The Magdalena File

by Jon Stenhugg

  Chapter 13

  The head of the NSS, Ekman’s boss, had been briefed by Ekman just after Sara left his office. On the following day he’d been flown down in a military jet to meet with the Prime Minister at the villa in France.

  The PM had come to enjoy the NSS briefings, with their detailed accounts of the lives of leading business leaders stepping out of line with unsavoury elements, both foreign and domestic. He’d been surprised to learn how often foreign ambassadors had used diplomatic mail pouches to transport drugs and weapons into the country – barely legal, but so very difficult to stop. He’d been told any attempts to end this traffic would result in immediate reprisals to his own ambassadors and Foreign Service personnel, and such a result might be more embarrassing than it would be worth.

  The Prime Minister always noted anything which could be used later on in a special binder known as the gaffing book. People whose names and deeds got them into the binder could be pulled into the PM’s boat whenever he wished, could be forced to do whatever he felt needed to be done. So it was with great anticipation that the PM sat with a yellow ruled notepad and an eager grin on his face as the head of the NSS sat down on the other side of the desk.

  “Any good bits of gossip this week?” asked the PM.

  “Sorry, Prime Minister, we have a major problem today. It’s about the MS Sally.”

  The PM frowned. This problem rose to the surface at regular intervals, often creating negative media coverage. He adjusted his glasses, a sign that he was ready to hear more.

  “We have a connection between the MS Sally and the Member of Parliament who was recently murdered, Leo Hoffberg.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” said the PM, as he opened the binder to the letter H. “He was a pain in the ass when he was on the Defence Committee, always revealing secret information to the public. And his point of view that we were trying to impede the investigation into why the Sally went down was just embarrassing. I hope we weren’t behind his murder.”

  “No, of course not, but the investigation into his death has, uh, revealed something of extreme importance. You were informed by email yesterday.”

  “I was at a conference here yesterday,” said the PM, “and I’ve never trusted email very much. What’s this all about?”

  “We have an indication that a Russian nuclear weapon has been removed from the MS Sally.” The NSS Director stopped for a few seconds, doing everything he could to get the PM’s attention. “And we don’t know where it is.”

  When the MS Sally had gone down, the Swedish government had been informed about the possibility that a nuclear weapon had been on board, and the Prime Minister had reversed his initial promise to bring up as many bodies as possible for burial, declaring instead that the sunken ship was now a sacred burial ground, off-limits to the entire world.

  Initial dives had never revealed any weapons, but he’d been advised the safest step for the future would be to cover the ship with gravel and concrete, creating a huge sarcophagus and shaping it so that any explosion in the future would create a wave which would be directed across the Baltic towards St. Petersburg, Russia, but not Stockholm. It had been difficult to inform the public of all these steps without telling them the entire story, but he had succeeded, using his expert ability to lie.

  The skin on the PM’s forehead wrinkled into an ugly maze, a sign that he was experiencing extreme stress. “Does anyone else know this? Have the police found this out?”

  “No, Prime Minister, we’re keeping everyone in the dark. They have to solve the murder, and there are a few bits of evidence that might be difficult to explain, but so far no one has been able to put it together.”

  “This goes nowhere,” said the PM, “and I mean nowhere else. I’ll keep it from the rest of the government ministers and you’ll keep it inside the NSS. We can’t let this get out. There’d be panic.”

  “Yes, Prime Minister.”

  “Do you have any idea where this weapon might be? How was Hoffberg involved in all this?”

  “We’re not sure yet, Prime Minister. It appears he might have purchased a manual for the weapon while he was in Estonia.”

  “A manual? So he intended to use it. Or sell it. Do we know how he got his hands on the weapon? Where is the safest place for the government right now? I’ll need some answers soon.”

  “Yes, Prime Minister, of course. We’re working on all of those questions, but it would be a great help if you began to prepare a contingency plan in case we’re forced to evacuate some part of the country because of this. We have an obligation to report this to the SRSA, Rescue Services, or at least to the Little Reference Group for consideration.”

  “No,” retorted the PM, “there will be no evacuations. We can’t evacuate people without explaining why, and there will be no explanations about this. Ever. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Prime Minister,” said the chief of the National Security Service, as he bowed his head to the grim anger he saw appear on the PM’s face. “No evacuations,” he continued. “We’ll find another way to solve this.”

  “Be sure you do,” said the PM, “and be sure I’m kept informed. There will be regular daily briefings from now on, but we’ll have to be careful not to arouse suspicions there’s something happening. I’ll fly back to my farmhouse and you’ll come there every evening at a different time each day, between 7 and 10 pm.”

  “Yes, Prime Minister.”

  “And remember, keep the police out of this. We don’t need to read about this in the evening papers.”

  “Of course, Prime Minister.”

  *

  That the media people were holding off gave Sara something new to think about. In the beginning they’d been eager to follow up on the Hoffberg widow, and now they’d just disappeared. There had been no further interviews, no background articles on Hoffberg and no scathing accusations about how little was getting done.

  Sara appreciated the chance to work without having to think about a string of journalists on her tail all the time. Still, it was weird, not at all like them, and she wondered if maybe Ekman had used his considerable influence on the media power-people. She didn’t get too much time to worry about it though; she’d been right about the world of banking.

