“You don’t say,” said the minister, leaning forward in order to hear better. “Is there anything you can tell us about this?”
“It will have to stay in this room, then,” said the special adviser, with a certain apparent hesitation. “Yes, he was the one who saved all those kids from that burning day-care center out in Solna a few years ago.”
“Now that you mention it,” said the minister with his forehead deeply creased. “I have some vague recollection.”
“The whole day-care center was burning like a beacon, but Bülling rushed straight into the sea of fire and carried out every single kid. Fourteen times, a kid under each arm, in total about thirty kids if I’ve calculated correctly, but if he hadn’t been able to borrow the Phantom’s fireproof undies probably not even Bülling would have managed it.”
“You’re pulling my leg,” said the offended minister.
“Why would you think that?” said the special adviser, looking at the minister as though he were an interesting object and not a person of flesh and blood. And at last Berg had been able to get to the point.
Berg had prepared himself carefully. First he had an up-to-date list made of persons who in various ways might be thought to constitute a threat against the prime minister and those closest to him. He had also been very selective in his choice and only included those who, according to his coworkers, “deserved to be taken seriously.” All those who’d only been drinking at their neighbor’s and seen the prime minister on TV and sworn that “I’m going to personally shoot that bastard’s head off” had thus not been taken seriously. Not even if they were in the national guard and had an AK-4 in the closet, or devoted their time to hunting or competitive shooting, which by the way evidently many of them seemed to do. So many that there were even grounds for suspicion that such activities formed an essential part of their personal profiles.
Their neighbors and other close associates also appeared to form an interesting group, because daily more or less anonymous tips came in to the police authorities, and even directly to the secret police, about normal, honorable Swedish citizens who “in an informal social context promised to take the life of the prime minister.” But “all of these drunkards, nut jobs, and big talkers”-at any given point in time there were hundreds of such pending cases piled one on top of another in Berg’s surveillance register-Berg had chosen to leave out. Remaining were twenty-two persons who at the moment could be imagined going from words to action, and those whom Berg himself looked at most seriously were of course those who hadn’t talked very much about their wishes or intentions.
Viewed as sociological material they formed an interesting group; among other things, they were distributed across the entire social spectrum. There was a count with his own castle, large forests, and landholdings who, it was true, said little for the most part but who at the same time possessed considerable personal and material resources. In addition he had an ominous history. He was demonstrably prone to violence and risk-taking, and capable in practical matters. In the B-annex on Polhemsgatan where Berg spent most of his time he was long referred to as “Anckarström”-the notorious assassin of King Gustav III in 1792-and on one occasion Berg had personally intervened in a rather delicate matter. When he’d found out that the prime minister had accepted an invitation to an exclusive dinner to which “Anckarström” had also been invited, he had contacted the government office building. At the last moment the prime minister had had a conflict and Berg had avoided both a personal headache and an unnecessary assignment for the bodyguard unit of the secret police.
In this material there was also a Swedish billionaire who resided in London. He had left a tax suit behind at home in Sweden in which the government was demanding several hundred million dollars from him, and with London as a base he had spent large sums over the past several years to support various campaigns directed against the Social Democratic Party, the government, and not least the prime minister personally. At a private dinner at the West India Club in London he had also expressed more far-reaching ambitions than that and promised ten million to the person, or persons, “who can see to it that the Gustav III of our time meets a logical end.” According to Berg’s informant, who had been a guest at the same dinner and had a long history within the industry’s own security organization, the presumptive ringleader had been stone sober, serious, and low-voiced when he laid out his offer. “He seemed almost slightly amused as he said it,” the informant summarized.
In Berg’s organization the billionaire had been given the cover name Pechlin, after one of the conspirators against Gustav III; it was Berg himself who’d chosen it for him. Berg was interested in history, and most of what he read outside his work were books dealing with Swedish history. There was something soothing about the subject, thought Berg. Regardless of how depressing it had been and how badly things may have gone, it was already history and nothing that he could be expected to do anything about. However, these two, and a few others besides, were still exceptions, and the center of gravity was of course where it always was in such matters. Exactly half of the twenty-two were dangerous criminals, and two of them were serving life sentences for murder.
One of the two was a Yugoslav terrorist, and because he was where he was, it was not he but rather his associates who constituted the practical concern. He had ongoing contacts with at least three of his countrymen, all of them known criminals who seemed to have a lot of hair on their chests and had complete freedom of movement. They were also difficult to keep an eye on, extremely taciturn in a hard-to-understand language, almost Mafia-like in their behavior and choice of associates.
The other murderer was a dogmatic Swede who harbored a deep, implacable hatred for the Swedish authorities in general and the judicial authorities in particular. He was no ordinary dogmatist, either. Among other things he was technically knowledgeable and had during his active period pieced together a number of bombs that functioned well enough to earn him his life sentences. Among those who were like-minded he was a model and a leadership figure, and because almost all of his supporters were still running loose he ached like a thorn in Berg’s awareness. Most recently he had also shown an ominous interest in the prime minister and at least two of his governing colleagues.
What the remainder had in common was that they were all men without a previous criminal record, but who otherwise constituted a delightful mixture. Two of them were, in context, more interesting than the others. Pure nightmares from a secret police perspective, Berg used to think in gloomy moments. One was a former paratrooper and junior officer at the paratrooper school in Karlsborg. Ten years earlier he had been discharged from the military and simply disappeared, it was unclear to where. A girlfriend of his had reported the disappearance to the police, but the investigation had been discontinued when she received a postcard from Turkey on which he briefly reported that he didn’t intend to see her again, thanked her for “at least one memorable lay,” and asked her not to bother the police on his behalf as he was “doing great” and didn’t intend to “return home any time soon.” The girlfriend had shown the postcard to the police, who had asked the usual questions, compared the handwriting on the postcard with previous messages, and closed the case. Of what the “memorable lay” consisted had never been discovered, but according to local gossip the ex-girlfriend was said to have parachuted on at least one occasion in her life.
A little more than a year later he had shown up in Sweden again and been observed, purely physically, in connection with a large-scale surveillance effort against a Swedish political organization on the extreme left wing. It was also by pure chance that he had been noticed-the SePo spy who did so had had him as a commander when he did his military service as a paratrooper, and the spy described him as the person who would end up lowest on his list if he had to choose an enemy. The object’s background, the context in which he was observed, and the opinion of the person who had done so had quickly increased interest in his person at the secret police’s surveillance squad.