“And what exactly can a dirty bomb do that other bombs can’t?”
Gitte Nymand’s dark eyes gleamed with something that looked like equal parts professional curiosity and concern.
“Aside from the fact that they explode, which can obviously inflict serious injuries and damage depending on the force of the explosion, the goal is to spread radioactive material throughout the area,” the red-headed analyst said. “Which doesn’t necessarily have a significant impact on the fatality rate. It’s more the nature of the fatalities that causes the concern, and the long-term effects. And especially the psychological effect it can have on the civilian population.”
Søren was on his feet now.
“I don’t need to give you my whole terrorism lecture again, do I?” he asked, and an only partially stifled groan spread through the room. “Terrorism is called terrorism because …?”
“Because the goal is fear,” a couple of them said almost in unison.
“Yes. And that’s exactly what makes a dirty bomb an effective weapon of terror. It’s exceptionally well suited to spreading fear.”
“Decapitated heads,” Mikael said suddenly. “At Antioch the crusaders chopped off enemy heads and lobbed them into the city with the trebuchets. It’s nothing new.”
Sometimes that man knew the strangest things, Søren thought. Mikael had had the dubious honor of escorting the corpse from the gas tank to the medical examiner’s and observing the autopsy, which might explain why his thoughts were a little gorier than usual.
“Let’s just get it over with, Mikael,” Søren said. “The autopsy report?”
Mikael stood up. He looked tired, but then he had been on his feet since 4 A.M. like the rest of the team.
“According to the preliminary report, the guy died of radiation sickness, presumably Thursday or early Friday.”
“Not later than that? Maybe Saturday night or Sunday?” Søren asked.
“No.” Mikael cleared his throat and reached for a water glass. Jytte from the cafeteria had also stocked the meeting table with a plate of open-face sandwiches, but apparently Mikael had lost his appetite. “The pathologists and the staff at the National Institute for Radiation Hygiene pretty much agree that he was exposed to very powerful radiation two to three weeks ago. From accidents elsewhere in the world, we know that the illness typically begins with nausea and vomiting, fever, and in serious cases diarrhea. After that people often improve, but if the exposure was significant, for example four to six grays, the immune system is so compromised that, after a few days, the patient starts to develop infections, another fever, hemorrhages, sores.…” Mikael caught Søren’s eye. “Well, you saw him yourself. When they opened his mouth, his gums were almost gone. God-awful sight.”
Mikael’s last statement hung in the air for an uncomfortably long time, and again Søren had to wave the disturbing images from Valby out of his mind.
“Can they say anything about how he was exposed?”
“Yes. He presumably took in the brunt of the radiation through his hands. The pathologists found wounds there that were reminiscent of burns. There were also a number of other signs that suggested he might have handled the radioactive source.”
“What about identification?”
“Wasn’t there something about a passport? Sándor Horváth, right? Isn’t that why they woke you up in the middle of the night?” Gitte asked.
“I don’t think it’s him,” Søren said. “The nurse recognized the passport photo. The man in the photo was still alive Saturday night when the nurse treated him for a minor eye injury. Alive, and in Denmark. Besides, Sándor Horváth is in his early twenties, and I think our corpse is younger than that. An overgrown boy, no more.”
“Our John Doe was missing a canine in his upper jaw,” Mikael said. “The pathologist thinks he had probably never seen a dentist, unfortunately. At any rate he had no fillings. That’s typical for some of the poorest of the Eastern European Roma.”
“So there won’t be any dental records,” Søren said. “But there must be a link between him and Sándor Horváth. If we haven’t done it already, send a picture of the body to the NBH.”
“It’s been done,” Gitte said. “They were actually very helpful. A man’s on his way up here to assist us in our search for Sándor Horváth, and they also assigned a couple of people to dig up a little more on his family and friends in Budapest. They’re going to keep us up to date.”
“And how’s it going with our friend Khalid?”
“Not so well.”
That response came from Bjørn Steffensen, a generally unshaven and insolent aging homeboy from the rough part of Amager. He normally worked with the Organized Crime Center. He was one of the team members Torben had managed to borrow, and he didn’t look too happy that his first job here was to be the bearer of bad news.
“This whole line of enquiry is a ticket to Shitville” he said, having apparently decided that offense was the best defense. “The technicians have been working on the kid’s computer since 5 A.M., and we have fuck-all on the guy. To begin with, it wasn’t even his computer that was used to contact Sándor Horváth. Or at least not the one we confiscated. I suppose he could have another one stashed somewhere.”
Søren felt an uncomfortable sinking sensation somewhere in that part of his mind where he was trying to keep all the facts in the case straight. “What do you mean?” he said. “I thought that we’d at least established that much?”
“The MAC address doesn’t match. You’ll have to ask IT about the details,” Bjørn said. “And when we sent one of the tech guys to look at the school’s network, he reported that the security system has more holes than a Swiss cheese. The head of the school’s IT department has apparently been busy with more important things. He teaches Danish and English as well.” That last bit was said with a snide curl at the corner of his mouth, as if nothing could be more laughable than a literature teacher being in charge of the school’s Internet security.
“Christian was able to get onto the school’s wireless network from his own laptop without any trouble,” Mikael added. “The security was so bad that he didn’t even need a username or password, and that means that anyone within a radius of thirty meters of the school could have used the school’s IP address to visit those shady sites.”
“So I high-tailed it out there to pick up the footage from the surveillance cameras that cover the schools’ outdoor areas,” Bjørn said.
Søren listened with a growing sense that everything was falling apart.
“But if Khalid didn’t do it, why wouldn’t he let us look at his computer?” Søren asked.
Bjørn smirked.
“As I said, it’s possible that he has another computer and needed to win himself a little time so he could swap the two machines. But personally I think he was just worried about his little side business. I’ve never seen so many pirated music files in one place before. He could get in real trouble for that, and I guess that would be reason enough.”
Søren curbed his desire to kick something. Bjørn, preferably. Don’t shoot the messenger, he admonished himself. But couldn’t the man control his gloating just a little?
“And what do the surveillance cameras say?”
“We know that our potential buyer went online Saturday, May second, at 8:52 P.M. and was logged on for about forty minutes. We can see only one car that was parked at the school for that entire time frame, and it left the site immediately after. It’s impossible to read the license plate, but luckily it’s an old banger, an Opel Rekord E, probably from the early ’80s, and there aren’t that many of them in the motor vehicle registry. About two hundred or so in the whole country, a hundred and eighteen of which are in the Copenhagen area.”