaper or trade journal, and there’s no-one who can tell us who his clients were. It’s as if he never actually existed in the professional world.”

“What are you saying?”

“Säpo is the obvious link. Zalachenko was a Soviet defector. Who else but Säpo would have taken charge of him? Then there’s the question of a coordinated strategy to get Salander locked away in an institution. Now we
have burglaries, muggings, and telephone tapping. But I don’t think Säpo is behind this. Blomkvist calls them ‘the Zalachenko club,’ a small group of dormant Cold War mongers who hide out in some dark hallway at Säpo.”

“So what can we do?” Bublanski said.

Superintendent Torsten Edklinth, director of Constitutional Protection at the Security Police, slowly swirled his glass of red wine and listened attentively to the CEO of Milton Security, who had called out of the blue and insisted Edklinth come to Sunday dinner at his place on Lidingö. Armansky’s wife, Ritva, had made a delicious casserole. They had eaten well and talked politely about nothing in particular. Edklinth was wondering what was on Armansky’s mind. After dinner Ritva repaired to the sofa to watch TV and left them at the table. Armansky began to tell him the story of Lisbeth Salander.

Edklinth and Armansky had known each other for twelve years, ever since a female member of Parliament had received death threats. She’d reported the matter to the head of her party, and Parliament’s security detail was informed. In due course the matter came to the attention of the Security Police. At that time, Personal Protection had the smallest budget of any unit. The member of Parliament was given surveillance during the course of her official appearances but was left to her own devices at the end of the working day, the time when she was obviously more vulnerable. She began to have doubts about the ability of the Security Police to protect her.

She arrived home late one evening to discover that someone had broken in, daubed sexually explicit epithets on her living-room walls, and masturbated in her bed. She immediately hired Milton Security to take over her personal protection. She did not advise Säpo of this decision. The next morning, when she was due to appear at a school in Täby, there was a confrontation between the government security forces and her Milton bodyguards.

At that time, Edklinth was acting deputy chief of Personal Protection. He instinctively disliked a situation in which private muscle was doing what a government department was supposed to do. But he recognized that the member of Parliament had reason enough for complaint. Instead of exacerbating the issue, he invited Milton Security’s CEO to lunch. They agreed that the situation might be more serious than Säpo had at first assumed, and Edklinth realized that Armansky’s people not only had the skills for the job, but also that they were as well trained and probably better equipped. They solved the immediate problem by giving Armansky’s people responsibility for bodyguard services, while the Security Police took care of the criminal investigation and paid the bill.

The two men discovered that they liked each other a good deal, and they enjoyed working together on a number of assignments in subsequent years. Edklinth had great respect for Armansky, so when he was invited to dinner and to have a private conversation, he was willing to listen.

But he had not anticipated Armansky’s lobbing a bomb with a sizzling fuse into his lap.

“You’re telling me that the Security Police is involved in flagrant criminal activity.”

“No,” Armansky said. “You misunderstand me. I’m saying that some people within the Security Police are involved in such activity. I don’t believe that this activity is sanctioned by the leadership of SIS, or that it has government approval.”

Edklinth studied Malm’s photographs of a man getting into a car with a registration number that began with the letters KAB.

“Dragan . . . this isn’t a practical joke?”

“I wish it were.”

The next morning Edklinth was in his office at police headquarters, meticulously cleaning his glasses. He was a grey-haired man with big ears and a powerful face, but for the moment his expression was more puzzled than powerful. He had spent most of the night worrying about how to deal with the information Armansky had given him.

They were not pleasant thoughts. The Security Police was an institution in Sweden that all parties (well, almost all) agreed had an indispensable value. This led them to distrust the group and at the same time concoct imaginative conspiracy theories about it. The scandals had undoubtedly been many, especially in the leftist-radical seventies when a number of constitutional blunders had certainly occurred. But after five governmental—and
roundly criticized—Säpo investigations, a new generation of civil servants had come through. They represented a younger school of activists recruited from the financial, weapons, and fraud units of the state police. They were officers used to investigating real crimes, not chasing political mirages. The Security Police had been modernized, and the Constitutional Protection Unit in particular had taken on a new, conspicuous role. Its task, as set out in the government’s instructions, was to uncover and prevent threats to the internal security of the nation, that is, “unlawful activity that uses violence, threat, or coercion for the purpose of altering our form of government, inducing decision-making political entities or authorities to take decisions in a certain direction, or preventing individual citizens from exercising their constitutionally protected rights and liberties.”

In short, to defend Swedish democracy against real or presumed anti-democratic threats. They were chiefly concerned with the anarchists and the neo-Nazis: the anarchists because they persisted in practicing civil disobedience, the neo-Nazis because they were by definition the enemies of democracy.

After completing his law degree, Edklinth had worked as a prosecutor, and then twenty-one years ago joined the Security Police. He had at first worked in the field in the Personal Protection Unit, then within the Constitutional Protection Unit as an analyst and administrator. Eventually he became director of the agency, the head of the police forces responsible for the defence of Swedish democracy. He considered himself a democrat. The constitution had been established by Parliament, and it was his job to see that it stayed intact.

Swedish democracy is based on a single premise: the Right to Free Speech (RFS). This guarantees the inalienable right to say, think, and believe anything whatsoever. It embraces all Swedish citizens, from the crazy neo-Nazi living in the woods to the rock-throwing anarchist—and everyone in between.

