Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End

CHAPTER II

Free falling, as in a dream

Stockholm in the 1970s and 1980s

In the fall of 1976 the secret police set up an external group to increase its organizational security. Given the working name Group for Internal Security and Protection Against Leakage, it constituted the most secret part of covert police operations. As protection against discovery, a number of measures had been taken. A private-sector management consulting firm was created as a front for its operation; its office was in the city, and no one who worked there could be traced back to the secret police’s already secret lists and payrolls.

Contacts with the parent organization that the group was created to watch over and defend were, naturally, surrounded with every conceivable secrecy. To start with, the group was run solely by the head of the operations bureau, who in reality was head of the entire secret police. Because of the character of the group’s mission this solution had proven to be far from ideal, primarily because it limited the opportunities for systematic insight into the various branches of the operation.

For that reason, changes were made the following year. Another special group was created within the larger organization-the Group for Organizational Protection-and on the basis of that, a network of informants had been built up in all branches of the operation. At the same time, the majority of them were-hopefully-unaware of the fact that they now had a dual function in which they not only did their work but also reported what they and their colleagues were doing via daily hour-by-hour reports and continuously updated logs of data access as well as internal and external contacts. The union had objections, of course, but because SePo’s union was only a pale shadow of the uniformed police officers’ professional organization-and as usual had no idea what the whole thing was really about-the new system still turned out as planned.

The external group had been retained, of course, and essentially in the same form as before. The influx of information had also increased markedly, but the price to be paid was that more people within the parent organization were now aware of the external group’s existence. The entire process was a good illustration of the classic dilemma of all secret police work. Ultimately it was about putting together a puzzle, and it went without saying that the task was considerably easier if the ones doing the solving had access to all the pieces. As a method the process was a complete disaster, of course, if the intention was to simultaneously keep both the puzzle-solving and the finished puzzle secret from as many people as possible, regardless of which side they belonged to.

Among the initiated few who were aware of the external operation, it was also known that the entire construction was the idea of the bureau director, Berg. Berg was the head of the operations bureau but had never breathed a word of his role as its originator, which among his superiors was interpreted as a good sign of both discretion and personal modesty. Berg himself knew better, for he had gotten the whole concept from the German security service, from its major and minor aspects all the way down to pure details; they had a long tradition of just this aspect of secret police work.

Based on his historical knowledge and everything he knew about the work of foreign security agencies, he also had a strategy for how he might get his new operation to grow and develop. The ultimate goal he envisioned was a secret bureau, or perhaps even a separate secret organization for constitutional protection, where not only the secret police were under surveillance, but also the so-called open operation within the police, and the military, of course, as well as every other governmental authority, private organization, or sector whose activity might conceivably threaten or damage the highest political authority. This mission was the historical basis of all governmental security services, the primary task overshadowing everything else. Constitutional protection, thought Berg. An excellent phrase in a context where he had to be utterly discreet when describing his assignment to an outside world often both ignorant and hostile, and which gladly took any opportunity to portray the guardians of democracy as its enemies.

The Swedish secret police, in contrast to its counterparts in both the West and the East, was an organization made up almost exclusively of police officers. The Swedish secret police had no intellectual or academic tradition whatsoever, and it was Berg’s firm conviction that this was also its main strength. No upper-class pansies from Oxford or Cambridge who might sell out the whole country to the enemy for a piece of ass at some shabby hotel in a third-world country; no overexcited theoreticians who couldn’t think a single original thought without immediately broadcasting it in a seminar with a crowd of their ilk; no philosophical scatterbrains or political brooders. A completely pure organization made up solely of police officers, thought Berg.

During the following years they indeed had great and well-deserved successes, both within the organization as a whole and perhaps above all else within that part of the operation that was Berg’s darling; day by day it was becoming more and more like the secret bureau for constitutional protection that he had imagined. They had good luck and they had bad luck, made use of the good and turned the bad to their advantage; in brief, they successfully managed the whole situation.

At first they had good luck, exposing a spy within their own organization. An alcoholic police officer who had sold secret information to the enemy with all the finesse of a common street peddler and whose prices weren’t much higher. Life imprisonment, good press, and encouraging pats on the back from the average man on the street as well as from the political bosses.

Then they had bad luck. Hostile-minded elements on the outermost fringes of the left had spread a story that it was in reality the Israeli security service that had captured the Swedish spy. In their usual unsentimental way, their agents were said to have spirited him away at the Beirut airport and conveyed him to a suitably situated prison hole where they put the muzzle of a gun to his temple and invited him to unburden his conscience. When he was through with that, which should only have taken a few days, they had driven him back to the airport and put him on the airplane to Copenhagen, at which time they called their Swedish colleagues and informed them that they had just sent them a present.

True or not, this had caused problems. Berg was not one to debate his operation in the media, however much the media nagged, but the minister of justice, who was politically responsible, had taken up the matter at their weekly meeting, and for reasons of which only he and Berg were aware he had chosen to sound more worried than irritated. Was there any truth in these, to say the least, astounding assertions?

