The low woman on the totem pole. She was at the bottom of it all, down in the sewers. She was used to that and didn’t mind. It was where she did the most good. But who was at the top of this crisis? She didn’t envy the people in the corridors of power in Stockholm. Even being in rainy Roslagen was better than being there.
It was unusual for local police to ask for help so quickly. But Sofia thought she understood why they had in this case: there was the risk of attracting a great deal of media attention. Only about an hour after she’d gotten Carpelan’s call, she’d received a warning that a reporter had heard about the killing and a TV news crew was on the way.
The victim wasn’t just anybody. He was a high-ranking civil servant. A person who had received threats from various parties during the years he’d spent in his position. In the view of the Security Service, however, the danger to him had diminished quite a while ago. This business about markers on the body was sure to be what had most attracted the media. Sofia had the feeling her boss knew more than he was telling her, but she was used to that. She decided the reason was that, like the good boss he was, he wanted her to form her own opinion.
She turned toward the Skeppsmyra folk museum, a large barn, painted Falun red, that looked like hundreds of others she’d passed on the way. She parked not far from a hand-painted sign on a fence: “Roslagen auction Friday, August 11, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.”
Big gray clouds sailed across the sky. They looked heavy enough that there would probably be more rain. The police from Norrtälje had cordoned off the area with blue-and-white tape. Two crime scene technicians were walking around on the heavily trampled path that led to the building’s entrance, collecting shoe imprints from the mud. It must have rained like hell here in the last day. As usual, Sofia was wearing her white Adidas Stan Smiths. The wrong shoes for this job.
She was met by Filip Eriksson, the ranking Norrtälje police officer on the scene. Filip told her what they knew at this point. Half an hour into the previous day’s auction, it was time for lot number 14 in the catalogue, an old Swedish hope chest. When the auctioneer opened the chest, a murmur passed through the crowd. Then panic broke out.
On the stage, the chest was leaning against a sawhorse. Next to it was the podium where the auctioneer had stood, and behind that were a number of objects, large and small, sitting on tables. Because of the disruption, they’d never had the chance to be auctioned off. Everything was lit up by the faint sunshine coming in through large mullioned windows. Dust particles swirled weightlessly over their heads, up under the high roof. Sofia wondered whether the building had been made for use as a church or a meeting space for the local IOGT-NTO temperance movement.
In the chest lay a dead man. Sophia’s first thought, as she observed the scene from a distance, was that it wasn’t big enough for a grown person. The longer she looked, the stronger the feeling of religiosity or ritual grew in her. She couldn’t put her finger on whether the feeling came from the bestial arrangement in the chest or was emanating from the bare wooden walls. But in its entirety, this felt like a burial scene or even a sacrificial rite.
Someone had wanted to stage something here—that was obvious. This was a case not of a murderer who wanted to hide his or her deeds but of someone who wanted to tell a story. The question was what the story was.
“What do we know about the victim?” asked Sofia.
“Claes Callmér, born 1942, fifty-eight years old at the time of his death. Director-general of the Swedish Migration Agency.”
Sofia nodded. Filip got straight to what was most important. Head of the Migration Agency. No wonder the media had taken an interest.
“The chest?” asked Sofia.
“Was submitted by an elderly man who lives nearby. He bought it at an auction himself eleven years ago; that was in the Östhammar area. We’ve questioned him, but as far as we see there’s no connection to him. He deposited it here two weeks ago.”
“Who tipped off the journalist?”
“A young guy at the auction took a picture of the body and sent it to her. He’s no older than seventeen and greatly regrets what he did.” Filip shrugged; there wasn’t anything they could do about that now.
Sofia knew her bosses would try to get the TV news to hold off for a day or so, but as soon as they heard that other agencies knew about the murder, they would broadcast their segment on it.
“Have you examined the body?”
“No. We haven’t moved the body—we haven’t even changed its position in the chest. The technicians say a medical examiner—”
“Come on, let’s get closer.”
Filip took out a handkerchief and held it to his nose. The victim must have died shortly before the auction started; otherwise the attendees would have reacted to the smell. They had been sitting here for half an hour before the chest was opened.
When they were standing right above the victim, Sofia first looked only at the hope chest. It looked old, but she wasn’t an expert on antiques. On the inside, flower patterns and symbols such as boats and suns had been hand-painted in light blue, purple, and pink. The wood was worn. The lid was a good two centimeters thick. The chest couldn’t be more than 130 centimeters long.
Finally she looked at him. At his upper body, anyway. There was a rough-edged cut at the level of Claes Callmér’s hips, and Sofia assumed the lower part of his body hadn’t been found and wasn’t going to be. She took a closer look at the cut. If some kind of blade had divided him, it must have been a dull one. It almost looked as if he had been torn apart. A sharp smell of decay came from the opening below his hips. His arms had been folded under him so there would be room for his upper body in the chest. Why not take the arms off, too, if you were going to cut him apart and stick him in there? She resisted the temptation to take hold of the body and turn it over so she could see his hands; she knew if she did so the technicians would complain that she had made their investigation more difficult.
