Hjelm soon stopped counting the number of security doors they went through with the help of various cards and codes. Schonbauer acted as gate boy while Larner rambled on, uninterrupted, spouting information of the sort one might find in a brochure: the number of employees, the departments, the nature of basic training, the expert groups, everything but what was relevant.
Finally they approached one last security door, which opened on its monumental hinges, and then they were standing before a system of corridors that belonged to the serial killer squad at the FBI’s New York division. Larner’s and Schonbauer’s names were inscribed on two adjacent doors. Schonbauer went into his office without a sound, and the rest of them stepped into Larner’s.
“Jerry’s going to prepare a little multimedia show for you,” Larner explained, sitting down at his desk. The office was small and lived in, Hjelm noted gratefully; it had at least a shade of the personal touch. The walls had bulletin boards instead of wallpaper, it seemed, and tacked up on them were all kinds of notes. Behind Larner stood a whiteboard, and the familiar pattern of arrows, rectangles, and lines could have been mistaken for Hultin’s.
“Well, here we have everything in concentrate.” Larner followed Hjelm’s gaze. “Twenty-four rectangles with tortured bodies. Forty-eight holes in twenty-four necks. A sober outline of the un-outlineable. Gruesome terror reduced to a few blue lines. What else can we do? The rest of it, we carry inside us.”
Hjelm looked at Larner. Without a doubt, the FBI agent carried a great deal inside himself.
“One question first,” said Larner calmly. “Is it true that you think he shot one of the victims?”
“It seems so,” said Hjelm.
“If it is, it changes in one blow the minimal psychological profile we’ve scraped together.”
“On the other hand,” said Kerstin Holm, “your original theory was that he was a Vietnam veteran. They aren’t usually too far from firearms.”
Larner made a face. “You know what happened to that theory.”
“Of course,” said Holm, and Hjelm almost thought she blushed. A diplomatic faux pas in her first remark. He could tell that she was cursing herself. But she didn’t seem to want to give up. “Could you explain why you let all the other members of Commando Cool go?” she asked. “They weren’t analyzed in the material you sent to Sweden.”
Larner stretched and gathered the information from the considerable archive in his brain. “The group seems to have been made up of eight members, all specially trained. Its focus was torture in the field-a somewhat brutal way to put it, I suppose. Once someone explained to me that its more official purpose was ‘active-service collection of information,’ but I got the sense that they invented this term specifically for me-it was never the plan that even a tiny crumb of information would leave the inner circle.”
“Who was in the inner circle? Was it the military in general?”
Larner gave her a sharp look. “Military intelligence.”
There was more on his mind, she noticed. “That was all?” she prompted.
“Commando Cool-just the obnoxious name suggests it wasn’t meant to become public… Anyway, Commando Cool was somehow directly below Nixon. It was established during his administration, toward the end of the war, and you get the impression that it was done out of desperation. Publicly its role was said to be military intelligence, but other powers were at work behind the scenes.”
“The CIA?” Holm seemed to have left her diplomatic mask at the hotel.
Ray Larner swallowed and gave her a look that indicated that their relationship had changed-not necessarily for the worse.
“With many layers of top-secret stamps, yes, possibly. You have to understand how tense the relationship between the CIA and the FBI is. And if it in any way gets out that I’ve said this, I can forget ever having a pension. My personal phone has been monitored, and I can only hope there aren’t any bugs in this room. They’re always a step ahead of me. But you understand, I’ve already said too much. Try to forget it.”
“Already have,” said Holm. “We’re just here to find links to Sweden. Nothing else will end up in our reports.”
Larner regarded each of them for a minute, then nodded briskly. “It had eight members,” he resumed.
“What about Balls?” Kerstin interjected recklessly.
Larner burst out laughing. “Have you been consulting FASK? Fans of American Serial Killers, on the Internet?”
They looked at each other.
“Follow me.” Larner leaped to his feet and rushed out into the corridor. A few offices down, he knocked on a door marked BERNHARD ANDREWS and ushered them in.
A seemingly out-of-place young man in his early twenties, with jeans and a T-shirt, looked up through round glasses from a huge computer and smiled broadly. “Ray,” he said cheerfully, holding out a printout. “Yesterday’s haul. A cotton executive in West Virginia, a golf club in Arkansas, and a couple other little goodies.”
“Barry,” said Larner, taking the list and scanning through it, “these are officers Yalm and Halm from Sweden. They’re here about K.”
“Aha,” said Bernhard Andrews jovially. “Colleagues of Jorge Chavez?”
Their jaws dropped.
“Born in Sweden in 1968,” Andrews continued. “In Ragswede, right? To Chilean parents with left-leaning associations.”
“It’s called Rågsved,” Hjelm said, bewildered.
“Chavez was in the FASK site a week ago,” Andrews explained smugly. “He had a good but slightly transparent disguise. He put up a hundred and thirty dollars of taxpayers’ money to get in. A little development aid from the Swedish people to the American tax coffers.”
They gaped at him, their jaws rattling against their kneecaps.
“Barry’s a hacker,” said Larner calmly, “one of the best in the country. He can get in anywhere. We were lucky to grab him. Also, he’s FASK.”
“Fans of American Serial Killers,” said Andrews. “Nice meeting you.”
“Barry set up FASK as a way to attract potential serial killers.” Larner waved the printout. “No matter how hard they try to disguise themselves, he catches them. We’ve caught three with FASK’s help. I would venture to say that Barry is the country’s most obscure hero.”
Bernhard Andrews smiled broadly.
“So Balls doesn’t exist?” said Kerstin Holm, who was quicker on the uptake than Hjelm.
“I got it from The Pink Panther,” said Andrews. “The expert in disguise whom Inspector Clouseau hires and who survives every bombing attack. When it comes to serial killers and their fans, the only thing that’s certain is that they have no sense of humor. Humor seems to be the antidote to everything.”
“He used the name Balls to fish out a protest from someone who knew better,” said Larner. “But so far we haven’t had a bite.”
They said goodbye to Fans of American Serial Killers, who gave them another broad smile and waved.
In the corridor, Larner said, “Very little is as it seems in the world today.”
He led them back to his office and sat at his desk. “I didn’t think you had ethnic minorities in your police corps,” he said, putting his finger precisely on a Swedish sore spot. “But not even Chavez can be told about FASK. Barry is one of our most important secret weapons in the fight against serial killers.”
He pulled out a drawer and took out a few sheets of paper, laid them on the desk, and placed an FBI pen on each sheet.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, but my superiors have prepared these papers for you. It’s an oath of confidentiality that, if broken, will result in penalties in accordance with American law. Please read through them and sign them.”