Hjelm, satisfied, still had to ask, “What kind of ideal are you working toward? What does the life that you’re defending with all this violence look like?”
“Like yours,” said Wayne Jennings without hesitation. “Not like mine, like yours. I have no life. I died in Vietnam. Do you believe that you live this freely and with this much privilege at no cost? Do you believe that Sweden is alliance-free and neutral?”
He paused and looked at the wall, then moved his gaze toward Norlander. He met eyes filled with hate. It was hardly the first time. He ignored it.
“Where is Gunnar Nyberg?” he asked.
“Taking care of his broken hand. Why?”
“No one has ever taken me out before. And no one has ever fooled me like that. I thought he was an idiot.”
“He identifies with Benny Lundberg. He sat with him as he was going through the worst of his suffering. His warmth saved Benny’s life. Is that something you can understand?”
“Warmth saves more than cold. Unfortunately, cold is also necessary. Otherwise we would have an eternally cold earth.”
“Is that what the Lindberger story is about-eternal cold? Nuclear weapons? Chemical or biological ones? Or is it LinkCoop? Computers, or control devices for nuclear weapons? Saudi Arabia?”
He smiled inwardly. Maybe he was even a little impressed by the Swedish police-and by Paul Hjelm. “I’m still thinking about it. I could ask you to contact a certain authority, but I don’t know. There are risks.”
“Are you aware that you are sitting here because you committed twenty murders and one attempted murder? That you are a criminal? An enemy of humanity? Someone who destroys all the human worth that we have spent several thousand years building up? Or do you think you can get out at any time? Do you think you can just choose the right second to get up from the chair, free yourself from the handcuffs, and tear my head off?”
Jennings smiled again, that smile that never reached his eyes. “People should never make murder machines out of other people.”
Hjelm looked at Hultin. Suddenly they began to feel threatened. After all, the only thing that separated them from a murder machine was a set of handcuffs.
“You don’t kill police officers,” Hultin said with bombproof certainty.
“I weigh the pros and cons of every situation. The alternative with the most pros wins. If I had killed that policeman”-he nodded toward Norlander-“you wouldn’t have handled me this mildly today. And then we would have had a problem.”
“You were counting on being caught? You’re joking!”
“It was in fifteenth place in the list of possibilities. It went down to seventeenth after Nyberg’s visit. That was why I wasn’t on my guard. That was an excellent tactic.”
Jennings closed his eyes and weighed the pros and cons. Then he made an extremely fast movement and was out of the handcuffs.
Chavez had his pistol up first. Holm was second, Norlander third. Söderstedt was sluggish, and Hultin and Hjelm sat still.
“Nice reaction over there in the corner,” said Jennings, pointing at Chavez. “What’s your name?”
Chavez and Norlander approached him with pistols raised. Hjelm took his out to be on the safe side. All three held Jennings in check while Holm and Söderstedt cuffed him again, considerably tighter this time.
“I’ve had a full month’s training on handcuffs,” Jennings said calmly. “And I mean a full month. We need to understand each other here.”
“Okay,” said Hjelm. “You’ve made your point. So how did the pros and cons look on April 6, 1983?”
Jennings performed a quick search of his memory bank, then he flashed a smile. It passed. “I understand,” he said.
“What is it that you understand?”
“That you’re not a bad policeman, Paul Hjelm, not bad at all.”
“Why did you write that letter to your wife?”
“Weakness,” Jennings said neutrally. “A pure con. The last one.”
“The episode with Nyberg, then?”
“We’ll see,” he said cryptically.
“We found the letter, almost completely burned up, in Lamar’s apartment.”
“Was that where you found my name?”
“Unfortunately, it wasn’t. If it had been, Benny Lundberg wouldn’t be lying half terrified to death at Karolinska right now. Why did you write your name? Surely it didn’t matter to Mary Beth what you called yourself. It was really quite infantile. And it drove Lamar to come here, which killed him.”
“It was a farewell to my last remnants of a personal life. The letter was supposed to have been burned immediately. She got her revenge by not burning it.”
“Or else she wanted one last memory of the man she had once made the mistake of loving. It’s called human emotion. For you, it’s something other people have, something you can exploit.”
“It was a final farewell,” Jennings said.
“This final farewell killed your whole family. It made your son follow you and get killed by you; it made your wife kill herself. A cute farewell.”
Was it possible to hurt him? Hjelm wondered, as Jennings looked at him with narrowed eyes. Had he found a sore spot?
“Did she kill herself? I didn’t know that.”
“Your deeds are never done in isolation. You can’t kill someone without it having a wide array of consequences. You spread clouds of evil and sudden death around you-do you really not understand that? Do you know how many serial killers you have inspired? You have a fan club on the Internet. You’re a fucking legend. There are K T-shirts, small cookies in the shape of a K that say ‘The Famous Kentucky Killer,’ badges that say ‘Keep on doing it, K,’ licorice versions of your pincers. You have actively contributed to the fact that a frightening number of serial killers are running riot in the country you think you’re protecting. You’re a madman who must be stopped. Stop yourself, for God’s sake.”
“I’m hardly alone,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. “I follow orders and receive a salary each month. If I disappear, there’ll be a job opening, and a lot of people will apply.”
“Are you finished thinking?”
“Yes,” he said abruptly. “I’ll make it short and concise-listen up. LinkCoop is a shady company. It survives on illegal imports and exports of military computer equipment; the rest is a front. The CEO, Henrik Nilsson, is a crook. LinkCoop has gotten hold of control devices for nuclear warheads, just as you said, Hjelm. Eric Lindberger from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was the middleman between LinkCoop and the Saudi Islamist movement. I thought I had stopped the deal by taking out Lindberger. By the way, he’s the only one who hadn’t talked under pressure-I was impressed. But great sums of money have been transferred to LinkCoop’s secret accounts today. This means the equipment is in the hands of the Swedish middleman, in an unknown location, and will soon be on its way to a Swedish harbor, I don’t know which one, in order to be transported on to those in the fundamentalist movement.”
“Perhaps Eric Lindberger withstood your torture simply because he didn’t know anything. Perhaps he was innocent, and the Swedish middleman was someone else.”
“I received reliable information from… my sources. They’ve never been wrong before.”
“How did the message read, exactly?” Arto Söderstedt asked from over by the wall.
Jennings’s head turned the necessary fraction of an inch, no more.
Söderstedt had his turn to meet the gaze. Hard core, he thought.
“It was a coded message,” said Jennings, “and it went ‘E Lindberger M.F.A.’ It was unambiguous.”
“Elisabeth Justine Lindberger,” Söderstedt said coldly.