The Swimmer (40 page)

The door that led to the dock opened, and Klara’s grandfather came out with two steaming mugs in his hands.

‘Klara,’ he said. ‘Sweet girl, come in so you don’t catch your death of cold.’

He took a few steps onto the snow-covered dock and held the mugs out to her and George. The sweet scent of mulled wine filled the air. George gratefully accepted his mug, and Grandpa stretched out his hand toward Klara and stroked her wet cheek.

‘No matter what your intentions, it’ll turn out wrong somehow in the end,’ he said. ‘That’s the only thing life teaches you.’

Klara took the mug and pressed her cheek into his dry hand, felt its warmth against her frozen, wet skin. She shook her head.

‘It wasn’t wrong,’ she said. ‘You weren’t wrong. There was no right or wrong. You did what you thought was best. You’ve always done everything for me.’

Grandpa pulled her to him. He smelled faintly of mulled wine, coffee, and alcohol. Somewhere beside them George coughed.

‘Oh my God!’ he said. ‘What’s in this mulled wine?’

Grandpa turned to him with a sly smile on his lips.

‘Half mulled wine and half Archipelago Special,’ he said. ‘Bosse’s not the only one with access to first-class liquor out here.’

Stockholm, Sweden

The soda didn’t help. Gabriella’s throat felt like sandpaper. She cleared it. Took another sip.

‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘That is the computer.’

She leaned forward and slid it across the glass table, toward Susan. As she did so, a door opened, and a man exited from the suite’s interior. He was dark-haired, serious, wore a dark, wrinkled suit, and seemed to be about the same age as Gabriella. He wore a white shirt, but no tie.

‘This is my colleague. He’ll verify that this is indeed the right computer,’ said Susan.

Gabriella’s throat constricted even farther.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s encoded. We don’t even know what’s on it.’

She ran her hand through her hair nervously. Thinking she had to take control of this situation, of herself. They’d start to suspect something if she didn’t calm down.

‘Maybe so,’ said Susan. ‘That’s likely the case. But I’m afraid we have quite a bit more to discuss with you and your client. You’ve been subjected to things you shouldn’t have been subjected to. And even though it’s not your fault, it’s still a problem.’

The way Susan said it made it sound like a threat. Her eyes were glassy and coldly calculating. It was just like the American on the island had said. If you have nothing to bargain with, you’ll have nothing to protect you.

The man in the wrinkled suit threw a quick glance at Gabriella before opening the screen and pressing the power button. Gabriella closed her eyes. The stress was too intense. She heard the clacking of the man’s fingers flying over the keyboard. She leaned back in the couch. How could they have imagined this plan would work? When Gabriella opened her eyes cautiously, just a slit, as if she didn’t quite dare to see what was happening, the man’s forehead was furrowed. His eyes darted across the screen as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. After a few seconds he turned the screen in Susan’s direction and looked up at Gabriella.

‘Is this some kind of fucking joke?’ he said.

Gabriella sat up on the couch. She glanced toward the door she’d come through just a few minutes ago. Come on now!

‘How is it possible,’ Gabriella heard Susan say, ‘that after everything you’ve been through, you still don’t understand the seriousness of this situation? What in the hell do you hope to accomplish by this?’

Susan did not seem like the kind of woman who usually swore. She turned the screen so that Gabriella could see it too. Against a white background in thick, red letters, FUCK YOU FASCIST PIGS! was emblazoned across the screen. If the situation hadn’t been so horribly stressful, Gabriella would have laughed. Blitzie seemed to be exactly as Klara described her. Before Gabriella could say anything she heard the sound of a key card being swiped through the lock on the hotel door. The door was opened partway, and a guard stuck his head into the suite.

‘One of our Swedish contacts says he has a phone call for your guest.’

The man nodded in Gabriella’s direction. She couldn’t breathe. It was as if she’d forgotten how. Somehow she managed to open her mouth and squeeze out a few words.

‘If you want an explanation,’ she croaked, ‘it’s probably best that you let me take this call.’

She pointed awkwardly toward the door. She had hoped she’d be tougher in this situation. But she was overwhelmed; she had no choice but to let the current carry her.

