Ingvar Johansson leaned back in his chair and considered her question. "Not that I know of. Why?"
Annika held out the computer printout. "Christina Furhage must have received some serious threats. No one but the director of the local tax office knows where she lives. You know, there are only about a hundred people in Sweden who have this protection."
She handed the paper to Ingvar Johansson. He looked at it blankly.
"What do you mean? Her personal data isn't protected. Her name is here."
"Right, but check the address: 'c/o loc dir Tyresö'."
"What are you talking about?" Ingvar Johansson said.
Annika sat down.
"There are different levels of protection the authorities can use when people are at risk," she explained. "The lowest protection is when you have a security flag in the Public Register. That's not too unusual; there are about five thousand people whose personal info is classified. That's when it says 'protected data' on the screen."
"Yeah, I know all that. But it doesn't say that here," Ingvar Johansson said.
Annika pretended not to hear. "To have a security flag against your data, there has to be some form of tangible threat. The decision to classify data is made by the director of the local tax office in the area where the person is officially living."
Annika tapped her pen on the printout. "This, on the other hand, is really unusual. This level of protection is much tighter and a lot harder to get than being merely flagged. You're invisible in the Public Register. Furhage simply isn't listed in the register, except like this, with a reference to the director of the local tax office in Tyresö outside Stockholm. He's the only civil servant in the entire country who knows where she lives."
Ingvar Johansson gave her a skeptical look. "How do you know all this?"
"You remember my work on the Paradise Foundation— articles on people living underground in Sweden?"
"Of course, I do. So what?"
"The only other time I've come across this was when I was searching for people the government had done their best to hide deep down."
"But Christina Furhage isn't hidden, is she?"
"We haven't found her, have we? What telephone number do we have for her?"
They searched the newspaper's contacts book, which could be found on all the computers in the newsroom. Under the name Christina Furhage, title Olympic Boss, there was a GSM cellphone number. Annika dialed the number and got connected to an automated answering service.
"Her phone's not on," she said. She called directory enquiries to find out in whose name the subscription was. The number was ex-directory.
Ingvar Johansson sighed. "It's too dark anyway for my picture of Furhage in front of the arena," he said. "We'll save it till tomorrow."
"We still have to find the woman," Annika said. "It's obvious that she'll have to comment on what's happened."
She stood up and started toward her room.
"What are you going to do now?" Ingvar Johansson asked.
"I'm calling the Olympic Secretariat. They've got to know what the hell is going on here."
* * *
Annika dropped into her chair with a thud and leaned her forehead on the desk. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a cinnamon bun that had been sitting there since the day before. She took a bite. It was stale, but she mixed it in her mouth with the dregs of the Diet Coke she'd had at lunch. Having collected the crumbs with her fingers, she dialed the switchboard of the Olympic Secretariat. Busy. She tried once again, this time changing the last digit from nought to one, an old trick to bypass the switchboard and get straight on to someone's desk. Sometimes you had to try a hundred times, but sooner or later you'd end up on the desk of some poor bastard working late. Not so this time: Amazingly, she was successful at the first attempt. The director of the Secretariat himself, Evert Danielsson, answered.
Annika deliberated for half a second before she decided to skip the small talk. She'd try to beat him up a bit. "We want a comment from Christina Furhage," said Annika, "and we want it now."
Danielsson groaned. "You've called ten times already today. We have promised to pass on your questions."
"We want to talk to her ourselves. Surely you must appreciate she can't hide on a day like this? How would that look? They're
her
Games, for Christ's sake! She's never been afraid to talk before. Why is she hiding? Come on, give her to us now."
Danielsson breathed down the phone for several seconds. "We don't know where she is," he said in a low voice.
Annika felt her pulse quicken. She switched on the tape recorder next to her phone. "Haven't you been able to reach her either?" she said slowly.
Danielsson swallowed. "No," he said, "not all day. We haven't been able to reach her husband either. But you won't write about this, will you?"
"I can't tell," Annika said. "Where could she be?"
"We thought she was at home."
"And where is that?" Annika asked, thinking about what she'd found on the computer.
"Here in town. But no one's answering the door."
Annika breathed in. Why was he telling her this? He sounded desperate; Annika pressed on and quickly asked:
"Who's been threatening Christina Furhage?"
The man gasped. "What? What do you mean?"
"Come off it!" Annika said. "If you want me to not write about it, you'll have to tell me what's really going on here."
"How did…? Who said…?"
"She's off the record on the Public Register. Which means the threat against her is so serious that a court of law would issue a restraining order against the assailant. Has this happened?"
"My God," Danielsson said. "Who told you this?"
Annika groaned inwardly. "It's in the Public Register. If you know the language, all you have to do is to read the screen. Has a restraining order been issued against someone who's threatened Christina Furhage?"
"I can't talk any longer," the man said stiffly, and hung up.
Annika listened for a few seconds to the hum of the line before she sighed and put the phone down.
* * *
Evert Danielsson stared at the woman standing in the doorway. "How long have you been there?"
"What are you doing in here?" Helena Starke replied, crossing her arms.
