Anger Mode (33 page)

Jonna rejected his suggestion as unnecessary. It was impossible for her to keep tabs on Serge and monitor everything he did. The skills that he possessed were not ones that you could learn at any university. They were the product of a very keen intellect, experience and an almost manic obsession. The man lived for his computers and networks and sat in front of a computer screen every waking moment. How he made a living, she did not want to know.

JÖRGEN HAD NO no appetite. Even though Ulrika Melin served oven-grilled chicken with homemade potato salad, he could not down more than a few mouthfuls. She followed him constantly with her eyes and smiled as soon as he met her light-blue eyes. She was loaded with expectation, like an atomic bomb.

Jörgen cringed when she asked if there was something wrong with the food.

“You’re eating like a bird,” she said with a smile.

Jörgen excused himself and went to the toilet where he spat out a mouthful of food and then rinsed out his mouth. He gulped some water and looked at himself in the mirror. He was pale. He looked worn and undernourished, although the scales at the hospital told another story. How could that be?

One hour later, Jörgen and Ulrika ended up on the sofa, each holding their own glass of red wine. She put her legs up in a provocative pose and lit a few candles on the small coffee table. Jörgen sipped the bag-in-a-box wine. It was a young Merlot from South Africa that left a sour, metallic aftertaste.

They made a toast and she welcomed him for the second, or was it the third, time. Jörgen complimented her choice of wine and gazed around the living room. As far as he could see, the majority of the furnishings came from flat-pack stores.

“Do you like my flat?” she asked, delighted. “I’ve tried to put my personal stamp on the room.”

Jörgen nodded in approval. “You have a really original style.”

“Do you really think so?”

After fifteen minutes, Ulrika had attended to three errands in the kitchen. After each task, she moved a little closer to Jörgen. Now she was sitting so close that her knee nudged the outside of his thigh. He crossed his legs, gaining a few centimetres, but it did not take long before she, by using the excuse that a candle was not standing straight and then adjusting it, took back the remaining centimetres.

Jörgen felt a cold shiver go through his body when their legs touched again. The moment he dreaded had now come. The success of the evening was now in the balance.

He realized that there were two options. He could firmly refuse her and blame the fact that they did not know each other very well. She would probably feel rejected, and the situation would end on an anticlimax that would mean that he would not get to meet her again, which was very unfortunate in terms of the microrouter.

The other, and presumably better, alternative, from the investigative journalist’s perspective, was to empty the bag-in-a-box as quickly as possible and pray that his memory would fail him from now on. Whatever happened that night, he hoped to be blissfully ignorant about it for the rest of his days.

It was ten past two when Jörgen found himself naked in Ulrika’s bedroom. The room was spinning, and he had a hard time getting his mouth to work. Clothes lay in a pile on the floor. Presumably, he had had assistance in taking them off. No matter how he tried, his lips would not form any words – just an unintelligible, continuous slurring. He observed Ulrika with blurry eyes as she took off her clothes. When she was wearing only knickers and a bra, he tried to sit up on the edge of the bed. Despite emptying the bag-in-a-box, he still possessed way too much consciousness. She had drunk only three glasses of wine the whole evening. Jörgen must have tossed back almost two litres. Yet he was still fully conscious of what was about to take place. A shudder ran down his spine. He was on the verge of panicking, but calmed himself by taking some deep breaths through his mangled nose.

Then she removed her bra. He turned around and saw two breasts exposed in the glow from the streetlight outside the window. Jörgen had difficulty focusing and Ulrika’s naked body blurred into the rest of the room.

She discarded her semi-transparent knickers and an overgrown bush grinned back at Jörgen. With the speed of a ferret, she jumped up on the bed and flipped Jörgen on his back. She straddled him with a serious expression and stared into his eyes.

Then she broke into laughter that sounded like screeching seagulls.

“You turn me on,” she said, unabashed.