She turned her attention to the dead man’s head, focusing on the markers her boss had spoken of in such a serious tone. Because of how they would complicate the investigation, these were the kind of strange incisions she would rather not find on a murder victim.
The scene in front of her looked like nothing she had seen before. She couldn’t let go of the idea that some kind of ritual had been performed here, that this dismemberment was carried out to tell someone something. But what was the message? And to whom had it been addressed?
Probably using a knife, the murderer had carved a mark that looked like the mirror image of a C into Claes Callmér’s throat just under his Adam’s apple.
A numeral was carved into his forehead.
The numeral 9.
5
Charlie took his usual seat at the end of the oblong conference table without removing his brown oilskin. As she sat down next to Sarah, Pashie looked at Max. Since she’d come home from her meeting with the shaman yesterday, she thought he’d been looking at her in a different way.
Sarah nodded at Max to indicate that he should begin.
“We’ve called you in in reaction to Hein Espen’s call,” said Max. “It’s probably best to start with some quick background on the exercise that has taken place in the Barents Sea.”
He cleared his throat.
“During the nineties we saw the world’s largest navy rusting apart and sinking to the bottom of the harbor basins at Murmansk and Severomorsk. At the height of its power, the Soviet Navy had more than three hundred submarines. Today perhaps forty of those are in working condition. Now Russia wants to show that it’s still a power to be reckoned with.”
“And international media are covering this as if it were some kind of entertainment spectacle?” asked Pashie.
Max nodded.
“There’s been a good deal of speculation about this exercise,” he said. “Are the Russians going to conduct it with live ammunition? Are the submarines equipped with nuclear weapons?”
“So what could have happene
d?” asked Charlie.
“We don’t know yet. It’s been reported that the Northern Fleet has brought all its biggest ships to the exercise, including the Kirov-class cruiser Pyotr Velikiy and a number of Oscar II-class submarines, including the Kursk. They’re planning to play a kind of cat-and-mouse game.”
“What is an Oscar II?” asked Sarah.
“A submarine that weighs fifteen thousand metric tons and is as tall as a five-story building. It’s over one hundred fifty meters long.”
“One hundred fifty meters?” said Charlie. “Twice as long as a Boeing 747.”
Max nodded. “The submarines are reactor driven and equipped with cruise missiles that can sink aircraft carriers.”
“Could an explosion really create such powerful seismic effects?” asked Charlie. “Is it possible that an earthquake was responsible?”
“If we’re to believe our Norwegian friends, the seismic effects don’t have a natural cause,” said Max. “There were two isolated events, and they weren’t as powerful as earthquakes—at least the first one wasn’t. The second event’s effect was approximately fifty times greater than that of the first. It’s more likely that the events were explosions.”
“Nuclear weapons?” asked Charlie.
“Maybe.”
Charlie leaned forward. “You remember what General Lebed talked about a few years ago on American TV—portable nuclear weapons can be placed anywhere.”
“Yes, we know what he said.”
The Russian military general had made himself popular in his country with such famous quotes as “I’m not a liberal, I’m a general.” He had found himself in a position to tip the scales of Russia’s 1996 presidential election and was subsequently appointed head of the national security council after Yeltsin won. In a frank interview on 60 Minutes, he had warned of what could happen if the Russian armed forces no longer had their most dangerous weapons under control. Lebed had spoken of nuclear weapons small and light enough to be carried in ordinary suitcases but powerful enough to create an explosion that could flatten all of the buildings in central London and force an evacuation to the M25 ring road surrounding the city.
A few years after this interview, Lebed had died in a helicopter crash at the age of fifty-two.
“I’ve heard suitcases like that are kept on Russian submarines,” said Charlie.
“Where did you hear that?” asked Max. “It’s much more likely that there’s been an accident with the torpedoes on one of the subs.”
Sarah cleared her throat. “But would they waste those during an exercise?”
“No,” said Max. “That’s exactly what doesn’t make sense to me. If torpedoes were fired, that would most likely happen in the context of an actual attack with live weapons.”
“An actual attack by the Russians themselves?” asked Charlie.
No one said anything.
“Well, damn it, don’t tell me it was an attack by someone else.”
“At the moment we don’t know anything,” said Max. “This could have been an accident. A torpedo on a nuclear-powered submarine could have imploded.”
“The Kursk?” asked Pashie.
Max nodded. “Yes, the Kursk. Maybe.”
“The pride of the Russian Navy?” said Sarah. “Unsinkable, according to the Russians themselves.”
“Good Lord,” said Charlie. “If it was the Kursk, that’s really bad news.”
Pashie turned in her seat. “The Northern Fleet has been preparing for this exercise for about a year,” she said. “We’ve gotten a letter from worried family members. The maintenance of the vessels and the training of the sailors are both catastrophically poor. There are reports that the cranes that load and unload the torpedoes don’t work. That means that the navy isn’t able to maintain the torpedoes, that they carry out exercises with live nuclear weapons that may well be defective. The new president has rushed to get this exercise done. In addition to the torpedoes Max mentioned, there’s a new torpedo, the Shkval, that…”
Max watched Pashie as she talked, and his mind drifted. Her gaze had taken on a burning intensity. The people affected by this were her countrymen. Whatever was going on down there in the Barents Sea, it meant more to her than to the rest of them.
