acting outside of, or parallel to, regular operations. Because this had been going on for many years - at least since 1976, when Zalachenko arrived in Sweden - it had to be organized and sanctioned from the top. Exactly how high up the conspiracy went he had no idea.
He wrote three names on a pad:
Goran Mårtensson, Personal Protection. Criminal Inspector.
Gunnar Bjorck, assistant chief of Immigration Division. Deceased (Suicide?).
Albert Shenke, chief of Secretariat, S.I.S.
Figuerola was of the view that the chief of Secretariat at least must have been calling the shots when Mårtensson in Personal Protection was supposedly moved to Counter-Espionage, although he had not in fact been working there. He was too busy monitoring the movements of the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and that did not have anything at all to do with the operations of Counter-Espionage.
Some other names from outside S.I.S. had to be added to the list:
Peter Teleborian, psychiatrist
Lars Faulsson, locksmith
Teleborian had been hired by S.I.S. as a psychiatric consultant on specific cases in the late '80s and early '90s - on three occasions, to be exact, and Edklinth had examined the reports in the archive. The first had been extraordinary - Counter-Espionage had identified a Russian informer inside the Swedish telecom industry, and the spy's background indicated that he might be inclined to suicide in the event that his actions were exposed. Teleborian had done a strikingly good analysis, which helped them turn the informer so that he could become a double agent. His other two reports had involved less significant evaluations: one was of an employee inside S.I.S. who had an alcohol problem, and the second was an analysis of the bizarre sexual behaviour of an African diplomat.
Neither Teleborian nor Faulsson - especially not Faulsson - had any position inside S.I.S. And yet through their assignments they were connected to... to what?
The conspiracy was intimately linked to the late Alexander Zalachenko, the defected G.R.U. agent who had apparently turned up in Sweden on Election Day in 1976. A man no-one had ever heard of before. How was that possible?
Edklinth tried to imagine what reasonably would have happened if he had been sitting at the chief's desk at S.I.S. in 1976 when Zalachenko defected. What would he have done? Absolute secrecy. It would have been essential. The defection could only be known to a small group without risking that the information might leak back to the Russians and... How small a group?
An operations department?
An unknown operations department?
If the affair had been appropriately handled, Zalachenko's case should have ended up in Counter-Espionage. Ideally he should have come under the auspices of the military intelligence service, but they had neither the resources nor the expertise to run this sort of operational activity. So, S.I.S. it was.
But Counter-Espionage had not ever had him. Bjorck was the key; he had been one of the people who handled Zalachenko. And yet Bjorck had never had anything to do with Counter-Espionage. Bjorck was a mystery. Officially he had held a post in the Immigration Division since the '70s, but in reality he had scarcely been seen in the department before the '90s, when suddenly he became assistant director.
And yet Bjorck was the primary source of Blomkvist's information. How had Blomkvist been able to persuade Bjorck to reveal such explosive material? And to a journalist at that.
Prostitutes. Bjorck messed around with teenage prostitutes and Millennium were going to expose him. Blomkvist must have blackmailed Bjorck.
Then Salander came into the picture.
The deceased lawyer Nils Bjurman had worked in the Immigration Division at the same time as the deceased Bjorck. They were the ones who had taken care of Zalachenko. But what did they do with him?
Somebody must have made the decision. With a defector of such provenance the order must have come from the highest level.
From the government. It must have been backed by the government. Anything else would be unthinkable.
Surely?
Edklinth felt cold shivers of apprehension. This was all conceivable in practice. A defector of Zalachenko's status would have to be handled with the utmost secrecy. He would have decided as much himself. That was what Falldin's administration must have decided too. It made sense.
But what happened in 1991 did not make sense. Bjorck had hired Teleborian effectively to lock Salander up in a psychiatric hospital for children on the - false - pretext that she was mentally deranged. That was a crime. That was such a monstrous crime that