‘Yugoslavs?’ the coffee-scented predator barked.
‘Could be,’ Robban panted. ‘I dunno. They look southern, they do. Ruthless guys. Always speaking gibberish together.’
‘What d’you mean by that?’
A sudden burst of kamikaze bravado: ‘Go fuck yourself, you bastard.’
The grizzly bear grabbed the rabbit’s neck, pressing hard. The rabbit shook violently – a trembling piece of second-rate fur.
‘I learned this through close contact,’ Gunnar Nyberg informed him pedagogically. ‘It really works.’
‘Wait. Christ! Wait,’ Robban trembled.
Nyberg loosened his grip, feeling ill at ease. He had said he would never again use violence in his work. It had just happened. As though his grizzly role demanded it.
Robban stared admiringly at him.
‘Wow, man!’ he shouted, massaging his neck. ‘What a grip!’
‘Get to the point now,’ Nyberg muttered, ashamed.
‘OK. I’ve heard about a drug dealer who’s made a thing of it. All his men speak gibberish between themselves. It’s a way of disguising the entire thing.’
A way of disguising the entire thing, Gunnar Nyberg thought to himself before asking, as he should: ‘Which dealer?’
‘Rajko Nedic.’
‘And you think it’s Nedic making deliveries to you?’
‘No idea,’ said Robban, lighting a cigarette and trying to look calm. ‘And above all, I didn’t say that.’
Nyberg returned to his worn-out old Renault, sitting for a moment with his hands on the wheel and looking out over Hjulsta’s utterly homogeneous seventies architecture. The July sun reflected listlessly in the identical, greyish-brown rows of windows.
Well, Gunnar Nyberg thought to himself. It was the warmest day of the year, he was dripping with sweat, and his thoughts were heroically trying to crawl up out of a day which had turned into quicksand. Once again, he thought: Well…
And: Well…
His thoughts broke free in a short, sharp burst.
If Rajko Nedic’s men always spoke Serbo-Croat between themselves, how could those Swedish Nazis in Kumla have worked out that a handover was going to take place?
Niklas Lindberg surely couldn’t have tortured Lordan Vukotic twice. Someone would have noticed. And yet Lindberg knew two things: that a big handover was going to take place, and that there would be a meeting in Kvarnen. How had he known?
Nedic’s empire was built on perfect discipline. No one ever blabbed. That was the mainstay of the entire operation. That was how he managed to act as a law-abiding restaurateur with such precision. Quite simply, his word was the law.
Did that mean he had suddenly discovered a crack in Nedic’s walls?
One of his men in Kumla had squealed – even before Vukotic had done it. A leak in the watertight system.
Gunnar Nyberg saw the chance to sow some weeds in the carefully pruned garden. Wasn’t there a chance that the whole organisation might start to bleed information if news of a leak reached Nedic?
Nyberg sat in his car. His hands had turned white at the wheel. Drops of sweat ran between his fingers, loosening them.
Three men in Kumla. What were they called? Zoran Koco, Petar Klovic, Risto Petrovic. He would talk to them. Right away.
He was already halfway there. Hjulsta. He tore off in his rusty old Renault, along the E18 towards Örebro. Between Bålsta and Enköping, he passed a place called Grillby. The name set a little bell ringing in his head. Grillby? He had been to Grillby. When? How? Though he didn’t know why he was thinking about it now. Probably some kind of failure to adjust to a slower speed.
After Örebro, he sped across the Närke plain towards Kumla. It didn’t take much more than an hour. He made his way to the prison governor and immediately found the trio’s collected works in front of him in an interrogation room.
Interpol’s material was extensive but, ultimately, not especially comprehensive. There were lots of blanks, especially in relation to the Yugoslav war. Zoran Koco was a Bosnian Muslim from Sarajevo and had apparently been one of the leading black-market sharks during the Bosnian war. Petar Klovic was a Bosnian Serb and had been a guard in one of the concentration camps for Muslims. No crimes – if you ignored their crimes against humanity. Risto Petrovic was a Croat, the former commander of a paramilitary group which had also been involved in the ethnic cleansing. Though of Serbs in Croatia.
An utterly unholy alliance.
When it came to Niklas Lindberg, the blank was his year in the Foreign Legion. May ’94 to May ’95. Koco and Klovic were already in Sweden by then, but not Petrovic. On the contrary, there was a very significant gap in the material from that time. In July 1995, Petrovic had come to Sweden and joined Rajko Nedic’s gang, something which was, of course, unconfirmed. By September, he had already been nicked for peddling drugs, and had been inside, awaiting deportation, ever since.
Nyberg contacted CID’s Interpol group. They, in turn, contacted the Foreign Legion and, within an hour, had produced a number of possible names from ’94 to ’95.
During that hour, Gunnar Nyberg had tried to make sense of it all.
A Croatian who had taken part in ethnic cleansing. There was a musty stench of Ustaša, the fascist organisation which had exterminated Serbs during the Second World War, about the whole thing. It wasn’t unlikely that Risto Petrovic had arrived in Sweden by way of the Foreign Legion, under a false name, in order to avoid arrest. There, he had met a kindred spirit, the ex-commando major Niklas Lindberg. Petrovic had then ingratiated himself with the Serbian-Swede Rajko Nedic, who wasn’t especially interested in ethnic purity, in order to supply Lindberg with information on the imminent transaction between Nedic and a Swedish ‘policeman’, for example. But was Lindberg really powerful enough to have planted a spy in Nedic’s organisation? Or were there larger organisations of right-wing extremists at work in the background? Directing both Petrovic and Lindberg? And if so, did that mean there was an even greater motive behind the Sickla Slaughter?
Gunnar Nyberg sat in the little interrogation room in Kumla, and felt like the walls were closing in. What kind of strange connection had he come across, thanks to a rabbit-like drug pusher called Robban?
The fax machine rattled into life. Three extracts from the Foreign Legion register for 1994 to 1995. Three Yugoslav names, and three mediocre but clearly discernible photographs.
Gunnar Nyberg rang Jan-Olov Hultin. He explained the situation, and was given various orders. All sounded good.
Risto Petrovic was brought into the interrogation room. A certain contentedness spread through Nyberg’s enormous body as he immediately recognised the man’s face from one of the pictures.
Petrovic sat staring at him. He was large, compact, with the kind of solid, bulging muscles that only prisoners have. A body which doesn’t do much moving but, instead, spends hours pumping iron. His gaze was ruthless, on the verge of inhuman. Exactly as Nyberg had hoped.
When he opened his mouth, he was fully aware that, by doing so, he was sentencing Risto Petrovic to death.
‘Jovan Sotra?’ he read from one of the three faxes.
Petrovic froze. Suddenly, the consequences were clear to him. As soon as Koko or Klovic or any of the others close to Nedic found out about the link, he would be a dead man. Power was coursing through Gunnar Nyberg at that very moment. Pure power. He understood right away what it means to have a man’s life in your hands. It was unbearable.
Perhaps he should have stayed at his computer. In the safety of cyberspace.
‘I don’t know what you’re taking about,’ Petrovic eventually said in English, though his eyes told a different story.
Nyberg switched to a rusty-sounding English.
‘Shortly after the end of the war in Croatia, you went from being commander of a paramilitary group to a private in the French Foreign Legion. During that time, you met a Swede, a former officer called Niklas Lindberg. When you later met again here in Kumla, you gave him information about a large transaction that would be taking place between your employer, Rajko Nedic, and another party. Lindberg used that information to kill Nedic’s closest man, Lordan Vukotic, as well as to rob and kill three other Nedic men in the so-called Sickla Slaughter, where whatever was being handed over was stolen.’