Pashie had never taken an especially kind view of the Russian regime, particularly not of its treatment of Tatars, like her father, and other minorities. Now there was a seriousness in her tone Max had not heard since the terrible events four years ago when he had come close to losing her.
She was a power-packed bundle of intelligence, of flesh and blood, and she felt a strong empathy for the people of her homeland and the dangers they now faced.
When Pashie finished, she looked Max in the eye.
“Still no reaction from the Swedish military?” asked Charlie. “Or the NATO countries?”
“Nothing,” said Sarah.
“Let’s pray to the gods that this was an accident,” said Charlie.
“We’re supposed to pray to the gods that there’s been an accident?” asked Pashie.
“Well, no, of course not. But damn it, this had better not have been a torpedo fired by a NATO vessel—that’s what I meant.”
“So NATO has a presence in the area?” asked Sarah.
No one answered her.
“Why should they have a presence in the area?” asked Pashie.
Charlie sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t have a damned clue. But I have a bad feeling about this.”
“So—an accident?” said Max, looking at Pashie.
He knew they were thinking the same thing. He let her say it: “It’s August.”
“What do you mean?” asked Charlie.
“In Russia there’s a tendency for tragic events to occur in August,” said Pashie. “Some people claim it has something to do with the planets. Others blame the warm weather and the fact that the leaders are on vacation and there’s no one keeping an eye on things.”
“What kind of tragic events would those be?” asked Charlie.
“In recent history, the attempted coup in 1991,” said Max. “The beginning of the second war in Chechnya last year and the apartment bombs in Moscow.”
“In Russia we call it the August curse.”
“Where is Putin right now?” asked Sarah.
“He’s on vacation,” said Pashie. “Sunning himself on the Black Sea coast. That tells you how much he cares about what’s happened in the Barents Sea.”
6
Max opened the door to his and Pashie’s apartment. Pashie was at Friskis & Svettis for her aerobics class, and Max had come home to change his clothes before going to their dinner engagement in Östermalm. If he’d had the option of staying home, he certainly would have. But his relationship with Pashie didn’t offer him that kind of freedom of choice. And he knew she needed to talk to the Marklunds.
Try to be friendly.
He tossed his shoulder bag on the dining-room table. Sudden dizziness made him freeze in the midst of taking a step. These mild attacks had become increasingly frequent during the past year and were often accompanied by headaches. They’d started when he’d stopped taking benzodiazepines a year ago. For a while after he’d stopped, his left hand had had a tendency to start trembling. As if he were hyperactive. Pashie had seen it. Feliz at the boxing club had joked about it and mimicked him. Usually a cup of strong coffee or a good round of sparring would get it to stop, but it unnerved Max.
He took today’s newspapers out of his bag and lay down on the sofa from Svenskt Tenn that was his and Pashie’s greatest joint investment to date. Despite its inviting flowery Josef Frank pattern, it was hard and uncomfortable compared with the one he’d had in his bachelor digs. Even though it had been two years now, he still didn’t feel as much at home in this apartment as he had on Sveavägen, at least not when Pashie wasn’t here. She had gotten rid of some of Carl Borgenstierna’s most worn-out furniture and replaced it with a couple of light-colored armchairs from IKEA. These armchairs and the sof
a were the furniture they now had around the TV. The map of the Soviet Union that had decorated the wall above the sofa in his old apartment had been torn up, tossed down the garbage chute. Now there were two watercolors depicting scenes from the Stockholm archipelago on the wall above their new sofa.
Max couldn’t quite put his finger on where it had come from, this disturbing feeling that had taken root in him since he’d gotten home. Was it the conversation he and Pashie had had last night? Or was it the newspapers sitting in front of him, which seemed strangely ominous now that he knew something had happened in the Arctic Ocean?
He skipped the articles providing information about the naval exercise that he’d already gotten elsewhere and looked for something of interest in the other articles. He skimmed half an article in Dagens Nyheter about a Swedish candidate the government had proposed for the United Nations’ refugee commissioner post before another story grabbed his attention; it was an article about a mysterious signal that, according to a secret source, the Russian embassy in Stockholm had registered. A spokesman for FRA, the National Defence Radio Establishment, did not wish to comment, but the article made it clear that the Swedish Armed Forces’ secret signals intelligence organization was keeping a close eye on developments.
Max put the newspaper down and glanced at his watch. When was the dinner starting, again? He reached for the remote control and turned on the TV.
The news organizations had tried to get a representative of the Russian Navy or the Russian embassy in Stockholm to comment, but of course such efforts were pointless; no Russian wanted to go on the record. According to unconfirmed reports, forces aligned with the West were in the area.
Ten Swedes Must Die Page 3