The Steel Spring Read Free

kilometres. The latest measurements at ground level showed the area had more than doubled. The investigation had been carried out as part of a routine programme, and had not caused any measures to be taken. The report had been declared confidential, since it was feared that the findings could cause anxiety to certain parts of the population, but before that it had been circulated among senior police officers. Jensen had read it and passed on the papers without comment.
    The traffic was dense but fast moving. The sides of the road were lined with coloured posters reminding people of the forthcoming democratic elections. Posters bearing the image of a lantern-jawed man with thinning hair and vivid blue eyes alternated with others that were just a letter of the alphabet, a big pink ‘A’. The man was the future head of the government, an individual considered to represent the totally interdependent concepts of welfare, security and accord better than anyone else. Married into the royal family, he had previously been the head of the National Confederation. He was currently the Minister for the Interior. Before the grand coalition he had been a social democrat.
    The taxi driver put on the brakes as a policeman signalledto him to stop. They were on their way up on to a long bridge, and ahead of them, constables in green uniforms were busy with a traffic jam. The driver wound down the side window, took a white handkerchief out of his breast pocket and blew his nose. He looked impassively at the grey-black marks on the handkerchief, cleared his throat and spat out of the window.
    ‘Another demonstration,’ he said. ‘We’ll be through in no time.’
    Thirty seconds later, the police constable waved the traffic ahead, and the driver engaged gear and eased the car forward.
    ‘Morons,’ he said. ‘Taking up a whole lane.’
    They met the march up on the bridge. It was not a particularly large one. Jensen made a practised assessment of its size and composition. Between two thousand, five hundred and three thousand people, divided roughly equally between the sexes, and a surprising number of children for a country with a birth rate in permanent decline. Some of the children were so small that they were in pushchairs or sitting on their parents’ shoulders. The demonstrators were carrying placards and banners, and Jensen read the slogans as the march went past. Some were easy to understand. They complained about issues like poor air quality and non-recyclable packaging, but also about the current government. ‘Accorded to Death’ was a recurring slogan. But most of the texts were incomprehensible. They were about solidarity with other races and foreign peoples, countries he’d never heard of and combinations of letters he didn’t understand, but assumed to be acronyms. Some of the marchers were carrying pictures of foreigners with strange names, presumably heads of state or political leaders. The intention appeared to be to sing the praises of some of these and denounce others. There were also placards with a variety of old-fashionedand obsolete slogans and sentiments like class struggle, proletariat, capitalism, imperialism, the working masses, and world revolution. At the front and back of the march there were massed red flags.
    The people in the cars and along the sides of the road seemed wholly unaffected, doing no more than glance distractedly at the flags and placards. The onlookers seemed simply indifferent. Admittedly they all appeared dissatisfied and nervous, with nowhere to go, but their reaction had nothing to do with the demonstration. Jensen knew this from experience.
    The demonstrators were marching four abreast. The police calmly and systematically made way for them and kept the traffic moving. There was no commotion; the whole thing seemed harmless.
    The procession had passed by, and the taxi driver accelerated and asked without much interest:
    ‘Who are that lot? Some kind of socialists?’
    ‘I don’t