Project Nirvana (23 page)

“What’s going on?” Jörgen shouted to one of the police officers.

He received an angry glare.

After a short period of suspense, something finally started to happen. From the other side of the field, Jörgen thought he saw the front door open. He had difficulty seeing in the gathering gloom and the distance was at least three hundred metres. He grabbed the photographer’s camera and zoomed in with the telephoto lens. Now he could see what it was.

She had a
Nokia N95. According to his go-between, that model could be unreliable after the fake upgrade. His little program could sometimes make them freeze. The triangulation data had to be sent from a special communications port and, depending on the version of the software installed on the phone, a few small adjustments might be necessary. Mjasník was lucky. Her phone software was almost two years old, which lowered the risk of detection. He had sent the MMS message from the fake sender and she had accepted the bogus upgrade. The little program now sent her location co-ordinates every five seconds to Mjasník’s laptop by means of GPRS.

With satisfaction, Mjasník watched the small, red triangle moving on the map. It left a trail of dots, which made it possible for Mjasník to follow at a distance of several kilometres and yet still know her location, give or take ten metres.

The address she was currently visiting was obviously the police headquarters downtown. He wished he understood the language. He could now even eavesdrop on her conversations. Thanks to some ambitious students in Israel, the decryption algorithm for mobile networks had been broken, according to the major from the FSB. The mobile-phone industry had quickly bought and buried the software, but the FSB had not been slow to exploit the discovery.

In today’s information society, access to the correct type of information was critical. Mjasník had already established an information bridgehead. All he needed now was access to the detective’s mobile phone. The problem was that he had still not opened his MMS message.

The smallest locker
in the department store was not very spacious, but was still big enough for the padded envelope containing a CD and a sheaf of documents. Alice McDaniel locked the door and went to the menswear department. She wondered if she was being watched by her client. If he still looked as she remembered him, he would be easy to recognize. He wasn’t unattractive. Or perhaps he had used a stand-in. The more she thought about these bizarre events, the more irritated she became.

She looked around and tried to spot a potential stalker. But she saw neither trench coats nor sunglasses. Two mothers with prams passed her by. She quickly looked at them. No, not those two. Two youngsters were examining a jumper. Not them, too young. An elderly couple was walking towards the escalator. They were unlikely shadows. It was pointless. Women and men of all ages and appearances were strolling about on this floor. Any, or none, of them could be following her. She gave up and walked to the spot where she had been instructed to put the key.

At the back of the shop, next to the fitting room, a dark trench coat, size 54, was hanging up. She put the key in the inside pocket, as instructed, and then walked away. Then she took the escalator down to the floor below and quickly walked through the womens’ wear department. As far as she could tell, nobody was following her. She disappeared behind some plastic containers with unpacked goods and then behind three large advertising posters. Five metres ahead of her was a door to the stairwell. She slid through the steel door with the “Exit” sign and ran back up to the next floor, where she tried discreetly to remain hidden from view behind a shelf of lamps. She pretended to be interested in a dark green table lamp, which was probably the most hideous thing she had seen. She now had a good view of the trench coat.

Her heart was thumping. Her anticipation was mixed with amusement at the absurdity of the situation.

After almost thirty minutes, she could not wait any more. The person who came closest to the coat was a young woman with a back pack. She had taken some shirts from the shelves next to it. Alice McDaniel went to the coat and felt the inner pocket. It was empty. She felt robbed. It had taken less than three minutes for her to backtrack to the menswear department. In that short time, someone had taken the key. She had been watched from the start. Then she remembered the storage locker. It was probably too late, but still worth a try. She ran up the escalator and past the sports department, continued towards the cafeteria and the wall with the storage lockers. When she arrived, she saw the key sitting in the door of locker 19. Her mobile phone was silent, but she was pretty sure they would call her soon.

The call came after two hours.

Jonna met Cederberg’s
inquisitive stare. His smile had no effect on her and she was already irritated, although he hadn’t said a word yet. She would rather resign from the force than work for Cederberg for one more week.