Berg shook his head emphatically. Not in the least, but as so often before in a situation like this the truth was such that it couldn’t be told or discussed even in the most exclusive company. It was actually his internal security group that had been on the trail of the spy and the external part of that group that had carried out the practical aspects. Because the operation was so sensitive, and must be concealed at all costs, it was Berg who had made contact with the Israelis and in consultation with them worked out the actual arrest. Afterward they had collectively cooked up a kidnapping story on how it had been done and through their usual channels seen to it that the “news” spread to their opponents.

“They swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker, so we killed two birds with one stone,” Berg summarized, with a friendly nod toward the speechless minister. Just like you, but the other way around, he thought.

“You may rest assured that this will stay in this room,” the minister of justice replied warmly.

Unmasking a spy in your own organization was good, but nothing you could live on until the end of time, and if there was more than one it could quickly get really bad. Besides, it was unnecessary. What security work was primarily about was refining information that was being gathered anyway, taking care to manage every conceivable risk, and exploiting this to the organization’s advantage. In that way conditions for expansion could be created without a need to point out a lot of annoyances that had already occurred.

Threats and menaces, dangers and future scenarios, prognoses and preventive measures were what it was really about, and you would have to be a complete fool not to understand that a well-written, well-supported, and selectively distributed security analysis, all else aside, was far superior to any number of airplane hijackings, bombing attacks, or assassinated politicians when it was a matter of securing economic resources. We have a lot to learn from the Germans, thought Berg, who had studied in detail how they dealt with the legacy from their domestic terrorists. But we haven’t been as good on that point, he thought. At the beginning of the eighties it was time for the next change of organization.

First the in-house part of the operation was renamed the Group for Departmental Protection. For one thing this sounded better, a little more diffuse, a little broader, a little more Swedish, to put it simply. Also, the workload had increased markedly and among other things a special unit had been formed to inspect and refine all the information compiled within the framework of the overarching operation. No possibilities could be left untried in the hunt for new resources. Berg had been careful to underscore this when they had an introductory kickoff. Even if he hadn’t put it that way.

The external operation had been retained. True, it had grown so markedly that it became necessary to create yet another front organization, which in turn gave rise to a set of leadership and coordination problems, the solution to which was found within the framework of a foundation, but the fundamental strategy, as well as the direction of the work, remained the same as before.

The special “threat group” that he had set up-Berg often, and with pride, used to think of it as his own marketing department-also had a very successful start in its operation. First, the situation in the Balkans had been taken up. Since the early 1970s, the Yugoslavs had been a source of happiness for the Swedish secret police. Croatian extremists had shot the republic’s Serbian ambassador, after which their comrades freed them from a Swedish prison by hijacking an airplane, and in the end the Swedish secret police received major appropriations to battle the new terrorism.

But the Yugoslavs had been good in more ways than that. The stream of political refugees had increased steadily, and among those who came here there were strong political divisions and a reasonable element of common career criminals who gladly sat up nights, conspiring in their smoky club quarters. Appropriations for reconnaissance and external surveillance, wiretapping, and interpreters had multiplied. Appropriations for interpreters alone had increased by more than two thousand percent in less than five years.

But then it was as though the air had been let out of them, and in melancholy moments Berg used to think that the Yugoslavs clearly couldn’t handle the comfortable coziness of Sweden. The terrorist acts flagged in their forecasts had simply not happened, and while year followed year and appropriations continued to climb, the opposite side quite simply refused to deliver all the atrocities that SePo had promised its political superiors. Illegal clubs, aggravated robbery, and the occasional bloody reckoning among Yugoslavian criminals were all well and good, but in the context within which Berg was operating this was clearly insufficient. The politicians had started grumbling, and among operatives within the open operation there was a growing and increasingly vocal opinion maintaining, in complete seriousness, that they now had the Yugoslavs under control and that the secret police ought to occupy itself with other things.

The situation was not good, the trend even worse, and it was at exactly that point that his newly formed threat group, the Group for Analysis and Processing of Information, as it was called in more solemn contexts, had gone in and taken a concerted hold on the entire Balkan problem. Suitable sections of a large number of old strategic analyses acquired from the Swedish military intelligence service and their foreign colleagues had been compiled-the sections that for several years had been promising the imminent collapse of the Yugoslav republic and subsequent total chaos in the Balkans and elsewhere in Europe. With these simple means a report was produced with alarming content for the nation’s guardians: highest level of secrecy, highest priority, and the most restricted distribution to political superiors. Additional appropriations had arrived like a check in the mail.

After that they quickly moved ahead and went to work on the Kurdish problem. It wasn’t all peace and harmony among the Kurdish refugees elsewhere in Europe, and when conflicts flared up they did sometimes shoot each other. The problem was that they stubbornly persisted in only shooting other Kurds, which from a secret police point of view was economic madness. Berg’s German colleague at Constitutional Protection had the same problem as he did, and due to the fact that the Kurds themselves clearly lacked political ambitions they decided they had to do something about this.

