Invisible Murder

NSIDE THE SURVEILLANCE van, the smell of nervous sweat and coffee-induced flatulence had grown intense over the past couple of hours. Søren leaned forward, and then back, in an attempt to focus on the screen. Recently his optician had begun to mutter something about “bifocals.”

“Any chance of a better picture?” he asked.

“Not while he’s moving,” the technician said. “It’s not exactly broad daylight out there.”

The image was jumping and shaking as the man outside made his way across the abandoned railway yard. Søren’s eyes wandered over to one of the other screens, the one that gave him a bird’s eye view of the area. They had two men stationed on the roof of the closest residential building on Rovsingsgade. The beat-up blue Scania refrigeration truck that was the object of the whole operation was parked more or less in the middle of the derelict triangle of no-man’s land between Rovsingsgade and the old railway junction tracks. A little farther away, on the other side of the strip of straggling allotment gardens, a train rattled past in a flicker of lit windows. Darkness had given way to half-light. Luckily, a mass of leaden clouds delayed true dawn a little, but it was still light enough for the inhabitants of the refrigeration truck to spot Berndt if he wasn’t careful.

But he was. Currently the little camera mounted on his headset was showing nothing except close-ups of stiff, yellow grass and nettle stalks from last year.

“Come on, come on.…” mumbled a voice on the far side of the technician—Mikael Nielsen, an intense young man with a very high IQ, one of the new people Søren had personally helped recruit to counterterrorism from the surveillance force. With his crew-cut and ruddy complexion, he could be mistaken for the head of one of the more violent soccer fan clubs, and he gave off a vibe that made people reluctant to share a taxi with him. He had been part of Søren’s group for a year and a half now, but Søren wasn’t sure he would last. Yes, he had a sharp mind and a head filled with astonishing facts, but there was a restlessness in him that he struggled to control during moments like this, when all they could do was wait. And wait. And wait some more. Caution took time.

Suddenly the camera advanced with a bump. They could hear Berndt’s breathing; it was very loud in the stuffy, oxygen-depleted atmosphere inside the van. The image got significantly darker.

“He’s under the truck now,” Gitte Nymand said, practically into Søren’s ear. She was standing behind him and had leaned forward so she could follow the action more closely. He couldn’t help noticing the feminine scent of freshly washed hair and deodorant. Hopefully the contrast with his own sixteen-hours-on-the-body shirt wasn’t too jarring.

Suddenly an image popped up on a screen that had so far been dark. It cut in and out and bounced and pixilated before resolving into something Søren didn’t need glasses to make out.

The bare interior of the truck’s cargo compartment. Spotlights from primitive work lamps fell stark and cold on a single, exposed silhouette on a chair. The man’s hands were cuffed behind his back, and a black plastic package had been strapped to his bare chest with wide strips of metallic duct tape.

“Yes!” Gitte hissed softly, and Søren didn’t begrudge her the small triumphant outburst. She had been right. She was the one who had gotten their captured activist to reveal his knowledge of the local area—surprisingly extensive knowledge, considering the man was a foreigner. She and Mikael had spotted the refrigeration truck and discovered that its registered owner had never heard of it. She had been in counterterrorism for only four months, and her self-confidence would undoubtedly benefit from a victory like this one.

“Contact on-site command,” Søren told Mikael. “Tell him we have visual confirmation and that they have explosives on the hostage. We need to stop traffic on Rovsingsgade before we go in.”

There were other more shadowy forms moving inside the Scania truck’s cargo hold. Four of them, it looked like. Two were holding a video camera and debating quietly in English why it wasn’t working.

“It’s the batteries.” The speaker was a woman, but the balaclavas and the shapeless bulletproof vests made it hard to discern much else.

“I just recharged them!” protested another, a youngish man by the sound of it.

“I can’t believe that Berndt got us visuals,” Gitte said. “I thought we’d be lucky to have sound. How did he do it?”

“The ventilation system,” Mikael Nielsen said absentmindedly, jabbing at his fancy new digital radio with an irritated thumb. “Come on!”

Finally he got a connection. He spoke quietly and moved over to the farthest end of the van so as to disrupt the surveillance as little as possible, and Søren refocused his attention once more on events in the refrigeration truck.

Two of the four kidnappers were holding automatic rifles; it was hard to see exactly what make, but there was something about the outline that reminded Søren of the Danish army’s old Heckler & Kochs. Presumably the two with the video camera at least had handguns, even though he couldn’t see them. But the explosives were by far the most critical factor in this situation.

