Hostage (28 page)

‘Why?’

‘I want to take a closer look at them.’

It wasn’t really an answer to his question, but Fredrika didn’t want to get into a discussion about why she was asking for the records. She wanted to carry out her own analysis, that
was all.

Sebastian made room for Fredrika at his computer and opened up a new program.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she said as she sat down.

‘No problem. I’ve got to go and check on something anyway, and you can only access phone records from certain computers, so you might as well use mine. Let me know if you need any
help.’

Sebastian left the office and Fredrika gazed at the screen.

Soon her fingers were flying across the keys.

She identified the point at which Zakaria claimed he had bought the phone, and sorted all the calls into chronological order. Then she sorted them again so that all calls made to or from the
same number ended up together. The phone had been in contact with roughly twenty numbers; some came up more often than others. Fredrika went through everything systematically.

Just as Sebastian had said, certain numbers came up on both sides of the dividing line, which meant that those numbers had been in contact with both Zakaria and the previous owner of the
phone.

Three numbers appeared more frequently than the others. Fredrik made a note of them.

If Zakaria refused to say who the previous owner of the phone was, then surely one of the people who had been in touch both before and after the changeover would be able to help them.

Negotiating with terrorists was out of the question. Alex Recht knew that, and deep down he sympathised with that point of view. But what if the terrorists made demands that
were reasonable? For example, what if Zakaria Khelifi really was innocent, and ought to be released? Should you refuse to countenance such a demand just because it came from terrorists?

After Fredrika had left him in the kitchen, he hadn’t known what to do. His daughter called him on his mobile, wanting to know how things were progressing. Alex knew what she really wanted
to ask: was he going to make sure that her brother came home? Alex didn’t have an answer to that question.

He still hadn’t been able to contact his daughter-in-law. In an ironic twist of fate, she was on board another long-distance flight heading for South America. He couldn’t bear to
think about how the news would be broken to her when she landed. They could ask the local police for help if necessary. What was Alex’s role in the ongoing investigation?

Nobody knew. With only the initial bomb threats to deal with, the National Bureau of Investigation had had a clear remit, but now Alex wasn’t at all sure what his function was supposed to
be. No further interviews were planned, and Säpo seemed to be processing all other information themselves.

Fredrika had a point when she said there was something odd about the previous day’s bomb threats. No one had claimed responsibility, no concrete demands had been made. Four separate
threats, two of them targeting such widely different places as the government building at Rosenbad, and Åhlén’s department store. Had they missed some underlying symbolism in the
choice of targets? Did it have something to do with the subsequent hijacking? Alex didn’t think so. The only link was Karim Sassi’s fingerprints on one of the mobile phones. Which was
no bloody help at all.

Alex left Säpo HQ and went back to his own office to check on how far they had got with the investigation into the bomb threats, see if any new information had emerged. Not that it would
change anything, but he had to keep busy somehow. He remembered their thoughts on the hijacking before they found out that Karim was involved. Either they had to get the Swedish and US governments
to meet the hijackers’ demands, or they had to defuse the bomb that was supposed to be on board. Or find the perpetrators behind the hijacking, thus averting the danger.

But with the captain himself involved, that last option disappeared, which was what Alex found so frustrating. There was no longer any chance of having an impact on the threat from the ground;
it had to happen on the plane. And Erik was the only one who could help them.

Alex went to speak to one of his colleagues who was working on the previous day’s bomb threats.

‘At the moment I don’t have anything useful to report,’ he said, barely able to look Alex in the eye. ‘We don’t understand why Karim Sassi was careless enough to
leave his prints on one of the phones, but not the others. And if we presume that others were involved, do they also work at Arlanda, or for an airline company?’

‘Arlanda?’ Alex said.

‘All four calls yesterday were made in and around the airport.’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘If we assume that Karim made the call using the phone he left his prints on, then we can also assume that he made that call before or after he started work. But if he wasn’t the
only one who called, then why did all the calls come from Arlanda?’

