The Magdalena File

by Jon Stenhugg

  “Lemko is in custody. But the two guys in the van said they picked him up at a truck stop in Arboga as a hitchhiker. Their story checked out with what Lemko told them, and the drivers told the officers they’d miss their boat to Kiel if they were detained, so the officers got their names and addresses and let them go. They’re probably having dinner on their way to Germany right now.”

  “You must be joking. They let them go? How did they explain who cut off the handcuff? Did Lemko bite through the chain with his teeth?”

  “Lemko said it was a defective handcuff, that he simply jerked on it until it broke. The arresting officer said he seemed very happy to be in custody again.”

  “Really? Let’s see what he thinks when I show up. Tell them I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

  “I wish I were in Gothenburg,” said Robert.

  “Why, what’s up?”

  “They’ve shut down the power grid in the western counties and begun to evacuate everyone within a ten-mile radius of Mora towards Stockholm.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “I can’t find out. All they’re telling us is what’s happening, not why. Personally I think it has something to do with the torpedo.”

  *

  “Haven’t you disarmed it yet?” the American mission controller shouted over the sound of the four turbo-fan engines just outside the shell of the C-130. “We have to make a decision very soon.”

  “It’s the manual,” replied the demolitions expert. “It’s ambiguous. It depends on whether the clock was set to turn on the rocket motor, or to detonate the warhead when used as a mine.”

  “Yeah, so what are you saying?”

  “There’s only one off-switch. If I turn off the clock which might start the torpedo, it might detonate the warhead as a mine. If I turn off the clock which might turn off the mine, it might start the rocket motor. I’m not sure if this torpedo was upgraded. There have been some, uh, rumours about this control system.”

  “Rumours?”

  “Yes. We’ve heard that on the older models, once you start the clock, you can’t turn it off without detonating the ordnance.”

  The mission controller sat on one of the canvas flight chairs screwed to the wall. Blood drained from his face. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then asked, “Are there any options?”

  “Yes,” said the demolition expert. “One. I can try to take the warhead apart and remove the fusing mechanism. That’s what I’m doing right now.”

  “When will you know if it works?”

  “You won’t know if it doesn’t.”

  A red light in the hold began flashing, and the mission controller returned to the cockpit.

  “Chantilly tells me the bogy behind us is the Russian Coaler we saw at Bromma Airport. They’re catching up fast.”

  “They wouldn’t chase us if they weren’t packin’. Have you asked Orland Main Station in Norway for help?”

  “They scrambled two F16s. They’re hanging around at the Norwegian border, but we gotta get there first. Norwegian pilots. They won’t violate Swedish airspace.”

  “What kind of aircraft is chasing us?”

  “Antonov 72. The Swedes probably wouldn’t let them carry missiles under the wing, so we’ll only have to deal with cannon fire.”

  “Can you outfly them?”

  “This is a propeller-driven freighter. They’re flying a jet freighter. The only thing I can do is fly slower than they can. And lower.”

  Chapter 24

  The sting of Kristina Hoffberg’s voice when Sara had asked her for Leo’s telephone records was like a broken track on a damaged CD, repeating itself until Sara felt like she had to turn it off. She’d learned a long time ago that what caused this was one of the sources of her success when it came to solving crimes, so she never took that last step. She kept the memories active until they finally found a home in the bulk of evidence surrounding the cases she dealt with.

  Now, as her car approached Gothenburg, the chance to interview Lemko created other questions in her mind. She’d finally have a decent chance to interrogate him and maybe get this case completely solved once and for all. The horizon in front of her was brightening with the orange-coloured neon street lamps that signalled her approach to Gothenburg. It wouldn’t be long now.

  When she arrived at the ferry terminal, there was a police van parked beside the entrance. Sara tapped on the window to get the attention of the driver.

  “I’m Sara Markham,” she said, holding up her ID card, “from the National Bureau of Investigation in Stockholm. I hear you managed to catch a fugitive we’re looking for.”

  “Oh, him in the back?” asked the driver, a police assistant who seemed too young to have graduated from the academy. “He keeps asking for something to eat. I told him he’d have to wait until you came.”

  “Good. Are you alone?”

  “No, my partner’s upstairs talking to a witness. The guy in the back had a ticket and boarding pass issued to him, but he was in the back of a van, sitting with some German when we caught him. The other German was the one who purchased the tickets.”

  “Where are the Germans?”

  “We let them go,” said the PA. “We waited as long as we could – they would have missed their ship otherwise. They just picked up your guy at a truck stop in Arboga.” He nodded back towards Lemko. “He confirmed that himself, so there wasn’t much else to do.”

  “Then who’s your partner talking to?” Sara asked, barely able to conceal her irritation after being reminded they’d let two kidnap suspects loose.

  “The girl who sold the tickets. She’s pretty hot,” said the PA.

  “So very lucky for him. Get him down here. Now. I want you both to take your prisoner to the Central Prison in the city. I’ll be right behind you. Can you manage that?”