All things considered, the hostage was remarkably calm. He was sitting quietly in the chair, watching his executioners with impassive equanimity. The spotlight bounced off his clean-shaven head and created sharp shadows below his chin and in the hollows beneath his collarbones. The mild shivers that made his naked shoulders tremble every few seconds seemed to be only a reaction to the cold.

Suddenly Søren felt Mikael’s hand on his shoulder.

“It’s not working,” he said. “I can’t get through to command. This crappy new system keeps transferring me to 911 instead.”

Shit. Søren didn’t say it out loud, that would only make the situation worse. He also suppressed the urge to snatch Mikael’s radio in order to see if it made any difference that an inspector pushed the buttons. Sometimes you could get people to do what you wanted by pulling rank; technology couldn’t care less.

“See if you can get him on his mobile,” he said. “But be careful what you say. We aren’t the only ones who can eavesdrop on the mobile network.”

Mikael nodded, chewing the nicotine gum that kept him smoke-free in tense situations so vigorously that the muscles in his intimidating jaw bulged under his skin. “I’ll try.”

But a few seconds later he swore again. “He has turned it off.”

That was per regulation, actually. Søren’s own mobile was also off so it wouldn’t jeopardize the operation.

“Okay,” he said. “Input?”

“The clock is ticking,” Mikael said. “At some point they’ll notice that Blue 1 is missing or that Blue 4 is failing to check in.” Blue 1 was the code name for the activist they had captured and interrogated; Blue 4 the guard that Berndt’s unit had taken out.

“Can we still get in touch with our own lot?” Søren said.

“Yes. It’s just the rest of the emergency services that have fallen off the map.”

“Brave new digital world,” Søren muttered.

“I think we should go in,” Mikael said. “While we still have the element of surprise. Seize them before they can push the button.”

“And if it goes wrong? You don’t know how powerful those explosives are,” Søren pointed out. “They’re only about twenty to thirty meters away from the traffic on Rovsingsgade.”

“And they could easily have a lookout outside—someone we haven’t spotted,” Gitte said.

“Well, if they do, then why didn’t he spot Berndt?” Mikael objected.

“Because Berndt is Berndt.”

“But it’s every bit as dangerous to wait. They could kill the hostage at any time. With or without the explosives.”

“No,” Gitte said. “Because they haven’t made the recording yet.”

Mikael emitted a sound of frustration, half wheeze, half sigh.

“Terrorism is called terrorism because the goal is fear,” Gitte said. “Isn’t that what you’re always preaching, boss?”

“Yes.” Søren permitted himself the hint of a smile. Killing a man, however important, in a refrigeration truck in Copenhagen certainly wouldn’t be the ultimate goal of any terrorist group. They would want the whole world to watch while they did it. To have the recording played on as many TV screens as possible, thus getting attention, instilling fear, and changing people’s behavior. Without a video recording, there was precious little point to the act as far as the terrorists were concerned. They might even suffer the affront of having another group claim responsibility.

Suddenly Gitte sat up in her chair. She was a tall woman, as tall as most men and had the shoulders of an Olympic swim star. When Gitte straightened up, people noticed.

“What is it?”

“The traffic,” she said, pointing to the screen that gave them the aerial overview. “It’s stopped.”

She was right. The sparse a-little-past-six-in-the-morning trickle of cars had completely dried up. Rovsingsgade was deserted.

“Shit.” This time Søren did say it out loud. What the hell was going on here? Who was the idiot that had blocked off the road without checking with them first? And how long would it take before the group in there realized it? Seconds, maybe, if they really did have another lookout outside the truck. “Now!” he said into the earpiece in Berndt’s ear. “We’re going in now!”

LIGHTS, COLD, MOVEMENT. The still-faint daylight felt like a birth shock after the dark incubator of the surveillance van. He hit the asphalt running, crossed the first parking lot, and jumped over the low beech hedge into the next. The refrigeration truck wasn’t his goal; Berndt and the strike team would take care of that, and Søren had no intention whatsoever of getting in the way of people trained for that sort of thing. His goal was a man with a radio, standing on the roof of the four-story residential building their bird’s eye view was coming from, a radio that could hopefully communicate with the rest of the emergency services, so he could find out what the hell was going on. He burst through the back door—considerately taped so the latch couldn’t click into the strike plate—and sprinted up the smooth terrazzo stairs. First floor, second floor, third floor … past the fourth and up the last narrow service stairwell to the roof. There was an uncomfortable burn in his knee where he had had surgery on his cruciate ligament, and his lungs were on overtime. But he had enough breath left to snarl “Give me that radio!” at a startled young officer, uniformed police. In his own earpiece he could hear static and breathing and short, terse statements, but no shots. Thank God, no shots yet.

