at S.I.S. put out a contract on a long-ago spy using a 78-year-old man. It beggars belief."
"Nevertheless, you check it out. And your entire investigation has to be carried out without a single person other than me knowing anything at all about it. Before you take one single positive action I want to be informed. I don't want to see any rings on the water or hear of a single ruffled feather."
"This is one hell of an investigation. How am I going to do all this alone?"
"You won't have to. You have only to do the first check. You come back and say that you've checked and didn't find anything, then everything is fine. You come back having found that anything is as my source describes it, then we'll decide what to do."
Figuerola spent her lunch hour pumping iron in the police gym. Lunch consisted of black coffee and a meatball sandwich with beetroot salad, which she took back to her office. She closed her door, cleared her desk, and started reading the Bjorck report while she ate her sandwich.
She also read the appendix with the correspondence between Bjorck and Dr Teleborian. She made a note of every name and every incident in the report that had to be verified. After two hours she got up and went to the coffee machine and got a refill. When she left her office she locked the door, part of the routine at S.I.S.
The first thing she did was to check the protocol number. She called the registrar and was informed that no report with that protocol number existed. Her second check was to consult a media archive. That yielded better results. The evening papers and a morning paper had reported a person being badly injured in a car fire on Lundagatan on the date in question in 1991. The victim of the incident was a middle-aged man, but no name was given. One evening paper reported that, according to a witness, the fire had been started deliberately by a young girl.
Gunnar Bjorck, the author of the report, was a real person. He was a senior official in the immigration unit, lately on sick leave and now, very recently, deceased - a suicide.
The personnel department had no information about what Bjorck had been working on in 1991. The file was stamped Top Secret, even for other employees at S.I.S. Which was also routine.
It was a straightforward matter to establish that Salander had lived with her mother and twin sister on Lundagatan in 1991 and spent the following two years at St Stefan's children's psychiatric clinic. In these sections at least, the record corresponded with the report's contents.
Peter Teleborian, now a well-known psychiatrist often seen on T.V., had worked at St Stefan's in 1991 and was today its senior physician.
Figuerola then called the assistant head of the personnel department.
"We're working on an analysis here in C.P. that requires evaluating a person's credibility and general mental health. I need to consult a psychiatrist or some other professional who's approved to handle classified information. Dr Peter Teleborian was mentioned to me, and I was wondering whether I could hire him."
It took some while before she got an answer.
"Dr Teleborian has been an external consultant for S.I.S. in a couple of instances. He has security clearance and you can discuss classified information with him in general terms. But before you approach him you have to follow the bureaucratic procedure. Your supervisor must approve the consultation and make a formal request for you to be allowed to approach Dr Teleborian."
Her heart sank. She had verified something that could be known only to a very restricted group of people. Teleborian had indeed had dealings with S.I.S.
She put down the report and focused her attention on other aspects of the information that Edklinth had given her. She studied the photographs of the two men who had allegedly followed the journalist Blomkvist from Cafe Copacabana on May 1.
She consulted the vehicle register and found that Goran Mårtensson was the owner of a grey Volvo with the registration number legible in the photographs. Then she got confirmation from the S.I.S. personnel department that he was employed there. Her heart sank again.
Mårtensson worked in Personal Protection. He was a bodyguard. He was one of the officers responsible on formal occasions for the safety of the Prime Minister. For the past few weeks he had been loaned to Counter-Espionage. His leave of absence had begun on April 10, a couple of days