First, they increased the pressure on their informants among the Kurdish refugees. They were warned in no uncertain terms that if they couldn’t deliver anything more than the usual nonsense on yet another impending murder of some talkative guy with a fruit stand, they might just as well pack their bags and go back to Turkey. The argument clearly hit home, for within just a few months much disturbing information had come in from several different infiltrators in both Sweden and Germany. It was obvious that extremist political groups among the Kurds were planning assassination attempts on several centrally placed domestic politicians in those countries where they had the privilege of residence as refugees. And yes, new appropriations also arrived like a check in the mail. Finally, thought Berg, who had at last succeeded in showing that there was even a way to squeeze money out of a former shepherd from the mountainous regions around Diyarbakir.

When Berg, much later, looked back at the early eighties, he would think of that period as the happy years in his life. There had been a lot to do, but it had been fun doing it and the successes had been great. Then worries started to pile up. First he was saddled with a regime change. He had calculated at an early stage that the conservatives wouldn’t last forever, and he had no political opinions whatsoever, if someone were to come up with the preposterous idea of asking him, but if he were able to choose… of course.

The conservatives had been easy to deal with, unaccustomed as they were to people like him, but the social democrats represented a different species. That he knew from early experience. Berg had been around a good while, and six years in line for the public troughs had given them sufficient appetite when it was finally time. As soon as the election results were clear, Berg had cleaned out his calendar, taken his closest associates with him to a secure location, and devoted three whole days to analyzing the new situation. Analyze? They had gone over it down to the minutest detail. They were forewarned, and thereby forearmed.

The new government had hardly had time to take its place before the military intelligence service performed the anticipated assault, with the help of its well-trained contacts within the social democratic leadership. It was the usual old turf war, but this time Berg had been better prepared than anyone before him. The day before the meeting in the government office building he had sent over the latest analysis of the situation on the terror front and seen to it that it was well spiced with an optimal selection of the military intelligence authority’s own judgments. Where was the antagonism? Berg wondered innocently. As far as he could understand, both he and his coworkers were in complete agreement with their military colleagues in their view of the matter.

Berg had chosen to head back after the meeting on foot, and as he was walking in the autumn sun between Rosenbad and his own building on Kungsholmen, he became aware that he was humming the finale from Beethoven’s choral symphony. Alle Menschen werden Brüder, Berg hummed contentedly, and when he sat down behind his desk the papers he had requested the weekend before were already topmost on the pile.

First he went to work on the requested compilation of the new government ministers, government secretaries, and the remaining politically appointed officials and advisers who had now taken over the government office building. Up until a day ago, a good many of the latter had been found in the secret police register. For good reasons and with well-deserved thick files, thought Berg with a wry smile, but after the just-completed autumn housecleaning the archives were neat and tidy and all necessary papers that might cause unnecessary annoyance were now in secure storage outside the building. In a week he would meet with the politically appointed board for the secret police, and bets were already being made among his coworkers on which of the new board members would suggest a visit to SePo’s personal archive this time. There were three to choose from, and none of them was a sure thing.

Within the external operation an analysis had been made of the key political figures with whom the parent organization would now be working. All in all it consisted of a dozen people, of which a two-thirds majority sat in Rosenbad and was divided approximately equally among the preliminary Cabinet and the justice and defense departments. All of them had been made a gift of a secret police profile, the main point of which gave a summary of their special interests and inclinations in matters of national security.

With that as a foundation, a client-oriented list of priorities had then been made of those areas and issues that might conceivably appeal to the tastes of the new consumers, and for the time being his entire analysis group was busy picking out the information that must be available when, in approximately two weeks-and here too the wagering was well under way-it would be necessary to demonstrate that these were the very problems which had been viewed for a long time with the utmost seriousness.

The list of priorities was hardly exciting for an old fox like Berg. There were all the usual old articles from the standard assortment, such as the supervision of persons with sensitive positions and the surveillance of various extreme political parties, which solely concerned their own ends regardless of political orientation. Ultimately it was only a matter of weeding a little in the flower beds and shifting perspective a few degrees; after that for the most part things could proceed as before. Obviously it was necessary to raise the priority of neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists, as much as this irked him. His resources were not inexhaustible, and it was Berg’s firm conviction that there were better ways to use money than keeping an eye on a few hundred semi-retarded, misguided, snot-nosed kids who marched out of step even when they didn’t have a case of strong beer under their belts. Which they no doubt usually did, Berg thought acidly. But that is how things were now and that’s the way it would have to be.

His own contribution to the list of priorities was a source of satisfaction to him. It dealt with something completely new in the history of the secret police, which in the long run could prove very fortunate; the fact that it was his loser of a nephew who had given him the idea didn’t make matters worse. Berg’s father had been a policeman out in the country, within the old organization, long before it had been nationalized. He had had two sons who had both become policemen. Things had gone well for Berg, far beyond expectations; for his older brother things had gone badly.

When Berg left the police academy, he started out as a patrolman with the uniformed police department in Stockholm. In his free time he studied for a high school diploma by correspondence. After that he took a leave of absence from the police department and studied law full-time with money he had saved up as a constable. This degree had taken him three years as opposed to the usual five, and when he applied to the prosecutor’s office they had taken him in with open arms. Several of his new colleagues had made the same class journey as he had. After ten years as a prosecutor, he had been approached by the secret police. The police force had been nationalized, and the secret police had been reorganized as a special division of the National Police Board. The old operation needed to be aired out, worn-out brooms exchanged for new ones, and Berg was one of the first to be asked. Ten years later he was in effect head of the whole thing.