He snatched the radio—or “terminal” as they were supposed to call them now—out of the officer’s hand and stood frozen for a second, staring at the unfamiliar keys. Then information he knew, but which had yet to become second nature, coalesced, and he entered the sequence that was supposed to put him in touch with on-site command.

At that moment a hard, flat bang resonated—both inside and outside his earpiece. In three quick steps, Søren moved over to the half wall that ran around the edge of the roof, and now for the first time in the cool, sharp reality of morning, he had the same bird’s eye view of the area that he had had earlier on the screen in the surveillance van. The back end of the refrigeration truck was hanging open and a diffuse cloud of grayish-white smoke was wafting out over the railway yard.

“Berndt?” he said quietly into his microphone headset.

Twenty-eight seconds passed. Søren counted them. Then Berndt’s voice responded with the unnatural intimacy that came with in-ear receivers:

“It’s okay. We’re in, and we have control.”

BY THE TIME Søren made it down to the refrigeration truck, they had the handcuffs off the hostage and a blanket around his shoulders. Apparently Gitte was the one charged with the thankless task of removing the flat, black object that was attached to his chest. The man made a face as she tried to tug the wide tape off.

“Do we have any rubbing alcohol?” Søren asked. “That’ll make it come off a little easier.”

“Never mind,” said the former hostage. “Just get it over with.”

His naked torso was too muscular for him to be completely believable in the role of a captured head of state, and although Søren could see him flexing his fingers in a pumping rhythm to get the blood flowing to his hands again, he didn’t otherwise look like a man who had been bound and helpless for more than four hours. Torben Wahl—deputy director of PET’s counterterrorism section and Søren’s immediate supervisor—was not a man who was easily rattled.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“Not that great,” Søren admitted. “The intelligence side of things went okay, and Berndt and the SWAT team went in like they were supposed to. However, liaising with the rest of the emergency services was a total failure. Someone had better get a handle on that before the summit, because if this had been the real deal.…”

“Well, that’s why we drill,” Torben said, but he didn’t look happy.

DESPITE THE SHOWER, a fresh shirt, and four hours of sleep with the curtains drawn, the effects of the training exercise were still lingering in his body as Søren parked in front of PET’s headquarters in suburban Søborg late that afternoon. He yawned on his way up the stairs. He could have used a couple more hours of downtime, but he had to check in to see what had turned up on his desk while he had been off playing cops and robbers in Rovsingsgade. His mood was not improved when he was forced to skirt around several young men in yellow T-shirts struggling with a giant, cube-shaped monstrosity and a plastic drum of drinking water that were apparently destined for the little niche in front of the lavatories farther down the hallway.

A water cooler. He had seen machines identical to this popping up throughout the building. They might keep the water cold, but they also gave off a constant irritating hum. Personally, he managed just fine with water from the tap in the men’s room, but in recent years the younger people, especially the women, had insisted on the phthalate-saturated energy wasters. Now it appeared that their bit of the corridor would have one, too. Of all the frivolous, useless fads—and he could reel off quite a few without even trying—water coolers ranked among the very worst, on par with the spider catchers he had recently seen in Kvickly, followed closely by patio heaters and ceiling fans. But apparently this was what the younger people wanted these days. Søren sighed. “The younger people?” When had he begun to call them that? Of course the majority of the eighty men and women who worked in the Danish Security and Intelligence Service’s counterterrorism branch were younger than him, but still—“the younger people”? He was going to have to stop using that expression. It made him sound like a world-weary old fart. Especially when he was also ranting about newfangled water coolers.

Søren ducked into the little kitchenette at the end of the hall and selected a mug from the cupboard. The coffee left in the machine was jet black and tasted like charcoal; it had probably been sitting there since lunch. A few other people from the group had also drifted in even though they weren’t on duty again until the next morning. He could hear someone typing and quiet laughter coming from the large, open-plan office. Gitte Nymand was leaning over Mikael Nielsen’s shoulder and pointing to something or other on the screen in front of them. She had a small wrinkle of concentration on her brow, but she was smiling, and her voice bubbled with excitement. Søren allowed himself to stand there for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, enjoying the view. Gitte wasn’t beautiful in the traditional sense. Her short-cropped hair framed a face that was just as distinctive as her gold-medalist swimmer’s shoulders and muscular legs. Wide cheekbones, strong jaw, bushy eyebrows that were astonishingly dark despite her standard Scandinavian blonde hair and blue-green eyes. But what rendered her one of his best personnel finds of late was the calm, natural authority she radiated, even though she was only in her late twenties. Also, she got along well with Mikael, who could be a little prickly to work with. Søren seemed to remember they had been at the police academy together. It did something to the cadets’ relationships, those months of standing side by side in riot gear, in yet another interminable attempt to clear Christiania’s cannabis market.

