“So we’re saddled with Säpo as well?”
“No comment.”
Go to hell, Bublanski thought. “Are Olofsson and the others at Industry Protection working on this?”
“No comment, as I said. When can you start?” Ekström said.
“I’ll do it, but I have some conditions,” Bublanski said. “I want my usual team: Modig, Svensson, Holmberg and Flod.”
“Of course, O.K., but you get Hans Faste as well.”
“No way!”
“Sorry, Jan, that’s not negotiable. You should be grateful you get to choose all the others.”
“You’re the bitter end, you know that?”
“I’ve heard it said.”
“So Faste’s going to be our own little mole from Säpo?”
“Nonsense. I happen to think that all teams benefit from someone who thinks differently.”
“Meaning that when the rest of us have got rid of all our prejudices and preconceived notions, we’re stuck with somebody who will take us back to square one?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Faste is an idiot.”
“No, Jan, he isn’t. He’s just...”
“What?”
“Conservative. He’s not someone who falls for the latest feminist fads.”
“Or for the earliest ones either. He may have just got his head around all that stuff about votes for women.”
“Come on, Jan, get a grip. Faste is an extremely reliable and loyal investigator, and I won’t listen to any more of this. Any other requests?”
How about you go take a running jump? Bublanski thought. “I need to go to my doctor’s appointment, and in the meantime I want Modig to lead the investigation,” he said.
“Is that really such a wise idea?”
“It’s a damned wise idea,” he growled.
“O.K., O.K., I’ll see to it that Zetterlund hands over to her,” Ekström said with a wince.
Ekström was now far from sure he should have agreed to take on this investigation.
Alona Casales rarely worked nights. She had managed to avoid them for a decade and justified her stance on the grounds that her rheumatism forced her from time to time to take strong cortisone tablets, which not only turned her face into the shape of a full moon, but also raised her blood pressure. She needed her sleep and her routine. Yet here she was, at 3.10 in the morning.
She had driven from her home in Laurel, Maryland, in a light rain, past the sign saying “N.S.A. NEXT RIGHT — STAFF ONLY”, past the barriers and the electric fence, towards the black, cube-like main building in Fort Meade. She left her car in the sprawling parking area alongside the pale blue golf-ball-like radome with its myriad dish aerials, and made her way through the security gates up to her workstation on the twelfth floor. She was surprised by the feverish atmosphere there and soon realized that it was Ed Needham and his young hacker team who were responsible for the heightened concentration hanging over the department.
Needham looked like a man possessed and was standing there bawling out a young man whose face shone with an icy pallor, a pretty weird guy, Casales thought, just like all those young genius hackers Needham had surrounded himself with. The kid was skinny and anaemic-looking with a hairstyle from hell, and had strangely rounded shoulders which shook with some sort of spasm. Maybe he was frightened. He shuddered every now and then, and it did not help matters that Needham was kicking at his chair leg. The young man looked as if he were waiting for a slap, a clip across the ear. But then something unexpected happened.
Needham calmed down and ruffled the boy’s hair like a loving father. That was not like him. He did not go in for demonstrative affection. He was a cowboy who would never do anything as dubious as hug another man. But perhaps he was now so desperate that he was prepared to give normal humanity a go. Ed’s zip was undone and he had spilled coffee or Coca-Cola on his shirt. His face was an unhealthy flushed colour, his voice hoarse and rough from shouting. Casales thought that no-one of his age and weight should be pushing himself so hard.
Although only half a day had gone by, it looked as if Needham and his boys had been living there for a week. There were coffee cups and fast-food remnants and discarded caps and college jerseys everywhere, and a rank stench of sweat and tension in the air. The team was clearly in the process of turning the whole world upside down in their efforts to trace the hacker. She called out to them in a hearty tone:
“Go for it, guys!... Fix the bastard!”
She did not really mean it. Secretly she thought the breach was amusing. Many of these programmers seemed to think they could do whatever liked, as if they had carte blanche, and it might actually do them some good to see that the other side could hit back. Here in the Puzzle Palace their shortcomings only showed when they were confronted with something dire, as was happening now. She had been woken by a call saying that the Swedish professor had been murdered at his home outside Stockholm, and even though that in itself was not a big deal for the N.S.A. — not yet, at any rate — it did mean something to Casales.
The killing showed that she had read the signs right, and now she had to see if she could move forward one more step. She logged in and opened the diagrammatic overview of the organization she had been tracking. The evasive Thanos sat right at the top, but there were also names of real people like the member of the Russian Duma Ivan Gribanov, and the German, Gruber.
She did not understand why the N.S.A. gave such low priority to the matter, and why her superiors kept suggesting that other, more mainstream law-enforcement agencies should be taking care of it. They could not rule out the possibility that the network had state backing, or links to Russian state intelligence, and that it was all to do with the trade war between East and West. Even though the evidence was sparse and ambiguous, there were indications that western technology was being stolen and ending up in Russian hands.
But it was difficult to get a clear view of this tangled web or even to know whether any crime had been committed — perhaps it was purely by chance that a similar technology had been developed somewhere else. These days, industrial theft was an altogether nebulous concept. Assets were being borrowed all the time, sometimes as a part of creative exchanges, sometimes just dressed up to seem legitimate.
Large businesses, bolstered by threatening lawyers, regularly scared the living daylights out of small companies, and nobody seemed to find it odd that individual innovators had almost no legal rights. Besides which, industrial espionage and hacker attacks were often regarded as little more than routine research in a competitive environment. You could hardly claim that the N.S.A. crowd were helping to raise ethical standards in the field.
On the other hand, it was not so easy to view murder in relative terms, and Casales took a solemn vow to leave no stone unturned in trying to unseat Thanos. She did not get far. In fact she only managed to stretch her arms and massage her neck before she heard puffing and panting behind her.
Needham looked dreadful. His back must have given out on him too. Her own neck felt better just looking at him.
“Ed, to what do I owe this honour?”
“I’m thinking you and I are working on the same problem.”
“Park your butt, old man.”
“You know, from my limited perspective...”
“Don’t knock yourself, Ed.”
“I’m not knocking myself at all. It’s no secret I couldn’t care less who’s high or low, who thinks this and who thinks that. I focus on my own stuff. I protect our systems, and the only thing that really impresses me is when people are good at their jobs.”