To the Top of the Mountain (32 page)

‘Expr.’? And then ‘p. 12 top’? That must have been a reference to the top of page 12 in the previous day’s issue of
Expressen
. There weren’t any tabloids on Midsummer’s Eve, were there? Maybe Orpheus had got hold of the day before’s number – and found . . .?

Söderstedt rang the police station’s library. A woman answered, and five minutes later, a girl brought him a copy of
Expressen
from 24 June. Most articles were about the Kvarnen Killing, but at the top of page 12 was one with the headline: ‘
THE SISTERS WHO VANISHED INTO THIN AIR
.’ It was a follow-up article on the Florento sisters. Partway through, it said: ‘The sisters were just spiritual sisters.’ Towards the end, it read: ‘No crime is worse than bitter betrayal, said the Florento sisters.’

And the article ended with the words: ‘But the sisters vanished into thin air.’

He went through the rest of the messages from
THIS WEEK
’
S
‘
I LOVE YOU
’. All were quotations from the
Expressen
article.

Reconstruction, Söderstedt thought to himself, leaning back. Orpheus finds the article about the Florento sisters. In his first message to Eurydice, he refers to it. She replies after two hours, during which time she’s presumably gone out in Falkenberg, where everything’s closed for Midsummer, to get hold of a copy of
Expressen.
She then replies with a quote from the article: ‘The sisters were just spiritual sisters.’ The pair must have agreed in advance to call one another Orpheus and Eurydice, those who escaped the kingdom of the dead. They find an article on a couple of spiritual sisters who have done the same thing – and who have also got hold of an enormous sum of money. They identify with the sisters, so they send a quotation from the article each time they communicate. They’re moving through Sweden, each in a different location, and they’ve decided in advance to keep in touch using
Gula Tidningen
’s most harmless, well-hidden page:
THIS WEEK
’
S
‘
I LOVE YOU
’. That implies that they have access to the Internet. Wherever they are, the pair seem to have immediate Internet access. How? And why the Internet? Why not direct contact? To avoid the chance of being traced? Hmm.

The server, Söderstedt nodded. It must be possible to find out where the messages to
Gula Tidningen
were coming from.

He contacted the webmaster again. Yeah, Orpheus and Eurydice were using the same server. A free Spanish server called Virtud. He found it online. After some linguistic confusion and general resistance, Virtud’s Spanish webmaster finally accepted that Arto Söderstedt was calling from the Swedish police and, very reluctantly, gave him Orpheus and Eurydice’s details. They were registered as Baruch Spinoza and Elton John. That didn’t mean a great deal. The most important thing was that there were two phone numbers.

Two mobile phone numbers.

In other words, Orpheus and Eurydice were connecting to the Internet using their mobile phones.

He looked up the numbers with the provider, Comviq. Both were registered. At the same address. A restaurant.

The Thanatos restaurant in Östermalm, Stockholm.

He contacted the Patents and Registrations Office. What could they tell him about the Thanatos restaurant?

Eventually, Arto Söderstedt found the name of the owner.

The Thanatos restaurant was owned by a man called Rajko Nedic.

Arto Söderstedt suddenly felt completely, completely calm.

34

THE WEAK LINK
between Sara Svenhagen and Jorge Chavez was called Gunnar Nyberg. A few weeks ago, he and Sara had been working as a pair. Now, the other half of the pair was Jorge.

Though ‘pair’ was maybe a bit much. They didn’t take it in turns running up dingy stairwells, service weapons raised; they didn’t cover one another as they crept down some dark alley; they didn’t play good cop, bad cop in any dark interrogation rooms. No, they sat at their computers. Through no fault of his own, the once boorish bodybuilder policeman had been thrown from one computer nerd to the next and, as a result, had actually become quite good at working online.

Though enough was enough.

Moving back to the A-Unit had somehow breathed life into old habits. Or maybe they were bad habits. He went out into the underworld, into the old Gunnar Nyberg territory. Suddenly he’d had enough of virtual cyber-Nazism, and put a surprising number of rank-and-file officers to work, hunting the only line of business which never took a break.

First of all, there was a gang of robbers. It was primarily made up of relatively young right-wing extremists, but also of more out-and-out professional criminals like Danne Blood Pudding. Nyberg organised an extensive interrogation of professional criminals, bank robbers and skinheads. He followed up leads, above all on Danne Blood Pudding and Roger Sjöqvist.

