His own contribution to the list of priorities was a source of satisfaction to him. It dealt with something completely new in the history of the secret police, which in the long run could prove very fortunate; the fact that it was his loser of a nephew who had given him the idea didn’t make matters worse. Berg’s father had been a policeman out in the country, within the old organization, long before it had been nationalized. He had had two sons who had both become policemen. Things had gone well for Berg, far beyond expectations; for his older brother things had gone badly.
When Berg left the police academy, he started out as a patrolman with the uniformed police department in Stockholm. In his free time he studied for a high school diploma by correspondence. After that he took a leave of absence from the police department and studied law full-time with money he had saved up as a constable. This degree had taken him three years as opposed to the usual five, and when he applied to the prosecutor’s office they had taken him in with open arms. Several of his new colleagues had made the same class journey as he had. After ten years as a prosecutor, he had been approached by the secret police. The police force had been nationalized, and the secret police had been reorganized as a special division of the National Police Board. The old operation needed to be aired out, worn-out brooms exchanged for new ones, and Berg was one of the first to be asked. Ten years later he was in effect head of the whole thing.
His older brother got married at the same time as he finished school and started as a patrolman with the uniformed police department in Stockholm. In rapid succession he had acquired three children and problems with finances, alcohol, and his marriage. Then his wife left him and took the children with her. He had driven a patrol car under the influence, crashed into a newsstand, been fined and given a suspended sentence, disciplined in the form of suspension and payroll deductions, and finally been offered a new career as watchman at the police department’s lost-and-found office. There he had remained for five years, and the summer when his own son started as a patrolman in Stockholm City he had borrowed a service vehicle, driven out to Vaxholm, and plunged straight into the water from the steamboat pier.
Berg was firmly convinced that blood was thicker than water, but when it came to his own nephew his conviction had wavered on more than one occasion. When his brother had been killed in the accident-that’s of course how it was described-he had exerted himself vigorously to put some order into the life of his younger relative. Because the difference in age between them was only twelve years-in solitary moments he used to thank his creator that it wasn’t greater than that-he had tried to be like an older brother to him, but with hindsight that had been wasted effort.
His nephew had had miserable grades during all of his years in school. He had already acquired a well-established reputation as a bully by the end of his first year in elementary school, and the political opinions that he often, and gladly, expressed had never fit on the map provided by the Swedish parliament.
But he was big and burly, he had a grandfather, a father, and an uncle who were policemen, and he had been welcomed into the fold when he applied to the police academy.
His career had proceeded without a hitch and after a few years he was working as commander of the garrison with by far the most complaints in the Stockholm Police Department’s riot squad. Without realizing it, he had a quality that made him both useful and usable to the organization he served. Police officers like him create sufficient scope for action for all the normal, functional officers, thought Berg. In addition, he was an untapped resource for the operation that Berg represented.
An absolute majority of all police officers voted for the conservatives. Berg knew that. He also knew that a sufficient number of them did so for lack of a more extreme alternative, and with that knowledge his mission was established. So: start out by mapping antigovernment elements within the police department and gradually expand the mission to include their counterparts in the military. Several of them already associated privately across operational boundaries, so there were natural inroads and it shouldn’t be too difficult.
Berg himself had written the long background section to the report on undemocratic movements and elements within the institutions whose mission it was to protect the security of the realm against external and internal attacks, and he had been careful to underscore that there were two organizations that had historically shown themselves to be extraordinarily dangerous for the politically appointed powers that be, namely the military and their own secret police. He had concluded by stating that this was an important but unfortunately overlooked issue, to which, however, significantly greater attention had been devoted for some time. He also had an explanation for why it had turned out this way. “The fact that our Swedish political democracy has been one of the most stable democracies known to twentieth-century European history is in all likelihood essentially the reason that secret police interest in this issue has previously been so low.”
Twelve days, not fourteen, had passed before Berg and his coworkers had been called up to the government office building in order to give an account of the prioritized activity. Normally there would be three regular participants at these meetings-the minister of justice, the chief legal officer, and Berg himself-but this time there was an additional person in the room. A week earlier the prime minister had let Berg be informed that he had decided to elevate certain security issues to his own chancellery in the Cabinet, and that he had therefore decided that from now on his special adviser would take part in these meetings on behalf of the prime minister, and that he assumed that he would hear from Berg immediately if he had any objections to his choice of person.
It had been almost seven years since Berg had been forced to listen to the language of power from his superior, and this time, unlike before, he had also been slightly shaken and a little more worried than was pleasant. Actually he had expected something like this-he had not even ruled out the possibility that he would be called up to Rosenbad only to find out that he was being replaced-but this he hadn’t foreseen, especially not the concluding portion of the prime minister’s directive: “objections to my choice.” To Berg’s ears this sounded suspiciously like a hidden message, even a warning.
Berg, like the prime minister and his adviser, obviously knew that the latter had been classified in the highest protection category for the past several years. The question was whether the prime minister and the person this ultimately concerned also knew anything more, thought Berg. For example, that Berg had certain pieces of information removed from the adviser’s personal file, which he didn’t want the person the information concerned to find out that Berg knew. He had brooded half the night until he saw himself as if in a mirror that mirrored another mirror diagonally behind his back, multiplying him into infinity; the next day he had been both tired and disheartened. For a brief moment he had in complete seriousness considered summoning his most intimate coworker, Police Superintendent Waltin, the head of the external operation, to seek his advice, but this was not a time for weakness, so he had dismissed that thought. Never show what you’re thinking, wait and see, thought Berg. Besides, he didn’t really know if he could completely trust Waltin.