His older brother got married at the same time as he finished school and started as a patrolman with the uniformed police department in Stockholm. In rapid succession he had acquired three children and problems with finances, alcohol, and his marriage. Then his wife left him and took the children with her. He had driven a patrol car under the influence, crashed into a newsstand, been fined and given a suspended sentence, disciplined in the form of suspension and payroll deductions, and finally been offered a new career as watchman at the police department’s lost-and-found office. There he had remained for five years, and the summer when his own son started as a patrolman in Stockholm City he had borrowed a service vehicle, driven out to Vaxholm, and plunged straight into the water from the steamboat pier.

Berg was firmly convinced that blood was thicker than water, but when it came to his own nephew his conviction had wavered on more than one occasion. When his brother had been killed in the accident-that’s of course how it was described-he had exerted himself vigorously to put some order into the life of his younger relative. Because the difference in age between them was only twelve years-in solitary moments he used to thank his creator that it wasn’t greater than that-he had tried to be like an older brother to him, but with hindsight that had been wasted effort.

His nephew had had miserable grades during all of his years in school. He had already acquired a well-established reputation as a bully by the end of his first year in elementary school, and the political opinions that he often, and gladly, expressed had never fit on the map provided by the Swedish parliament.

But he was big and burly, he had a grandfather, a father, and an uncle who were policemen, and he had been welcomed into the fold when he applied to the police academy.

His career had proceeded without a hitch and after a few years he was working as commander of the garrison with by far the most complaints in the Stockholm Police Department’s riot squad. Without realizing it, he had a quality that made him both useful and usable to the organization he served. Police officers like him create sufficient scope for action for all the normal, functional officers, thought Berg. In addition, he was an untapped resource for the operation that Berg represented.

An absolute majority of all police officers voted for the conservatives. Berg knew that. He also knew that a sufficient number of them did so for lack of a more extreme alternative, and with that knowledge his mission was established. So: start out by mapping antigovernment elements within the police department and gradually expand the mission to include their counterparts in the military. Several of them already associated privately across operational boundaries, so there were natural inroads and it shouldn’t be too difficult.

Berg himself had written the long background section to the report on undemocratic movements and elements within the institutions whose mission it was to protect the security of the realm against external and internal attacks, and he had been careful to underscore that there were two organizations that had historically shown themselves to be extraordinarily dangerous for the politically appointed powers that be, namely the military and their own secret police. He had concluded by stating that this was an important but unfortunately overlooked issue, to which, however, significantly greater attention had been devoted for some time. He also had an explanation for why it had turned out this way. “The fact that our Swedish political democracy has been one of the most stable democracies known to twentieth-century European history is in all likelihood essentially the reason that secret police interest in this issue has previously been so low.”

Twelve days, not fourteen, had passed before Berg and his coworkers had been called up to the government office building in order to give an account of the prioritized activity. Normally there would be three regular participants at these meetings-the minister of justice, the chief legal officer, and Berg himself-but this time there was an additional person in the room. A week earlier the prime minister had let Berg be informed that he had decided to elevate certain security issues to his own chancellery in the Cabinet, and that he had therefore decided that from now on his special adviser would take part in these meetings on behalf of the prime minister, and that he assumed that he would hear from Berg immediately if he had any objections to his choice of person.

It had been almost seven years since Berg had been forced to listen to the language of power from his superior, and this time, unlike before, he had also been slightly shaken and a little more worried than was pleasant. Actually he had expected something like this-he had not even ruled out the possibility that he would be called up to Rosenbad only to find out that he was being replaced-but this he hadn’t foreseen, especially not the concluding portion of the prime minister’s directive: “objections to my choice.” To Berg’s ears this sounded suspiciously like a hidden message, even a warning.

Berg, like the prime minister and his adviser, obviously knew that the latter had been classified in the highest protection category for the past several years. The question was whether the prime minister and the person this ultimately concerned also knew anything more, thought Berg. For example, that Berg had certain pieces of information removed from the adviser’s personal file, which he didn’t want the person the information concerned to find out that Berg knew. He had brooded half the night until he saw himself as if in a mirror that mirrored another mirror diagonally behind his back, multiplying him into infinity; the next day he had been both tired and disheartened. For a brief moment he had in complete seriousness considered summoning his most intimate coworker, Police Superintendent Waltin, the head of the external operation, to seek his advice, but this was not a time for weakness, so he had dismissed that thought. Never show what you’re thinking, wait and see, thought Berg. Besides, he didn’t really know if he could completely trust Waltin.

…

Perhaps I’ve been worrying unnecessarily, thought Berg; looking solely at what had actually been said, their meeting had gone smoothly and with only marginal, factual objections from his superiors. The new minister of justice had first expressed a certain surprise that the Kurds had such far-reaching plans for subversive activity, to judge by the survey of which Berg “so meritoriously” had given an account, but actually he was not so surprised after all if he could “be a little personal,” for he had suspected for quite some time that “there was something fishy.

“With the Kurds, that is,” he explained.

