To the Top of the Mountain

by Arne Dahl

  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.’

  Petrovic stared at Nyberg. His eyes were searching for a way out. He didn’t know whether he could find one in the large, bear-like policeman. Maybe. He repeated, mostly because it was expected of him: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  It sounded so hollow that Nyberg simply ignored him.

  ‘However,’ he said, nodding, ‘there is a way out.’

  They looked at one another for a moment. The paramilitary commander and Sweden’s Biggest Policeman. The Foreign Legionnaire and Mr Sweden. It felt masculine to the point of absurdity.

  ‘We’re waiting for a policeman called Lars Viksjö. He’ll take you to a safe place. You’ll be a Crown witness, get a new identity, and be placed wherever in the world you want to go. In exchange, we want to know the following. One: the connection between you and Lindberg. Two: everything imaginable, and unimaginable, about Rajko Nedic’s organisation. Three: what kind of handover it was. Four: who was going to receive it. Five: what Lindberg was going to use it for. Six: where Lindberg and his men are now.’

  Risto Petrovic closed his eyes. He was completely still. When he opened them again, the decision had been made. It was obvious.

  ‘I don’t know where Niklas Lindberg is,’ he said.

  Then he said nothing more.

  After fifteen minutes of absolute silence, Lars Viksjö arrived, taking Petrovic with him. Once again, the former war criminal had changed lives.

  It would be interesting to see how Rajko Nedic reacted.

  Gunnar Nyberg allowed himself a moment of quiet contemplation. No, he admitted to himself, not contemplation; that was saying too much. Rather, it was a moment of pure self-righteousness. He felt very pleased with himself.

  He rang Hultin and updated him.

  Hultin said: ‘Bloody good job, Gunnar.’

  Nyberg said: ‘Not at all.’

  He climbed back into his rusty old Renault and pottered homewards. Just after Enköping, he came to the little village called Grillby. He was forced to stop. What was it with this Grillby? Why was it demanding his attention in his moment of triumph?

  Grillby. A little cottage. An aunt’s cottage. Youthful feeling of freedom. Police College exams. Twenty years ago. Five men and a van full of six-packs.

  What was it he had said? ‘I’m going out to the cottage to recharge the batteries.’

  Why not try? Gunnar Nyberg followed a twenty-year-old internal map. Grillby mustn’t have changed much, because he found it without a problem. He came to a narrow gravel road which led out of the little community into the forest. He drove a couple of kilometres along an increasingly vanishing road. The sun turned the old Renault into a baking oven, and Gunnar Nyberg into a slow-cooked meatloaf. He was doubting his memory more and more, along with his sense of direction, when a glade finally opened up in the sparse forest, and the little cottage came into view. It was the same, exactly the same. It stood by the edge of the trees and looked like it had been abandoned. A little red labourer’s cottage from the turn of the century. Many beers had been transformed into urine here.

  Ludvig Johnsson was leaning against the veranda, stretching. He looked up with an utterly surprised, almost terrified gaze. He obviously wasn’t used to visitors.

  Nyberg waved to him. His face lit up, and he jogged over to the Renault, peering in through the wound-down oven window. He recoiled.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘You’ve been sitting in there a while.’

  ‘It’s quite warm,’ said Gunnar Nyberg, squeezing out of the entirely-too-small car. He stretched, and held out his hands towards the cottage.

  ‘So it’s still standing,’ he observed.

  Ludvig Johnsson nodded, returning to the veranda and continuing to stretch.

  ‘It’s still standing,’ he said. ‘No electricity, no running water, no phone. I come back when I want to get away from the world. It’s happening more and more.’

  Nyberg nodded. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘I go to my son and grandson’s in Östhammar, though it hasn’t happened so often this year.’

  Johnsson stopped stretching and looked at him.

  ‘That’s not so relevant for me,’ was all he said.

  Nyberg bit his tongue. Much too late.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  Ludvig Johnsson walked over to Nyberg and put an arm around him. It turned into a hug. They stood in the blazing hot sunshine by the little cottage outside of Grillby, Uppland county, hugging. The power of the past.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Ludvig Johnsson eventually said. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  They sat in the shade on the veranda. Johnsson fetched two beers. They disappeared quickly. Two more appeared.

  ‘Gas fridge,’ said Johnsson.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Nyberg. ‘I’ve got to drive home later. We’ve had a breakthrough in the investigation.’

>   ‘From paedophiles to Nazis,’ Johnsson nodded. ‘Anything you want to talk about?’

  ‘I think so. Later. Is this still your aunt’s place?’

  Ludvig Johnsson laughed and scratched his bald head.

  ‘She had senile dementia even then, when we were here celebrating the end of exams. She still does. She’s in the same home and looks the same, though she’s closer to a hundred. Like the dementia preserved her.’

