Invisible Murder

HITE AS SNOW, red as blood.…”

For some reason that fairy tale line was the first thought that struck Søren as he pulled the blanket away from the young man’s face. Even through his mask, Søren thought he could smell the sweet, rotten stench.

“And hair as black as ebony.”

Snow White from Hell, Søren thought, looking at the long, greasy strands of hair that stuck to the boy’s forehead. His narrow face gleamed white under the floodlights the Emergency Management Agency had set up at the crime scene, and his chin was covered with dried brownish streaks of blood that had apparently come from both his mouth and nose. Just under his hairline at one temple there was an a crater of a wound that shimmered in shades of green and white, and a fresher sore on his cheekbone appeared to be the source of the broad reddish-brown streaks that ran across his cheek like war paint. Søren couldn’t help but wonder if it had been smeared like that before or after his death. He looked down into the dark, underground metal tank from which the body had just been pulled, and shivered.

“Can you say anything about the cause of death?”

One of the forensic technicians who had placed the young man on the stretcher shrugged his shoulders. The man’s nose and mouth were covered by his black respirator face mask, and the reflection of the lights in the glass visor meant that Søren only got a rather blurry view of his eyes. But his arms were drooping, and he looked tired. They had been working out here for almost twenty-four hours, Søren knew, even though they hadn’t opened the cover to the repair shop’s old gas tank until about 3 A.M.

“It’s too early to say, but at first glance he doesn’t seem to have been shot, strangled, or beaten, so I’d guess it’s either radiation sickness or suffocation that killed him. Personally my money’s on radiation.”

Søren raised his eyebrows behind his own protective mask. The tech leaned across the dead body and cautiously peeled back the shirt so Søren could see the top of the boy’s torso. He instinctively took a step back. The chest was mottled with blackish-brown hematomas. Like enormous blood blisters, Søren thought, feeling the nausea kick in his gut. In several places the hematomas had turned into open sores that stuck to the plaid fabric of the shirt in patches.

“I’m no doctor,” the technician said. “But that doesn’t look healthy. The coroner’s on his way.”

Søren looked at the bloody streaks on the boy’s cheeks again, and the half-frozen bread roll he had managed to wolf down in the car on the way out to Valby churned in his stomach. The boy on the stretcher under the floodlights looked like he had cried blood and then smeared it across his own cheeks, like a snotty five-year-old might have done with his tears. Søren had been a policeman for almost twenty-five years, but he occasionally still saw things he wished he could unsee. He caught himself hoping the boy had at least been dead before he was entombed in that damn gas tank. To think otherwise was near unbearable.

As far as Søren had been informed, it had started as a case for the police and the Emergency Management Agency early yesterday morning, but the investigation had been triggered because they thought the Hungarian Roma who had been staying at the garage had suffered an accidental contamination, perhaps from radioactive scrap somewhere back in Eastern Europe. That theory had crumbled when the Geiger counters started howling hysterically down in the covered inspection pit. They hadn’t found the actual source, but small amounts of radioactive sand were still there, revealing where the material had presumably been stored. And when they found the body in the tank, the alarm bells really started going off. Especially because of the passport they had found in his shoe. The police had run a routine check on the computer and called the PET.

Søren ran a hand through his hair, as if to brush the last remnants of sleep away. Morning fatigue still sat heavily in his body, but he could also feel his hunting instincts sending small surges of eagerness and heightened attention to his brain and muscles. Because the name in the Hungarian passport was Sándor Horváth, which tied the find in Valby to the investigation of Khalid Hosseini and the weapons trail in a particularly ominous way.

Søren started walking back toward the barriers a few hundred meters away. His yellow protective suit was cumbersome and crinkled stiffly as he walked, but it was only once he had made it all the way out to the other side of the flashing cars that he was finally allowed to undo the silver-colored duct tape that sealed the suit at his wrists and ankles. He handed the gloves, suit, and mask to yet another spacesuit-clad younger man, whom he assumed was from the Emergency Management Agency or the National Institute of Radiation Hygiene and allowed himself to be taken to a hastily set up trailer with showers.