There’s one I don’t have to worry about, thought Berg.

The new participant at the meeting did not say much. For a while it actually appeared as if he had fallen asleep in his seat, leaning back in his chair with eyes closed, but when Berg got to his ongoing investigation of personnel hostile to democracy within the police department and the military, he suddenly revived and raised his heavy eyelids at least slightly.

Berg didn’t like his look, nor his expression, for that matter. He seemed almost amused, and Berg got an unpleasant feeling that the adviser was not seeing him but rather was observing him as though he were an object and not a person. The adviser suddenly started laughing so that his fat stomach bounced; then he nodded and smiled broadly toward Berg but without moving his eyelids a millimeter.

“Hear the roar from the crater of justice,” he chuckled and his fat stomach bounced again. “When will we have occasion to enjoy this good cigar? I can hardly contain myself.”

“According to my colleagues, we will be able to present an initial survey at the beginning of next year,” Berg answered, his expression a model of correctness.

“The age of miracles is clearly not past,” said the prime minister’s special adviser. He sank back in the chair again with eyelids lowered and an amused smile on his lips.

That man is not in his right mind, thought Berg. But he didn’t say that.

…

The following day he met Waltin at the secure location. Waltin had brought with him the papers that had been cleaned out of the special adviser’s file and were now being stored outside the building, while Berg brought what was left with him. Then he visited his workroom on the top floor and read the file while Waltin was pulling on a one-armed bandit that for some unknown reason was installed in the conference room directly below. At regular intervals a faint clanking sound forced its way through the double flooring, and on at least one occasion Waltin shouted with enthusiasm. Why did he do that? thought Berg, who knew that Waltin had his own key to the machine’s coin box.

There were three documents in the file that troubled Berg and that he blamed himself for not having read before yesterday’s meeting. They were all almost twenty years old and dealt with the special adviser’s time as a draftee in the army. According to the first document he had been placed with a regular infantry regiment in upper Norrland. One month later he had been reassigned to general headquarters in Stockholm after a request from headquarters made directly to the regimental head. There he did service for a little more than a year with a department under the command of general headquarters that produced “non-security-classified instructional materials” for draftees and noncommissioned officers in the army. And when he was discharged, after fifteen months of service, he was still an ordinary draftee.

The second document contained two different intelligence tests that he had undergone in connection with enlistment. The first was the usual test, which everyone who enlisted had to fill out, and his results had placed him in the highest category, where roughly two percent of every batch tended to land. There was in itself nothing exceptional about that; Berg himself had been in the category just below, but considering the special adviser’s placement as a regular draftee in a regular infantry regiment, there was something that didn’t add up. It would have been reasonable to have at least suggested alternative placement for him, but there was not the least indication of that.

Instead he came back a week later and underwent yet another test. Berg was no expert on psychological testing, but he could read. On the last page the psychologist who had conducted the test had added a handwritten note: “The respondent has attained the maximum result on Stanford Binet in the expanded variant. According to the distribution for the test in question, this means that he belongs to that portion of the total population which makes up circa.01% of the referenced population.” One in a hundred thousand, thought Berg. One of less than a hundred Swedes, who a few months later joins up as an ordinary drafted soldier in the infantry?

The third document contained only a typewritten piece of paper and its envelope: The address was handwritten with printed letters and the letter was addressed to “Stockholm Police Department, Investigation Unit, Police Station, Kungsholmen.” From there it had clearly wandered on unknown paths to the archives of the secret police. The sender was anonymous, but from the contents and between the lines it was evident that he worked as a staff officer at the training department, G.H.Q. Stockholm, where, among other things, he took care of draftees’ passes.

The anonymous informant was writing to point out an obvious anomaly. On the first day at his new service location, one of the draftees had already submitted a pass which granted him leave for the following two weeks. After that he had shown up and submitted another new pass with the same wording. The staff officer interpreted this as so remarkable that he asked him to wait while he checked the pass with the officer who had signed it. He had been “particularly brusquely treated by the aforementioned officer, who in an impudent tone said to me that I should not be meddling in things that were none of my business.” When he returned to his office “the draftee had already departed from quarters and as this obvious anomaly has gone on for almost a year I now turn to you, sir, to comment on the matter. The situation in my workplace is unfortunately not such that I could take up the problem with my superior.”

“What do you think about this?” asked Berg.

He and Waltin were sitting on the couch in the conference room and he had time to drink half a pot of coffee while Waltin read and pondered.

“Looks as though we’ve got another spy on our hands,” Waltin said with a wry smile.

Two or three, thought Berg, moaning to himself. The second was the minister of justice’s chief legal officer, who usually attended the weekly meetings. He had done so for many years, regardless of which party the minister belonged to. In addition he had a side assignment as legal adviser for the supreme commander, with the rank of lieutenant general and placement with general headquarters.

The chief legal officer tended to be a very taciturn man. On those rare occasions when he spoke, it was usually to answer a question, and what he said always concerned formalities and judicial questions. He presented an image both agreeable and taciturn. An old-fashioned educated scribe, Berg thought, but because he was not one to fall for a pretty face, and because the chief legal officer took the minutes at their meetings-granted, these were extremely concise-Berg nonetheless had a routine check carried out. His detective had spent an entire week in a cold delivery truck in the midst of a bitterly cold winter outside the chief legal officer’s magnificent villa on Lidingö without having the slightest thing to report. On the eighth night, however, things started happening with a vengeance, and according to the surveillance memorandum on Berg’s desk the next morning, the following had occurred.