So far, it hadn’t led to anything.

Then there was a drugs ring. Rajko Nedic really did seem untouchable, but in the long run there must be something to go on. Anything at all.

And that was what he was currently busy with. The old intimidation techniques were like reflex. He heaved his irritatingly constant 146 kilos towards the thin figure of a man named Robban, a known big-time pusher in Hjulsta. Robban was in his flat, gaping with surprise at the broken front door which was hanging in scraps – not splinters, not pieces of wood, but
scraps
. Robban thought: How the hell did he manage to break the door into scraps? But that wasn’t what he said. Instead, voice shaking, he said: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Think again,’ said Gunnar Nyberg.

‘Shit, man,’ Robban half sniffed. ‘You know as well as I do that it’s an idiot-proof system. You don’t know anyone else! There’s a delivery, you pick it up. You deliver the money, they look happy. When they don’t look happy, you’re dead.’

Nyberg heaved himself a little closer. His grizzly bear’s face was only a few centimetres from Robban’s, which was more rabbit-like than anything else. The grizzly’s breath
didn’t
smell of raw meat and fresh blood – it smelt of coffee.

‘Yugoslavs?’ the coffee-scented predator barked.

‘Could be,’ Robban panted. ‘I dunno. They look southern, they do. Ruthless guys. Always speaking gibberish together.’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

A sudden burst of kamikaze bravado: ‘Go fuck yourself, you bastard.’

The grizzly bear grabbed the rabbit’s neck, pressing hard. The rabbit shook violently – a trembling piece of second-rate fur.

‘I learned this through close contact,’ Gunnar Nyberg informed him pedagogically. ‘It really works.’

‘Wait. Christ! Wait,’ Robban trembled.

Nyberg loosened his grip, feeling ill at ease. He had said he would never again use violence in his work. It had just happened. As though his grizzly role demanded it.

Robban stared
admiringly
at him.

‘Wow, man!’ he shouted, massaging his neck. ‘What a grip!’

‘Get to the point now,’ Nyberg muttered, ashamed.

‘OK. I’ve heard about a drug dealer who’s made a thing of it. All his men speak gibberish between themselves. It’s a way of disguising the entire thing.’

A way of disguising the entire thing, Gunnar Nyberg thought to himself before asking, as he should: ‘Which dealer?’

‘Rajko Nedic.’

‘And you think it’s Nedic making deliveries to you?’

‘No idea,’ said Robban, lighting a cigarette and trying to look calm. ‘And above all, I didn’t say that.’

Nyberg returned to his worn-out old Renault, sitting for a moment with his hands on the wheel and looking out over Hjulsta’s utterly homogeneous seventies architecture. The July sun reflected listlessly in the identical, greyish-brown rows of windows.

Well, Gunnar Nyberg thought to himself. It was the warmest day of the year, he was dripping with sweat, and his thoughts were heroically trying to crawl up out of a day which had turned into quicksand. Once again, he thought: Well . . .

And: Well . . .

His thoughts broke free in a short, sharp burst.

If Rajko Nedic’s men always spoke Serbo-Croat between themselves, how could those Swedish Nazis in Kumla have worked out that a handover was going to take place?

Niklas Lindberg surely couldn’t have tortured Lordan Vukotic twice. Someone would have noticed. And yet Lindberg knew two things: that a big handover was going to take place, and that there would be a meeting in Kvarnen. How had he known?

Nedic’s empire was built on perfect discipline. No one ever blabbed. That was the mainstay of the entire operation. That was how he managed to act as a law-abiding restaurateur with such precision. Quite simply, his word was the law.

Did that mean he had suddenly discovered a crack in Nedic’s walls?

One of his men in Kumla had squealed – even before Vukotic had done it. A leak in the watertight system.

Gunnar Nyberg saw the chance to sow some weeds in the carefully pruned garden. Wasn’t there a chance that the whole organisation might start to bleed information if news of a leak reached Nedic?

Nyberg sat in his car. His hands had turned white at the wheel. Drops of sweat ran between his fingers, loosening them.

Three men in Kumla. What were they called? Zoran Koco, Petar Klovic, Risto Petrovic. He would talk to them. Right away.

He was already halfway there. Hjulsta. He tore off in his rusty old Renault, along the E18 towards Örebro. Between Bålsta and Enköping, he passed a place called Grillby. The name set a little bell ringing in his head. Grillby? He had been to Grillby. When? How? Though he didn’t know why he was thinking about it now. Probably some kind of failure to adjust to a slower speed.

