Borderline (19 page)

‘Who?’ I said.

He kicked me in the chest. I heard a rib crack and twisted away.

‘Yimmie Allenius,’ the man with the machete said.

Yimmie Allenius? Did he mean Jimmy Halenius?

‘The under-secretary?’ I asked. ‘The under-secretary of state? Where I work?’

A row of teeth flashed above me. ‘Very good! Colleague at work. You secretary, research secretary.’ He bent over and pressed on the place where he had kicked me. I heard myself groan.

‘You rich man?’ he whispered to the wall behind me.

‘No,’ I muttered in reply, ‘not at all.’

He pushed his fingers deeper into my ribcage. ‘You rich man?’ he screamed in my ear, and the whole world roared in answer.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes, yes. I’m rich man.’

He stood up and turned towards the doorway. ‘
Picha vifaa
,’ he said, and the tall man crept into the shack with a big lamp and a video camera. I remembered the journalist Annika had written about in the USA, the American whose head had been cut off in a video on the internet, and the air filled with blood-red panic.

* * *

That day’s print edition wasn’t much to shout about, he had to admit. The potential serial killer they had come up with for the front page was more tenuous than was strictly acceptable, but what was an editor with ambitious sales targets to do?

Apart from that, the Nightmare Scenario, with capital letters, had occurred in the early hours of the morning. The newsflash about the French passenger-plane crash had come in precisely two minutes after printing had reached the point where it was no longer possible to add any extra pages to the paper. They could have produced a new edition for the big cities, and there was a risk that the other evening paper would do that, but in Schyman’s opinion a serial killer in the suburbs of Stockholm, no matter how theoretical he might be, was at least as commercially appealing as a plane crash in which no Swedes were involved. Obviously the online edition was leading with the plane, and in the blogosphere the self-appointed experts were already broadcasting their evaluations: Islamic fundamentalists had blown the plane up, or rather down, into the sea. They clearly hadn’t learned anything from events in Norway.

The online edition had taken the speculation a step further and was running summaries of famous terrorist attacks in a fact box next to the article about the air disaster. To distance themselves from the mob mentality of the net, they had included boxes about Osama bin Laden and Anders Behring Breivik.

Personally Schyman had serious doubts about the terrorism theory. He had done his military service in the air force, at base F21 up in Luleå (admittedly only on fatigue duty), and had some very basic knowledge of the subject. If nothing else, his military service had given him an interest in the aeronautics industry and plane crashes. It was the second time this century that Air France had suffered an incident of this sort. A few years ago an Airbus A330 with 228 people on board had crashed on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, falling into the Atlantic. Only last summer had they finally managed to recover the black box from the seabed. They still didn’t know the exact cause of the accident: it might have been pilot error or bad weather – turbulence, lightning, strong storm winds. He found it highly improbable that the cause of the latest crash was some confused Muslim, explosives hidden in the heels of his shoes, or, for that matter, a Norwegian Christian.

From the corner of his eye he saw a familiar face fill the television screen on the far wall. It was everyone’s favourite Swedish EU commissioner, the talented young liberal politician who spoke five languages fluently and had responsibility for immigration into Europe and internal security. She was being interviewed in the Sky News studio. He reached for the remote and turned up the volume.

‘Absolutely,’ she said, in reply to a question he hadn’t heard. ‘The conference in Nairobi was a great success. The agreements haven’t been signed yet, but our collaboration with the African Union has been expanded, and each side has a greater understanding of the other’s respective policies and wishes.’

‘So there’s no chance that the kidnappers’ demand for Europe to open its borders will be considered?’

The EU commissioner’s head jerked slightly. ‘In light of the recent turbulence in North Africa and the Middle East, Frontex is more necessary than ever,’ she said. ‘Not only to protect the population of Europe, but to help and support refugees in the countries affected. Frontex is working to save lives. Without Frontex the torrent of refugees would—’

‘To save lives? But in this case the kidnappers are threatening to kill the hostages.’

‘The border crossings with Somalia need to be strengthened. That’s one of our key demands.’