‘Surely, we must be able to sort this out, for God’s sake,’ Alex said. ‘Have we listened to the recordings properly? Can’t we tell if it’s the same person
making all four calls, or different individuals? Or does the voice distortion make it impossible to work out?’

The voice distortion, bloody Mickey Mouse. Or what had TT said – was it Donald Duck?

‘I know that Säpo’s sound technicians took over that part of the investigation, because we couldn’t remove the distortion here. But if you’re asking me, then
I’d say it sounded like the same person.’

Alex heard Fredrika’s voice echoing in his mind:

It doesn’t necessarily mean that Karim made any calls at all; his fingerprints could have ended up on that phone in a different context.

‘Have we checked whether Karim has an alibi for the times when the bomb threats were made?’

‘An alibi?’

Alex clarified: ‘Do we know whether he was in the vicinity of Arlanda when those calls were made? Have we asked his wife where he was at those particular times? Checked his mobile, tried
to fix its position? Because if he wasn’t in or near the airport, then we can be certain that someone else made the calls.’

They hadn’t drawn the conclusion that Karim was behind the calls, but nor had they excluded the possibility. Too many loose ends were never good.

‘Check that right away,’ he said.

The evidence was laid out like luminous stones in a dark forest, leading the police in one direction: towards Karim Sassi. It wasn’t just the Tennyson book and the photograph. There were
also the bomb threats, the purpose of which they still didn’t understand. And the prints on the phone, and the fact that the phones had been dumped in a waste bin in a car park at
Arlanda.

Why would Karim Sassi have been so careless?

The clues he had left behind were so clear that he might as well have stood in front of the police, waving both arms and shouting: ‘It was me – don’t you get it?’

And that was exactly what Alex couldn’t understand. It was as if Karim Sassi
wanted
to be found out.

S
he would have given anything for a drink. A long, strong rum cocktail. Eden Lundell would happily have paid an entire year’s salary. Instead
she defiantly lit a cigarette in her office.

I’ll just have a couple of drags. I can stop any time I want to.

The plane would be shot down if it violated US airspace. That was the news they had brought back from Rosenbad. A kind of madness she was neither willing nor able to absorb. No one would ever be
able to forget the memories of 9/11. The Twin Towers collapsing, the column of smoke rising like a rocket into the sky, which just an hour earlier had carried the planes towards their destination.
Events like that were bound to shape a country’s policies and mental health.

The terrorist attacks in London and Madrid had had a similar effect on the UK and Spain. Rules that used to apply had become obstacles instead of tools in the quest for a safe society. To put it
bluntly, you could say that security now came before openness.

The attack on Bryggargatan in Stockholm came somewhere in between. The madness had struck right in the middle of the Christmas rush, just as unexpected as a bolt of lightning in the chill of
winter. The wound in the Swedish soul had healed quickly, but the scar remained, and sometimes it made its presence felt.

Flight 573 was heading towards a tragic end unless they could bring the plane down safely before it ran out of fuel. According to the hijackers, it would be blown up if it landed before the
Swedish and American governments had met their demands. The same applied if the pilot attempted an emergency landing, even if he did so because he had run out of fuel. The conclusion was clear: if
the demands were not met, then the plane and its passengers were doomed.

And now the Americans had said that if Flight 573 entered US airspace, it would be shot down.

Eden’s hand was trembling slightly as she stubbed out her cigarette. This wasn’t good news. Karim Sassi’s response when both the Americans and Säpo had contacted him
didn’t exactly help matters. He had no intention of violating US airspace as things stood at the moment, but nor did he intend to fly to an alternative destination in order to land. When the
fuel ran out, he would call the US authorities and demand permission to carry out an emergency landing.

‘I refuse to disobey the hijackers’ instructions,’ he had said.

