When the meeting was over he had sneaked around in the parking lot outside, and when the prime minister and his guards drove away to have dinner at the Freemasons Hotel in Linköping he’d followed them in his car. He had parked a distance away from the hotel, walked back and forth on the street outside, and after awhile went into the hotel lobby. At that point he was already surrounded by a hastily doubled surveillance group of, in total, four plainclothes detectives from the secret police in Norrköping.
“Do we know if he’s armed?” asked the group leader on the radio.
“Answer don’t know,” said one of the detectives who was best situated to see the object at the same time as he himself moved his service weapon from its shoulder holster to his right coat pocket.
“Okay,” said the group leader. “If he moves even one yard in the direction of the banquet room we’ll go in and take him.”
But he hadn’t. Instead he had quickly gone out onto the street again, gotten into his car and driven back to the house where he lived. The following day, after the leadership team meeting, he’d received the code name Immortelle.
As a surveillance matter, Immortelle had developed in a promising manner, but as a human being he appeared to be steadily feeling worse. It seemed as if he’d suddenly given up hope of getting his son back. He hadn’t even tried to contact him. He’d let go the employees he’d had previously, and the business he was running had been put on the back burner. His contacts with the outside world, by telephone and other means, had been drastically reduced. He isolated himself from other people. Instead he started cultivating certain of his earlier interests and acquired at least one that was completely new and at odds with his history. He could spend hours at the shooting range, where he put shot after shot into a torso target at a distance of three hundred yards with the aid of his hunting rifle and a newly purchased high-powered telescopic sight. When he’d started he was a good shot. Now he was at the same level as the police department’s own sharpshooters.
Early in the morning he disappeared out into the terrain dressed in running shoes and jogging clothes. A few months earlier he had needed more than a quarter of an hour to make his way around the cross-country track where he worked out. Nowadays he ran his two miles in less than nine minutes. In the evenings he lifted weights. He had taken a weightlifting bench, barbells, and weights to one of his greenhouses and his nightly training sessions usually lasted for two hours most days of the week. He was strong, he was fast, he could shoot, and taken all together this was not good at all.
On top of all that he had joined the Social Democratic Party. Scarcely from conviction, for there was nothing in his background that pointed in that direction. From the careful markings that he made with a pencil in the party newspaper, the local chapter’s member newsletter, and various mailings that had been rescued from his garbage can, he seemed most interested in where the prime minister was to be found, in a purely physical sense, in the immediate future. He had a motive, and he was also in possession of the means. Now he was just searching for a suitable occasion, and there was touching agreement about all this not only among the secret police in Norrköping but also among their superiors up in Stockholm.
Berg’s account had made an impression on his listeners. The minister of justice had been almost shocked. “Yes, I’m a little shocked when I hear this sort of thing,” he concluded. “You’d rather not think about the fact that such people exist.”
After that he got caught up in an extensive exposition of how things had been during the old king’s time. Back when he was only a young boy who went with his father to Palmgren’s Leather behind the Royal Theater to fetch Papa’s new riding boots, when the king suddenly came in, nodding amiably at everyone in the store.
“He walked around all alone, yes, not counting his aide-de-camp, but that was mostly so he could avoid paying himself, I guess. He walked around all alone in the middle of Stockholm and no one would have dreamed of even saying something rude to him.” The minister shook his head mournfully.
Even the chief legal officer had spoken up. When Berg-without naming names-had given a short description of the provincial count, the chief legal officer had suddenly opened his mouth for the first time outside his judicial preserve. He himself was an aristocrat on both his father’s and mother’s side of the family.
“He is regrettably a relative of mine,” the chief legal officer stated dryly. “By marriage, of course,” he added quickly when he saw the special adviser’s pleased smile.
The special adviser had said exactly what Berg had expected he would not say.
“How many people would you need to be able to carry out a complete surveillance of these characters?”
“Complete surveillance?” asked Berg in order to make clear to himself that the person who had posed the question also understood its import.
“Full surveillance. I’m talking about twenty-two surveillance teams.” The special adviser nodded.
“We can just forget that,” said Berg. “I don’t have that many people. Besides, they have a number of other things to do, as you gentlemen are certainly aware.” Why is he asking that? thought Berg. He surely must know to the penny how many resources we have, and he can count too.
The special adviser had been content to nod.
“One more thing,” he said. “How many others are there that you are aware of? Besides this especially qualified group that you’ve reported on?”
“Hundreds,” said Berg. “Certainly hundreds.” He’s not asking on his own account, thought Berg. He wants me to say it to the others. Why does he want that? he thought.
Then he recounted the information that the head of his bodyguard unit had compiled and he took the field with flying colors and fluttering banners.
“I’ve had a compilation done,” said Berg. “Of the guarding of the prime minister during the last thirty days before this meeting.”
…
The prime minister had been traveling inside and outside the country during seventeen of those thirty days, and if the decision had been up to Berg, he could just as well have been gone the entire time, for then he was always guarded by his own regular group of bodyguards, often augmented by reinforcements from the operations bureau as well as substantial resources from the local police. Best of all was when he was abroad, for there they had completely different experiences and the security forces were as a rule enormous compared to what Berg had to work with. It was worst when he was at home, at work, or in his own residence.
“During eleven of these thirteen days he hasn’t had any physical protection during the night, other than the guard from the security company that we’ve placed outside his entryway. On every one of these days he has on one or several occasions been alone outside Rosenbad or his residence. Altogether this amounts to more than twenty occasions, as it appears, everything from a quarter of an hour to several hours. He has walked away from and back to his residence; he has been out having dinner or in town shopping. That’s the situation,” said Berg, nodding with all the seriousness that the situation demanded.
“Naughty, naughty, Berg,” said the special adviser, chuckling with delight.
“I have not, repeat not, had him followed,” said Berg. “This is information that I have put together in other ways, and there is only one reason that I have done so. The prime minister is an object of protection for which I and my people are responsible and, moreover, one of our six highest priority objects. You are aware of the background that I have reported on and the rest you can certainly figure out for yourselves.”