  As soon as the banks opened on Monday, Dan called Sara and said he’d been able to find a copy of the document used to authorise the 50,000 euro payment to the account in Switzerland. It was an invoice for a manual from an Estonian trading company, and there was a note stating that the tax authorities had been alerted about the lack of VAT registration for the company. Leo Hoffberg’s estate would soon receive an invoice from the Swedish tax authorities, and his inheritor would have to pay a twenty-five per cent Swedish Value Added Tax for the purchase. Leo would be taxed even after his death.

  Sara told Dan to get this onto the whiteboard. They’d go through it and anything else that had come up during his investigation.

  Dan picked up the marker pen on the tray below the whiteboard and looked for a place to insert the few words that were relevant for tomorrow’s meeting. In the column under Hoffberg’s name he found the notation about the trip to Tallinn, and managed to squeeze in Bank payment €50K next to it. As he began to write the name of the company on the invoice the black marker pen ran out of ink, and he exchanged it, finishing with the name in bright blue.

  *

  Leo Hoffberg and Martin Spimler had met with the man from Teknologikka Ltd only once. He’d come to the SAS Radisson in Tallinn just after they arrived from the airport, calling Leo’s room from the lobby. He was a tall man, powerful, and wore his khaki t-shirt like a soldier out of uniform. His strained smile had revealed two stainless steel teeth in the front of his mouth, and after that Spimler had called him ‘Jaws’. The man wore a black leather jacket that seemed heavy, and Leo had wondered if it had been lined with Kevlar. Their conversation in the lobby was carried out in English, but the man spoke with an obvious Russian accent.

  “I have you document,” he sa
id. “It is with me. I want money.”

  “Of course,” Leo said, “I can arrange that, but I’ll need a paper to give to the bank in Sweden. Can I see the document?”

  “On CD,” the man said. “Show you on computer.” And he produced a laptop, inserted the CD into it and started it up. In a few minutes he was prompted for a password for the CD, and he spun the laptop away from view and typed it in. “I get money, you get password to CD and original book,” he said. “Now you see document.”

  Leo groaned heavily as the document filled the computer screen. It was written in Cyrillic and there was no way he would be able to interpret it. He turned to Martin, who seemed to be less perturbed.

  “I had to study Russian in the military,” said Martin. “We were supposed to use it to be able to figure out how to use the weapons we could get off them if we ever were in a war with them. I wouldn’t be able to translate War and Peace, but this should be simple enough if they’ve included the usual drawings.”

  The man from Teknologikka Ltd allowed them to view the manual for only a few minutes. “Now you see it real. No money, no manual.” He removed the CD from the laptop. “You pay, you get manual.” He got to his feet, preparing to leave. “You like Estonia?” he had asked. “Plenty nice Russian women. You want?”

  “No,” said Leo, “we don’t. I’ll need a document to be able to arrange payment from the bank account. If you create an invoice and scan it in then I’ll do the transfer from here. You can send the scanned document to my private email address. You can watch me make the payment, then you can give us the manual after that.” He wrote his Swedish email account on the back of a business card he still carried from the Swedish Parliament. The man from Teknologikka smiled in stainless steel and left with a heavyset, balding man who’d been sitting on the opposite side of the lobby during the negotiations. He’d returned in less than twenty minutes, shoved a single piece of paper into Leo Hoffberg’s hands and watched as the bank transfer was accomplished.

  As soon as the receipt of transfer had been issued, he slapped the dull orange-coloured manual and the CD onto the table in front of Leo and left without another word.

  *

  Sara called Spimler’s wife to see if she could help her with any details about her husband’s trip to Tallinn with Hoffberg.

  “I knew that he’d gone to Estonia in August,” said Mrs Spimler. “It was some kind of environmental conference about fishing in the Baltic. Martin spent a lot of time researching water and was convinced fish populations were being affected by pollution coming from Poland and Estonia. He could be very provocative when it came to the environment. Do you think that might have something to do with his disappearance?” she asked.

  “We don’t know anything yet,” said Sara, trying to divulge as little as she could, but still keep her talking, “but it might help us if you had any other information about that trip. Do you know which hotel he stayed at?”

  “Is there a SAS Radisson in Tallinn? I think he said he was staying there. The conference organisers must have been paying for it, Martin was always so stingy when it came to where he stayed.”

  “I’ll check that out if you like,” said Sara. “Do you know the name of the conference organisers?”

  “No,” she said, “just that it had something to do with fish. He kept everything in that cardboard box I gave you.” Sara could hear her draw a deep breath to keep from sobbing. “This is driving me crazy,” said Maria Spimler.

  “Yes, well I’m sure he’ll turn up soon,” said Sara, but she could hear that her voice didn’t carry the conviction she tried to convey.

  “Are you sure you haven’t found out anything? Is he with someone and you’re just not telling me?” Now her sobbing couldn’t be controlled.

  Sara felt like shit, not being able to tell her what she knew, and she excused herself, hung up the phone, then went into the Hoffberg room to see if anyone else was there before leaving for the day, hoping to find someone who could tell her she wasn’t a bad person.