  Sara sat in her car, watching as the driver came running over to the police van, and she followed closely behind them as they pulled into traffic. She could see Lemko’s silhouette when the windows were illuminated by street lights, and she hoped there wouldn’t be an attempt to free him, or worse yet, to kill him as they drove towards the police station. Her nervousness gave way to a sigh of relief when they pulled in front of the receiving section for prisoners and the gate locked behind them.

  She was inside at the receiving desk before they were, and she made arrangements for an interrogation room where she could talk to Lemko while they did all the administration of popping him into a cell.

  *

  Sara sat waiting for Lemko, and looked up as he was led into the interrogation room. She could see he recognised her, and he chuckled as they were handcuffing him to the table.

  “I remember you. You seem to like ferry terminals.”

  “So do you,” said Sara. “Now tell me, this story of you hitching a ride from Arboga. It’s crap. Who were the two German guys we let go?”

  “I’m not sure. The presentation wasn’t exactly formal.”

  “I’d be interested in knowing how you got out of the police van in Arboga. You were handcuffed to the van.”

  “Yes, well, as I told those young police officers, I just jerked on the chain and it broke. Faulty material, I guess.”

  “Faulty answer. I looked at those handcuffs and they were cut, so cut the crap, Lemko. Who cut you loose, and why?”

  Lemko’s face seemed to sprout wrinkles, and he looked at least five years older. She remembered when she’d first seen him dressed as a woman, and how his blonde wig had come off as they’d wrestled in the ladies’ room just days before.

  “I don’t remember who cut them,” he said, “and I never asked why.”

  “Lemko, those guys probably meant to kill you as soon as they’d tortured you for whatever you know. If you like, maybe we can arrange for them to come back and pick you up again. Do you understand? I want some answers, and I want them now.”

  “I’ve already admitted to killing Hoffberg.”

  “Why?” Sara asked, and
she interrupted his answer as he began by shouting, “And don’t tell me you liked it again. Tell me why you did it.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t work for the NSS? What would I get from you if I told you?”

  “A trial and jail time in Sweden. Hopefully for a long, long time.”

  Lemko weighed his answer carefully. “I was looking for something. Hoffberg knew where it was, and he wouldn’t tell me,” he said. “I just made sure he wouldn’t tell anyone else either. It was that simple.”

  “Why were you looking for something?”

  Lemko looked her in the eye for a moment, searching for something he hadn’t found in her question. “Aren’t you interested in what I was looking for?”

  “No. Why were you looking for it?” she asked again.

  “I, uh, I was getting paid to do it. It was a job.”

  “And your employer?”

  “Someone with a lot of money. I never met him, but he knew about me from my days at, you know, Stasi. All I had to do was to find what he was looking for and everything would have been alright. Hoffberg was very stupid.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know where it was.”

  “He knew, he knew. He just wouldn’t tell me. I told him about the risk he was running, that I’d have to kill him and he just said it didn’t matter. It sounded like he was dying anyway.”

  “How do you know he knew anything about it at all? How could you be so certain?”

  “I knew someone from before, a person who used to provide me with information – I used to call her Magdalena. Hoffberg had paid someone for a document in Estonia and left a lot of tracks after him. When I got his name I contacted Magdalena and asked for her help. She’s good at her job, she had the address and a complete time schedule of personal habits in no time at all.”

  “Magdalena, huh?” said Sara, and she stole a glance at Lemko’s face. He seemed very tired. “Did you meet with her?”

  “Not this time. The last time we met was when she worked in the city years ago. She left a report on the status of your government’s discussions about joining the NATO alliance.”

  “NATO? Was she a defence specialist?”

  “No. She was a book-lover. Just a very convinced person, politically I mean, very single-minded. She was dating a man who had all kinds of defence information. She never told me who he was, only that they were seeing each other.”

  “Was she Polish? How did you make contact with her?”

  Lemko looked at Sara in amusement, and he shook his head slightly as he said, “You’ve never had much contact with undercover agents, have you? I kept two Post Office boxes for correspondence: one she controlled that I used to contact her, and one I controlled that she could use to contact me. Mail to either was always forwarded to wherever we wanted to receive mail. We could fill in any address we wished whenever we wanted to change it. I never knew her identity, where she lived, or had any other way to contact her. She could drop out any time she wanted by simply not answering the postcard I sent her. And what makes you think she was Polish?”

  “Nothing. I know a cleaning woman named Magdalena. She’s Polish. This card, was it a special card?” asked Sara, as an idea formed.

  “Why should I tell you anything more than I already have? I’ll need to save something for when I speak to the NSS again,” said Lemko.

  “If you answer their questions truthfully, you still won’t know what that’ll get you. If you help me, maybe I can keep you alive long enough to get to trial.”

  Lemko hesitated for a minute before answering. He seemed to be calculating the risk of telling her more against the benefit of being able to get a public trial. “It was a picture postcard of Stockholm City Hall. I’d address it to her and name a day of the week and a time, as if we had already met there. That told her when we should meet in the coming week. We always met in the rose garden behind the City Hall, overlooking the water.”

  The image of the postcard on the refrigerator flashed behind Sara’s eyes. “And when she wanted to meet with you?”