Susan looked at her in confusion. It seemed as though her polished surface had been scratched.

‘A phone call?’ she said. ‘Are you kidding me?’

‘No,’ said Gabriella. ‘I’m not kidding. If you want that damn information, then you’ll have to let me take this call.’

Susan shook her head and gestured for the man in the wrinkled suit to leave. He got up and slunk through the door, back to the room he’d come from. She inspected Gabriella carefully, as if to signal that she was still in charge of this situation.

‘Okay,’ she said finally.

Gabriella stood up and walked toward the guard, who held her cell phone in his hand. With a quick glance over her shoulder at Susan she opened the door and stepped out into the windowless corridor.

Gabriella ignored the remaining guard at the suite door and started walking down the corridor toward the elevators. She fumbled nervously with the phone and finally pressed it against her ear. This was it.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is Gabriella.’

There was silence on the other end.

‘Hello?’ she tried again.

It took another second, before a thin metallic voice appeared in her ear.

‘It’s absolutely disgusting,’ said someone who could only be Blitzie, her voice channeled through some distortion device. ‘It’s fucking disgusting, what’s on this computer. Corpses and torture or whatever you wanna call it. Video and pictures. I haven’t had time to look through much of it yet, obviously. But it’s absolutely full of this shit, that’s for sure.’

‘So you got the password?’ said Gabriella.

It felt like she was floating away from herself. As if she could see everything from above, from outside. The suite with Susan in it and herself only a few yards away, holding the phone in the middle of this suffocating hotel corridor. It was surreal.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Blitzie. ‘Of course. When the correct password was entered into your computer it was automatically sent to me. I just typed it in here. Piece of cake. What do you want me to do now?’

‘How much stuff is there?’ said Gabriella.

‘I don’t know,’ Blitzie replied. ‘One, two, three… at least five of these films where they, you know, torture people, I guess. Maybe fifty photos. Corpses and disgusting things. There are a couple of Word documents as well but I guess—’

Suddenly Gabriella remembered what Mahmoud had said about Lindman, what Klara had said about the dying American: that there was something else, something more. Something impossible to deny. ‘Open the Word documents,’ she said.

‘Okay,’ Blitzie said. ‘Hold on.’

There was a moment of silence. Gabriella glanced over toward the guards by the door. They were immobile, their eyes firmly locked on her.

‘So,’ Blitzie said. ‘I don’t know. It’s just a list of Arabic names and birthdates.’

‘Maybe the prisoners,’ Gabriella mumbled. ‘Open the other one.’

‘Same thing,’ Blitzie said. ‘Just names and numbers.’

There had to be something else. Something that they couldn’t wash their hands of. Or had both the American and Lindman been wrong?

‘Is that it?’ Gabriella said. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Well, it’s all I can see here. Wait… There is a PDF document as well.’

She went quiet for a moment.

‘Fuck,’ Blitze said finally. ‘You need to see this. I’ll send it to your phone, okay? This shit is crazy.’

A wave of excitement and relief ran through Gabriella.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Don’t do anything with the information yet, okay?’

‘I’m not suicidal,’ replied Blitzie, and hung up.

When Gabriella returned to the suite it had gone almost completely dark outside the enormous window. It looked like it was snowing lightly. A beautiful Christmas eve was under way out there. The suite was dark too, the only lighting two dim lamps on a side table.

Susan was in the chair by the window, checking her phone. She looked up when Gabriella opened the door.

‘So,’ she started. ‘Would you like to tell me what is going on here?’

Gabriella sat down on the sofa and leaned back. The atmosphere in the room had changed considerably. She wondered if Susan understood just how fundamentally. Soon enough she would.

‘When your man punched in the password on the computer that I had with me, it was automatically sent to a friend of mine,’ Gabriella started. ‘The computer I gave to you was just a shell. The hard drive had been exchanged for the one on my friend’s computer. So all the data you’ve been chasing was in fact not on this computer anymore. Do you understand?’

‘All right…’ Susan said tentatively. ‘Go on.’

‘So when my friend received the password, we received access to all the information that is stored on the laptop.’