  He grimaced and continued.

  ‘Then, when I got a family, I almost forgot about it. Hanna and I travelled a lot. With the boys once they’d arrived, too. They were nine and seven when they died, and they’d been to fourteen countries. They bragged about it at school. Fourteen countries! Then one day they were just gone. All three. Hanna, Micke, Stefan. Just like that, gone. I don’t know if it’s possible to understand it.’

  It was completely silent. Gunnar Nyberg imagined he could hear the sun shining. A tiny, tiny whirring in the background. He had nothing to say. There was nothing to say. He had managed to put the broken pieces of his past back together. Ludvig Johnsson hadn’t even had the chance. The irrevocability of death.

  ‘Mmm,’ Johnsson said after a moment. ‘Then I remembered the cottage. I can just be myself here. I need it. Recharge my batteries before taking the paedophile world head on. No one knows that this place is here. Well, they didn’t until now.’

  ‘I won’t tell,’ said Gunnar Nyberg, thinking he had made a mistake. He had barged onto holy land. He had populated a world which should never have been populated. Without consideration, he had forced open a door to an intimate world with such force that it was hanging in scraps. He felt awful.

  Ludvig Johnsson leaned forward over the table, placing his hand over Nyberg’s, and looking into his eyes with a clear, searching look.

  ‘It’s OK, Gunnar,’ he said quietly. ‘Maybe it’s what I needed. I can’t be a hermit any more.’

  They looked at one another. In some way, they were still living together in their shared flat, twenty years ago. Neither of them had ever really left it. The way you never really leave a place. Everything always remains. Those had been important years in their lives. The worldly Ludvig and the sulky Gunnar. There they were again.

  And so it happened that Gunnar Nyberg made a mistake. He talked about the case. He needed a sounding board more than ever, and his sounding board needed to be one, too. That was clear. For a moment, Gunnar Nyberg imagined that they were about to solve the case together. Like they had done in Police College.

  He began with the breakthrough, with the leak around Rajko Nedic: Risto Petrovic. Then he went back to the very beginning, to the events in Kvarnen and the Kumla Bunker, before moving on to the ex-Yugoslav mercenaries and Niklas Lindberg and the Foreign Legion and possible right-wing extremist umbrella organisations, and then he was done. It was a long and complicated story. One which, thus far, had no ending.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ said Ludvig Johnsson.

  That was all.

  When Gunnar Nyberg left Grillby, it felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. An old friendship had been revived, properly revived, and he felt like he had found a sounding board for life. It felt good. As though yet another stray piece from the past had fallen into place.

  He pulled out onto the E18 and returned to Stockholm.

  35

  ‘YES, YES, YES!’ shouted Bullet. ‘Got it again!’

  It was the second time that day. The first had come and gone. A brief signal which might have been, though probably wasn’t, a false alarm. But this time it was clear. Bullet felt extremely pleased. Even he had stopped believing.

  Niklas Lindberg could see it in him. His short but broad body almost quivering with sudden, unanticipated expectation. Like a soufflé, he surprised himself by thinking.

  He looked down towards his parents’ home. It was so still down in the valley. The cute little rows of houses where he had come into existence. Undisturbed by foreigners. A clean and healthy childhood where everything was as it should have been. Trollhättan – so typically Swedish. And now? Shady pizzerias on every corner, mafia gambling joints, dishonest southerners’ shirker mentality. A world of rapists, drug pushers, madmen with knives, benefit scroungers; of Arabic–Jewish–Catholic corruption and weakness dressed up as machismo. At least he knew what he was fighting against. It was more difficult to say what he was fighting for.

  ‘Gone again,’ Bullet said, subdued, turning the dials.

  ‘Did you get a direction?’ asked Niklas Lindberg.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bullet. ‘Eastward. Either on the 44 or the 42.’

  ‘What’s out there? Rogge?’

  Roger Sjöqvist leafed through the atlas.

  ‘Hard to see. Right between pages. The 44 splits in two. Continues as the 44 up to Lake Vänern, Lidköping. As the 47 it goes to Falköping. But the 47 meets the E20 which goes up to Skara and Skövde. What else did you say? The 42. It doesn’t go anywhere. Vårgårda. Fristad.’

  ‘We need another signal,’ said Bullet.

  Niklas Lindberg thought. ‘Take the 44,’ he said. ‘And put your foot down.’

  ‘The speed limit, though?’

  ‘Fuck it. We’re close now.’

  ‘What are you thinking, Nicke?’ asked Bullet.

  ‘That we’ll get another signal,’ Niklas Lindberg replied. ‘And then we’ll know.’