  “The same thing, except she used the box number that I controlled,” said Lemko.

  “So if you didn’t meet her this time, how did she give you the details you needed?”

  “She just sent me a couple of pages to my Post Office box. Nothing more, just an address and some dates and times when she was sure I could find Hoffberg alone.”

  “What kind of information did you give her on Hoffberg? I mean, she must have had access to every register in the country to be able to help you so quickly. And how would she be able to give you personal details about his habits?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, she was always very thorough. Exceptional, actually,” he said. “I…I just gave her Hoffberg’s name and asked her if she could help me get some background on him. She never knew what I was going to do with the information. I never told her about the, uhm, the torpedo.”

  “A torpedo? Now what would make a torpedo worth killing for?”

  “It wasn’t just any torpedo,” said Lemko. “Defence people call this kind of torpedo a Rocketfish.”

  “Where did it come from?” Sara asked. He’d finally opened up, and she felt he could help her tie up the final threads of the case. His shoulders were hunched and he bent towards the table, resting his weight on his left forearm, his right hand cuffed to the table. He could have passed for any other middle-aged man in a crowd, and Sara began to understand the secret of his success. When she closed her eyes, even for a short while, it was difficult to recall what he looked like. It was as if he emanated a signal to everyone around him which invaded their brains and erased the image of his face.

  “Where did it come from?” she asked again.

  “Estonia,” he said, finally. “It was from Estonia.”

  “So Estonia was in the torpedo-making business,” said Sara. Lemko pushed himself back, stopped by the handcuff that held him to the table, and she continued, “We never heard anything about that up here.”

  “They didn’t actually build the torpedoes,” he said quietly, beginning to show signs of fatigue. “They were only involved in the final step, the manufacture and installation of the warhead. And the training for their use, of course. And no, it wasn’t common knowledge, Paldiski was kept a close secret,” said Lemko, confirming everything Hurtree had told her. “Up until the day the Russians left Estonia, the entire town was closed to anyone who didn’t work there or go to school there.”

  “OK, Lemko, here’s what I want you to do.” Sara pushed a blank sheet of paper and a pen over to his side of the table. “I want you to write down on this paper whatever it is you would write if you were going to meet with this Magdalena person on Tuesday of next week. If it doesn’t work I’ll arrange for a special transport again, one that we won’t help you out of.”

  Lemko looked up at her and then back at the sheet of paper in front of him. “I don’t have the postcard that I use when I contact her. You’ll need to buy one at the Central Train Station if it’s going to work. It looks something like this.” He drew a crude image of the view of Stockholm’s City Hall. Sara recognised it immediately from the postcard found in Hoffberg’s kitchen. Lemko then blocked off an area that approximated the size of a postcard and wrote,

  Thanks for lunch last Tuesday.

  Magdalena / S.

  Box 4015

  12522 Älvsjö

  Sara took the paper from him when he’d finished and asked, “Just curious – why Älvsjö?”

  “That’s the kind of question the NSS would ask,” he said, and he broke his blank stare. “It’s simple. When I travelled to Stockholm, I always booked a train ticket from southern Sweden, and at that time the train always stopped in Älvsjö before continuing into the city. It’s a small place and I was almost always the only one to get off, so I could see if I’d been followed. And there’s a fantastic little bakery just down from the train station and the Post Office. I always bought something there. Will she be arrested, my little Magdalen
a?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Sara hoped her lie would remain undetected. “I’m only interested in talking to her at this point. But you’re sure you haven’t met with her this time?”

  Lemko went silent again. Sara tried another question, something which had made her curious from the first night she’d seen him. This time she used his codename. “Your clothes, Schneller. Are you a real transvestite, or just good at disguises?”

  He said nothing at first, then replied in a tired voice, “I was trained by one of the best. A man called Wolf. You might have heard of him.”

  “Yes, actually I have,” said Sara.

  “They taught us everything. How to dress, how to walk, how to put on make-up, how to flirt. Just everything. It was a very good school. And Markus, he always wore a long, black leather overcoat. I thought it looked very, well, fashionable, so I bought one too. I always liked the way it looked on me, regardless of whether I was dressed as a man or a woman.”

  After that he went silent again. Her phone rang and she could see from the display it was Hurtree.

  “Hi there, Sara. It’s me, Hurtree, and I’ve got a little problem.”

  “John, I can’t talk right now.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “If you could talk I wouldn’t have a problem. I think we should get together as soon as possible.”

  Sara looked over at her prisoner, and saw he’d recognised Hurtree’s voice. He turned his face towards the wall as soon as he noticed she was looking at him.

  “Like I said, John, I’m not in a place where I can talk. I’ll be in Stockholm late this afternoon. If you can come to my office I can see you then.”

  “I’m in the reception of your building now. I’ll just sit here until I start growing mushrooms.”

  “Look around for some fertiliser, we usually have some bullshit lying around. I love mushrooms.”

  Lemko sat for several more minutes without saying a word after Sara put her cell phone in her pocket. Finally, he broke the silence. “I should have stopped that son-of-a-bitch when I had the chance.”