If Susan was shocked or the slightest bit upset she didn’t let on. She nodded calmly.

‘And what was it that was stored on the laptop?’ she said.

‘You don’t know?’ Gabriella said, incredulous. ‘You sent a gang of murderous thugs after us just as some sort of precaution?’

Susan shook her head calmly and leaned forward slightly in her chair.

‘Of course I know the general theme of what was on the computer,’ she said slowly, as if to a child. ‘But I don’t know the extent. I have understood that there were enhanced interrogations, that the company to which we had outsourced the managing of one of our facilities went rogue.’

Gabriella didn’t say anything.
Enhanced interrogation
. There was something in that bureaucratic euphemism that sounded even worse than
torture
.

‘It’s terrible,’ Susan continued. ‘It’s truly terrible. You must understand that this operation was never sanctioned. We hired this company to manage some of the prisoners and to carry out interrogations in accordance with our internal procedures. Unfortunately they took matters into their own hands. When we discovered it, we immediately took measures to shut them down. Then when we learned that some pictures of this horrible practice had leaked we made the mistake of letting the company convince us that they could put things back in their place. This put you and your friends at danger, for which I am truly sorry. In hindsight, maybe we should have just come clean right away? I mean, what happened was out of our hands. We do what we can to curtail this kind of operation, but unfortunately we can’t control every aspect of the intelligence machine, however much we would like to.’

Even now, in the face of what Susan certainly must recognize as defeat, she kept up the act. It was eerily impressive.

‘My friend died,’ Gabriella said, her voice cold and empty. ‘Your fucking decisions led to him being shot down in a fucking grocery store.’

‘And for that I am so, so sorry,’ Susan said.

A warmth at the core of her voice shone through the steeliness of her professionalism and made it sound as if she actually meant it.

‘Maybe you actually are sorry for that,’ Gabriella said. ‘But you are lying about everything else.’

Susan pulled back slightly, as if Gabriella had made a halfhearted attempt at slapping her in the face.

‘Now why would you say that?’ she said.

‘Because you are,’ Gabriella said. ‘Enhanced interrogation? Really? You really want to call it that? We have pictures and videos of prisoners being burned with cigarettes, butchered, electrocuted, tortured in every conceivable, medieval way you can dream up. And you still want to stick with this enhanced interrogation routine?’

‘But you must understand,’ Susan began, her voice all steel again. ‘This was never what we wanted, never what we had instructed or intended it to be. Things got out of hand.’

Gabriella just looked at her. Then she quietly slid her phone across the table to her. Susan did not move to take it but just let it lie there, its screen gleaming in the half-light.

‘What’s that?’ she said, nodding at the phone.

‘That’s a PDF document that we found on the hard drive together with the pictures and films,’ Gabriella said. ‘It contains two letters. One is from you to what I believe is the director of the CIA. It’s dated about a year ago. You might remember it? In the letter you outline the high success rates of an operation in Afghanistan managed by a company called Digital Solutions. You warn the director that their methods might go beyond the manuals. I think you might even use the word “brutal”?’

Susan had turned away from Gabriella and was looking out at the steady snowfall.

‘The second document,’ Gabriella continued, ‘is signed by the director of the CIA. It says that after having consulted with the White House, his decision is to continue the operation managed by Digital Solutions and to do everything to assist them, while keeping them gray. Whatever that means?’

Susan turned back toward Gabriella. There was sadness in her eyes now.

‘Gray,’ she said. ‘It refers to shadows, I guess. That’s what we call it when we maintain deniability. When we remove someone from our databases and accounting systems, erase them from our records, make it seem as if they never existed. And that’s what we did.’

She sighed and nodded at the phone.

‘Not even that letter is recorded anywhere. As you can see, it has no document number. Only a date. But Digital Solutions insisted on knowing that what they were doing was sanctioned.’

She shook her head slowly.

‘You understand the kind of chaos this will lead to?’ she began again. ‘For Afghanistan, of course. For us. For the entire Arab world. If those pictures are as terrible as your friend seems to think and with the letter making it seem like it was all done as part of an official strategy—how can they not hate us when they see all of that?’