“At two-eighteen hours the surveillance object came out onto the balcony of his bedroom on the upper floor of the villa. Thereafter with a certain difficulty he came to so-called attention and raised a glass of champagne with his right hand, after which he proposed four cheers to His Majesty the King. He was at the time in question dressed in blue briefs with yellow stripes, an army uniform jacket with lieutenant general’s rank markings, ditto cap with peak. The object had thereafter begun singing the first lines of the King’s song, whereupon the door to the balcony was opened from inside the villa and a naked female person came out onto the balcony and led the object through the balcony door into the villa. The female in question is according to our evaluation identical with the object’s wife, who at the moment described made an extremely exhilarated impression. Certain activity appears thereafter to have occurred in the bedroom. Because the curtains had been drawn and the door to the balcony closed, however, the more precise nature of this activity could not be ascertained. At five-thirty hours the light in the bedroom was turned off.”

How could they know that it was champagne? thought Berg as he fed the surveillance memorandum into his paper shredder.

Before he and Waltin parted company they agreed to tone down the military aspect of their survey of antidemocratic elements. The minister could hardly be counted on, and two against one was one too many.

“I think it’s best that we lie low until we see how this develops,” said Berg.

“Yes, that’s probably the safest until we know if he’s fish or fowl,” agreed Waltin. How can a person who is so talented be a social democrat? he thought.

Things had gone well and things had gone badly, but Berg had stayed in his position. Things had gone well and things had gone badly, but regardless of which, day had followed day and turned into months and by and by into years, and Berg was still sitting where he was. At the same time it was in some way as though his surroundings-his mission and the people who made that same mission tangible and concrete-were in the process of closing around him. But not to take him in their embrace, which would have been difficult enough, as he preferred a firm handshake at a respectful distance, but rather as preparation for something quite different. Berg had spent a day at the secure location to analyze his situation seriously and in depth, with himself as his only interlocutor.

Police Superintendent Waltin was Berg’s closest man. He was ten years younger than Berg, and when Berg thought about who would become his successor, thoughts that he didn’t relish, it was Waltin he envisioned. They had a history in common, they had secrets in common, on a few occasions they had even exchanged personal confidences, and in addition he was Waltin’s mentor. Considering their common mission it was also Waltin to whom he had given the task of holding his protective hand around its innermost core, the most sensitive, the most secret of all things secret, that which could not be jeopardized at any price and which must never be revealed: the external operation.

Nor was there anything that indicated he couldn’t trust Waltin. All the checks he had carried out on him had been completely without result, not the least hint of anything that didn’t add up, if you disregarded that silly story about his secret key to the one-armed bandit and other such childishness. Still, something was wrong. He sensed that it was there and he couldn’t even put his finger on it.

Berg’s officers were all ambitious, meticulous, and hardworking. Those who weren’t he got rid of or placed in positions in his organization where their deficiencies could be of use for his overarching purposes, but still, sometimes it went wrong.

At his last meeting with his superiors, most of the time had been devoted to discussing the disturbing reports collected by his group for the surveillance of the Kurds. This minister of justice was the latest in a line of ministers of justice, and was like his predecessors to the point of interchangeability in muddling their considerations.

“This Kudo,” asked the minister of justice. “What kind of fellow is he? Kudo? It sounds foreign, almost African. Is the fellow African?”

Then he would hardly have a first name like Werner, thought Berg, but he didn’t say so. Instead he shook his head politely.

“Inspector Kudo is the head of the Kurdish group’s surveillance unit,” said Berg. “He’s the one who has compiled and written the report in question,” he explained.

“Oh, I understand,” said the special adviser, raising his eyelids a millimeter. “That’s why he signed his name to it.”

“I mean the name,” said the minister of justice, who didn’t give up so easily. “Kudo? Isn’t that African?”

“I seem to recall that his father came here as a refugee from Estonia after the war,” said Berg. “Kudo. I think the name is actually Estonian.”

“Personally I would say it’s an assumed name,” said the special adviser, his eyelids lowered and wearing his usual irritating smile. “Let us assume, purely hypothetically, that is,” he said and for some reason nodded at Berg, “that his father’s name was Kurt and his mother’s was Doris. So it became KuDo instead of Andersson. One ought to be grateful that he doesn’t spell it with a capital ‘D.’ Ku-Do,” said the special adviser with emphasis on both syllables, while for some reason he looked at the minister.

“Exactly,” said the minister of justice and giggled. “For then I might well have thought he was Japanese. As in ‘judo,’ I mean,” he clarified, nudging the chief legal officer, who smiled politely without saying anything.

“If this is important to you gentlemen I can of course check this out,” said Berg politely. One complete fool, one who never says anything, and one who isn’t in his right mind, thought Berg.