The director got up from Christina Furhage's chair, looking around distractedly, as if not having noticed until now that he was sitting at the Managing Director's desk. "Well, I was… checking Christina's diary to see if she'd made a note of where she was going or something… but I can't find it."
The woman looked hard at Evert Danielsson. He met her gaze.
"You look like shit," he said before he could stop himself.
"What a truly sexist comment," she said with a disgusted look, walking up to Christina Furhage's desk. "Since you asked, I got drunk as a skunk last night and threw up on the doormat this morning. If you say that was unusually unladylike, you're dead.
"Christina is spending the day with her family," Helena Starke said while pulling out the second drawer of the Olympic boss's desk with practised movements. "That means she's working from home rather than here at the office," she explained.
The director saw Helena Starke pull out a thick diary, opening it near the end. She leafed through it, the paper rustling.
"Nothing. Saturday, December 18 is completely empty."
"Maybe she's doing her Christmas cleaning," Evert Danielsson said, and now both he and Helena Starke smiled. The thought of Christina in a housecoat with a feather duster in her hand was funny.
"Who called?" Helena Starke asked, putting the diary away in the drawer. The director noted that she pushed it firmly shut and turned a key in the upper right-hand corner of the drawer unit.
"Some journalist from
Kvällspressen.
A woman. I don't recall her name."
Helena put the key in her jeans pocket. "Why did you tell her we haven't been able to reach Christina?"
"What was I supposed to say? That she has no comment? That she's hiding? That would make it even worse." Danielsson flung his hands out to the sides in a gesture of helplessness.
"The question is…" the woman said, coming so close that he could smell the stale alcohol on her breath. "The question is: where
is
Christina? Why hasn't she come in? Wherever she is, has to be in a place where she hasn't been getting any news whatsoever, right? Where the hell could that be? Any ideas?"
"Her country cottage?"
Helena looked at him with pity. "Please… And that terrorist bullshit you came out with at the press conference wasn't very smart, was it? What do you think Christina will say about that?"
Evert Danielsson lost his temper now; the overwhelming feeling of failure felt stiflingly unjust. "But that's what we agreed on. You were there when we discussed it. It wasn't only my view. On the contrary, we were going to seize the initiative and direct public opinion straight away. We all agreed on that."
Helena turned away and started walking toward the door.
"It got a bit embarrassing when the police denied it all with such emphasis. On TV you appeared hysterical and paranoid— not particularly becoming."
She turned around in the doorway and put a hand on the doorpost. "Are you staying in here or can I lock up?"
The director left Christina Furhage's room without a word.
* * *
The evening news meeting took place around the large conference table in the editor's office. TV1's
Aktuellt
news would start in fifteen minutes. Everybody except the night editor Jansson was present.
"He'll be here," Annika said. "He's just…"
"He/she is just" is the code for delays caused by general disturbances or other b.s.— reporters who don't know what they're supposed to do or readers on the phone who simply have to state their opinions at that very moment. It can also mean you've gone to the toilet or to get coffee.
The participants around the table were preparing or waiting. Annika went through her list of points to be presented during the meeting. She didn't have a long list like Ingvar Johansson, the news editor, who was handing out slips of paper with the different jobs in progress to the people around the table. The picture editor, Pelle Oscarsson, was on his cellphone. The editor was rocking to and fro on his feet, staring unseeing at the muted TV.
"Sorry," the night editor said as he hurtled into the room, coffee mug in one hand and the dummies for all the pages of the paper in the other. He was barely awake and was into his second mug. Naturally, he spilled some coffee on the floor as he shut the door. Anders Schyman noticed and sighed.
"Okay," he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down at the table. "Let's begin with the Bomber. What have we got?"
Annika didn't wait for Ingvar Johansson but started talking straight away. She knew the news editor liked to go through the whole lot, including her patch. She wasn't going to sit around and wait for that.
"The way I see it, there'll be four stories from us on the crime desk," she said. "We won't be able to escape the terrorist angle. Evert Danielsson himself brought it up at the press conference, but the police want it toned down. That in itself could be a story. The fact is that we have discovered that Christina Furhage has been on the receiving end of some kind of intimidation. She is off the PubReg, and her address is care of the Tyresö local tax office. Furthermore, no one knows her whereabouts, not even her closest colleagues at the Olympic Secretariat. I'll take care of that one."
"What headline did you have in mind?" Jansson asked.
"Something like 'Olympic boss living under threat' and then a pull-quote from Danielsson, 'This is a terrorist attack'."
Jansson nodded approval.
"Then we have the main story, which has to be really thorough. We could put it together with graphics and captions around a big photo of the devastation. Patrik will take care of that. We've got daylight pictures of the stadium, both aerial and from the roof of the lamp factory, haven't we, Pelle?"
The picture editor nodded. "Yes. I think the helicopter pictures are better. The rooftop pictures are a bit underexposed, unfortunately; they're simply too dark. I've tried to brighten them up on the Mac, but they're a bit out of focus, so I think we should go for the aerial shots."
Jansson wrote something on his dummy page. Annika felt the anger surge within her like fire, fucking Armani photographer who couldn't even set the focus or the right aperture!
"Who took the rooftop pictures?" Anders Schyman asked.
"Olsson," Annika responded curtly.
