Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (8 page)

“Hi,” Søren grunted in response.

He raised his hand halfheartedly and continued into his own office, set the charred coffee down on the desk, and turned on his computer. He stared at the dark screen as the machine slowly whirred through its security protocol. His own face was reflected back at him dimly behind the blinking gray lines of text, looking rather more geriatric than usual. It was the lack of sleep, he told himself firmly, as if attempting to banish the specter of age by willpower alone. Normally, all he saw was himself—broad forehead, receding hairline, and the narrow, hooked nose which, along with his black hair, had earned him the nickname “Kemosabe” at the police academy. As far as he knew no one called him that anymore. Admittedly, the black hair had grayed a bit since then, and his promotion to inspector had probably put the kibosh on that type of linguistic creativity.

At least he was in good shape. He worked out in the gym in the basement every Monday and Wednesday morning before heading for his desk, and he ran two or three times a week, usually ten kilometers or more, and even though he didn’t time himself, he knew he was still creditably fast. The physical that stopped any number of aspiring cadets every year because of excessive cigarettes and chronic puppy fat would still be no hindrance to him. No, there was nothing wrong with his physique, and he didn’t feel old. But to everyone else, to the “younger people,” he had already crossed the line into old-man territory. The most ambitious exercise program in the world couldn’t change that.

Ding
.

The computer had finally plodded its way through the startup process and automatically opened the most recently updated daily report. Leaning forward a little, Søren scrolled down the screen. It appeared that some wiretap equipment had been deployed the previous night without any hitches. He hadn’t expected otherwise. The man they were supposed to be watching had gone to the derelict farmhouse he owned in Sweden. His mobile phone signal hadn’t budged for three days, so everything indicated that he was standing thigh-deep in some river, happily catching salmon, while the tech boys were sneaking into his downtown apartment here in Copenhagen. At any rate, they had accomplished what they were supposed to. Aside from that, all seemed quiet on the home front. A couple of messages had come in from Hungary, Belgium, and Turkey. They had all been vetted by Communication, and none of them were priority matters. The Hungarian message had been tagged “Attn. Kirkegaard,” though, so something in there must require his personal attention.

He printed the e-mail. He still preferred to read on paper—possibly another sign of age, he admitted grudgingly, but years of poring over typed reports had left him in the habit of doing his thinking with a pencil in his hand. It seemed a little late to change those spots.

He quickly circled the most important points of the mail. His colleagues from the Hungarian intelligence service, NBH, had a couple of websites under observation because they suspected these sites of trading in the arms, ammunition, and other military “surplus products” that poured over Eastern European borders in a steady stream. A neat flow chart showed that web traffic from a number of relatively legitimate forums and sites was being directed to a more hardcore inner
circle of dedicated arms sites that in turn led to the object of primary interest to Hungarian Intelligence: the apparently innocent-looking hospitalequip.org, which served, according to the NBH, as a coded hub of exchange for customers looking to buy or sell arms, chemicals, and other dangerous substances.

Brave new World Wide Web. There were times when Søren felt sure there had to be a devil somewhere, gleefully contemplating the effects of his latest attack on humanity. In the past, people with shady, bizarre, or downright disgusting interests had had a much harder time locating each other. These days, even the most loathsome proclivities could find affirmation from likeminded nutters via the Internet, easily and more or less anonymously. And no matter what they wanted, it was out there—stolen antiquities, endangered species, illegal World War II souvenirs, pornography in all shapes and forms, weird drugs, and, yes, also arms, explosives, and dangerous chemicals.

“Fresh coffee, my liege?” asked Gitte, who was on her way to the kitchenette, and Søren nodded gratefully as he typed hospitalequip.org into his browser window. The page appeared, bland, pale green, a simple layout with a menu bar completely devoid of any graphic interest or stylish Flash animations. There were currently five chat rooms open. The discussion in one of them was apparently about “aggressive treatments for infections,” while another was simply about “equipment.” He could see which users were online—or, at least, he could see the pithy little aliases they were hiding behind. In the last three chat rooms, Søren couldn’t tell what the topic of conversation was or who was participating. When he tried hitting the Enter Chat button, he was asked to enter his PIN. He typed in four random numbers, and a few seconds later an automated message popped up: access denied. Please contact moderator.

He gave up trying to gain access. This was NBH’s ball game, and they hadn’t asked him to play. Besides, he could easily guess what was hiding behind the access codes—hospitalequip.org was by no means unique. Like other similar websites, it functioned as a marketplace where buyers and sellers could find each other and make that first contact. They announced what they had for sale or what they were interested in buying, anonymously of course, and then the hospitalequip people took care of the rest. NBH believed they were marketing their own stolen goods this way as well as earning a hefty sum by steering customers into interest-specific
chat rooms that were set up and taken down so fast that it was hard for the intelligence service to keep up. The money flow was also hard to follow—the hospitalequip people made creative use of gold-based Internet currencies like e-bullion and e-gold.

What was interesting from a Danish perspective was that a group of Danes appeared to have been poking around on the site. At least one of them had made a connection and then subsequently dropped out of the chat to continue the discussion more discretely via mobile phone. The trail petered out at that point because the telephone number obtainable from the chat records had only been used briefly, presumably to exchange more secure numbers that the NBH had not been able to trace.