“It would be just splendid if you could do that,” said the special adviser with exaggerated warmth in his voice. “I guess if necessary I can put up with the fact that the fellow can neither think nor write-what do we really have to choose from?-but I’m suspicious of types who change their names.”

What is it you really want to say? thought Berg.

A hidden message, thought Berg a few hours later. He was sitting behind his desk and had just finished reading Werner Kudo’s personal file. Born Werner Andersson, son of Kurt Andersson and his wife, Doris, née Svensson.

Careless of me, thought Berg.

It had been a very delicate task to recruit people to the Kurdish group. Finding people who were ambitious, meticulous, and hardworking and who at the same time could accept the ever more fantastic stories that their hard-pressed informants were delivering. Werner Kudo had fit like a hand in a glove since the day in the break room when, in utmost confidence, he had revealed to one of Berg’s secret informants within the operation that there were gnomes on the farm in Småland where he had grown up. Little homespun-clad fellows who kept a watchful eye on people, livestock, and buildings at his parental home, he explained while his colleague in the break room nodded encouragingly, listened eagerly, and made a mental note of every word.

Also, it was Berg who had found the perfect partner for Kudo. His name was Christer Bülling-that name was also assumed, but because his birth name was Sprain the reason was self-explanatory. He had worked at the Solna police department’s planning group before Berg sank his claws into him. It was the Stockholm chief constable who had tipped him off. During a dinner he had talked about a younger colleague from Solna whom he had met during a meeting and who had made an indelible impression on him.

“The most intelligent young man I’ve ever met; the others call him the Professor,” the chief constable had said by way of summary. This had immediately aroused Berg’s curiosity.

Berg was a man possessing great knowledge. Among other things he knew that beauty tends to dwell in the eye of the beholder, and because he was also firmly convinced that the Stockholm chief constable was the most moronic police officer he had ever met, he had contacted Waltin the very next day and asked him to make a careful survey of Christer Bülling, alias the Professor.

“Why is he called the Professor?” Berg had asked when he met Waltin a week later to go over the survey.

“According to one of his first-grade classmates, it’s because he was the only one wearing glasses. He was also supposed to have horribly protruding ears and generally appeared a bit dopey,” Waltin had explained. “Personally I thought it was due to his grades,” he had continued, “but according to one of the psychologists we have here at the firm, children are just not capable of irony in the same way as adults.”

“So he’s not exactly a genius,” Berg concluded.

“Not exactly,” Waltin had said, and sighed. “If you want I can pull his test results when he enlisted. According to the psychologist-”

“Forget about that,” Berg interrupted. “Do you have anything else?”

“Bülling was exempt from fieldwork rather early. It was the company’s in-house physician who recommended it. He’s said to suffer from agoraphobia and has difficulty meeting people in general. Extremely taciturn, almost autistic.”

“Not one to run around and talk a lot?” Berg asked.

“No,” Waltin said with conviction. “On the other hand he’s almost obsessed with reading a lot of papers. That certainly fits in with his diagnosis, according to the doctor. It’s supposed to relieve anxiety for people like him. At the planning group they are very satisfied with him. He gets extraordinary ratings.”

I can believe that, Berg thought, but he didn’t say that.

“Is this someone you’re thinking of recruiting?” Waltin asked.

“To the Kurd group, as head of investigation and analysis. What do you think of that?”

Waltin nodded approvingly.

“Kudo and Bülling.” Waltin savored the names. “They’re going to be a real radar unit. And besides, it’s a kind of radar we ordinary mortals lack.”

Kudo and Bülling were turning into a problem. The whole Kurdish effort, in fact, was undoubtedly getting out of control, thought Berg, because the two of them took themselves and their assignment so damn seriously. They knew nothing about the real reason the group where they were now working had been set up, and they lacked any qualification for figuring out, on their own, how matters really stood. The most recent meeting with the minister of justice might have gone badly. Also, it was, remarkably enough, the minister of justice who had made the unpleasant discovery in the papers that Berg should have read more carefully.

“I wonder about this secret monitoring,” said the minister.

“Yes,” said Berg, looking at him with a neutral expression.

“How is this really?” continued the minister. “I don’t find it in the legal text. Is it regulated in any of those secret statutes?”

“If it’s telephone wiretapping you mean,” said Berg, “then it’s regulated by a special-”

“No,” interrupted the minister and for once he sounded a bit irritated. “I don’t mean telephones. You don’t suppose they’re sitting in the same room talking to each other on the phone, do you? This must be some kind of concealed monitoring device. Right, like hiding a lot of microphones in the walls and ceiling and in furniture and God knows what.”

“I see,” said Berg vaguely. “The legal situation is a little unclear, if I may say so. What do you say, Gustav?”

Berg looked at the chief legal officer, who was looking down at his papers and didn’t seem particularly interested in delineating this particular legal situation.

“I think Gustav is the right man,” urged Berg. “How many of us are there who have had the privilege of holding both the scales of justice and the sword of power in our hands?” he continued ingratiatingly, with a friendly look at his interlocutor.

What the hell does that dreadful man mean? thought the chief legal officer, feeling a shudder pass through him. Is he trying to say something or what?

He really looks strange, thought Berg. He’s seemed odd for quite some time now. It may be high time for a new little check.

