Invisible Murder

E HAVE A problem.”

Christian from IT had gone to the trouble of coming up to Søren’s second floor office from the ground floor. Usually he just telephoned. He was standing in the doorway with a piece of paper that looked very small in his large hands.

“All right,” Søren said, rolling his chair back from his desk and flipping a hand in an attempt to seem encouraging. “Tell me about it.”

He liked Christian, but he needed to read at least two hundred more pages to prepare for the training exercise evaluation later that day, and he was meeting with a couple of visiting American police officers very shortly. Why was it that IT problems never seemed to fall into the solved-in-ten-minutes category?

Christian moved a little further into the office. He was a tall man, in his mid-forties, with wrists as thick as tree trunks and a solid barrel chest. He had been in IT for as long as Søren could remember, and he had recently taken over responsibility for most of their Internet surveillance.

“We’ve started tracing the IP addresses you sent down to us yesterday,” Christian said, placing the piece of paper in front of Søren. “Three of them are familiar faces from the right-wing extremist scene, and they don’t seem to have gone in too deeply. They were probably just drooling over the specifications for an M-79 or something. I’ve done a report on it that I’ll send up later.”

Søren nodded. All of this was what he had expected.

“Two of the IP addresses that visited the alleged hospital equipment page look like normal search errors. In other words, people got there by accident and left again as soon as they saw the trashy layout. The third, the one you underlined … well, that one is a little more problematic.”

“And?” Søren glanced at his watch. He was supposed to meet the American delegation in ten minutes.

“Well,” Christian said and cleared his throat. “The IP address belongs to a technical college in northwest district and may have been used by any number of the school’s students, faculty members, and so forth. Luckily the search was in the evening and during exams week, so there weren’t that many people on campus at the time. A couple of teachers and four students, who were all identified from the school’s surveillance cameras. We asked all of them for permission to download the contents of their laptops, but one of the students is refusing to give us access to his PC.”

Søren rolled his chair back up to his desk and looked at the piece of paper in front of him. Khalid Hosseini, aged nineteen, living in Mjølnerparken. Christian had bolded the name, address, and civil registration number.

“And what’s your impression?”

Christian shrugged. “He seems pretty normal. Young, short hair, saggy pants, and T-shirt. Not your average religious fanatic, if that’s what you mean. But he was clearly shitting himself when we asked to see his computer, and he wouldn’t hand it over.”

Søren stood up and grabbed his meeting papers off the desk.

“Get a court order, then. I want a look at that computer.”

Christian nodded, but remained next to the desk as if he were waiting for something more.

“I have to go now,” Søren said, trying to hide the irritation that was starting to well up inside him. If the man had more to say, why didn’t he just up and say it? Surely Christian could see that he was on his way out the door.

“There’s a time issue,” Christian said. “We’re stretched to the limit right now in terms of manpower. We have three men off on the SINe course. Iben is down for the count with some virus, Martin is still on sick-leave with stress, and then there’s the Summit and … well.…”

Søren paused in the doorway. The problem was real, he knew that. Over the summer all of the civil defense and emergency services were supposed to switch their communication over to a common, coordinated digital communication system. Secure Information Net, or SINe for short. This way, it was hoped, they wouldn’t be fumbling with outdated analog radios at the Summit. The switch was the main reason for the ill-fated training exercise. IT, in particular, were overworked and under pressure. Too many superiors were pestering Christian and his colleagues right now, and Søren was only one of them.

“Any idea what our young friend was doing on the site?”

“No. I mean, he was there for a while, and we can tell that he searched for ‘radiation therapy’ and ‘cancer treatment.’ ”

“That could mean anything, given the content of the site.”

“Yes. And the telephone numbers he used for the subsequent contact didn’t give us anything either. Top-up disposables, probably dumped the minute he had used them. Possibly stolen in the first place. At any rate, they’re not in service anymore.”

“Okay.” Søren drummed his fingers against the doorframe, then made up his mind. “How is this for a compromise? Get the computer off him ASAP, before he dumps it or makes some kind of switch. After that … if you get me the full report sometime next week, I’ll get off your back. I’ll talk to the young man tomorrow. See what he has to say for himself and put the fear of God in him while I’m at it.”

“Um … maybe two weeks from now?” Christian’s pleading face looked almost comical.

“Yes, okay.” Søren nodded. So far, they were still just following up on the famous Islamist whisper. Pushing Christian past the point of collapse would get him nowhere.

Young men—and yes, some of them were Muslims—did routinely develop an unhealthy interest in recipes for explosives or suicide videos. The Service had had good results from nipping that kind of thing in the bud—often a little chat with the PET had a remarkable cooling effect on the hot-headed juvenile compulsion to fantasize about death, destruction, and things that go boom. It had been quite a while since he had personally done one of these wake-up calls, but right now that was the simplest solution. Most of his own people had been clocking overtime since the middle of March, and there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that he would be able to pass it off to some other department. The ops teams were almost as run-down as IT, and most of Søren’s colleagues were fighting tooth and nail to protect their own interests.

“Khalid Hosseini.” Søren repeated the name to himself as he hurried off to the meeting room on the third floor. It was pretty damn ballsy to say no to the PET when your name was Khalid. Ballsy—and a little alarming.