Inspector Monica Figuerola, in spite of her unusual name, was born in Dalarna to a family that had lived in Sweden at least since the time of Gustavus Vasa in the sixteenth century. She was a woman who people usually paid attention to, and for several reasons. She was thirty-six, blue eyed, and one metre eighty-four tall. She had short, light-blonde, naturally curly hair. She was attractive and dressed in a way that she knew made her more so. And she was exceptionally fit.

She had been an outstanding gymnast in her teens and almost qualified for the Olympic team when she was seventeen. She had given up classic gymnastics, but she still worked out obsessively at the gym five nights a week. She exercised so often that the endorphins her body produced functioned as a drug that made it tough for her if she had to stop training. She ran, lifted weights, played tennis, did karate. She had cut back on bodybuilding, that extreme variant of bodily glorification, some years ago. In those days she was spending two hours a day pumping iron. Even so, she trained so hard and her body was so muscular that malicious colleagues still called her Herr Figuerola. When she wore a sleeveless T-shirt or a summer dress, no-one could fail to notice her biceps and powerful shoulders.

Her intelligence, too, intimidated many of her male colleagues. She had left school with top marks, studied to become a police officer at twenty, and then served for nine years in Uppsala police and studied law in her spare time. For fun, she said, she had also studied for a degree in political science.

When she left patrol duty to become a criminal inspector, it was a great loss to Uppsala street safety. She worked first in the Violent Crime Division and then in the unit that specialized in financial crime. In 2000 she applied to the Security Police in Uppsala, and by 2001 she had moved to Stockholm. She first worked in Counter-Espionage, but was almost immediately hand-picked by Edklinth for the Constitutional Protection Unit. He happened to know Figuerola’s father and had followed her career over the years.

When at long last Edklinth concluded that he had to act on Armansky’s information, he called Figuerola into his office. She had been at Constitutional Protection for less than three years, which meant that she was still more of a real police officer than a fully fledged desk warrior.

She was dressed that day in tight blue jeans, turquoise sandals with a low heel, and a navy blue jacket.

“What are you working on at the moment, Monica?”

“We’re following up on the robbery of the grocer’s in Sunne.”

The Security Police did not normally spend time investigating robberies of groceries, and Figuerola was the head of a department of five officers working on political crimes. They relied heavily on computers connected to the incident reporting network of the regular police. Nearly every report submitted in any police district in Sweden passed through the computers in Figuerola’s department. The software scanned every report and reacted to 310 keywords, nigger, for example, or skinhead, swastika, immigrant, anarchist, Hitler salute, Nazi, National Democrat, traitor, Jew-lover, or nigger-lover. If such a keyword cropped up, the report would be printed out and scrutinized.

The Constitutional Protection Unit publishes an annual report, Threats to National Security, which supplies the only reliable statistics on political crime. These statistics are based on reports filed with local police authorities. In the case of the robbery of the shop in Sunne, the computer had reacted to three keywords – immigrant, shoulder patch, and nigger. Two masked men had robbed at gunpoint a shop owned by an immigrant. They had taken 2,780 kronor and a carton of cigarettes. One of the robbers had a mid-length jacket with a Swedish flag shoulder patch. The other had screamed “fucking nigger” several times at the manager and forced him to lie on the floor.

This was enough for Figuerola’s team to initiate the preliminary investigation and to set about enquiring whether the robbers had a connection to the neo-Nazi gang in Värmland, and whether the robbery could be defined as a racist crime. If so, the incident might be included in that year’s statistical compilation, which would then itself be incorporated within the European statistics put together by the E.U.’s office in Vienna.

“I’ve a difficult assignment for you,” Edklinth said. “It’s a job that could land you in big trouble. Your career might be ruined.”

“I’m all ears.”

“But if things go well, it could be a major step forward in your career. I’m thinking of moving you to the Constitutional Protection operations unit.”

“Forgive me for mentioning this, but Constitutional Protection doesn’t have an operations unit.”

“Yes, it does,” Edklinth said. “I established it this morning. At present it consists of you.”

“I see,” said Figuerola hesitantly.

“The task of Constitutional Protection is to defend the constitution against what we call ‘internal threats’, most often those on the extreme left or the extreme right. But what do we do if a threat to the constitution comes from within our own organization?”

For the next half hour he told her what Armansky had told him the night before.

“Who is the source of these claims?” Figuerola said when the story was ended.

“Focus on the information, not the source.”

“What I’m wondering is whether you consider the source to be reliable.”

“I consider the source to be totally reliable. I’ve know this person for many years.”

“It all sounds a bit… I don’t know. Improbable?”

“Doesn’t it? One might think it’s the stuff of a spy novel.”

“How do you expect me to go about tackling it?”

“Starting now, you’re released from all other duties. Your task, your only task, is to investigate the truth of this story. You have to either verify or dismiss the claims one by one. You report directly and only to me.”

“I see what you mean when you say I might land in it up to my neck.”

“But if the story is true… if even a fraction of it is true, then we have a constitutional crisis on our hands.”

“Where do you want me to begin?”

“Start with the simple things. Start by reading the Björck report. Then identify the people who are allegedly tailing this guy Blomkvist. According to my source, the car belongs to Göran Mårtensson, a police officer living on Vittangigaten in Vällingby. Then identify the other person in the pictures taken by Blomkvist’s photographer. The younger blond man here.”

Figuerola was making notes.

“Then look into Gullberg’s background. I had never heard his name before, but my source believes there to be a connection between him and the Security Police.”

“So somebody here at S.I.S. put out a contract on a long-ago spy using a 78-year-old man. It beggars belief.”

“Nevertheless, you check it out. And your entire investigation has to be carried out without a single person other than me knowing anything at all about it. Before you take one single positive action I want to be informed. I don’t want to see any rings on the water or hear of a single ruffled feather.”

“This is one hell of an investigation. How am I going to do all this alone?”

“You won’t have to. You have only to do the first check. You come back and say that you’ve checked and didn’t find anything, then everything is fine. You come back having found that anything is as my source describes it, then we’ll decide what to do.”

Figuerola spent her lunch hour pumping iron in the police gym. Lunch consisted of black coffee and a meatball sandwich with beetroot salad, which she took back to her office. She closed her door, cleared her desk, and started reading the Björck report while she ate her sandwich.