Just as Sebastian had said, certain numbers came up on both sides of the dividing line, which meant that those numbers had been in contact with both Zakaria and the previous owner of the phone.
Three numbers appeared more frequently than the others. Fredrik made a note of them.
If Zakaria refused to say who the previous owner of the phone was, then surely one of the people who had been in touch both before and after the changeover would be able to help them.
Negotiating with terrorists was out of the question. Alex Recht knew that, and deep down he sympathised with that point of view. But what if the terrorists made demands that were reasonable? For example, what if Zakaria Khelifi really was innocent, and ought to be released? Should you refuse to countenance such a demand just because it came from terrorists?
After Fredrika had left him in the kitchen, he hadn’t known what to do. His daughter called him on his mobile, wanting to know how things were progressing. Alex knew what she really wanted to ask: was he going to make sure that her brother came home? Alex didn’t have an answer to that question.
He still hadn’t been able to contact his daughter-in-law. In an ironic twist of fate, she was on board another long-distance flight heading for South America. He couldn’t bear to think about how the news would be broken to her when she landed. They could ask the local police for help if necessary. What was Alex’s role in the ongoing investigation?
Nobody knew. With only the initial bomb threats to deal with, the National Bureau of Investigation had had a clear remit, but now Alex wasn’t at all sure what his function was supposed to be. No further interviews were planned, and Säpo seemed to be processing all other information themselves.
Fredrika had a point when she said there was something odd about the previous day’s bomb threats. No one had claimed responsibility, no concrete demands had been made. Four separate threats, two of them targeting such widely different places as the government building at Rosenbad, and Åhlén’s department store. Had they missed some underlying symbolism in the choice of targets? Did it have something to do with the subsequent hijacking? Alex didn’t think so. The only link was Karim Sassi’s fingerprints on one of the mobile phones. Which was no bloody help at all.
Alex left Säpo HQ and went back to his own office to check on how far they had got with the investigation into the bomb threats, see if any new information had emerged. Not that it would change anything, but he had to keep busy somehow. He remembered their thoughts on the hijacking before they found out that Karim was involved. Either they had to get the Swedish and US governments to meet the hijackers’ demands, or they had to defuse the bomb that was supposed to be on board. Or find the perpetrators behind the hijacking, thus averting the danger.
But with the captain himself involved, that last option disappeared, which was what Alex found so frustrating. There was no longer any chance of having an impact on the threat from the ground; it had to happen on the plane. And Erik was the only one who could help them.
Alex went to speak to one of his colleagues who was working on the previous day’s bomb threats.
‘At the moment I don’t have anything useful to report,’ he said, barely able to look Alex in the eye. ‘We don’t understand why Karim Sassi was careless enough to leave his prints on one of the phones, but not the others. And if we presume that others were involved, do they also work at Arlanda, or for an airline company?’
‘Arlanda?’ Alex said.
‘All four calls yesterday were made in and around the airport.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘If we assume that Karim made the call using the phone he left his prints on, then we can also assume that he made that call before or after he started work. But if he wasn’t the only one who called, then why did all the calls come from Arlanda?’
‘Surely, we must be able to sort this out, for God’s sake,’ Alex said. ‘Have we listened to the recordings properly? Can’t we tell if it’s the same person making all four calls, or different individuals? Or does the voice distortion make it impossible to work out?’
The voice distortion, bloody Mickey Mouse. Or what had TT said – was it Donald Duck?
‘I know that Säpo’s sound technicians took over that part of the investigation, because we couldn’t remove the distortion here. But if you’re asking me, then I’d say it sounded like the same person.’
Alex heard Fredrika’s voice echoing in his mind:
It doesn’t necessarily mean that Karim made any calls at all; his fingerprints could have ended up on that phone in a different context.
‘Have we checked whether Karim has an alibi for the times when the bomb threats were made?’
‘An alibi?’
Alex clarified: ‘Do we know whether he was in the vicinity of Arlanda when those calls were made? Have we asked his wife where he was at those particular times? Checked his mobile, tried to fix its position? Because if he wasn’t in or near the airport, then we can be certain that someone else made the calls.’
They hadn’t drawn the conclusion that Karim was behind the calls, but nor had they excluded the possibility. Too many loose ends were never good.
‘Check that right away,’ he said.
The evidence was laid out like luminous stones in a dark forest, leading the police in one direction: towards Karim Sassi. It wasn’t just the Tennyson book and the photograph. There were also the bomb threats, the purpose of which they still didn’t understand. And the prints on the phone, and the fact that the phones had been dumped in a waste bin in a car park at Arlanda.
Why would Karim Sassi have been so careless?
The clues he had left behind were so clear that he might as well have stood in front of the police, waving both arms and shouting: ‘It was me – don’t you get it?’
And that was exactly what Alex couldn’t understand. It was as if Karim Sassi wanted to be found out.
43 19:35
She would have given anything for a drink. A long, strong rum cocktail. Eden Lundell would happily have paid an entire year’s salary. Instead she defiantly lit a cigarette in her office.
I’ll just have a couple of drags. I can stop any time I want to.
The plane would be shot down if it violated US airspace. That was the news they had brought back from Rosenbad. A kind of madness she was neither willing nor able to absorb. No one would ever be able to forget the memories of 9/11. The Twin Towers collapsing, the column of smoke rising like a rocket into the sky, which just an hour earlier had carried the planes towards their destination. Events like that were bound to shape a country’s policies and mental health.
The terrorist attacks in London and Madrid had had a similar effect on the UK and Spain. Rules that used to apply had become obstacles instead of tools in the quest for a safe society. To put it bluntly, you could say that security now came before openness.
The attack on Bryggargatan in Stockholm came somewhere in between. The madness had struck right in the middle of the Christmas rush, just as unexpected as a bolt of lightning in the chill of winter. The wound in the Swedish soul had healed quickly, but the scar remained, and sometimes it made its presence felt.
Flight 573 was heading towards a tragic end unless they could bring the plane down safely before it ran out of fuel. According to the hijackers, it would be blown up if it landed before the Swedish and American governments had met their demands. The same applied if the pilot attempted an emergency landing, even if he did so because he had run out of fuel. The conclusion was clear: if the demands were not met, then the plane and its passengers were doomed.
And now the Americans had said that if Flight 573 entered US airspace, it would be shot down.