Every other basic right, such as the Formation of Government and the Right to Freedom of Organization, are simply practical extensions of the Right to Free Speech. On this law democracy stands or falls.

All democracy has its limits, and the limits to the RFS are set by the Freedom of the Press regulation (FP). This defines four restrictions on democracy. It is forbidden to publish child pornography and the depiction of certain violent sexual acts, regardless of how artistic the originator believes the depiction to be. It is forbidden to incite or exhort someone to commit a crime. It is forbidden to defame or slander another person. It is forbidden to engage in the persecution of an ethnic group.

Press freedom has also been enshrined by Parliament and is based on the socially and democratically acceptable restrictions of society, that is, the social contract that makes up the framework of a civilized society. The core of the legislation states that no person has the right to harass or humiliate another person.

Since RFS and FP are laws, some sort of authority is needed to guarantee the observance of these laws. In Sweden this function is divided between two institutions.

The first is the office of the prosecutor general, assigned to prosecute crimes against FP. This did not please Torsten Edklinth. In his view, the prosecutor general was too lenient with cases concerning what were, in his view, direct crimes against the Swedish constitution. The prosecutor general usually replied that the principle of democracy was so important that it was only in an extreme emergency that he should step in and bring a charge. This attitude, however, had come under question more and more in recent years, particularly after Robert Hårdh, the general secretary of the Swedish Helsinki Committee, submitted a report which examined the prosecutor general’s lack of initiative over a number of years. The report claimed that it was almost impossible to charge and convict anyone under the law of persecution against an ethnic group.

The second institution is the Security Police division for Constitutional Protection, and Superintendent Edklinth took on this responsibility with the utmost seriousness. He thought it was the most important post a Swedish policeman could hold, and he wouldn’t have exchanged his appointment for any other position in the entire Swedish legal system or police force. He was the only policeman in Sweden whose official job description was to function as a political police officer. It was a delicate task requiring great wisdom and judicial restraint, since far too many countries have shown that a political police department can easily transform itself into the principal threat to democracy.

The media and the public assumed for the most part that the main function of the Constitutional Protection Unit was to keep track of Nazis and militant vegans. These types of groups did attract interest from the Constitutional Protection Unit, but a great many institutions and phenomena also fell under the auspices of the division. If the king, for example, or the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, happened to decide that Parliament should be replaced by a dictatorship, they would very swiftly come under observation by the Constitutional Protection Unit. Or, to give a second example, if a group of police officers decided to stretch the laws so that an individual’s constitutionally guaranteed rights were infringed, then it
was the Constitutional Protection Unit’s duty to react. In such serious instances the investigation also came under the authority of the prosecutor general.

The problem, of course, was that the Constitutional Protection Unit had only an analytical and investigative function, and no operations arm. That was why generally either the regular police or other divisions within the Security Police stepped in when neo-Nazis were to be arrested.

In Edklinth’s opinion, this state of affairs was deeply unsatisfactory. Almost every democratic country maintains an independent constitutional court in some form, with a mandate to see to it that authorities do not ride roughshod over the democratic process. In Sweden the task is that of the prosecutor general or the parliamentary ombudsman, who, however, can only pursue recommendations forwarded to them by other departments. If Sweden had a constitutional court, then Salander’s lawyer could instantly charge the Swedish government with the violation of her constitutional rights. The court could then order all the documents on the table and summon anyone it pleased, including the prime minister, to testify until the matter was resolved. But in the current situation, the most her lawyer could do was file a report with the parliamentary ombudsman, who didn’t have the authority to walk into the Security Police and start demanding documents and other evidence.

Over the years, Edklinth had been an impassioned advocate of the establishment of a constitutional court. He could then more easily act upon the information he had been given by Armansky. But as things stood, Edklinth lacked the legal authority to initiate a preliminary investigation.

He took a pinch of snuff.

If Armansky’s information was correct, Security Police officers in senior positions had looked the other way when a series of savage assaults were committed against a Swedish woman. Then her daughter was locked up in a mental hospital on the basis of a fabricated diagnosis. Finally, they had given carte blanche to a former Soviet intelligence officer to commit crimes involving weapons, narcotics, and sex trafficking. Edklinth grimaced. He did not even want to begin to estimate how many counts of illegal activity must have taken place. Not to mention the burglary at Blomkvist’s apartment, the attack on Salander’s lawyer—which Edklinth could not bring himself to accept was part of the same pattern—and possible involvement in the murder of Zalachenko.

It was a mess, and Edklinth didn’t feel the slightest desire to get mixed up in it. Unfortunately, he had become involved from the moment Armansky invited him to dinner.

How now to handle the situation? Technically, the answer was simple. If Armansky’s account was true, Lisbeth Salander had at the very least been deprived of the opportunity to exercise her constitutionally protected rights and liberties. From a constitutional standpoint, this was the first can of worms. Decision-making political bodies had been induced to make certain decisions. This too touched on the core of the responsibility delegated to the Constitutional Protection Unit. Edklinth, a policeman, had knowledge of a crime, and thus he had the obligation to submit a report to a prosecutor. In real life, the answer was not so simple. It was, to put it mildly, complicated.