‘But you’ll still be disobeying them if you attempt an emergency landing,’ Eden had replied.

‘Yes, but if I’ve run out of fuel, it won’t matter. I’ll have nothing to lose by going against their orders. But as long as I still have fuel, I’m going to do what
they want, and stay close to US airspace.’

With that he had ended the call and Eden had returned to her desk to gather her thoughts.

Sebastian came in.

‘Perhaps you should try knocking?’ Eden said.

‘Perhaps you should try giving up smoking?’

‘Did you actually want something, or are you here because you’re too stupid to do anything sensible?’

Eden was ashamed of herself as she spoke, partly because she sounded like a teenager, and partly because she knew Sebastian was right. At the very least she had to stop sneaking a quick smoke in
her office.

Sebastian laughed wearily.

‘You really are unbelievable.’

Eden crossed her legs and slid her lighter under a pile of papers.

Sebastian leaned against the wall.

‘Fredrika Bergman is going through the phone records.’

‘What phone records?’

‘The ones that show that Zakaria Khelifi could be telling the truth when he says he’s only owned that mobile for a few months.’

‘Let her carry on. Alex says she’s really good; maybe she’ll find something significant. Whatever that might be.’

‘I had a look at Khelifi’s file myself,’ Sebastian said. ‘Even if we can’t use the phone records, we still have a solid case. We don’t need any historical
evidence to prove that he could be involved in activities that constitute a threat to national security.’

Eden went through the key points out loud:

‘We think we’ve come across him in three preliminary investigations. In the case that led to his being charged, we were able to prove that he helped the two main perpetrators by
driving them to various locations, and by picking up the package containing the chemicals that were used to make the bomb. In addition, Ellis stated in several interviews that Zakaria had been
involved in the preparations.’

‘Allow me to play devil’s advocate,’ Sebastian said. ‘Zakaria says that the phone didn’t belong to him when it came up in our earlier investigations. He also says
he didn’t know what was in the package that he collected. And Ellis retracted his statement.’

Their eyes met, and Eden could see that Sebastian was thinking exactly the same as her.

Sebastian looked surprised. His eyebrows shot up and his broad brow furrowed in a way that Eden found quite attractive.

You ought to look surprised more often.

‘We need to speak to Ellis again,’ he said.

‘Indeed we do. He and Hassan are still in the custody block, aren’t they?’

‘Yes – they’re due to be moved tomorrow.’

‘Arrange an interview right away,’ Eden said. Sebastian left the room.

It had been a long day for all of them, and it was going to be even longer. No one on Eden’s team could go home as long as the plane was in the air. She had even made Elina, who worked
part-time, stay on.

‘But I have to go home and feed the kids,’ Elina had protested.

‘Don’t you have a partner who can take care of them?’

‘Well, yes, but he’s got his own business, and he’s really busy at the moment.’

‘In that case, I suggest you ring him and tell him that this evening, and any other evening, a threat to national security takes precedence over his little business. And if that’s
not perfectly clear to both of you, then you need to find another job. In the very near future.’

Just thinking about the conversation made Eden’s blood boil. Sweden would never achieve equality as long as people continued to pretend that the family was the most important thing in the
world. Nor would the country be safe. To think that it took a hijacking to make her realise something so obvious.

Although to be fair, it wasn’t only Elina who had problems with that kind of discussion at home. As she had already discovered, Mikael wasn’t too impressed by his wife’s
priorities.

Damn him – if he hadn’t been so wonderful she would have left him and the girls several years ago.

The thought had barely crossed her mind when she was overwhelmed by such a wave of regret that she was afraid she would have to sit down on the floor. Eden hadn’t cried for years, but she
felt the tears spring to her eyes.

Good God, where had this come from? Adults didn’t cry. Crying was a sign of weakness, not humanity.

And Eden Lundell was not, in her opinion, weak. Not after everything that had driven her from London. Since then she had chosen the only possible option: invincibility.