The Hungarian end of the contact was an IP address associated with the university in Budapest. The Hungarian colleague who had written the e-mail, a man by the name of Károly Gábor, reported that in addition to hospitalequip.org the Hungarian user had also visited a number of other suspicious pages, including the Islamic
hizbuttahrir.org
. Thus, NBH were hereby giving due notification, according to instructions, etc., etc., etc.…

Søren sighed softly. The flag-burning and the riots might have subsided, but the Mohammed cartoons and Denmark’s participation in Iraq and Afghanistan were still making the country a target. In the old days, e-mails like this would have slumbered gently in archives unless there were further alerts in the matter. Now they had to follow up on every single Islamist whisper that had Denmark’s name in it. Especially now that the Summit was so close. His thoughts went to the morning’s partially botched training exercise, and he suppressed a wave of irritation. The damned Summit was moving Copenhagen even further up the list of attractive targets, whether you were an Islamist terrorist, a swastika-waving neo-Nazi, or just an attention-seeking grassroots organization with a spare bucket of red paint.

It made him tired. The hatred that flowed in wide, black rivers across the Internet, venting itself at Danes, Muslims, Gypsies, gays, Jews, liberals, conservatives, women—at every conceivable and inconceivable minority, in Denmark and the rest of the world … it was more than just stupidity. It was evil. He wasn’t a religious person, and he usually resisted such simplistic terms, but when he read what people wrote online on a regular basis about “stupid bitches” and “sheep fuckers” and
“horny homos” who, according to vox populi, all deserved to be hanged or burned or mutilated, that was the only word he could think of: evil.

“Gitte!”

She had tiptoed into his office, set the coffee down, and was already on her way out again.

“Could you forward this to the techies right away?”

Gitte took the printout of the email and quickly scanned through it.

“These three,” Gitte said, pointing at the first three addresses with a long, slender finger. “I think I can guess who they are without any help from the IT department.” She smelled of apples and lemons now, Søren thought fleetingly, with a faint pang of emptiness somewhere in his abdomen.

“Yes,” he said quickly. “It looks like our very own bunch of flag-waving White Pride idiots are at it again. These others, on the other hand, could be just about anyone. This one is probably the most significant.” He circled the Danish IP address that had been in touch with what he quietly thought of as “the Islamist whisper.” “But we ought to get them all checked out. Ask them to send us a list as soon as possible.”

Gitte nodded briskly and left, and Søren turned back to the flickering pale-green screen on his desk. Despite Denmark’s restrictive gun laws, it really wasn’t all that difficult to get hold of an ordinary hand weapon if you knew where to go. Gun-shopping in Hungary seemed a bit extreme, what with all the delivery problems and border crossings it entailed, so maybe the buyer was looking for something a little more exotic. Søren scrolled down through the bare-bones layout one last time. “Buy now, good stuff, new needles, from Russia with love.”

In my next life, he thought, I want to do something else. Something that actually permits the existence of love.

UCK
!”

Nina jumped back a few steps, swearing, but it was too late.

The aerator from the kitchen faucet had come off. It shot down into the dirty pan soaking in the sink, and a cascade of greasy dishwater sprayed indiscriminately across the wall, the counter, the floor, and Nina’s T-shirt and jeans. She turned the water off and gave the little piece of thoroughly corroded metal that should have been replaced a long time ago a dirty look. Now the kitchen floor was awash with water
and
dust bunnies, and on the counter, the parade of salad bowls, plates, cutlery, and cups remained unstacked and unwashed. Nina felt her already bad mood descend into a thoroughly foul temper. It wasn’t really the water on the kitchen floor and the unappetizing onion skins and carrot peelings at the bottom of the sink, although none of that helped. It was Morten. Morten and the damn duffel bags in the bedroom.

Morten was packing.

He had done it many times before. He was a geologist and had been the resident “mud logger” at one of the North Sea oil rigs for years. Recently he had been promoted to project manager, which did mean fewer days at sea, but he still had to go on a regular basis, and every single time, Nina had the same aching anxiety in the pit of her stomach when he started packing. She missed him when he was gone, and once the door had closed behind him, Ida’s hostile, brooding silence would hang over the apartment like a sort of teenage curse. It wasn’t that Nina had much trouble from Ida while Morten was away. She went to her friends’ houses most nights, but she also dutifully picked up Anton and did the grocery shopping a couple times a week. On the face of it, a fourteen-year-old marvel of daughterly obedience. But Nina knew she did those things only
because Morten had asked her to do them and because doing them quietly was one more way of avoiding conversation. If Ida did deign to join them for dinner, her complete lack of expression squashed any attempt at small talk. Ida seemed barely able to tolerate Nina’s presence, and Nina asking her to pass the potatoes was obviously a major imposition.

Nina would almost have preferred the arguments they used to have, and she felt sorry for Anton, who fidgeted in his chair as he tried to lighten the atmosphere with jokes and quotes from his favorite show on Cartoon Network. He did sometimes manage to wring smiles out of Ida or Nina, but God, he had to work at it.

Nina got out a cloth and mopped up the water from the kitchen floor while she tried to concentrate on the seven o’clock news. The police didn’t have enough manpower for the Copenhagen Summit, and the far right was up in arms again because some new Islamic cultural center was building “what amounted to minarets,” according to the professionally outraged spokesman for the party. As he went on about the importance of “upholding Danish values,” Nina’s ability to concentrate plummeted abruptly. She dried her hands, turned her back on the rest of the mess, and went into the bedroom.

He was almost done.

Socks, underwear, T-shirts, and a variety of electronic gear were laid out in small, separate mounds on the double bed, so that all he had to do was dump them into the waiting bags. He had done it so many times that he could now pack for a two-week absence in under half an hour.

“Have you seen my iPod?”