“Hi, Boss.”

They had noticed him. Gitte straightened up and looked at him inquisitively, which gave him a brief and very irritating sense of being in the way. As if they were just waiting politely for their aging boss to clear off so they could once again immerse themselves in the details of their report on the training exercise. You could see the easy intimacy between them in the way they moved—Mikael, leaning back casually in his chair, Gitte with her hand still on his shoulder. Søren felt a ridiculous pang of jealousy. When had he last felt that kind of camaraderie with any of his colleagues? When had he last worked side by side with someone who had also seen him drunk? None of his supervisors ever leaned over his shoulder with bright eyes and eager voices, that was for sure.

“Hi,” Søren grunted in response.

He raised his hand halfheartedly and continued into his own office, set the charred coffee down on the desk, and turned on his computer. He stared at the dark screen as the machine slowly whirred through its security protocol. His own face was reflected back at him dimly behind the blinking gray lines of text, looking rather more geriatric than usual. It was the lack of sleep, he told himself firmly, as if attempting to banish the specter of age by willpower alone. Normally, all he saw was himself—broad forehead, receding hairline, and the narrow, hooked nose which, along with his black hair, had earned him the nickname “Kemosabe” at the police academy. As far as he knew no one called him that anymore. Admittedly, the black hair had grayed a bit since then, and his promotion to inspector had probably put the kibosh on that type of linguistic creativity.

At least he was in good shape. He worked out in the gym in the basement every Monday and Wednesday morning before heading for his desk, and he ran two or three times a week, usually ten kilometers or more, and even though he didn’t time himself, he knew he was still creditably fast. The physical that stopped any number of aspiring cadets every year because of excessive cigarettes and chronic puppy fat would still be no hindrance to him. No, there was nothing wrong with his physique, and he didn’t feel old. But to everyone else, to the “younger people,” he had already crossed the line into old-man territory. The most ambitious exercise program in the world couldn’t change that.

Ding.

The computer had finally plodded its way through the startup process and automatically opened the most recently updated daily report. Leaning forward a little, Søren scrolled down the screen. It appeared that some wiretap equipment had been deployed the previous night without any hitches. He hadn’t expected otherwise. The man they were supposed to be watching had gone to the derelict farmhouse he owned in Sweden. His mobile phone signal hadn’t budged for three days, so everything indicated that he was standing thigh-deep in some river, happily catching salmon, while the tech boys were sneaking into his downtown apartment here in Copenhagen. At any rate, they had accomplished what they were supposed to. Aside from that, all seemed quiet on the home front. A couple of messages had come in from Hungary, Belgium, and Turkey. They had all been vetted by Communication, and none of them were priority matters. The Hungarian message had been tagged “Attn. Kirkegaard,” though, so something in there must require his personal attention.

He printed the e-mail. He still preferred to read on paper—possibly another sign of age, he admitted grudgingly, but years of poring over typed reports had left him in the habit of doing his thinking with a pencil in his hand. It seemed a little late to change those spots.

He quickly circled the most important points of the mail. His colleagues from the Hungarian intelligence service, NBH, had a couple of websites under observation because they suspected these sites of trading in the arms, ammunition, and other military “surplus products” that poured over Eastern European borders in a steady stream. A neat flow chart showed that web traffic from a number of relatively legitimate forums and sites was being directed to a more hardcore inner circle of dedicated arms sites that in turn led to the object of primary interest to Hungarian Intelligence: the apparently innocent-looking hospitalequip.org, which served, according to the NBH, as a coded hub of exchange for customers looking to buy or sell arms, chemicals, and other dangerous substances.

Brave new World Wide Web. There were times when Søren felt sure there had to be a devil somewhere, gleefully contemplating the effects of his latest attack on humanity. In the past, people with shady, bizarre, or downright disgusting interests had had a much harder time locating each other. These days, even the most loathsome proclivities could find affirmation from likeminded nutters via the Internet, easily and more or less anonymously. And no matter what they wanted, it was out there—stolen antiquities, endangered species, illegal World War II souvenirs, pornography in all shapes and forms, weird drugs, and, yes, also arms, explosives, and dangerous chemicals.