  36

  DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT JAN-OLOV Hultin wasn’t at all happy that Jorge Chavez was sitting on his desk, swinging his legs. Not happy at all. Though he didn’t really know why.

  Probably because he couldn’t be seen.

  It was Friday 9 July, and time was passing quickly, quickly. They had no real hot leads to go on. Lots of new information all the time, but nothing really hot, really important. Maybe things would start looking up today.

  Why this sudden optimism?

  The past few meetings in the Supreme Command Centre had actually been dominated by a kind of hopeless resignation. So much information, and so little room for action. Nedic was lying low, and the inevitable nationwide alert for Niklas Lindberg and his men was drawing closer. If they released their identities, the tabloids would blow the Sickla Slaughter up into something enormous, Lindberg would be depicted as the Antichrist and the three others his apostles of darkness. They wanted to avoid that at all costs.

  So far, Hultin had Mörner, the head of CID and the Police Commissioner on side when it came to keeping the lid on Lindberg, Sjöqvist, Andersson and Kullberg’s identities, but the longer the investigation failed to produce any results, the more the demand for disclosure grew. Soon, they would no longer be able to avoid bringing PC General Public into the equation – increasing Rajko Nedic’s room for manoeuvre considerably by doing so; he would suddenly know exactly who had robbed him. Soon they would have no other way to go. Hultin dreaded that moment. It would paralyse their investigation, they would end up in a hopeless period of checking tips, and any chance of giving the team a free rein would disappear.

  And what was the A-Unit without a free rein?

  The sight of the free-reined Gunnar Nyberg down in the depths of the Supreme Command Centre was one of the reasons for Hultin’s sudden optimism, but there were others. Everyone looked so psyched up – perhaps with the exception of Viggo Norlander, sleeping open-mouthed and dribbling. A nice titbit for the tabloids. ‘A behind-the-scenes glimpse into how the hunt for the country’s most dangerous criminals is being run.’ Accompanied by a close-up of his dribbling mouth. Nice.

  He had learned to read the facial expressions of the A-Unit well enough to know what to expect. Jorge looked lively up on the desk – that boded well. For the past few days, he had been noticeably absent; infatuation – but also a kind of visible pressure, as though there were unwanted obstacles in the way of love. Paul looked as though he was in real high spirits – which, actually, he had done since he was paired up with Kerstin, and Hultin suspected that there were certain complications. Kerstin,
in turn, also looked charged. But she always looked good. Still, it was Arto who caught his attention the most. The corners of his mouth were taut in a way that Hultin hadn’t seen for a long while. He’d be damned if Arto Söderstedt hadn’t gone and cracked the whole bloody thing. It certainly looked that way.

  So, it was not without expectation that Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin handed over to the A-Unit.

  A television and VCR stood by alongside the desk. Chavez pressed play on a remote control. A sequence of a few seconds played. A short, broad man wearing a hat entered a bank. Experienced, he hid his face from the camera using his hand, stepping out of frame. Only his legs were visible. He was wearing boots, and stood for a few seconds next to a table. Then the picture disappeared into static. Chavez played the sequence once more.

  ‘Bank robbery in Gothenburg,’ he said. ‘Before the CCTV cameras were shot out. Look at his feet. Measurements at the scene showed that they were size 7.’

  ‘Though those aren’t four-year-old Reeboks,’ said Arto Söderstedt.

  They looked at him, waiting for a continuation which never came.

  ‘No,’ Chavez admitted. ‘They’re not the four-year-old Reeboks that walked through Eskil Carlstedt’s blood in the Sickla industrial estate. But it is possible to change shoes. Such things have actually happened.’

  A defiant glance at Söderstedt. No reaction. Chavez continued.

  ‘This bank robbery yesterday was the crown on what, with hindsight, is clearly a real string of raids in south-west Sweden. Everything from shops to banks along the west coast. It started on Midsummer’s Eve, with a petrol station in Skillingaryd, between Jönköping and Värnamo in Småland. The Sickla Slaughter took place in the early hours of Midsummer’s Eve.’

  ‘Skillingaryd isn’t on the west coast, though,’ said Kerstin Holm.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Chavez. ‘That came later. Six further places have seen raids: Ängelholm, Mellbystrand, Halmstad, Varberg, Ulricehamn, and the culmination, yesterday, in Gothenburg, where they took 420,000 kronor. Since the evidence from witnesses is basically non-existent, we still don’t know if it’s the same gang behind all of these raids. But with the combination of experienced behaviour in the bank in Gothenburg and size 7 shoes, it’s not entirely unlikely that it really is our boys in this gang on the west coast. There were four bank robbers, after all, of which one was apparently injured. I want to say that it is our boys. And there’s one more thing.’