03 - The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

03 - The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

Author:Stieg Larsson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781616574826
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-05-24T23:00:00+00:00


The prime minister gave the director of Constitutional Protection a long, wary look. Edklinth had a sense that cogs were whirring at high speed behind the PM’s glasses.

The PM shifted his gaze to Figuerola, who hadn’t said a word during the presentation. He saw an unusually tall and muscular woman looking back at him with a polite, expectant expression. Then he turned to the minister of justice, who had paled over the course of the presentation.

Then the PM took a deep breath, removed his glasses, and stared for a moment into the distance.

“I think we need a little more coffee,” he said.

“Yes, please,” Figuerola said.

Edklinth nodded and the minister of justice poured coffee from a thermos carafe.

“Let me be absolutely certain I understood you correctly,” the prime minister said. “You suspect that there’s a conspiracy within the Security Police that is acting outside its constitutional mandate, and that over the years this conspiracy has committed what could be categorized as serious criminal acts.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re coming to me because you don’t trust the leadership of the Security Police?”

“No, not exactly,” Edklinth said. “I decided to turn directly to you because this sort of activity is unconstitutional. But I don’t know the objective of the conspiracy, or whether I’ve misinterpreted something. For all I know, the activity may be legitimate and sanctioned by the government. Then I risk proceeding on faulty information, thereby compromising some secret operation.”

The prime minister looked at the minister of justice. Both understood that Edklinth was hedging his bets.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this. Do you know anything about it?”

“Absolutely not,” the minister of justice said. “There’s nothing in any report I’ve seen from the Security Police that could have a bearing on this matter.”

“Blomkvist thinks there’s a faction within Säpo. He refers to it as the Zalachenko club,” Edklinth said.

“I’d never even heard that Sweden had taken in and protected a Russian defector of such importance,” the PM said. “He defected during the Fälldin administration, you say?”

“I don’t believe Fälldin would have covered up something like this,” the minister of justice said. “This kind of defection would have been given the highest priority, and would have been passed over to the next administration.”

Edklinth cleared his throat. “Fälldin’s conservative government was succeeded by Olof Palme’s. It’s no secret that some of my predecessors at SIS had a certain opinion of Palme—”

“You’re suggesting that somebody forgot to inform the social democratic government?”

Edklinth nodded. “Let’s remember that Fälldin was in power for two separate mandates. Each time, the coalition government collapsed. First he handed over to Ola Ullsten, who had a minority government in 1979. The government collapsed again when the moderates jumped ship, and Fälldin governed together with the People’s Party. I’m guessing that the government secretariat was in turmoil during those transition periods. It’s also possible that knowledge of Zalachenko was confined to so small a circle that Prime Minister Fälldin had no real oversight, so he never had anything to hand over to Palme.”

“In that case, who’s responsible?” the PM said.



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