“Fresh coffee, my liege?” asked Gitte, who was on her way to the kitchenette, and Søren nodded gratefully as he typed hospitalequip.org into his browser window. The page appeared, bland, pale green, a simple layout with a menu bar completely devoid of any graphic interest or stylish Flash animations. There were currently five chat rooms open. The discussion in one of them was apparently about “aggressive treatments for infections,” while another was simply about “equipment.” He could see which users were online—or, at least, he could see the pithy little aliases they were hiding behind. In the last three chat rooms, Søren couldn’t tell what the topic of conversation was or who was participating. When he tried hitting the Enter Chat button, he was asked to enter his PIN. He typed in four random numbers, and a few seconds later an automated message popped up: access denied. Please contact moderator.

He gave up trying to gain access. This was NBH’s ball game, and they hadn’t asked him to play. Besides, he could easily guess what was hiding behind the access codes—hospitalequip.org was by no means unique. Like other similar websites, it functioned as a marketplace where buyers and sellers could find each other and make that first contact. They announced what they had for sale or what they were interested in buying, anonymously of course, and then the hospitalequip people took care of the rest. NBH believed they were marketing their own stolen goods this way as well as earning a hefty sum by steering customers into interest-specific chat rooms that were set up and taken down so fast that it was hard for the intelligence service to keep up. The money flow was also hard to follow—the hospitalequip people made creative use of gold-based Internet currencies like e-bullion and e-gold.

What was interesting from a Danish perspective was that a group of Danes appeared to have been poking around on the site. At least one of them had made a connection and then subsequently dropped out of the chat to continue the discussion more discretely via mobile phone. The trail petered out at that point because the telephone number obtainable from the chat records had only been used briefly, presumably to exchange more secure numbers that the NBH had not been able to trace.

The Hungarian end of the contact was an IP address associated with the university in Budapest. The Hungarian colleague who had written the e-mail, a man by the name of Károly Gábor, reported that in addition to hospitalequip.org the Hungarian user had also visited a number of other suspicious pages, including the Islamic hizbuttahrir.org. Thus, NBH were hereby giving due notification, according to instructions, etc., etc., etc.…

Søren sighed softly. The flag-burning and the riots might have subsided, but the Mohammed cartoons and Denmark’s participation in Iraq and Afghanistan were still making the country a target. In the old days, e-mails like this would have slumbered gently in archives unless there were further alerts in the matter. Now they had to follow up on every single Islamist whisper that had Denmark’s name in it. Especially now that the Summit was so close. His thoughts went to the morning’s partially botched training exercise, and he suppressed a wave of irritation. The damned Summit was moving Copenhagen even further up the list of attractive targets, whether you were an Islamist terrorist, a swastika-waving neo-Nazi, or just an attention-seeking grassroots organization with a spare bucket of red paint.

It made him tired. The hatred that flowed in wide, black rivers across the Internet, venting itself at Danes, Muslims, Gypsies, gays, Jews, liberals, conservatives, women—at every conceivable and inconceivable minority, in Denmark and the rest of the world … it was more than just stupidity. It was evil. He wasn’t a religious person, and he usually resisted such simplistic terms, but when he read what people wrote online on a regular basis about “stupid bitches” and “sheep fuckers” and “horny homos” who, according to vox populi, all deserved to be hanged or burned or mutilated, that was the only word he could think of: evil.

“Gitte!”

She had tiptoed into his office, set the coffee down, and was already on her way out again.

“Could you forward this to the techies right away?”

Gitte took the printout of the email and quickly scanned through it.

“These three,” Gitte said, pointing at the first three addresses with a long, slender finger. “I think I can guess who they are without any help from the IT department.” She smelled of apples and lemons now, Søren thought fleetingly, with a faint pang of emptiness somewhere in his abdomen.

“Yes,” he said quickly. “It looks like our very own bunch of flag-waving White Pride idiots are at it again. These others, on the other hand, could be just about anyone. This one is probably the most significant.” He circled the Danish IP address that had been in touch with what he quietly thought of as “the Islamist whisper.” “But we ought to get them all checked out. Ask them to send us a list as soon as possible.”

Gitte nodded briskly and left, and Søren turned back to the flickering pale-green screen on his desk. Despite Denmark’s restrictive gun laws, it really wasn’t all that difficult to get hold of an ordinary hand weapon if you knew where to go. Gun-shopping in Hungary seemed a bit extreme, what with all the delivery problems and border crossings it entailed, so maybe the buyer was looking for something a little more exotic. Søren scrolled down through the bare-bones layout one last time. “Buy now, good stuff, new needles, from Russia with love.”

In my next life, he thought, I want to do something else. Something that actually permits the existence of love.