Invisible Murder

O MATTER HOW you look at it,” Torben said stretching in his chair, “it is a secret organization in breech of some of this country’s laws.”

Søren felt almost as tired as before he had slept.

“They help deported refugees and other illegal aliens,” he said. “They’re sentimental do-gooders, for Christ’s sake, not some gang of violent extremists.”

They were surrounded by boxes of ring binders, confiscated from Peter Erhardsen’s house in Vanløse. Names, dates, addresses, budgets. The man had a better grasp of who his “clients” were than most social service agencies. And absolutely no clue about how to run a covert operation. They could unravel his whole so-called Network based on his own meticulous lists.

“You of all people should know that idealistic, altruistic motives are no guarantee against terrorism. On the contrary. There is a risk that we’re dealing with a group of people who might do something to promote their cause during the Summit.”

“Yes, but not a dirty bomb, for God’s sake.” Søren studied Torben to see if he was playing devil’s advocate or if he really believed this theory. He knew that privately Torben was less than thrilled with the current government’s immigration policy, but that would only make him especially careful to keep his threat assessment objective and professional.

There was a knock on the door. It was Gitte.

“Our visitor from the NBH has arrived,” she said.

“Good,” Torben said. “Then let’s try to get this business under control before it’s too damn late.”

Søren looked up abruptly and caught a glimpse of the revved-up tension underneath Torben’s calm, professional demeanor. Torben noticed him noticing and subtly shrugged one shoulder.

“Central Station,” he said. “Or the stadium on Wednesday during the international game. Don’t you see? They don’t even need to target any of the politicians at the Summit; they just need to hit Copenhagen. If we have a big, nasty radioactive bomb crater somewhere in the downtown area, the Summit won’t happen, at least not right here, right now. And that might be enough of a victory.”

Søren felt a chill down his spine. He was glad he wasn’t running security right now. That he wasn’t the one who had to decide how to divvy up the available equipment, where to position people with Geiger counters, and where not to. They couldn’t cover all of Copenhagen—that was impossible. Someone would have to prioritize who and what should be protected, and for the rest, all they could do was hope.

“How big an area are we talking about?” he asked. “I mean, how big would the contamination zone be?”

Yet another understated shrug. “It depends entirely on how strong the explosives are and how much radioactive material there is,” Torben said. “And maybe we’ll know more about the latter after we’ve talked to our man from the NBH.”

THE MAN FROM the NBH looked like a retired wrestler, Søren thought. Short, graying dark hair, strong shoulders, strong neck, low center of gravity, but definitely more muscle weight than fat. His name was Károly Gábor, and he radiated a calm professionalism that matched Torben’s perfectly.

“We traced the radioactive material to this old, disused hospital,” he said, pushing a button on his laptop so the projector showed a picture of the skeleton of a building and a little map indicating where it was located. “Apparently the Soviet troops abandoned some radiation-therapy equipment in the hospital’s basement when they left in 1990. Unfortunately the radioactive substance was cesium chloride, which has both a very long half-life—about thirty years—and physical properties that allow it to bind very easily with its environment if the seal is broken.”

A new picture—this time of people in yellow suits that resembled the ones currently decontaminating the soil in Valby. In this picture, however, there was a Latin American slum in the background.

“In terms of comparable events there’s the Goiânia disaster in Brazil, in 1987, where careless handling of a similar unit resulted in the deaths of four people, and 249 others suffered serious radiation sickness. Like the device in Goiânia, the actual radioactive core in our unit was sealed in a ball-shaped lead capsule that rotated inside another lead ball, both with small openings so that when these two openings lined up, and only then, there would be a brief, controllable beam of radiation.”

Cross sectional diagrams and animations helped him get his point across. The man had done his homework.

“In our case, however, the device was damaged following an earthquake, and the outer casing had split, so the two young Roma who found it were able to open it and access the unit itself: a small cylinder packed full of cesium salt, which they put in a big paint bucket filled with sand. We questioned one of the two young men, an eighteen-year-old named László Eros, better known by his nickname, Pitkin. He is currently at a hospital in Miskolc being treated for radiation sickness but appears to be recovering. The second, sixteen-year-old Tamás Rézmüves, was identified from the photo you sent us. He’s your corpse.”

Gábor pushed a button again, and a photo appeared on the screen. Snow White, now alive, flashing a foolhardy smile at the cameraman. You could see gap in his teeth, but it didn’t diminish the effect of his charm.

