Hostage (17 page)

She ended the call and turned her attention back to the file in front of her.

If Zakaria’s phone had been someone else’s at the time when Säpo linked it to their preliminary investigations, then they had to come up with a way of tracking down that person,
even if Zakaria refused to give them a name. And – more importantly – they had to find out if he or she had anything to do with the hijacking.

From not having set foot in Police HQ for over a year, in the space of a few hours, Fredrika Bergman had managed to acquire a workstation within both Säpo and the National
Bureau of Investigation. When she and Alex got back from Solna, they went straight up to the counter-terrorism unit, where they found Eden alone in her office.

‘I heard what happened,’ she said. ‘It’s lucky the neighbour happened to be passing just when you were there.’

‘We spoke to Karim’s wife on the way back,’ Alex said. ‘She’s staying with her parents in Copenhagen. She was shocked when she heard about the hijacking.
She’s coming back to Stockholm tonight, if possible.’

‘What had he said to her?’ Eden asked.

‘Nothing, really. Everything was perfectly normal this morning, according to his wife. Karim didn’t seem stressed or anxious. We didn’t mention the fact that we think he might
be involved; we just asked her a few questions in general terms.’

‘And how has he seemed recently? Has she noticed anything different about him?’

‘No, not that she could remember.’

‘What about the girl on the street, the one the neighbour saw? Did Karim’s wife know her?’

‘She’d heard about her from her daughter, of course, but she didn’t know who she was. She didn’t see her. To be honest, I don’t think the girl on the street is of
any interest to us.’

Eden gazed at someone who happened to be passing by outside the glass cube. There were far too many things that didn’t seem to be of any interest.

‘He refuses to contemplate an emergency landing. And he’s been in contact with one of the phones that was used to make a bomb threat yesterday,’ she summarised. ‘I
wouldn’t want to be sitting on that plane with Karim as the pilot.’

Fredrika glanced at Alex. He was pale, and she knew what was haunting him. The idea of losing his son when he had already lost his wife must be unbearable. She suppressed the impulse to reach
out and touch him.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Eden said, having realised that what she had just said wasn’t particularly helpful. ‘That was clumsy of me.’

‘It’s fine,’ Alex said, but anyone could see that it wasn’t.

‘Have we spoken to the airline about the possibility of giving Karim direct orders?’ Fredrika asked.

‘Yes,’ Eden said. ‘In a case like this, it’s unusual to force the captain into a course of action that he hasn’t chosen for himself. He and he alone is regarded as
the best person to decide what to do with the plane in the event of a hijacking.’

‘But if the captain himself is responsible for the hijacking, then surely that should put things in a different light?’ Alex said.

‘Sounds reasonable,’ Eden agree. ‘But if the captain is the hijacker, then I think it’s foolish to believe that he’s going to take orders from the
police.’

Fredrika could see that Alex was starting to get agitated.

‘We have to get in touch with Erik,’ he said. ‘He’s the co-pilot, and he’s just as capable as Karim of landing the plane.’

‘And how’s that going to happen?’ Eden said. ‘Is he going to knock Karim down first? I know the co-pilot’s role is to take over the plane if the captain shows signs
of unreliability, but I don’t think that rule applies in this case. Karim is not going to hand over to Erik voluntarily.’

She got up and came around the desk to join Alex and Fredrika. In her high heels she was taller than Alex.

‘We’ve got to be clever now,’ she said. ‘Because we don’t have much time. At the moment we haven’t got enough evidence to call Erik secretly and ask him to
put Karim out of action and land the plane himself. That would look like complete insanity if it got out, particularly if it all went wrong.’

If it all went wrong.

If everyone on board died.

If they had to inform all those desperate people who were calling the police right now, wanting to know if their relatives were on that plane . . . if they had to inform all those people that
the plane had gone down, and that their loved ones were at the bottom of the Atlantic.

Fredrika shuddered.

‘If Karim is involved, it would explain something else,’ she said. ‘How the note got into the toilet.’

