The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle (166 page)

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 HÃ¥rdh, 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.

Inspector Monica Figuerola, in spite of her unusual name, was born in Dalarna to a family that had lived in Sweden at least since the time of Gustavus Vasa in the sixteenth century. She was a woman whom people usually paid attention to, for several reasons. She was thirty-six, blue eyed, and six feet tall. She had short, light blond, naturally curly hair. She was attractive and dressed in a way that she knew made her more so. And she was in exceptionally good shape.

She had been a top-level gymnast in her teens and almost qualified for the Olympic team when she was seventeen. She had given up classic gymnastics but still worked out obsessively at the gym five nights a week. She exercised so often that the endorphins her body produced functioned as a drug that made it difficult for her to stop training. She ran, lifted weights, played tennis, did karate. She had cut back on bodybuilding, that extreme variant of bodily glorification, some years ago. In those days she was spending two hours a day pumping iron. Even so, she trained so hard and her body was so muscular that malicious colleagues still called her Herr Figuerola. When she wore a sleeveless T-shirt or a summer dress, no-one could fail to notice her biceps and powerful shoulders.

Her intelligence too intimidated many of her male colleagues. She had left school with top grades, studied to become a police officer at twenty, then served for nine years in Uppsala and studied law in her spare time. For fun, she said, she had also studied for a degree in political science.

When she left patrol duty to become a criminal inspector, it was a great loss to Uppsala street safety. She worked first in the violent crimes division and then in the unit that specialized in financial crime. In 2000 she applied to the Security Police in Uppsala, and by 2001 she had moved to Stockholm. She first worked in Counter-Espionage, but she was almost immediately hand-picked by Edklinth for the Constitutional Protection Unit. He happened
to know Figuerola's father and had followed her career over the years.

When at long last Edklinth concluded that he had to act on Armansky's information, he called Figuerola into his office. She had been at Constitutional Protection for less than three years, which meant she was still more of a real police officer than a desk warrior.

She was dressed that day in tight blue jeans, turquoise sandals with a low heel, and a navy blue jacket.

“What are you working on at the moment, Monica?”

“We're following up on the robbery of the grocer's in Sunne.”

Figuerola was the head of a department of five officers working on political crimes. They relied heavily on computers connected to the incident-reporting network of the regular police. Nearly every report submitted in any police district in Sweden passed through the computers in Figuerola's department. The software scanned every report and reacted to 310 keywords—
nigger
, for example, or
skinhead
,
swastika
,
immigrant
,
anarchist
,
Hitler salute
,
Nazi
,
National Democrat
,
traitor
,
Jew-lover
, or
nigger-lover
. If such a keyword cropped up, the report would be printed out and scrutinized.

The Constitutional Protection Unit publishes an annual report, “Threats to National Security,” which supplies the only reliable statistics on political crime. These statistics are based on reports filed with local police authorities. The Security Police did not normally spend time investigating robberies of groceries, but in the case of the robbery of the shop in Sunne, the computer had reacted to three keywords:
immigrant
,
shoulder patch
, and
nigger
. Two masked men had robbed at gunpoint a shop owned by an immigrant. They had taken 2,780 kronor and a carton of cigarettes. One of the robbers had a mid-length jacket with a Swedish flag shoulder patch. The other had screamed “Fucking nigger” several times at the manager and forced him to lie on the floor.

This was enough for Figuerola's team to initiate the preliminary investigation: to inquire whether the robbers had a connection to the neo-Nazi gang in Värmland, and whether the robbery could be defined as a racist crime. If so, the incident might be included in that year's statistical compilation, which would then itself be incorporated within the European statistics put together by the EU's office in Vienna.

“I have a difficult assignment for you,” Edklinth said. “It's a job that could land you in big trouble. Your career might be ruined. But if things go well, it could be a major step forward for you.”

“I'm all ears.”

“I'm thinking of moving you to the Constitutional Protection operations unit.”

“Forgive me for mentioning this, but Constitutional Protection doesn't have an operations unit.”

“Yes, it does,” Edklinth said. “I established it this morning. At present it consists of you.”

“I see,” said Figuerola hesitantly.

“The task of Constitutional Protection is to defend the constitution against what we call ‘internal threats,' most often those on the extreme left or the extreme right. But what do we do if a threat to the constitution comes from within our own organization?”

For the next half hour he told her what Armansky had told him the night before.

“Who is the source of these claims?” Figuerola said when the story was ended.

“Focus on the information, not the source.”

“What I'm wondering is whether you consider the source to be reliable.”

“I consider the source to be totally reliable. I've known this person for many years.”

“It all sounds a bit … I don't know. Improbable?”

“I know. It's the stuff of a spy novel.”

“How do you expect me to go about tackling it?”

“Starting now, you're released from all other duties. Your task, your only task, is to investigate the truth of this story. You have to either verify or dismiss the claims one by one. You report directly and only to me.”

“I see what you mean when you say I might land in it up to my neck.”

“But if the story is true—if even a fraction of it is true—then we have a constitutional crisis on our hands.”

“Where do you want me to begin?”

“Start with the simple things. First, read the Björck report. Then identify the people who are allegedly tailing this guy Blomkvist. According to my source, the car belongs to Göran MÃ¥rtensson, a police officer living on Vittangigatan in Vällingby. Then identify the other person in the pictures taken by Blomkvist's photographer. The younger blond man here.”

Figuerola was making notes.

“Then look into Gullberg's background. I'd never heard his name before, but my source believes there's a connection between him and the Security Police.”

“So somebody here at SIS put out a contract on a former spy using a seventy-eight-year-old man. I don't believe it.”

“Nevertheless, check it out. Your entire investigation has to be carried out without a single person other than me knowing anything at all about it. Before you take any action I want to be informed. I don't want to see any rings on the water.”

“This is one hell of an investigation. How am I going to do all this alone?”

“You won't have to. You have to do only the first check. If you come back and say that you didn't find anything, then everything is fine. If you come back having found
anything
as my source describes it, then we'll decide what to do.”

Figuerola spent her lunch hour pumping iron in the police gym. Lunch consisted of black coffee and a meatball sandwich with beet salad, which she took back to her office. She closed her door, cleared her desk, and started reading the Björck report while she ate.

She also read the appendix with the correspondence between Björck and Dr. Teleborian. She made a note of every name and every incident in the report that had to be verified. After two hours she got up, went to the coffee machine, and got a refill. When she left her office she locked the door, part of the routine at SIS.

Back at her desk, the first thing she did was check the report's protocol number. She called the registrar and was informed that no report with that protocol number existed. Her second check was to consult a media archive. That yielded better results. The evening papers and a morning paper had reported a person being badly injured in a car fire on Lundagatan on the date in question in 1991. The victim of the incident was a middle-aged man, but no name was given. One evening paper reported that, according to a witness, the fire had been started deliberately by a young girl.