Lene Kaaberbol - Invisible Murder

The man on the other side of the radiator moved his uninjured hand a couple centimeters up the pipe and moaned softly as he tried to push himself into a more upright position. Then he cleared his throat and out of the corner of her eye Nina saw that he was looking right at her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Nina shifted slightly so she could see him. He looked terrible. His shirt was damp and filthy and covered with bloodstains presumably from both his face and his injured hand. His eyes were dull and washed-out.

“I was in your apartment. I should have stopped them,” he continued. His English was easier to understand than the Finn’s, possibly because he spoke more slowly. It took him a long time to find the right words. Nina couldn’t be bothered to respond. She didn’t have the energy to provide him with water, soap, and towel so he could wash his hands of the whole thing. She had seen the video. No one had been holding a gun to his head. No one had forced him to watch while someone ripped off her daughter’s underwear. He was a free agent.

“She’s fourteen years old,” she said, noting much to her own irritation how the exhaustion and the seething rage made her voice tremble slightly.

The young man winced, and Nina knew that she should feel sorry for him. But she just didn’t care.

“ I would have stopped them,” she snarled. “I would have stopped them no matter what.”

Ida moved fitfully against Nina’s chest, raising her obstinate head and looking over at the young man.

“Mom,” she said, with a little of the old Ida’s arrogant tone. “It wasn’t Sándor. He couldn’t help it. They had his brother. They killed his brother.”

Nina sat there in total silence. She didn’t react. Didn’t make any doubting or shocked or sympathetic comments. She just felt the weight of her daughter’s living body and tried not to think about the implication—that they had killed someone. That that was a line they had already crossed.

O MATTER HOWyou look at it,” Torben said stretching in his chair, “it is a secret organization in breech of some of this country’s laws.”

Søren felt almost as tired as before he had slept.

“They help deported refugees and other illegal aliens,” he said. “They’re sentimental do-gooders, for Christ’s sake, not some gang of violent extremists.”

They were surrounded by boxes of ring binders, confiscated from Peter Erhardsen’s house in Vanløse. Names, dates, addresses, budgets. The man had a better grasp of who his “clients” were than most social service agencies. And absolutely no clue about how to run a covert operation. They could unravel his whole so-called Network based on his own meticulous lists.

“You of all people should know that idealistic, altruistic motives are no guarantee against terrorism. On the contrary. There is a risk that we’re dealing with a group of people who might do something to promote their cause during the Summit.”

“Yes, but not a dirty bomb, for God’s sake.” Søren studied Torben to see if he was playing devil’s advocate or if he really believed this theory. He knew that privately Torben was less than thrilled with the current government’s immigration policy, but that would only make him especially careful to keep his threat assessment objective and professional.

There was a knock on the door. It was Gitte.

“Our visitor from the NBH has arrived,” she said.

“Good,” Torben said. “Then let’s try to get this business under control before it’s too damn late.”

Søren looked up abruptly and caught a glimpse of the revved-up tension underneath Torben’s calm, professional demeanor. Torben noticed him noticing and subtly shrugged one shoulder.

“Central Station,” he said. “Or the stadium on Wednesday during the international game. Don’t you see? They don’t even need to target any of the politicians at the Summit; they just need to hit Copenhagen. If we have a big, nasty radioactive bomb crater somewhere in the downtown area, the Summit won’t happen, at least not right here, right now. And that might be enough of a victory.”

Søren felt a chill down his spine. He was glad he wasn’t running security right now. That he wasn’t the one who had to decide how to divvy up the available equipment, where to position people with Geiger counters, and where not to. They couldn’t cover all of Copenhagen—that was impossible. Someone would have to prioritize who and what should be protected, and for the rest, all they could do was hope.

“How big an area are we talking about?” he asked. “I mean, how big would the contamination zone be?”

Yet another understated shrug. “It depends entirely on how strong the explosives are and how much radioactive material there is,” Torben said. “And maybe we’ll know more about the latter after we’ve talked to our man from the NBH.”

T HE MAN FROMthe NBH looked like a retired wrestler, Søren thought. Short, graying dark hair, strong shoulders, strong neck, low center of gravity, but definitely more muscle weight than fat. His name was Károly Gábor, and he radiated a calm professionalism that matched Torben’s perfectly.

“We traced the radioactive material to this old, disused hospital,” he said, pushing a button on his laptop so the projector showed a picture of the skeleton of a building and a little map indicating where it was located. “Apparently the Soviet troops abandoned some radiation-therapy equipment in the hospital’s basement when they left in 1990. Unfortunately the radioactive substance was cesium chloride, which has both a very long half-life—about thirty years—and physical properties that allow it to bind very easily with its environment if the seal is broken.”

A new picture—this time of people in yellow suits that resembled the ones currently decontaminating the soil in Valby. In this picture, however, there was a Latin American slum in the background.

“In terms of comparable events there’s the Goiânia disaster in Brazil, in 1987, where careless handling of a similar unit resulted in the deaths of four people, and 249 others suffered serious radiation sickness. Like the device in Goiânia, the actual radioactive core in our unit was sealed in a ball-shaped lead capsule that rotated inside another lead ball, both with small openings so that when these two openings lined up, and only then, there would be a brief, controllable beam of radiation.”

Cross sectional diagrams and animations helped him get his point across. The man had done his homework.

“In our case, however, the device was damaged following an earthquake, and the outer casing had split, so the two young Roma who found it were able to open it and access the unit itself: a small cylinder packed full of cesium salt, which they put in a big paint bucket filled with sand. We questioned one of the two young men, an eighteen-year-old named László Eros, better known by his nickname, Pitkin. He is currently at a hospital in Miskolc being treated for radiation sickness but appears to be recovering. The second, sixteen-year-old Tamás Rézmüves, was identified from the photo you sent us. He’s your corpse.”

Gábor pushed a button again, and a photo appeared on the screen. Snow White, now alive, flashing a foolhardy smile at the cameraman. You could see gap in his teeth, but it didn’t diminish the effect of his charm.

“How did he end up buried in a gas tank in Valby?” Mikael asked.

“We think it’s quite likely that he and his half-brother, Sándor Horváth, found a buyer in Denmark for the radioactive material and came up here to deliver the material. We believe their motive is exclusively financial, but we can’t be sure. It appears that young Rézmüves was harboring a certain amount of anger at the Hungarian establishment. In terms of the buyer’s identity, the only lead we can offer is the IP address we already gave you.”