Jörgen did not have the strength to fight back. With eighty kilos of female flesh on top of him, there was not much he could do. Instead, he closed his eyes and fell into a drunken slumber.

Seconds later, he was brutally awakened by a cold hand on his crotch.

C
HAPTER 25

JONNA CALLED JÖRGEN’S mobile phone at five-thirty in the morning. She had just received a call from an exhilarated Serge Wolinsky, who announced that he was now inside the District Court database. She waited for seven rings on Jörgen’s mobile phone. On the eighth ring, a woman’s voice answered.

When she described herself as a friend of Jörgen’s and asked to speak to him, she was met with silence at the other end. After a few seconds, the woman asked what kind of friend she was. “Just a friend,” Jonna answered drolly.

The woman explained that Jörgen was busy sleeping off a hangover and therefore could not be disturbed. She took a message and promised that Jörgen would call his “friend” back when he woke up, which in all probability would not be before the afternoon, given the amount of alcohol he had consumed the previous evening.

Jonna had herself only consumed two drinks the evening before, not counting the two beers she had in the flat before she went to the club and the wine she drank with her meal. One of the two drinks, a San Francisco, she drank together with Sandra at the San Marino restaurant in Blasieholmen.

After an exquisite dinner of chicken breast poached in white wine and a rather expensive Chardonnay, both girlfriends finished the evening at the trendy club Le Cheliff, down on Stureplan. There, she had her second drink, a dry martini. The queue to Le Cheliff was nonexistent, which was unusual. Perhaps even the brats were feeling the financial recession. After the usual buttering up of the musclebound bouncers on the door, they were both let inside.

As soon as they had hung their coats in the cloakroom, Jonna was approached by a tipsy plumber. He introduced himself as Tomas without the ‘H’ and was twenty-nine. He had his own business and a brand new van with the logo “TOMBOY AB”. He wrote off most of his expenses to the company, except for booze, and had a fifty-inch plasma TV in his living room at Farsta. “Chicks like handymen,” he declared, raising his hand as if swearing an oath. Just in case she wondered, he never cleaned his own pipe by himself and if she needed help cleaning her drains, then he was the man for her. He managed to share this information in one single breath. Jonna thanked him politely for his interest, but declined his invitation. She would think of Tomboy next time she had a “blockage”.

They continued to mingle farther in towards the half-empty dance floor where the music pulsated at a high volume. A disco gigolo got them in his sights just as they got onto the dance floor. The gigolo fixed his eyes on Jonna and threw his arms out as if he was about to dance ‘Zorba the Greek’. Obviously, there was nothing wrong with his confidence. He loosened his tie and started to shake his hips. At a table next to the dance floor, the rest of his seven-man gang sat and clapped in time with his hip gyrations.

Jonna rolled her eyes. Sandra laughed at the spectacle even though she had to limp off the dance floor.

The gigolo adjusted his Beckham faux-hawk haircut, the tip of his tongue appearing through his lips. Spinning, he circled around Jonna, shaking his hips all the while, before ending up behind her.

Before she could turn around, he had grabbed her around the waist, trapping her arms. He pressed against her, resting his chin on her shoulder as his tongue searched for her ear.

That was more than enough now, Jonna sighed in resignation. Perhaps some teenager might have fallen for the dancing hotshot, but definitely not Jonna de Brugge.

Jonna tried to break free, but Don Juan refused to let her go. Instead, he tried to get her to follow his hip moves. She felt his hot breath panting in her ear. The enthusiasm of his gang at the table knew no limits. Their clapping hands were in the air and there was an occasional wolf whistle.

Jonna lost her temper. She took hold of his index finger and bent it backwards until he had to loosen his grip. Then she turned around, still holding the finger, and did a reverse pirouette so that he ended up in front of her in a classic police grip. She pressed his finger carefully upwards until he became co-operative.

She maneouvered him to the party table and parked him, where he sat down, humiliated.

