lift to the seventh floor, where he was received by Birger Wadensjoo, the new chief of the Section.
Wadensjoo had been one of the latest recruits to the Section around the time Gullberg retired. He wished that the decisive Fredrik was still there. Clinton had succeeded Gullberg and was the chief of the Section until 2002, when diabetes and coronary artery disease had forced him into retirement. Gullberg did not have a clear sense of what Wadensjoo was made of.
"Welcome, Evert," Wadensjoo said, shaking hands with his former chief. "It's good of you to take the time to come in."
"Time is more or less all I have," Gullberg said.
"You know how it goes. I wish we had the leisure to stay in touch with faithful old colleagues."
Gullberg ignored the insinuation. He turned left into his old office and sat at the round conference table by the window. He assumed it was Wadensjoo who was responsible for the Chagall and Mondrian reproductions. In his day plans of Kronan and Wasa had hung on the walls. He had always dreamed about the sea, and he was in fact a naval officer, although he had spent only a few brief months at sea during his military service. There were computers now, but otherwise the room looked almost exactly as when he had left. Wadensjoo poured coffee.
"The others are on their way," he said. "I thought we could have a few words first."
"How many in the Section are still here from my day?"
"Apart from me... only Otto Hallberg and Georg Nystrom are still here. Hallberg is retiring this year, and Nystrom is turning sixty. Otherwise it's new recruits. You've probably met some of them before."
"How many are working for the Section today?"
"We've reorganized a bit."
"And?"
"There are seven full-timers. So we've cut back. But there's a total of thirty-one employees of the Section within S.I.S. Most of them never come here. They take care of their normal jobs and do some discreet moonlighting for us should the need or opportunity arise."
"Thirty-one employees."
"Plus the seven here. You were the one who created the system, after all. We've just fine-tuned it. Today we have what's called an internal and an external organization. When we recruit somebody, they're given a leave of absence for a time to go to our school. Hallberg is in charge of training, which is six weeks for the basics. We do it out at the Naval School. Then they go back to their regular jobs in S.I.S., but now they're working for us."
"I see."
"It's an excellent system. Most of our employees have no idea of the others' existence. And here in the Section we function principally as report recipients. The same rules apply as in your day. We have to be a single-level organization."
"Have you an operations unit?"
Wadensjoo frowned. In Gullberg's day the Section had a small operations unit consisting of four people under the command of the shrewd Hans von Rottinger.
"Well, not exactly. Von Rottinger died five years ago. We have a younger talent who does some field work, but usually we use someone from the external organization if necessary. But of course things have become more complicated technically, for example when we need to arrange a telephone tap or enter an apartment. Nowadays there are alarms and other devices everywhere."
Gullberg nodded. "Budget?"
"We have about eleven million a year total. A third goes to salaries, a third to overheads, and a third to operations."
"So the budget has shrunk."
"A little. But we have fewer people, which means that the operations budget has actually increased."
"Tell me about our relationship to S.I.S."
Wadensjoo shook his head. "The chief of Secretariat and the chief of Budget belong to us. Formally, of course, the chief of Secretariat is the only one who has insight into our activities. We're so secret that we don't exist. But in practice two assistant chiefs know of our existence. They do their best to ignore anything they hear about us."
"Which means that if problems arise, the present S.I.S. leadership will have an unpleasant surprise. What about the defence leadership and the government?"
"We cut off the defence leadership some ten years ago. And governments come and go."
"So if the balloon goes up, we're on our own?"
Wadensjoo nodded. "That's the drawback with this arrangement. The advantages are obvious. But our assignments have also changed. There's a new realpolitik in Europe since the Soviet Union collapsed. Our work is less and less about identifying spies. It's about terrorism, and about evaluating the political suitability of individuals in