‘That occurred to me as well,’ Eden said.

They were interrupted by Sebastian, who yanked the door open without knocking.

‘That was quick,’ Eden said. ‘Have you already finished working through the list of calls?’

‘What list?’ Alex wanted to know.

Eden waved away his question.

‘It’s about the bomb threats that were made yesterday,’ Sebastian said.

Fredrika could see that Eden was disappointed, and wondered what she had been hoping for. She thought she would have enjoyed working with Sebastian; he seemed calmer than Eden, less spiky and
more amenable.

‘You know our guys went out to Arlanda to look for the four phones that were used to make the bomb threats?’

‘The phones someone had forgotten to switch off, which meant they could still be located,’ Eden said with a nod.

‘Airport security helped them to search. It took seconds. They found all four in a waste bin in the multi-storey car park next to the domestic flights terminal.’

Alex leaned back cautiously against one of the glass walls.

‘And the voice distorter?’

‘No sign. But we’ve got the phones, and forensics have secured fingerprints. The phones were new; they found prints belonging to just one person, and on only one of the
phones.’

‘One person’s prints on one phone?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And do we have a match?’

‘No. But judging by the size of the prints, it seems unlikely that they were made by a woman.’

Eden burst out laughing.

‘I don’t want to be rude, but I’m afraid no one was expecting you to find anything other than a man’s prints on those phones!’

Was that true? Fredrika wondered. From a statistical point of view, a man was more likely than a woman to be behind serious violent crime, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be a
woman. She remembered the case she and Alex had worked on a few years ago: a priest and his wife had been murdered, and nothing had turned out to be the way they had first thought.

‘We have to find out if they’re Karim Sassi’s prints,’ Eden said.

‘How do we do that?’

‘Call the prosecutor. We need permission to go into their house and lift prints for comparison.’

Fredrika suddenly thought of something.

‘His car is at the airport. His wife mentioned it.’

‘Excellent. Call her and get the registration number – forget the house for now.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Alex’s voice sounded deeper than usual.

‘We don’t have time to put together some jigsaw puzzle and play guessing games,’ he said. ‘I suggest we go to the prosecutor and get a search warrant. I want to go back
to Solna and turn Karim Sassi’s house upside down. We need a breakthrough, and we need it now.’

For a second, Fredrika was afraid that Eden would launch a counter-attack, put Alex in his place for taking the lead in her office. But she didn’t, because she knew he was right.

‘Let’s do that,’ she said. ‘Let’s ask for a search warrant right now.’

A
lex headed back to Solna while Fredrika stayed behind at Säpo. Eden had found her a workstation in the open-plan office. She would only need
it for one day. No longer. One day – after that the plane would have run out of fuel and the drama in the skies would be over.

Fredrika felt a knot of fear in her stomach. Hundreds of people trapped on board a plane that wasn’t allowed to land. A plane that could plunge to earth or be destroyed by a bomb in the
baggage hold.

Their options were limited. They could go for an emergency landing. Meet the hijackers’ demands. Or find whoever was behind the threat, thus freeing the passengers and crew. They
hadn’t managed to come up with any alternative courses of action. And if it turned out that Karim Sassi was involved, they had no options at all, because in that case it wouldn’t matter
if they identified his fellow perpetrators on the ground; Karim Sassi would still have the power to determine the fate of Flight 573.

Unless they could get Alex’s son Erik to intervene. It was only a question of time before they had to decide whether that was how they were going to save the plane. If Karim Sassi was
involved, then Fredrika was more convinced than ever that there was no bomb on board. It had no obvious function if the captain was part of the plot.

She sat down at the computer to read through some of the newspaper articles. The PM’s press conference had turned into a fiasco. The journalists refused to accept that he had no answers to
their questions, but Fredrika thought he had at least managed to convey the most important point: the Swedish government did not negotiate with terrorists. They would not be reviewing the decision
to revoke Zakaria Khelifi’s residence permit. If the hijackers wanted to have a discussion about this, they were welcome to get in touch, but so far no one had claimed responsibility for the
threat.