Jonna sat down beside Sandra, who was sitting at a corner table far from the pumping loudspeakers. They laughed at the incident on the dance floor. Sandra shook her head and reminded Jonna that she was always the one who attracted the whackos. Jonna agreed, but had no real explanation for it. It was not as if she did it on purpose. Presumably, it had something to do with her looks. If that was a good or bad thing, she was not sure. Sandra suggested that her good looks might be the problem. Only the overconfident idiots, who had nothing to lose, dared to chat up, in her words, a “top of the line” woman.

Before they left Le Cheliff, Jonna was once again approached. This time, it was a middle-aged lawyer who was as uptight and puffed up as the shirt across his belly.

He bought both Jonna and Sandra dry martinis and got straight to the point. Subtlety was not his thing. He considered Jonna to be the best-looking woman of the night and wanted therefore to make her a proposition that she could not possibly refuse.

Before the plump lawyer could say anything else, Jonna had taken out her police badge. She looked the lawyer straight in the eye and asked him to continue. The proposition never materialized and the lawyer hastily left the club with a bright red face.

“Girl power!” Sandra cried, doing a high five.

“This is about as good as it’s going to get,” Jonna dismally concluded, checking her watch. For the twentieth time, she checked to see if she had missed a text message or a phone call.

They left the club just after two and ended the night with a hug at the taxi rank on Stureplan. Sandra took a taxi back to Hammarby Sjöstad while Jonna debated with herself whether she should walk home, which would take half an hour, or take a taxi as well.

She was aided in her decision-making by a pushy taxi driver, who wanted to take her for a set fare of one hundred and fifty crowns. She chose to walk.

Jonna fell asleep at five past three in the morning. Alone in her oversized bed.

AT SEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning, Jonna rang the doorbell to Serge Wolinsky’s flat. She was met by a pale and red-eyed Serge in only his underpants.

“I was just going to hit the sack,” he said apologetically, looking down at his boxer shorts, which were two sizes too big and had a Hawaiian theme with a red sunset.

“Not anymore,” Jonna smiled and walked straight in.

“Do you have coffee?” she asked, looking at the kitchen.

“Yes, but you’ll have to make it yourself,” he said from a wardrobe in the bedroom.

Jonna looked around the messy kitchen. Dirty dishes that must have been at least a week old were piled in the sink, begging to be disinfected. After a while, she managed to locate the coffeemaker behind a pile of empty tins. She made a full pot.

Meanwhile, Serge had put on some clothes and had ended up in front of one of the computer screens.

“Take your pick,” he said, pointing to a list of data files.

“Is that the server at the Stockholm District Court?” she asked and took a sip of coffee.

Serge turned around when he smelt the coffee.

“That’s my mug. Only I drink from it,” he said with a hostile look when he saw the mug in Jonna’s hand. It was white and had the American National Security Agency logo on both sides.

“It was the only mug where I didn’t have to chip away the leftovers from the bottom,” she said and took another sip.

Serge gave her a surly glare for a few seconds before turning his attention to the screen again.

“All in all, there are four hundred, fifty thousand and ninetyeight files. Including a number of system files,” he said as a program window started to scroll files from the top down.

“What’s the structure of the file system?” Jonna asked.

“It’s a normal tree structure with a jumbled mix of OCR scanned documents, files written in Word and then converted to PDF files, et cetera. There seem to be judgments, different types of memos and other stuff. Their internal search index sucks.”

“Any personnel files?” she asked.

“Nope,” Serge hesitated. “More likely, there are links to a salary system that seems to be stored on the court administration servers. At least, that’s where the IP addresses point to.”

“Hmm …” Jonna hummed, deep in thought. “Their salaries are of course from the District Court, but the administration is completely independent from the courts themselves. Each court has to be completely autonomous.”

“What do you want to do with all the files?” Serge asked impatiently. “To download them will take a few hours. As you know, we don’t have much bandwidth over the GPRS connection.”