  *

  The room was empty and dark when Sara went in. She turned on the lights and sat down at the table full of binders and bags of evidence, then looked up at the whiteboard to see what Dan had written about the document that had been used for the bank payment to Switzerland.

  She had to stand up again when she saw it. It was the same name Robert had mentioned when he’d traced the company owning the car that Lemko drove when he left Stallarholmen for southern Sweden, now in bright blue letters on the whiteboard. Teknologikka.

  “Oh yes!” she shouted to no one except herself. “I’ve got you now.”

  Chapter 14

  When Sara got to work on Tuesday there was a note on her desk. Ekman wanted her to call as soon as she got in. She had the team meeting in the Hoffberg room before coffee, so when Ekman didn’t answer she went to her meeting first. Cantsten was there, holding her binder full of current cases, all dressed up to go somewhere, asking for an update and if they had anyone for her to arrest yet. There was the usual grumbling about needing a caffeine jolt, but the team seemed to wake up without it when Sara connected the dots about the company in Tallinn, Teknologikka, and how it was connected to the Hoffberg bank transfer, the Volvo and the house outside Trelleborg. Dan told them that he’d found out that besides owning the Volvo, Teknologikka also owned a motorcycle.

  There were grins on everyone’s faces that morning, and they all knew they had their villain. Lemko was as good as behind bars, and Sara had managed to get them onto the right track without even mentioning the manual she’d been forced to leave with Ekman.

  She asked Cantsten if she could get a search warrant for Lemko’s house in Trelleborg, and thought she could hear bureaucratic wheels spinning in Cantsten’s head as she waited for the answer to appear on the inside of her eyes.

  “Is this the only evidence you have? Our murder victim paid money into the account of a company that owns a house in Trelleborg? The company also owns a car that might have been observed near the scene of the murder, and the driver appears to have been a female member of the clergy. Have you uncovered any motive which might help me understand why I should allow you to enter and search property owned by a foreign entity? Taxes? Has the company paid their Swedish taxes?”

  Sara looked at Dan, who’d been following up that lead. “Yes,” he said, “they’ve paid all their taxes: property tax, vehicle taxes, everything.”

  “OK,” said Cantsten, “why would this company want to kill the victim? You’ve said he paid them money. Usually it’s the other way around: people get killed because they don’t pay.”

  “Maybe that’s why he was killed,” Sara said. “Maybe he was supposed to pay them more money and he refused.”

  “OK,” said Cantsten, “then why the torture? What’s that about?”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t tell the murderer something. Maybe he was killed when the murderer realised it was a dead end.”

  “I’m hearing lots of maybes here, and I still have a hard time connecting them to a foreign company,” said Cantsten as she looked at Sara and smiled. It was the first time Sara had seen Cantsten show any emotion at all and she felt like she’d won the lottery; she knew Cantsten was going to give her the search warrant.

  Then she saw Cantsten’s lips tighten as she continued, “What I think is that maybe you people aren’t giving me enough to go on. I won’t be ridiculed by some judge who thinks I haven’t been an Assistant DA long enough to run a murder case, and I won’t be giving you a search warrant to open a house owned by a foreign company and risk an incident with the Foreign Office unless you give me something more to go on. This is inadequate so far. You can have another two weeks of wiretap on Spimler’s wife, and I hope you use it to find out where he’s gone, because that’s where you’re going to find the solution to this case.”

  Cantsten left, apologising for having to attend a court session, making Sara feel like she’d just wasted her precious time again.

  The team ju
st sat there. Dan lowered his head to his desk, quietly banging it onto the oaken surface, and Robert shook his head back and forth to some unheard rhythm.

  Sara looked around after Cantsten had gone, and the glee that was there only a minute ago was now transformed to gloom. “OK, guys,” she said, “Spimler. I don’t care how you do it, but find this guy. He has to be somewhere.”

  *

  It was obvious Sara would have to do some background checking on her own down in Trelleborg, and she was on her way back to her office to find a better hotel in Malmö when her cell phone started playing the refrain from the Beatles’ song When I’m Sixty-Four, a ringtone she’d assigned to John Hurtree, the ex-US Army CID field agent who’d helped her a few years back on an almost-impossible case.

  “Hello, John,” said Sara, “It’s been a while.”

  “It has,” he said, “and I’m flattered you remember me.”

  “You’re a hard man to forget, John,” she said, and meant it. Hurtree had nearly got her fired because of his obsession with solving a case he’d been following for more than forty years, and now he was in her backyard again.

  Sara began to feel a little uneasy. “I’ve got a lot to do right now, John. Glad to hear from you again. I hope you enjoy Stockholm and I’ll call you when I get back. I have to go to southern Sweden now on a case. Bye.”

  “OK,” said Hurtree, his voice the pitch of smoked whisky. “That’s great. I was going to southern Sweden myself. A place called Trelleborg. Hope you enjoy your trip.”

  It was not so much what he said, as the way he said it. Sara began to feel Hurtree knew something connected to the Hoffberg case, and now he was trying to tell her something. Ekman’s words ran through her mind again: “Has Hurtree contacted you yet? He will.”