After Örebro, he sped across the Närke plain towards Kumla. It didn’t take much more than an hour. He made his way to the prison governor and immediately found the trio’s collected works in front of him in an interrogation room.

Interpol’s material was extensive but, ultimately, not especially comprehensive. There were lots of blanks, especially in relation to the Yugoslav war. Zoran Koco was a Bosnian Muslim from Sarajevo and had apparently been one of the leading black-market sharks during the Bosnian war. Petar Klovic was a Bosnian Serb and had been a guard in one of the concentration camps for Muslims. No crimes – if you ignored their crimes against humanity. Risto Petrovic was a Croat, the former commander of a paramilitary group which had also been involved in the ethnic cleansing. Though of Serbs in Croatia.

An utterly unholy alliance.

When it came to Niklas Lindberg, the blank was his year in the Foreign Legion. May ’94 to May ’95. Koco and Klovic were already in Sweden by then, but not Petrovic. On the contrary, there was a very significant gap in the material from that time. In July 1995, Petrovic had come to Sweden and joined Rajko Nedic’s gang, something which was, of course, unconfirmed. By September, he had already been nicked for peddling drugs, and had been inside, awaiting deportation, ever since.

Nyberg contacted CID’s Interpol group. They, in turn, contacted the Foreign Legion and, within an hour, had produced a number of possible names from ’94 to ’95.

During that hour, Gunnar Nyberg had tried to make sense of it all.

A Croatian who had taken part in ethnic cleansing. There was a musty stench of Ustaša, the fascist organisation which had exterminated Serbs during the Second World War, about the whole thing. It wasn’t unlikely that Risto Petrovic had arrived in Sweden by way of the Foreign Legion, under a false name, in order to avoid arrest. There, he had met a kindred spirit, the ex-commando major Niklas Lindberg. Petrovic had then ingratiated himself with the Serbian-Swede Rajko Nedic, who wasn’t especially interested in ethnic purity, in order to supply Lindberg with information on the imminent transaction between Nedic and a Swedish ‘policeman’, for example. But was Lindberg really powerful enough to have planted a spy in Nedic’s organisation? Or were there larger organisations of right-wing extremists at work in the background? Directing both Petrovic and Lindberg? And if so, did that mean there was an even greater motive behind the Sickla Slaughter?

Gunnar Nyberg sat in the little interrogation room in Kumla, and felt like the walls were closing in. What kind of strange connection had he come across, thanks to a rabbit-like drug pusher called Robban?

The fax machine rattled into life. Three extracts from the Foreign Legion register for 1994 to 1995. Three Yugoslav names, and three mediocre but clearly discernible photographs.

Gunnar Nyberg rang Jan-Olov Hultin. He explained the situation, and was given various orders. All sounded good.

Risto Petrovic was brought into the interrogation room. A certain contentedness spread through Nyberg’s enormous body as he immediately recognised the man’s face from one of the pictures.

Petrovic sat staring at him. He was large, compact, with the kind of solid, bulging muscles that only prisoners have. A body which doesn’t do much moving but, instead, spends hours pumping iron. His gaze was ruthless, on the verge of inhuman. Exactly as Nyberg had hoped.

When he opened his mouth, he was fully aware that, by doing so, he was sentencing Risto Petrovic to death.

‘Jovan Sotra?’ he read from one of the three faxes.

Petrovic froze. Suddenly, the consequences were clear to him. As soon as Koko or Klovic or any of the others close to Nedic found out about the link, he would be a dead man. Power was coursing through Gunnar Nyberg at that very moment. Pure power. He understood right away what it means to have a man’s life in your hands. It was unbearable.

Perhaps he should have stayed at his computer. In the safety of cyberspace.

‘I don’t know what you’re taking about,’ Petrovic eventually said in English, though his eyes told a different story.

Nyberg switched to a rusty-sounding English.

‘Shortly after the end of the war in Croatia, you went from being commander of a paramilitary group to a private in the French Foreign Legion. During that time, you met a Swede, a former officer called Niklas Lindberg. When you later met again here in Kumla, you gave him information about a large transaction that would be taking place between your employer, Rajko Nedic, and another party. Lindberg used that information to kill Nedic’s closest man, Lordan Vukotic, as well as to rob and kill three other Nedic men in the so-called Sickla Slaughter, where whatever was being handed over was stolen.’