Hostage Read Free

despair.
    Grief.
    Loss.
    Pain.
    He had known that they existed, that they had to be taken into account. Being crushed was just part of life. Or was it? He felt a fresh wave of irritation when he thought about Peder. Why the
hell couldn’t he just pull himself together? Why couldn’t he deal with the trauma in a different way, rather than making himself unhappy all the time?
    If only Peder had handled things better, he could have kept his job and carried on working with Alex and Fredrika. Because when it came down to it, that was what Alex found so upsetting: he had
lost a close colleague, someone he had enjoyed working with. And even though he knew it wasn’t fair, he found that very hard to forgive.
    Alex’s train of thought was interrupted as his boss stuck his head around the door.
    ‘Bomb threat,’ he said. ‘Came in just now.’
    ‘I’m on it,’ Alex said, getting to his feet.
    A bomb threat. Buildings destroyed, human beings blown to pieces. An evil act in its purest form.
    A short while later, he was fully up to speed. Not one but four bomb threats, targeting different places in Stockholm. Including Rosenbad, the government building.
    Alex couldn’t understand it.
    Four bombs. What the hell was this about?

3
12:32
    W here did all this anger come from?
    Eden Lundell had no idea. As the head of the Security Service’s counter-terrorism unit, she was expected to have a clear grasp of every case that passed through her hands, but she often
found it extremely difficult to follow the thought processes that lay behind the actions of certain individuals.
    Right now there were a number of issues that merited closer attention, and Eden had to prioritise. Resources were limited, and she wanted to see results. Patience was a quality she had lacked
all her life, and things hadn’t improved since she came to work for Säpo.
    If only they understood the origins, the source of this rage.
The rage that made young people turn their backs on respect for life, and resort to violence in order to bring about the
changes they thought were necessary. To commit acts of terrorism. Eden had asked herself many times what could possibly make her cross that line, make her take up arms and fight against people
living in the same country as her, with no evidence of antipathy.
    What would drive me to commit the worst sin of all?
    She had reached the conclusion that the love she felt for her family might be just such a trigger. If they were threatened or affected by misfortune in some way.
    God forbid that such a thing should ever happen, because then I will lay waste the castle of my enemy.
    But the anger that Eden encountered through her work didn’t seem to have a personal background. The hatred took root within young people for a completely different reason. It was
impossible to point to one single factor that could explain the whole phenomenon, however hard they looked for it.
    Eden was systematically going through the latest pile of material in one of the cases on her desk. It was depressingly thin. The original information was unequivocal: the suspects were financing
acts of terrorism in Colombia. But this source could not be used in court and, therefore, Säpo had to get hold of their own information in order to confirm what they already knew and,
hopefully, lead to a successful prosecution.
    All too often, the intelligence said one thing and the evidence another, always with the same result. The prosecution would lose in court, or even before the case got there. The authorities
would end up looking weak and incompetent, and as if they were constantly persecuting innocent individuals who had done nothing whatsoever to deserve the attentions of the security service.
    Eden couldn’t understand why there was always the same fuss. Her years with the National Bureau of Investigation hadn’t exactly been a catalogue of successful investigations, but
that kind of thing aroused far less interest from the public and the media.