‘I have no idea,’ said Risto Petrovic, a half-kilo of spaghetti twisted around his fork.
‘No possible hideouts?’
‘Sorry. No possible hideouts. I know very little about Sweden. I just came here for a job, but got locked up almost immediately.’
‘Let’s go straight to number five, then. What was Lindberg going to use the money for?’
‘Buying stuff. You buy stuff with money. That’s why everyone wants it.’
‘Thanks for the foundation course in capitalist economics. He wasn’t going to use the money for anything in particular, then?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Four: who was going to receive the money?’
‘You’re just asking the same questions as the others.’
‘Who?’
‘A Swedish policeman. I don’t know anything else. He was blackmailing Nedic for money. Ten million kronor.’
‘We’ve not heard about this sum before. It’s a big one. The policeman must’ve found something valuable, then. Something which could sink the entire Nedic organisation.’
‘Yep,’ said Petrovic, his mouth full of spaghetti. ‘Must’ve done. But I don’t know what.’
‘So that’s three answered, too,’ said Hjelm. ‘And we were going to take half each. The second, then. Rajko Nedic’s organisation.’
Petrovic nodded, chewing away. When he was finished, he fished under the table and retrieved a pile of handwritten papers.
Hjelm took it from him, leafing through the pages. It looked solid. He must have really worked on it. On that, and nothing else. Sinking Nedic.
‘Thanks,’ said Hjelm. ‘Impressive. Now it’s starting to look like something.’
‘Thank you,’ said Risto Petrovic in English, starting to twist spaghetti again. Twist after twist after twist.
‘Let’s try number one, then. What’s your relationship with Niklas Lindberg really like?’
‘We met in the Foreign Legion. Neither of us really fitted in there. We became friends and survived a year together. Then we bumped into one another in the Kumla Bunker. It was a welcome reunion. I was working for Nedic and tipped Nicke off that he was going to hand over ten million kronor to a policeman. Later, Lordan mentioned that meeting would be taking place in Kvarnen. I told Nicke about that, too.’
‘And what did you get out of it?’
‘Nothing. We’re friends. If you’d been through what we went through in the Legion, you’d understand. Otherwise you can’t.’
Hjelm nodded and looked at Chavez. Chavez nodded and looked at Hjelm.
‘Good,’ said Hjelm. ‘So now we know roughly where you stand, then. You want to sink Nedic whatever the cost, and you want to protect Lindberg whatever the cost. You’re united by the tough experience you went through. You’re friends in an almost Arab sense of the word. Friends for life. Thick as thieves.’
It had taken him a moment to express himself in English.
‘Sound familiar? he asked Chavez, still in English.
‘I heard it just recently,’ Chavez answered in English. ‘We’re just a normal group of robbers. We’re just friends. Same pattern.’
‘Though I don’t think we can talk about tees now.’
‘I don’t think we’d get a bite, no. So let’s do this.’
Jorge Chavez ripped Petrovic’s handwritten stack of papers into pieces.
Petrovic choked. Half-chewed spaghetti flew out into the room, uniting with the gaping Viksjö’s glowing flakes of tobacco.
‘You think that you’re a Crown witness to squeal on Rajko Nedic, but that’s not the case. We don’t give a shit about Rajko Nedic. What we’re interested in is the attack on Stockholm’s Stadium in a few days’ time. The World Police and Fire Games. Everything you know. Otherwise you’re heading straight for Kumla, where you’ll be back up close with Zoran Koco, Petar Klovic and the rest of Nedic’s men.’
Petrovic stopped coughing. The spaghetti was hanging like scraps of meat from his mouth. It looked like the final scenes of the Jaws films.
‘What the hell does it say here?’ asked Ludvig Johnsson. ‘In brackets?’
‘JC rips P’s N mtrl,’ Gunnar Nyberg read. ‘Apparently Jorge ripped up Petrovic’s papers on Nedic.’
‘How can he justify that?’
‘There’s something fishy about it. He’s bluffing. Presumably they’d already made a copy. But it’s a nice twist. It’ll be interesting to see what happened next.’
‘You were probably an organised right-wing extremist even before the war in Croatia broke out,’ said Hjelm. ‘The descendants of the old, ultra-nationalistic Ustaša. Serb-hate. Then during the war, you really went in for your role as commander of a paramilitary unit. You probably widened your web of international contacts during that time. Got some false papers from them and fled to the Foreign Legion. Took the opportunity to recruit ideological kinsmen in the Legion to this contact web of international fascists. Among these was Niklas Lindberg, who then started to bomb and beat up Kurds, and went to prison. In turn, he scraped together friends to join to the web of contacts inside Kumla: the so-called “Nazi clique”, in which the known right-wing extremist Sven Joakim Bergwall, who died in the Sickla Slaughter, was active. Together, the three of you planned a bigger attack in Stockholm, and what could be more appropriate than this summer’s World Police and Fire Games? Blow up policemen and prison guards. What a dream.
‘You knew that there was a suitable kind of explosive available within your big international group of contacts. A highly volatile and reliably explosive liquid which uses a microscopic electronic detonator. The South Africans had developed it for the ANC’s meetings, but apartheid ended before they had time to put it into use. So you smuggled a sample into Kumla and gave it to Lindberg, and you made sure that he would have enough money to get hold of a proper amount of this explosive. The money could be taken from your employer, Rajko Nedic – the Serbian bastard who’d managed to unite former enemies in his drugs organisation. A real peace organisation. Two birds with one stone. You could blow up policemen and Serbs in one go. Nice plan.
‘Lindberg’s still out there, and he’s got money – if not ten million then at least almost one – and he’ll be able to carry out the plan despite all the trouble. All while you, protected by four fine policemen, chew spaghetti, sink Nedic and are given a nice new identity by the Swedish state. Well planned, again. But you forgot the A-Unit.’
‘What did I forget?’ Risto Petrovic exclaimed.
‘Nothing,’ Hjelm continued. ‘Nothing at all. A parenthesis.’
‘What? When? How?’ asked Chavez. ‘Otherwise, we’re sending you back to Rajko Nedic. It’s that simple. Where will the bomb be? Where will Lindberg be when he detonates it? When will the bomb be put in place? When will it be set off? And how is it all going to pan out?’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Risto Petrovic, wiping his mouth. ‘It’s not so simple.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because some things are bigger than any individual.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Send me back to Nedic if you want. This is bigger than me. I’m a dispensable cog in a big machine.’
Hjelm and Chavez looked at one another. It had been going so well. And now, to be stopped in their tracks by something as unexpected as… idealism.
Sick, black idealism.
The most dangerous kind.
‘Did they send him back?’ asked Ludvig Johnsson.
Nyberg looked at him as he nibbled on yet another ice-cold chicken leg.
‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘He might still be valuable.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Johnsson. ‘He’s not going to talk. He’s well versed in his warped idealism. He really believes in ethnic cleansing and ethnic purity. The weak link is Kullberg. There’s still a chance there.’