“How did he end up buried in a gas tank in Valby?” Mikael asked.

“We think it’s quite likely that he and his half-brother, Sándor Horváth, found a buyer in Denmark for the radioactive material and came up here to deliver the material. We believe their motive is exclusively financial, but we can’t be sure. It appears that young Rézmüves was harboring a certain amount of anger at the Hungarian establishment. In terms of the buyer’s identity, the only lead we can offer is the IP address we already gave you.”

“We still haven’t been able to find any connection between the IP address and the group of people in Valby,” Søren said. “But we’re working on it. What we do know, however, is that Sándor Horváth was in Valby.”

“But you haven’t found him?”

“No. His phone has been inactive since Saturday, he hasn’t used his credit card, and we don’t have a single witness who has seen him since Saturday evening, when he apparently helped break into the apartment of one of the Danes who was helping the sick children in Valby, a nurse by the name of Nina Borg. She was the one who led us to Valby, after she was diagnosed with radiation sickness.”

“And of course you’ve questioned her,” Gábor said.

“Apparently she’s just an overly idealistic nurse who was helping some people in need. But then.…” Søren hesitated. How to word this? “Escaped” sounded so drastic. “She left the hospital with a youngish man we still haven’t identified. We don’t know where she is at the moment.”

One of Gábor’s eyebrows rose a couple millimeters, and Søren swore under his breath. No trace of Horváth, and then one of the case’s lead witnesses just walks away without their having any kind of surveillance on her. The man must think they were amateurs. His phone vibrated in his pocket, but he ignored it. Whatever it was, it would have to wait until they finished the briefing.

He sensed Gitte fidgeting in the row of chairs behind him, and shortly afterward she leaned forward and handed him her phone.

“Boss,” she whispered. “I think you need to hear this.”

THEY HAD BROUGHT the boyfriend of Nina Borg’s daughter into one of the interrogation rooms in Building C. He looked nervous and had a bruise on one cheek, presumably from Saturday night’s attack.

He was alone—a five-foot-eleven teenager with a shaved head in a black Iron Maiden T-shirt and a pair of camouflage hip-hop pants—because they hadn’t been able to find his girlfriend Ida.

“We know each other from Greve,” he explained. “I live across the street.”

“I thought she lived in Østerbro?”

“Not anymore. Not since her mom went all glow-in-the-dark and contaminated their whole apartment. Now she lives with her dad’s sister in Greve. But she still goes to Jagtvejen School, and we had agreed to meet there after school. But she didn’t show up. And when I asked Anna, who’s in her class, she said Ida hadn’t been there for the last two periods.”

Søren raised his index finger in Gitte’s direction. She nodded and left the room. They hadn’t found Ida at the address in Greve either. Of course Ida might just have gone to a friend’s house, but too many of the people involved in this case were going missing. It wasn’t too soon to push the panic button.

“Ulf, we’d like to hear a little more about the three men who attacked you.”

He patiently led the boy through the statements, not pushing him, but providing opportunities. Was the first man taller than Ulf, or shorter? Was he a wearing a jacket, or a T-shirt, or a button-down? Did they speak English with the same accent, or did they have different accents?

“Different,” Ulf said. “The one without the mask didn’t really say anything. The two with tights over their faces … one of them was Danish, I think. The other one talked a little … kind of like those guys on The Dudesons.”

The Dudesons? Søren thought.

“And what is that?” he asked.

“You know, the TV show. Those crazy guys from Finland who run around and do all kinds of weird stuff. Set themselves on fire or sit down on an anthill with no pants on, that kind of thing. Kind of like Jackass.”

“Do you mean the guy might be Finnish?”

Ulf shrugged his T-shirt-clad shoulders. “I dunno. He just sort of sounded like them.” Ulf looked down, apparently at the tabletop, but Søren could hear from his breathing that he was struggling with something. Tears? Disgraceful, unmanly tears? After all, the man who talked “kind of like those guys on The Dudesons” was also the man who had ripped the underwear off the boy’s girlfriend while the other guy filmed it on his phone. That might raise strong emotions even in souls more phlegmatic than Ulf’s.

“Why didn’t she show up?” the boy asked, still without looking up. “Did something happen to her?”

“Let’s not assume the worst,” Søren said. But he thought to himself that if the Dudesons guy had taken the daughter, it was no longer a mystery why the mother had chosen to go off with him without protest.