“For Christ’s sake, we’re talking about a guy who can kill half this squad with his bare hands,” the somewhat bad-tempered chief inspector summarized the surveillance matter that had landed on his desk.
Because neither he nor his colleagues in the military intelligence service had sent him there as an infiltrator-the very thought had been absurd-it was definitely the right man in the completely wrong place. Left-wing activists should have eyeglasses with lenses thick as bottle bottoms. They could happily go around in workman’s shirts and carpenter’s pants, for that made both surveillance and identification easier, and as long as they had office-workers’ hands with arms that weren’t any thicker than those of the squad’s female office assistants, they could squawk as much as they wanted that the working class that they nowadays represented would violently overthrow society.
As long as they couldn’t jump-start a car, much less screw together a functioning bomb, or even bloody one of his colleagues’ noses. To that extent they left him cold. The ex-paratrooper did not.
Regardless of this they’d drawn a blank. The ex-paratrooper had disappeared without a trace, and because he could also shoot a hole in a five-crown piece at a distance of five hundred yards, the bad-tempered chief inspector decided that it was high time to go outside the building.
“This is truly not a person you invite home for a cup of tea, so I believe it’s best that we talk with the Germans,” decided the boss, who was both an educated man and mild-mannered, despite the fact that he was a police superintendent.
The Germans had made contact six months later when they sent a surveillance picture that, according to their own image analyst “with a certainty bordering on likelihood,” depicted the former paratrooper. The picture had been taken by a rather craftily placed surveillance camera that covered the parking lot outside the agricultural bank in a small town by the name of Bad Segeberg thirty-five miles outside Hamburg. Just that day an amount corresponding to a little more than a million U.S. dollars had been in the till, and right before closing time three masked men had come in and taken it all with the help of their automatic pistol, probably of the Uzi brand and of Israeli manufacture. A robbery “with clear terrorist connections,” declared the head of Constitutional Protection’s division in Schleswig-Holstein. The three robbers were obviously putz weg, and it would be highly desirable if the Swedes could help out with their own countryman.
The following day the former paratrooper had been the object of an operational effort by the Swedish secret police: Operation Olga. The reason this name had been chosen was not that they wanted to mislead the enemy, which they would gladly do, but rather that the object of surveillance had gone by the nickname Olga during his time as a paratrooper.
True, it wasn’t something you called him when he was listening, for then you were dead, but the reason he’d acquired this particular nickname was flattering enough, for there was only one person in the entire paratrooper school in Karlsborg who was even tougher than the object in question-namely Olga, who was the manager of the paratroopers’ cafeteria.
Six months later Operation Olga had been concluded, and at that point for the most part everything about the person who was being investigated was known, up to when he’d finished military service. After that almost nothing was known other than that “with a certainty bordering on likelihood” he had robbed a bank in northern Germany six months earlier and clearly had a fairly close connection to a Swedish group on the extreme left wing with the Palestinian question topmost on its order of business. But it was as if he himself had been swallowed up off the face of the earth. Until two months ago, when he, with the same appearance despite all the years that had passed, tanned and in seemingly perfect physical condition, had shown up in a picture taken by a rather craftily placed surveillance camera at the little park outside the government building, Rosenbad.
Operation Olga had immediately been brought up from the archives, assigned a new project number and a new budget. Berg had elevated the guard level for Rosenbad and the key persons who worked there and had informed the person responsible for security at the government office. He had also had a conversation with the prime minister’s special adviser, who had been markedly uninterested in the matter itself but as usual generous with both sarcastic remarks and expressions of doubt.
“I don’t believe in such characters,” he stated behind his heavy, lowered eyelids. “As soon as they’ve acquired a face they’re almost always uninteresting. I don’t believe in your connection either,” he continued. “It’s probably as simple as the fact that you’ve confused him with another or several others, and it wouldn’t be the first time in that case, would it? And if you haven’t done so, we can be thankful for the fact that he went to the right meeting.”
“Right meeting?” said Berg. “I don’t really understand what you mean.”
“Don’t worry,” said the special adviser with his usual wry half-sneer, for this was before Krassner had come into the picture and forced them to approach one another. “It’s not that I’m trying to convert you to the Palestinian cause. What I mean is only that if he’d gone to a political meeting of the sort to which his type is expected to go, there would scarcely have been people from your group who could’ve caught sight of him.”
So that’s what you say, thought Berg sourly, but because this was before Krassner had brought them closer to each other he had kept his thoughts to himself.
A former paratrooper who had been observed on three brief occasions over a period of ten years and had otherwise disappeared without a trace. The other person who was of particular concern to Berg was the owner of a nursery outside Finspång in the province of Östergötland. It was the government office’s own security department that had reported him to Berg, and normally he would only have become one more case in the large pile of such cases that they were content to simply register.
A little more than a year earlier the man had written to the prime minister personally and asked for his help. After a divorce his ex-wife had gotten full custody of the couple’s then six-year-old son. In spite of the fact that she was a whore, in spite of the fact that her new husband was both an alcoholic and a criminal, and in spite of the fact that he loved his son more than anything else in the world. Could the prime minister intervene and put things right? Obviously he could not. The nursery owner had received the usual friendly letter of refusal from the female adviser in the prime minister’s office who took care of such matters and could rattle off the legal arguments in her sleep. Then he’d written again and received the same reply as the previous time. In his third letter he had sharpened his tone, become personal, unpleasant, even threatening. Then he’d started phoning, and about the same time as he landed on Berg’s desk he’d ceased making contact. From sheer momentum, however, the matter had gone on to the secret police’s office in Norrköping, where they either had little to do or money left in their account. The gardener was both a marksman and a hunter and had a license for eight weapons in totaclass="underline" a revolver, two pistols, three rifles, and two shotguns. Fourteen days after a surveillance file had been set up on him with the secret police in Norrköping he had shown up at a political meeting in Åtvidaberg where the prime minister was the main speaker.