Once he was back in his own clothes, his hair wet in the morning chill, he was directed to the green minivan that was parked a little farther down the road. Outside the van, surrounded by a group of police officers in a heated discussion, stood a short, angular man with a phone in one hand and a heavily laden clipboard in the other.

“He certainly can’t,” the man barked into his phone. “He’ll have to do that later. I need him now!” He looked up as Søren approached. “This is hopeless. Half the people we need are off on that Secure Information Networks course. Are you one of the people from Radiation Hygiene?”

“Sorry. Søren Kirkegård, PET.” He stretched out his hand, and the man gave it a skeptical look as if he thought it might be contaminated. Eventually, though, he held out his own hand to complete the handshake and nodded curtly.

“Birger Johansen. Yes, I can see why you might also have an interest in this case. What do you need to know?”

“First and foremost, what substance are we dealing with, and what can it be used for?”

“Cesium chloride. I thought you knew that.”

“Yes,” Søren said patiently. “But what does that mean? For example, can it be used to make a bomb?”

The man snorted, clearly disgusted at Søren’s abysmal ignorance.

“Not an atomic bomb. That’s completely out of the question.”

Søren nodded. So far his conjectures were proving correct.

“But an ingredient in a dirty bomb?” Søren suggested. “Could it be used for that?”

It was as if Birger Johansen were yanked down out of his pulpit of know-it-all arrogance for the first time.

“Well, ultimately any kind of radioactive material could be used for that,” he said. “The explosive force comes from a conventional detonation, of course. The radioactivity is just a … way of making the effects more unpleasant for longer.”

“And how effective would cesium chloride be at that?”

“Unfortunately it’s one of the most suitable substances available, if widespread contamination is the goal. It enters the environment very easily because it’s a powder, not a metal, and it reacts with pretty much any form of moisture.”

Søren felt something tighten in his chest and thought about Snow White’s bloody tears. Personally, he would rather be blown sky-high than end up like that.

“But you haven’t been able to track down the main source?”

“No. We’re assuming it was stored in the inspection pit for a few days. We found a small amount of radioactive sand, and the radiation level in general is extremely high right around there.”

“What did it take to move it?”

“What do you mean?”

“What kind of equipment? How big a vehicle? What are we searching for? A lone idiot with a wheelbarrow or a well-organized group with forklifts and trucks?”

Johansen raised a pair of thin, colorless eyebrows. The reflected glare from the windows of the minivan made the thinning hair on the top of his head glow strangely.

“Impossible to answer that one.”

“Why?”

“It depends on what kind of containment shielding they used. It could be anything from seventy to eighty kilograms of lead to a couple of bags of sand. The source itself isn’t very big on its own.”

Søren struggled to suppress his irritation. Presumably the man didn’t mean to be unhelpful, it was just his general condescending style that made him seem that way.

“The radioactive sand you found. Could that have come from the containment shielding?”

“It’s possible. Lead or concrete are better, but then there wouldn’t have been such severe contamination if we were dealing with professionals, would there?” Johansen said. “Whoever did this obviously had no idea of the correct way to store this kind of material.”

Based on what Søren had seen so far, neither Horváth nor Khalid seemed like professionals. Nor did they need to be, unfortunately, to set off a dirty bomb, he thought. Besides, he had a strong feeling that the overall picture was going to include something else, something more than those two. If Horváth was the guy they had just hauled out of the gas tank, then he certainly didn’t have the cesium now. And based on their surveillance, Khalid had never been anywhere near the Valby address.

“How many of the people living here have you found?” Søren asked.

Birger Johansen looked at him with a weary expression and turned an expectant face to the two nearest police officers. They weren’t wearing uniforms, and Søren guessed they were the local detectives who had been assigned to the operation.

“A dozen adults, plus a couple of kids,” one of them said. “But we haven’t been able to question them all. They speak neither German nor English, so we’re still hunting around for interpreters.”

“And how many people were staying here?”

Birger Johansen pushed a pair of narrow reading glasses into place on his nose and flipped through the papers he was holding in his hand.