“A leak, you say,” he finally said, playing with a Finnish Finger biscuit that lay next to his coffee cup.

“Everything points to a leak,” Jonna explained. Perhaps the hints she had dropped were a bit obvious.

“But who, and why?” He popped the biscuit into his mouth and rinsed it down with a mouthful of coffee.

“That’s for Internal Affairs to find out,” suggested Jonna.

Cederberg looked at her sceptically. “You’re making serious allegations,” he said.

“We, not I,” Jonna corrected him.

“Did Walter explicitly order you to report this?”

Jonna fidgeted. “Not directly.”

“So what did he say exactly?”

Jonna was just about to tell him about Borg, but she stopped herself. One look at Cederberg’s eyes was sufficient, and Walter had definitely forbidden her to mention Borg’s name. To make unsubstantiated accusations against a Security Service agent was tantamount to putting your head on the block. She didn’t know if she could trust Cederberg and Walter had not given her any instructions. For want of a better idea, she decided to tone down her proposals.

“Well, he didn’t really tell me to do anything specific,” she lied, remembering how she had recently followed Borg to the police station.

Cederberg rocked gently on his chair.

“I suggest we wait until Walter gets back, so that he can handle it himself,” he said.

Jonna agreed with him.

“Hey,” said Cederberg, as she was leaving the room.

“Yes?” she said, turning around.

“I hope that we’re not going to have any problems working together.”

Jonna was surprised. Had he read her mind? “I hope so too,” she answered politely.

“I’m not like Walter,” he said.

“No, you’re not Walter,” she replied, trying hard not to sound sarcastic.

Ccderberg looked at her for a moment. Then he nodded cordially. “Good. Let’s hope that I don’t have to be your boss for very long.”

He’s definitely a mind-reader, Jonna thought.

Harald Morell of
the National Bureau of Investigation introduced his counterparts from the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA). Both came from a unit called Group IK2, from International Liaison. A short, dark blonde man, with inquisitive eyes behind thick glasses, shook Jonna’s hand.

“Klaus Wägner,” he greeted her with a firm handshake.

Jonna introduced herself.

“Volmar Eschenbach,” the second gentleman said. He was somewhat taller and had dark, short-cut hair and was the senior officer of the two.

Jonna shook his sweaty hand.

Harald Morell began in English to explain why their colleagues from Germany had come to Sweden. Four employees of a biogenetic research establishment belonging to Dysencomp AG in Frankfurt had been murdered. Their deaths took place over a nine-day period four months ago. Each victim was a prominent researcher in biomedicine; one of them actually was the Head of Research and founder of Dysencomp. The first victim in the wave of murders was the controversial Günter Himmelmann; he was killed in the car park as he left work.

The other three were murdered in their homes, one in front of his three-year-old son. According to the German medical examiner, all the victims had had their throats cut after being stabbed in the kidney by a long, sharp blade or knife.

This method was commonly used by military special forces trained in close-quarter combat where silent executions were required.

According to the BKA profilers, the crimes were probably committed by somebody with a long history of mental illness. Empirical evidence suggested that the perpetrator, who probably acted alone, was a very disturbed person, but still sufficiently lucid to not leave any traces behind him; possibly, an ex-member of the military. They also believed that the murders were carefully planned, which could indicate revenge or possibly blackmail.

It had taken the BKA police two weeks to see the connection between the four murders. The victims had lived in four different jurisdictions, so local police had first started local investigations. So they had lost valuable time. There was one name in the investigation that kept popping up as time went on. That name was Leo Brageler. All four victims had worked with the Swedish scientist and his company Biodynamics & Genetic Research, in Uppsala. Since Brageler had been wanted by Interpol for some time for murders in Sweden, it seemed probable that the Swede had something to do with the events in Germany as well.

“Can you update us on the current situation in the manhunt for Leo Brageler?” asked Eschenbach.

His partner Wägner had a small laptop and was taking notes.