“Yes.” The chief legal office cleared his throat. “This is, as stated, an especially intricate question that the chief has brought up here, and in order to save time, I’d like to propose that we take this up after the meeting. I’m at your disposal as soon as the chief has time and so desires. But if I may say something very briefly”-he cleared his throat again before continuing-“then I’m without a doubt in total agreement with the chief that we’re faced with an especially complicated judicial matter.”

The minister of justice looked as happy as when his first-grade teacher had pasted a gold star in his arithmetic book.

“Yes, I suspected as much,” he said contentedly. “Now, where were we before I interrupted?”

He had been lucky, at any rate, thought Berg when he was sitting in relative security behind his desk. The prime minister’s special adviser had not been present. He had reported a scheduling conflict one hour before the meeting. This, by the way, had been happening more and more often during the past year. Not that I mind, thought Berg.

…

The day after the chief legal officer had been appointed, the supreme commander’s secretary had called and asked when he would have time to visit the tailor.

“Tailor?” asked the chief legal officer.

“To be measured for the chief legal officer’s uniform,” explained the secretary.

I don’t want a uniform, thought the chief legal officer with distaste, but before he managed to say so, the thought occurred to him that if the nation were to end up in a war, naval or otherwise, he would quite simply be compelled to wear a uniform. There were laws about that.

He had not dared say anything to his wife. They had met at an organization for liberal attorneys a few years earlier and married the following year; to have a general in the house was in all likelihood not at the top of her marital wish list. However, one evening after a nice dinner as they were sitting in the music room enjoying an excellent recording of Mahler’s second symphony, he had screwed up his courage and told her the whole dreadful story.

“Now, now, honey,” she said consolingly and patted him on the arm. “It’s not the end of the world, is it? Go upstairs and put it on, so I can see how you look. I promise not to start laughing.”

She hadn’t laughed. Instead there was a strange gleam in her eyes and she looked at him in a way she had never done before. That was how it had started.

The first time they played war. Because his mother-in-law was Norwegian and his wife spoke the language fluently, Sweden got to occupy Norway. It couldn’t be helped. At first he had the whole uniform on-well, not the shoes, of course, for he had kicked them off and that damn cap had tumbled off several times, but for the most part the whole uniform. It had been an exceptional experience. Then he had gone out on the balcony to collect himself and since he was there anyway, he had taken the opportunity to propose a toast to His Majesty the King, but then his wife came out and led him in again to continue negotiations for the occupation and to establish the final terms of peace, and then it had just gone on and on. Like in a dream, thought the chief legal officer. Up until now, thought the chief legal officer in distress. For now that horrid spy character Berg had evidently got on the trail of him and his wife.

“What do we do now?” said the chief legal officer, looking mournfully at his wife. How beautiful she is, he thought. But everything that has a beginning must also have an end, he thought.

“Never mind,” said his wife. “It’s not the end of the world, is it? There must be lots of uniforms that you can rent.”

Didn’t think about that, thought the chief legal officer.

“Is there anything in particular you’re thinking of,” he asked cautiously.

“I’m considering becoming a nurse,” his wife said with an efficient and energetic gleam in her beautiful brown eyes. “How’s that, honey? Haven’t you been feeling a little poorly lately?”

At the meeting the following week, the chief legal officer had introduced an item of his own for the “remaining business” part of the agenda; because this was the first time during Berg’s tenure, the matter had not contributed to his peace of mind. This agenda item, cryptic to say the least, provided little indication of where it was headed, either. Berg had been on pins and needles until it was time and the only consolation in this misery was that the prime minister’s special adviser had once again reported that he was prevented from attending.

“Yes,” the chief legal officer said, and cleared his throat. “As I’ve already said to my esteemed boss”-the chief legal officer nodded to the minister of justice, who nodded back, while Berg just felt left out-“I have today resigned from my position as attorney to the supreme commander. Effective immediately, by the way; my successor will be selected by the end of the week.”

“That’s too bad,” said Berg. What’s going on? he thought.

“Oh,” said the chief legal officer with an unexpected chill in his voice. “I have made the evaluation that in light of your ongoing survey of antidemocratic elements within the police and the military, there is a risk that I might find myself in a conflict of interest and I have therefore decided to resolve it in this way.”

“Perhaps that’s a wise decision,” Berg said in a neutral tone.

“Certainly,” said the chief legal officer, looking at him. “Even if we still have nothing specific to consider, I prefer to forestall rather than be forestalled.”

“Exactly what I was going to say,” said the minister with false joviality in his voice. “I’m sure all of us in this building have wondered the same thing. By the way, the prime minister came to see me the other day after the governmental meeting. How is your survey coming along, Berg? It’s been going on for a good while now.”

What’s going on? thought Berg.

“How’s it going with that doggone survey of our colleagues?” said Berg when he was with Waltin a few hours later.

“Pretty well,” said Waltin, shrugging his shoulders in a gesture of indifference. “Or pretty badly, if you want. It depends on how you look at it.”

“Do we have anything on hand?” asked Berg. “The wolf pack down in Rosenbad has started howling.”

“Plenty,” said Waltin.

“Good,” said Berg.