“Based on the number of makeshift beds, we’re missing at least thirty of the tenants, if you can call them that. I don’t know how those Gypsies do it, but they weren’t here when we moved on the address, and they haven’t been back since. Someone must have tipped them off. They aren’t exactly keen on the police, you know.…”

Frustrated, Johansen rolled a pen between two fingers and tipped it toward the two detectives.

“The police have asked all officers to be on the lookout for Gypsies in town, and so far they’ve picked up about sixty of them from locations such as the Central Railway Station, Vesterbro, and Strøget, but then that’s twice as many as we’re looking for, and we have no way of knowing if we’ve got the right ones. I don’t even think they’re all from Hungary. Some of them are sitting in the police station downtown right now, but of course they won’t say boo in any language any of us can understand. It’s a little like herding cats.”

Søren nodded.

“Then I suppose we’d better start with the Danish witnesses,” he said. “I understand there was a woman who tipped you off about the radioactive material.”

“Tipping off is perhaps not quite the word,” Birger Johansen said crossly. “She was admitted to the hospital with radiation sickness Saturday night and was then gracious enough to tell us where she’d been. A nurse. Apparently, she had been attending some of the children. Not entirely legit, you know. She’s pretty sick because of the radiation so it wasn’t all that easy to talk to her. If I were you, I’d start with her ‘colleague.’ ” Birger Johansen made air quotes with his fingers with a condescending smile, which for some reason or other particularly pissed Søren off. He ignored the sarcasm.

“And his name is?”

“Peter something-or-other. It’s all in there.” Birger Johansen detached a couple of sheets of paper from his clipboard and grudgingly offered them to Søren, then pulled out his phone again and entered a number. “If you have questions, just call me later.”

Søren folded the papers in half and started walking back to his car.

“I doubt you’ll get much useful information out of those two.” Birger Johansen was standing behind him in a jaunty position, his stance wide, phone held rather abortedly at head height. “They’re both bleeding-heart liberals. The kind who think they can save the whole world.”

Søren smiled as politely as he could manage. Farther up the road, he could still see the cluster of flashing police cars and fire trucks, and the image of Snow White from the gas tank flitted ephemerally through his mind. The edges of those weeping, crater-like sores, the yellowish fluid that had soaked the boy’s shirt, and the bloody tears. The ironic cynicism of Birger Johansen’s comment was wasted on Søren this morning. If anyone was volunteering to save the world, that was just fine with him. It certainly needed doing.

HE CALLED GITTE and woke her up.

“Yes?” she said in that aquarium voice people had when they’ve just been hauled up from the depths of sleep.

“Drag Khalid Hosseini in and get one of the real pros to interrogate him. HC or someone like him. And tell Christian that I need everything he can get out of that computer now.”

“HC is in the middle of a training exercise for the Summit,” she said.

“So call him back in. Right now there’s nothing out there more important than this. No, wait. You’re going to have to clear it with Torben first. Tell him I’ll call and explain. But bring Khalid in now. And make sure there’s a fresh report summarizing everything we have on him—phone contacts, surveillance, the works. Plus, I want to know everything we can dig up on this address in Valby. Gasbetonvej 35. Who owns it, who uses it, and for what.”

“Yes, sir. Will that be all?”

She wasn’t being sarcastic. That was just Gitte.

“No. Also … the Emergency Management Agency removed some Hungarian Roma from the Valby property. Find out where they are now, and see if you can get anything out of the women. You’re good with languages.”

“Um, not Hungarian.”

“I’m sure it’s just as important that you’re good at winning people’s trust. Get as much information on this group of people as you can. And ask them if they’ve seen the damned cesium. Birger Johansen from the Emergency Management Agency can tell you a little about what it might look like. Just keep pushing him until you get a real answer.”

He gave her Johansen’s number.

“Okay. Anything else?”

“We need to get in touch with Hungary and get the NBH to give us some more about Sándor Horváth’s background. But I suppose I’ll put Torben on that. No, nothing else for you. And, uh, sorry I woke you up.”

“De nada,” she said with a very authentic sounding Spanish accent. “Uh, but, boss … what exactly is going on? I mean what’s the big picture?”

“The fat’s in the fire,” he just said. “See you at the briefing at noon. I just have a couple of witnesses to grill first.”