“How long will it take?”

“Around eight to nine hours.”

“Then you’d better get started,” she said. “While that’s going on, you have other work to do.”

Serge gazed at her, puzzled. “Like what?”

“You have to write a program while you’re waiting,” Jonna said, taking yet another sip of coffee.

“What type of program?” he asked dubiously.

“A program that solves puzzles.”

“Puzzles?”

“Listen carefully,” she said, putting the coffee mug down on the desk. “In a court hearing, a judge presides who is also the court president, together with three lay jurors and a court secretary who takes notes. Present during the trial are the accused, defending barristers, prosecutors, witnesses and, in most cases, spectators.”

“No kidding?” said Serge, moderately enthusiastic about this lesson on “what goes on in the courtroom”.

“Let me finish,” Jonna said. “I have the name of a district prosecutor, a lay juror and a judge. You’re going to write a program that searches through all the files and lists the documents in which all of these three names are mentioned. I suggest you start with judgment and memo files.”

Serge wrinkled his forehead, concerned. Then he broke into a mischievous smirk. “Has this got anything to do with that Sjöstrand or whatever her name is? The one who killed her own daughter?”

“Listen,” Jonna ordered. “You will match the following three names: Lennart Ekwall, Karin Sjöstrand and Bror Lantz. I want the documents where all three of these names are mentioned together.”

Serge picked up the coffee mug with the NSA logo and grinned. “Gotcha,” he said and took a gulp.

JÖRGEN SAT UP up in the bed and looked around the unfamiliar bedroom. For a short, merciful moment, he had no idea where he was.

Seconds later, panic flooded him.

He heard noises from the kitchen and grabbed his head. The alarm clock on the bedside table said quarter past eight. He lifted the cover and verified that he was, not unsurprisingly, naked. Clothes lay on the floor in a pile by the bed. Who had emerged as the victor during last night’s struggle?

He stood up, but a wall of pain hit him in the head. He was forced to retire to the bed again.

Ulrika Melin gazed at Jörgen from the doorway as he lay with his hands over his face, making remorseful noises. The night had not really developed as she had hoped. But it was not too late yet.

“Good morning,” she said, putting down a tray of coffee and sandwiches on the bed.

Jörgen turned towards her, squinting with his good eye. “Good morning,” he croaked.

“Are we a little hung over today?” she laughed and handed over a cup of fresh coffee.

He reached out his hand, but discovered that it shook so much that the cup would probably be empty before it got to his mouth.

“A full case of the DTs as well,” Ulrika laughed and bent over Jörgen. “Do you want me to feed you?”

“No, thank you. It’s about time for me to think about the final curtain,” he said, making a last-ditch effort to get up.

“Speaking of final curtains,” she said, quickly putting the cup aside. “There wasn’t much of a finale last night, if you get my meaning. You went out like a candle just as the curtain was about to go up.”

He pretended not to hear, continuing to attempt his getaway.

With a swift movement, she pushed him back into bed and held his head firmly on the pillow.

“Not so fast,” she smiled.

Jörgen’s head flashed with pain and he tried to smother an urge to vomit.

Ulrika smiled, carefully stroking his curly hair backwards. Her fingers kept getting tangled in his snake’s nest of curls. After a while, she gave up and extricated her hand, which instead made its way under the covers. Jörgen froze. Suddenly, he was wide-awake.

He half-turned to look at the clock. “I really do have to go now,” he excused himself. “I have a job to go to …”

“So do I,” Ulrika cut him off. “But that doesn’t stop us from staying in bed a few minutes longer.”

She looked curiously at Jorgen while her hand slowly wandered up his leg.

Jörgen started to flinch. Unpleasant tingles shot through his body like bolts.

After a serpentine meander up his thigh, her hand finally covered his penis like clingfilm.

Jörgen turned to stone. Her hands felt as if they had come directly out of the fridge.