His intercom buzzed, a little grating sound that always made him jump.

‘You have a visitor on the way up to see you,’ the caretaker said, the new one who actually seemed to have a brain.

‘Thanks,’ the editor-in-chief said, and pressed the button he thought he was supposed to press. Then he got the remote control and switched off the EU commissioner.

He looked out across the newsroom and saw Annika Bengtzon materialize in the office with her usual evasive body language, as if she were floating a centimetre or so above the floor. Maybe she did it to make herself less visible, but it had the opposite effect. Whenever she walked in, a silence would form around her, like a sort of vacuum. The light seemed to get more intense and everyone would look up: a quick glance to see what was disturbing the status quo.

She knocked on the glass door of his office as if he hadn’t seen her until then.

He waved her in.

‘Have the councils given up clearing snow all over Sweden, or just in Stockholm?’ she asked, as she pulled off her padded jacket and let it fall in a heap on to the floor.

‘Living in a democracy means that you only get what you want half the time,’ Schyman said. ‘And it was the public, in its boundless wisdom, who voted in this administration.’

She slumped on to his visitor’s chair with her hair pulled into a bird’s nest on top of her head. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘I might have been a bit hasty when I rejected your proposal yesterday.’

She had dark rings under her eyes, but seemed together. And she’d changed her clothes: a red sweater and black jeans.

‘I said you could think about it,’ he reminded her.

She squirmed on the chair. ‘The idea of talking about this in public feels so sleazy,’ she said. ‘Like standing in the square naked so that people have something to be shocked about.’

He nodded and waited. If it had been someone else sitting in front of him, pretty much anyone at all, he would have seen that remark as the beginning of lengthy negotiations about amounts and conditions. But Annika rarely had a hidden agenda. She had no talent for guile or manipulation. Her way of working was more like a tank’s: straightforward, as hard as possible, until all resistance had been crushed.

‘I don’t know yet if I need the money,’ she said. ‘How long have I got to make up my mind?’

‘The board needs a decision on Monday morning,’ he replied.

That wasn’t true. He could do what he liked with the money. It was in his budget (for ‘additional external costs’) and the board had no idea. But he didn’t have forty million dollars at his disposal. The upper limit was set at three million kronor.

Annika’s gaze had settled on that day’s paper, which was lying front-page up on his desk. ‘Do you believe that?’ she asked.

He felt his mood drop like a stone. ‘Annika …’

She pointed at the picture of Linnea Sendman. ‘She’d reported her husband four times for abusing her. Did you know that? She tried to get a restraining order twice, but failed both times. Have you checked that?’

‘Maybe there was a reason why the complaints weren’t acted upon,’ Schyman said, and heard how contrary he sounded. Bengtzon always managed to provoke him. Now she was sitting on the edge of her seat and leaning over his desk. She’d really got the bit between her teeth.

‘The prosecutor thought she was a silly, hysterical woman who ought to try being reasonable instead of getting stressed over little things. The same old routine, in other words.’

‘So what do you think we should have done? We can’t accuse her husband of something for which we’ve got no evidence against him,’ Schyman said, aware that he was on thin ice. And, sure enough, Bengtzon shut her eyes the way she always did when she couldn’t quite believe how incredibly stupid he was being.

‘But the plane that crashed was blown up by terrorists?’ she said.

He stood up, irritated. What did this have to do with his proposal to pay the ransom for her kidnapped husband? ‘We don’t point the finger at individuals, you know that,’ he said.

She leaned back in her chair. ‘Did you read the Europol report about terrorism in Europe a few years ago?’

Schyman tried to gather his strength.

‘Four hundred and ninety-eight acts of terrorism were committed in Europe within the space of a year,’ she went on. ‘Hundreds of people were arrested, under suspicion of various types of terrorist activity. The majority were Muslim. But do you know how many of those four hundred and ninety-eight acts of terrorism were committed by Islamic terrorists?’

‘Annika …’

‘One.’

He looked at her. ‘One?’

