‘You are allowed to land,’ Andrew Hoffman said. ‘But not here.’
‘What’s your response to the hijackers’ demands?’
‘I repeat: the United States government does not negotiate with terrorists. Your flight will not be granted permission to land. If you still insist on entering US airspace, the plane will be shot down.’
Shot down? Erik sat there, overcome by a kind of paralysis.
‘But you must have heard what was in the note,’ Karim said. ‘You have only as much time as it takes for us to use up the fuel we have on board.’
‘Exactly. In which case, I suggest, as I have already said several times, that you prepare for an emergency landing elsewhere. If you want to risk it, that is.’
‘If we run out of fuel I won’t have any choice,’ Karim said.
‘I think maybe you should read the note again,’ Hoffman said. ‘Because, according to our information, it states that if any attempt at an emergency landing is made, regardless of whether you have run out of fuel or not, the plane will be blown up. Isn’t that right?’
There was something about Andrew Hoffman’s tone of voice that made Erik shudder. As if there was an implicit message in his words that only Karim understood.
When Karim didn’t reply, Hoffman continued:
‘Good, in that case we understand each other. Over and out.’
And he was gone.
Karim looked as if he had been turned to stone.
‘Fuck,’ he whispered.
‘What’s going on?’ Fatima asked. ‘Did he say they were going to shoot us down?’
‘The bastards won’t let us in,’ Karim said.
Erik forced himself to take several deep breaths, then he turned to Karim.
‘We have to do as he says. We have to try for an emergency landing somewhere else. We need to call Canada or Mexico right away, to ask if they can help us.’
What the hell do we do if they won’t give us permission to land either?
‘I don’t understand,’ Fatima said. ‘Why won’t they let us in?’
Karim didn’t reply; Erik’s heart was pounding like a sledgehammer. Now more than ever he knew he had to get hold of his father. The Americans’ stance was completely illogical. Even if you took the bomb threat into account, it still didn’t make any sense.
Resolutely, he got to his feet, hoping that Karim wouldn’t notice how tense and nervous he was.
‘Fatima, stay here while I go and talk to the guy who got the text message.’
Fatima nodded. ‘He’s waiting in the bar with Lydia,’ she said, referring to the stewardess who was in charge of the bar in first class.
Erik turned to Karim:
‘I’ll be back in a few minutes, and then we can decide where we’re going to try for an emergency landing, okay?’
Karim didn’t reply.
‘I’ll be right back,’ Erik said, passing Fatima on his way out of the cockpit.
As the door closed behind him, he forced himself to breathe calmly. He would speak to the passenger as promised, and then he would call Alex and ask why the Americans had just signed a collective death warrant for four hundred people.
42 STOCKHOLM, 19:00
Fredrika Bergman leafed deftly through the various documents in Zakaria Khelifi’s file. Extracts from phone-tap material that looked exactly the same as the police records when Fredrika was working with the National Bureau of Investigation. Surveillance notes. Copies of interviews conducted with Zakaria while he was in custody.
Fredrika spent a little time going over the interviews; Zakaria didn’t dispute a single point that was put to him.
Yes, that was him in the surveillance shots.
Yes, he knew the man standing next to him.
No, they hadn’t met in order to plan a terrorist attack; his friend needed some help with his winter tyres.
Yes, he had made all the calls that Säpo knew about – except for the calls that had been made when the phone didn’t belong to him – and no, none of the calls was about anything other than exactly what they sounded like. No coded language, no secret messages.
Someone must have tipped off Säpo about Zakaria Khelifi, because he was arrested one morning without having done anything.
But how did something like that happen? How did a man like Zakaria Khelifi suddenly become interesting to the Swedish security service and be declared a threat to national security if he hadn’t done anything?
Fredrika started all over again from the beginning, and even though she knew Zakaria’s history with Säpo by heart, she spotted something new. Zakaria turned up over and over again, and in the end there were just too many coincidences for any security service worth its salt to ignore. Such individuals existed not only within Säpo’s area of interest, but also within the criminal circles investigated by the National Bureau of Investigation and other police authorities. Those eternal shadows that drifted from one investigation to another, always too insubstantial to grasp. Obviously, even criminals must know people who weren’t on the wrong side of the law, but how were you supposed to know which was which?
There was no denying that Zakaria Khelifi had some explaining to do. The problem was that he had tried to do just that. He had answered their questions and given perfectly reasonable explanations for things that seemed strange. He insisted that he hadn’t known what was inside the package he had collected. He didn’t know why Ellis had said he was involved. And he claimed he hadn’t made the calls that Säpo were able to link to previous investigations.
Fredrika picked up the record of Zakaria’s earlier telephone traffic which had just been analysed again. The calls that Zakaria insisted someone else had made. How had the police coped before the age of the mobile phone? In every single case Fredrika had worked on, the analysis of phone calls had been a key element. That was how they tracked down people who had disappeared, picked holes in their alibis and were able to link them to various crime scenes and cases. On a yellow Post-it note someone, possibly Eden, had scribbled:
‘A comparison of the phone traffic before and after the point at which Zakaria says that he acquired the mobile indicates that he could be telling the truth. Different contacts during the two different periods.’
A long column of calls was highlighted in yellow. Where the highlighting ended, someone had drawn an asterisk to mark before and after.
Fredrika’s cheeks began to burn.
What would happen if the government revised its decision and released Zakaria on the basis of the phone records? Would that bring the hijacking to an end? She was eager to find out more, but she couldn’t cope with printouts; she wanted electronic access to the telephone data.
She left her desk right away and went to find Sebastian.
‘I’d like access to Zakaria Khelifi’s phone records.’
‘Isn’t there a copy in the file?’
‘I’d like an electronic copy, please.’
Sebastian looked dubious.
‘Why?’
‘I want to take a closer look at them.’
It wasn’t really an answer to his question, but Fredrika didn’t want to get into a discussion about why she was asking for the records. She wanted to carry out her own analysis, that was all.
Sebastian made room for Fredrika at his computer and opened up a new program.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she said as she sat down.
‘No problem. I’ve got to go and check on something anyway, and you can only access phone records from certain computers, so you might as well use mine. Let me know if you need any help.’
Sebastian left the office and Fredrika gazed at the screen.
Soon her fingers were flying across the keys.
She identified the point at which Zakaria claimed he had bought the phone, and sorted all the calls into chronological order. Then she sorted them again so that all calls made to or from the same number ended up together. The phone had been in contact with roughly twenty numbers; some came up more often than others. Fredrika went through everything systematically.