…
Perhaps I’ve been worrying unnecessarily, thought Berg; looking solely at what had actually been said, their meeting had gone smoothly and with only marginal, factual objections from his superiors. The new minister of justice had first expressed a certain surprise that the Kurds had such far-reaching plans for subversive activity, to judge by the survey of which Berg “so meritoriously” had given an account, but actually he was not so surprised after all if he could “be a little personal,” for he had suspected for quite some time that “there was something fishy.
“With the Kurds, that is,” he explained.
There’s one I don’t have to worry about, thought Berg.
The new participant at the meeting did not say much. For a while it actually appeared as if he had fallen asleep in his seat, leaning back in his chair with eyes closed, but when Berg got to his ongoing investigation of personnel hostile to democracy within the police department and the military, he suddenly revived and raised his heavy eyelids at least slightly.
Berg didn’t like his look, nor his expression, for that matter. He seemed almost amused, and Berg got an unpleasant feeling that the adviser was not seeing him but rather was observing him as though he were an object and not a person. The adviser suddenly started laughing so that his fat stomach bounced; then he nodded and smiled broadly toward Berg but without moving his eyelids a millimeter.
“Hear the roar from the crater of justice,” he chuckled and his fat stomach bounced again. “When will we have occasion to enjoy this good cigar? I can hardly contain myself.”
“According to my colleagues, we will be able to present an initial survey at the beginning of next year,” Berg answered, his expression a model of correctness.
“The age of miracles is clearly not past,” said the prime minister’s special adviser. He sank back in the chair again with eyelids lowered and an amused smile on his lips.
That man is not in his right mind, thought Berg. But he didn’t say that.
…
The following day he met Waltin at the secure location. Waltin had brought with him the papers that had been cleaned out of the special adviser’s file and were now being stored outside the building, while Berg brought what was left with him. Then he visited his workroom on the top floor and read the file while Waltin was pulling on a one-armed bandit that for some unknown reason was installed in the conference room directly below. At regular intervals a faint clanking sound forced its way through the double flooring, and on at least one occasion Waltin shouted with enthusiasm. Why did he do that? thought Berg, who knew that Waltin had his own key to the machine’s coin box.
There were three documents in the file that troubled Berg and that he blamed himself for not having read before yesterday’s meeting. They were all almost twenty years old and dealt with the special adviser’s time as a draftee in the army. According to the first document he had been placed with a regular infantry regiment in upper Norrland. One month later he had been reassigned to general headquarters in Stockholm after a request from headquarters made directly to the regimental head. There he did service for a little more than a year with a department under the command of general headquarters that produced “non-security-classified instructional materials” for draftees and noncommissioned officers in the army. And when he was discharged, after fifteen months of service, he was still an ordinary draftee.
The second document contained two different intelligence tests that he had undergone in connection with enlistment. The first was the usual test, which everyone who enlisted had to fill out, and his results had placed him in the highest category, where roughly two percent of every batch tended to land. There was in itself nothing exceptional about that; Berg himself had been in the category just below, but considering the special adviser’s placement as a regular draftee in a regular infantry regiment, there was something that didn’t add up. It would have been reasonable to have at least suggested alternative placement for him, but there was not the least indication of that.
Instead he came back a week later and underwent yet another test. Berg was no expert on psychological testing, but he could read. On the last page the psychologist who had conducted the test had added a handwritten note: “The respondent has attained the maximum result on Stanford Binet in the expanded variant. According to the distribution for the test in question, this means that he belongs to that portion of the total population which makes up circa.01% of the referenced population.” One in a hundred thousand, thought Berg. One of less than a hundred Swedes, who a few months later joins up as an ordinary drafted soldier in the infantry?
The third document contained only a typewritten piece of paper and its envelope: The address was handwritten with printed letters and the letter was addressed to “Stockholm Police Department, Investigation Unit, Police Station, Kungsholmen.” From there it had clearly wandered on unknown paths to the archives of the secret police. The sender was anonymous, but from the contents and between the lines it was evident that he worked as a staff officer at the training department, G.H.Q. Stockholm, where, among other things, he took care of draftees’ passes.
The anonymous informant was writing to point out an obvious anomaly. On the first day at his new service location, one of the draftees had already submitted a pass which granted him leave for the following two weeks. After that he had shown up and submitted another new pass with the same wording. The staff officer interpreted this as so remarkable that he asked him to wait while he checked the pass with the officer who had signed it. He had been “particularly brusquely treated by the aforementioned officer, who in an impudent tone said to me that I should not be meddling in things that were none of my business.” When he returned to his office “the draftee had already departed from quarters and as this obvious anomaly has gone on for almost a year I now turn to you, sir, to comment on the matter. The situation in my workplace is unfortunately not such that I could take up the problem with my superior.”
“What do you think about this?” asked Berg.
He and Waltin were sitting on the couch in the conference room and he had time to drink half a pot of coffee while Waltin read and pondered.
“Looks as though we’ve got another spy on our hands,” Waltin said with a wry smile.
Two or three, thought Berg, moaning to himself. The second was the minister of justice’s chief legal officer, who usually attended the weekly meetings. He had done so for many years, regardless of which party the minister belonged to. In addition he had a side assignment as legal adviser for the supreme commander, with the rank of lieutenant general and placement with general headquarters.
The chief legal officer tended to be a very taciturn man. On those rare occasions when he spoke, it was usually to answer a question, and what he said always concerned formalities and judicial questions. He presented an image both agreeable and taciturn. An old-fashioned educated scribe, Berg thought, but because he was not one to fall for a pretty face, and because the chief legal officer took the minutes at their meetings-granted, these were extremely concise-Berg nonetheless had a routine check carried out. His detective had spent an entire week in a cold delivery truck in the midst of a bitterly cold winter outside the chief legal officer’s magnificent villa on Lidingö without having the slightest thing to report. On the eighth night, however, things started happening with a vengeance, and according to the surveillance memorandum on Berg’s desk the next morning, the following had occurred.