‘One. Most of the other four hundred and ninety-seven were carried out by various separatist groups, ETA and the Corsican nutters, neo-Nazis and animal rights activists, the odd Communist and a few complete lunatics. But every time we wrote about terrorists, we implied that they were Muslims.’

‘That’s because—’

‘Just look at what happened after the bombing in Oslo and the shootings on Utøya. Even the most stuck-up morning papers let their correspondents write analytical pieces about how international terrorism had arrived in Norway, and how they shouldn’t really be surprised, because if you got involved in Afghanistan that sort of thing was bound to happen.’

Schyman didn’t respond. What was he supposed to say?

‘We spread myths and fear that, to a very large extent, are utterly unfounded,’ she went on, ‘but when we’ve got a mother with a young child who gets murdered, suddenly the demands for proof are so high that we can’t even write a simple report without a guilty verdict from the Court of Appeal. Assuming we haven’t managed to invent a fictitious serial killer, of course. Because then we can really go to town.’

Schyman sat down again, completely drained. ‘The last contact with the plane was an automated fault report about an electrical short-circuit,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to suggest an explosion, or any form of terrorist attack.’

She looked at him in silence for a long time. He let her stew – he didn’t have the energy to try to work out what was going on inside that stubborn head of hers. Once, several years ago, he had actually considered her as one of his potential successors. He must have been mad.

‘The Frenchman’s dead,’ she said. ‘Chopped up into little pieces. The body was found near the Djibouti embassy in Mogadishu. The head’s still missing.’

He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. ‘Executed?’

She didn’t answer.

‘I haven’t heard anything about that,’ he said.

‘I don’t know why they’re taking their time breaking the news,’ she said. ‘Presumably there’s a good reason, some close relative they haven’t managed to get hold of. Well, now you’ve got a head-start. I’ve got one question.’

‘A question?’

‘How much money does your proposal run to?’

Unable to stop himself, he answered in the same way as her, unthinking, straight, and without any negotiating tactics. ‘Three million.’

‘Kronor?’ She sounded incredulous and disappointed.

‘At most,’ he replied.

She chewed the inside of her cheek for a few moments. ‘Could I have it as a loan?’

‘And pay it back by acting as my press-ethics conscience, free of charge until I retire?’

He saw her shrink in her chair, and wondered what he was playing at. Why did he feel the need to belittle a reporter whose husband had been kidnapped and who was negotiating the price of selling her dignity?

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘When would the articles and online posts be published? Straight away? Or could they wait until the whole thing’s over?’

‘They could wait,’ he heard himself say, even though he’d decided the exact opposite.

‘Do the children have to be included?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s part of the deal.’

‘Only if there’s a happy ending,’ she said. ‘If he dies, you just get me.’

That seemed reasonable.

‘I’ll write the articles myself,’ she said, ‘as a diary starting from when I found out that Thomas was missing. I haven’t got a video camera, so I’ll need to borrow one. I’ll write and film without any preconceived ideas. We can edit the material together once it’s over. And as far as my regular work is concerned, I’m on leave until further notice.’

He could only nod.

‘I’ll refer Picture-Pelle back to you when I get the camera,’ she said, picking up her coat. She stood up. ‘I’ll email you my account details. How quickly can you transfer the money?’

The negotiations about the size of the payment had evidently come and gone without him noticing. ‘It’ll take up to a couple of working days,’ he said.

She left his glass box without looking back, and Schyman couldn’t decide if he felt pleased or deceived.

She bought a takeaway from the Indian curry house and got back to the flat with red cheeks and steaming bags. Halenius took care of the food while she shook off her outdoor clothes.

‘Any video?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. How did you get on?’ he asked, from the kitchen.

‘Schyman can’t work me out,’ she said, hanging up her jacket. ‘He thinks I’m a bit stupid, all impulsive and emotional, a hysterical woman. I got exactly what I wanted.’

‘Congratulations. How much money was he offering?’

‘More than I expected,’ Annika said. ‘Three million.’

Halenius let out a whistle.

‘Are you hungry? Probably best to eat while it’s still hot,’ Annika said, pushing past him into the kitchen. The top of her arm nudged his chest.