Fredrika moved on to the American press to check out their angle on the story. It was certainly just as big on the other side of the pond, no doubt about it. Of the four hundred and thirty-seven
passengers on board the plane, one hundred and fifty-one were apparently US citizens. This was news to Fredrika; the US authorities must have leaked the figure. Twenty-two of these belonged to a
junior football team who had travelled to Sweden to play a friendly against Bromma boys’ team.

The US citizens came from no less than ten states. The issue would occupy many members of Congress during the day. Fredrika could well imagine the political pressure that was rapidly building up
in Washington, which would inevitably lead to loud demands for someone to
do something
. A favourite expression in the US. If someone died, if kids were getting too fat, if gas became too
expensive, the cry went up:
do something
. Anything. At any price. The ability to take action had a strange intrinsic value in the USA.

On the other hand, that same ability had an equally strange lack of value in Sweden. Fredrika had never made any secret of the fact that she loved the USA and the American success ethic, the
belief that anything was possible. She often found it difficult to swallow the European and Swedish smugness, the blind faith in their own social model. The year she had spent in New York
hadn’t diminished her enthusiasm; the Americans had a fire within them, and it created energy.

There were certain dates that people would always remember. Fredrika’s parents and their friends knew exactly where they were and what they were doing on the day they heard that President
Kennedy had been shot, and the same applied to the day they found out that Olof Palme had been assassinated.

And then of course there was 9/11. Fredrika knew exactly where she had been on that day: on holiday with Spencer. They had spent the whole afternoon in the hotel, unable to tear themselves away
from the TV. The images of the Twin Towers collapsing were etched on her memory and could never be erased. Those majestic buildings came down at a speed that was reminiscent of a Hollywood film,
with the proviso that Hollywood probably wouldn’t have made quite such a good job of it.

The fear Fredrika had felt afterwards had little to do with the terrorists behind the attack, and a great deal to do with the fact that the US President at the time was so ill-equipped to lead a
country, in every possible respect. Who knew what he might do, what crazy ideas might pass through that man’s mind?

The answer to that question came almost immediately. First, Afghanistan. Then, Iraq. And so many outrages in the hunt for the terrorists along the way that it was no longer possible to count
them. It was a war that could not be won, and millions of people all over the world paid the price for the insanity of it all.

Fredrika called her boss and passed on the latest developments in the investigation. She was careful to play down the possibility of Karim’s involvement; it would be better to tell him
when they knew exactly what the situation was. She hoped that Alex and his colleagues would be discreet when they went into Karim’s house; if the news that the police were searching Karim
Sassi’s house spread around the neighbourhood, it wouldn’t be long before everyone knew the police suspected that the captain was involved, which would make everything much more
difficult. On a positive note, the press hadn’t been told which specific flight was under threat, even if they had worked out that there weren’t very many to choose from.

The hijacking was like nothing else Fredrika had ever worked on. It had been staged in a way which worried her and made her think. There were so many coincidences. For example, Karim Sassi just
happened to be flying to New York the day after Säpo brought in Zakaria Khelifi. Was that by chance, or had he requested that particular flight?

She went over to Eden to ask whether they had checked with Karim’s employer.

‘According to SAS, the flight to New York was part of Karim’s normal schedule; he’s known about it for at least two months,’ Eden said.

‘So he hasn’t swapped flights or shifts with anyone?’

‘Apparently not. I’m starting to wonder whether the esteemed Mr Karim Sassi has been planning this for a long time.’

‘But that doesn’t seem likely,’ Fredrika said. ‘The government only made a decision on Zakaria Khelifi yesterday.’

‘That’s true. However, the date of the court hearing has been known since the beginning of August, which means it wasn’t difficult to work out roughly when the verdict would be
delivered. Perhaps whoever was so committed to Khelifi’s case would have taken similar action if he had been convicted. The fact that it’s happened as a result of the government’s
decision instead might not matter to whoever is behind this.’