David Lilja had asked Cederberg to put together a presentation on the case, since Walter could not attend the meeting. As Jonna’s boss, Cederberg has passed on this important assignment. She had been given over an hour to complete the task, since she was more of an expert on Brageler than anyone else in the County CID.

Five minutes before the meeting, Jonna had more or less completed her presentation, which included seven slides. It was therefore more appropriate that she also deliver the presentation to the Germans. Jonna was now certain that one week with that overweight man from Värmland as her boss was one week too many. Lack of sleep made her mind sluggish and unusually irritable, so she had to struggle not to say something inappropriate to her new boss.

When she had worked at RSU, Jonna had carried out a thorough analysis of Leo Brageler and had no difficulty in describing the extremely talented scientist. She explained how he had drugged members of a jury using a drug the Swedish police called Drug-X. Breaking into the homes of a district prosecuter, judge and lay jurors, Brageler had injected the compound into their food in order to induce attacks of rage that ended in murders. All of the murder victims had been close family members of the court members, which had also been Brageler’s intention.

The drug affected an area in the brain called the amygdala and resulted from private research that Brageler had undertaken while he worked at Biodynamics & Genetic Research in Uppsala. The basis for Drug-X came from an adaptive medicine that they were developing together with Dysencomp AG.

Jonna described how Brageler’s family had perished in a traffic accident caused by a drunk driver and that revenge was probably the motive for Brageler’s actions. The Stockholm District Court, led by a liberal judge called Bror Lantz, had dismissed charges against a director, Sonny Magnusson, in a drink-driving case. The district prosecutor had also decided not to appeal the ruling. Two weeks later, Magnusson had killed Brageler’s wife and ten-year-old daughter in a car crash.

“The line between genius and insanity can sometimes be very thin,” Eschenbach said, after Jonna finished her presentation.

“Yes, but to exact revenge in such a complex way requires a sophisticated intellect,” Jonna explained.

“Has Brageler any military background?” Eschenbach asked.

“He hadn’t done any military service, so I think we can rule him out as the perpetrator of any crimes requiring military skills.”

Eschenbach nodded in agreement. “Indeed,” he said. “Then there is the question of motive.”

“Yes,” said Lilja. “What could the motive be?”

Eschenbach put down his pen on the table. “We have investigated the projects that all four were involved in. Even Leo Brageler. But we haven’t found much because a major part of the research data has been destroyed.”

“Destroyed?” Martin asked.

“Yes, two days before Günter Himmelmann was murdered, a sophisticated deletion of data was performed on the company’s computer servers. The primary, temporary and back-up systems were all purged of any data related to a certain project. Only someone with full system privileges and considerable computer expertise could do something like this. We have an IT technician in custody who claims that Günter Himmelmann himself gave the order to destroy data and was even directly involved. In Germany, it seems the Prussian mentality, of carrying out orders without asking questions, still lives on.”

Klaus Wägner looked up from his laptop with a faint grin.

“What type of project were they working on?” Borg queried.

“We don’t know,” Eschenbach said. “All we do know for sure is that it went under the name of Project Nirvana.”

“Nirvana?”

“Yes, according to other scientists that worked for Himmelmann, they used Nirvana as the working name.”

“It must be the same project as the drug we call Drug-X,” Cederberg suggested.

“It could be, but it’s hardly probable,” Jonna said with some confidence. “Considering the statements from Brageler’s co-workers in Sweden.”

While Cederberg sulked, Lilja and Morell agreed with her.

“Why were other scientists involved in the project?” Lilja wondered. “Didn’t they know what they were working on?”

“The project was divided into different, autonomous parts, where everything had to be approved by an inner circle of scientists, with no direct communication between the different research centres,” Eschenbach said. “For security reasons, it was strictly forbidden to share information between research groups without the approval of Himmelmann and the other three scientists. In addition, the research centres were at different geographical locations, so there was no direct contact between the scientists. Approximately eighty scientists were involved in Project Nirvana without actually knowing its ultimate objective.”