Tainted Blood

41

Erlendur had the search for Einar stepped up. Photographs of him were sent to police stations in and around Reykjavik and the main regional towns; announcements were sent to the media. He ordered that the man was to be let alone; if anyone sighted him they were to contact Erlendur immediately and not do anything else. He had a short telephone conversation with Katrin who said she didn't know where her son was. Her two elder sons were with her. She had told them the truth. They didn't know anything about their brother's whereabouts. Albert had stayed in his room at Hotel Esja all day. He made two phone calls, both to his office.

"What a bloody tragedy," Erlendur mumbled on his way back to his office. They hadn't found any clue in Einar's flat as to where he might be staying.

The day passed and they shared out the duties. Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli talked to Einar's ex-wife while Erlendur went to the Genetic Research Centre. The company's large new premises were on the West Country Road outside Reykjavik. It was a five-storey building with strict security at the entrance. Two security guards met Erlendur in the impressive lobby. He'd announced that he was coming and the director of the company had felt compelled to talk to him for a few minutes. The director was one of the company owners, an Icelandic molecular geneticist, educated in Britain and America, who had championed the idea of Iceland as a base for genetic research targeted at pharmaceutical production. Using the database, all the medical records in the country could be centralised and health information processed which could help to identify genetic disorders.

The director was waiting for Erlendur in her office, a woman aged about 50 by the name of Karitas, slim and delicate with short, jet-black hair and a friendly smile. She was smaller than Erlendur had imagined from seeing her on television, but cordial. She couldn't understand what the CID wanted from the company. She offered Erlendur a seat. While he looked at the walls adorned with contemporary Icelandic art he told her bluntly there were grounds for suspecting that someone had broken into the database and retrieved potentially damaging information from it. He didn't know exactly what he was talking about himself but she seemed to understand perfectly. And she didn't beat about the bush, to Erlendur's great relief. He had been expecting opposition. A conspiracy of silence.

"The matter's so sensitive because of data privacy," she said as soon as Erlendur finished speaking, "and that's why I have to ask you to keep this completely between the two of us. We've known for some time about unauthorised accessing of the database. We've made an in-house inquiry into the matter. Our suspicions are directed at one particular biologist but we've been unable to speak to him because he seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet."

"Einar?"

"Yes, that's him. We're still designing the data-base, so to speak, but naturally we don't want word to get out that the encryption can be cracked and people can waltz through it as they please. You understand that. Although in fact it's not a question of encryption."

"Why didn't you inform the police about the matter?"

"As I say, we wanted to sort it out ourselves. It's embarrassing for us. People trust that the information in the database isn't passed around or used for dubious purposes or simply stolen. The community is extremely sensitive about this as you perhaps know and we wanted to avoid mass hysteria."

"Mass hysteria?"

"Sometimes it's like the whole country is against us."

"Did he crack the code? Why isn't this a question of encryption?"

"You really do make it sound like a cloak-and-dagger affair. No, he didn't crack any code. Not really. He went about it differently."

"What did he do?"

"He set up a research project that no-one had authorised. He forged signatures, including mine. He pretended the company was researching the genetic transmission of an oncogenic disease found in several families in Iceland. He tricked the data privacy committee — a kind of monitoring agency for the database. He tricked the scientific ethics commit-tee. He tricked us all here."

She stopped talking for a moment and looked at her watch. She stood up and went over to her desk and called her secretary to postpone a meeting for ten minutes then sat back down with Erlendur.

"That's been the dynamics up to now," she said.

"Dynamics?" Erlendur said.

Karitas looked at him thoughtfully. The mobile phone in Erlendur's pocket started ringing. He excused himself and answered. It was Sigurdur Oli.

"Forensics have been through Einar's flat on Storagerdi," he said. "I called them and they haven't really found anything except that Einar got himself a fire-arms licence two years ago or so."

"A fire-arms licence?" Erlendur repeated.

"It's on our register. But that's not all. He owns a shotgun and we found the sawn-off barrel under his bed."

"The barrel?"

"He'd sawn off the barrel. They do that some-times. Makes it easier to shoot themselves."

"Do you think he could be dangerous?"

"When we find him," Sigurdur Oli said, "we need to approach him carefully. We can't predict what he'll do with a gun."

"He can hardly intend to kill anyone with it," said Erlendur, who had stood up and turned his back on Karitas for some kind of privacy.

"Why not?"

"He would have already used it," Erlendur said in a low voice. "On Holberg. Don't you think?"

"I honestly don't know."

"See you," Erlendur said, switched off the phone and repeated his apologies before he sat down again.

"That's been the process up to now," Karitas resumed where she'd left off. "We apply to these authorities for permission to conduct a research project, like in Einar's case, the study of the genetic transmission of a specific disease. We're given an encrypted list of names of people who suffer from the disease or are conceivable carriers and compare it to the encrypted genealogy database. Then we can produce a kind of encrypted family tree."

"Like a message tree," Erlendur said.

"What?"

"No, do go on."

"The data privacy committee decodes the list with the names of the people we want to study, what we call a sample group, both patients and relatives, and it produces a list of participants with their ID numbers. Do you follow?"

"And that's how Einar obtained the names and ID numbers of anyone who had the disease in their family."

She nodded.

"Does this all go through the data privacy committee?"

"I don't know how deeply you want to go into this. We're working with doctors and various establishments. They submit the names of patients to the privacy committee, which encrypts the names and ID numbers and sends them here to the Genetic Research Centre. We have a dedicated genealogical tracer program which arranges patients into cluster groups on the basis of their relationship to one another. Using this program we can select the patients who provide the best statistical information for searching for specific genetic disorders. Then we ask individuals from this group to take part in the study. Genealogy is valuable for seeing whether a genetic disease is involved, selecting a good sample, and it's a powerful tool in the search for genetic disorders."

"All that Einar needed to do was to pretend to create a sample and have the names decoded, all with the help of the data privacy committee."

"He lied and tricked everyone and he got away with it."

"I can understand how this could be embarrassing for you."

"Einar is among our top management here and one of our most capable scientists. A fine man. Why did he do it?" the director asked.

"He lost his daughter," Erlendur said. "Didn't you know about that?"

"No," she said, staring at him.

"How long's he been working here?"

"Two years."

"It was some time before then."

"How did he lose his daughter?"

"She had a genetically transmitted neural disease. He was the carrier but didn't know about the disease in his family."

"A question of paternity?"

Erlendur didn't answer her. Felt he'd said enough.

"That's one of the problems with this kind of genealogy database. Diseases tend to jump out of the family tree at random and then pop up again where you least expected them."

Erlendur stood up. "And you keep all these secrets. Old family secrets. Tragedies, sorrows and death, all carefully classified in computers. Family stories and stories of individuals. Stories about me and you. You keep the whole secret and can call it up whenever you want. A Jar City for the whole nation."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Karitas said. "A Jar City?"

"No, of course not," Erlendur said and took his leave.