The Long Shadow (27 page)

The sunlight outside the garage was blinding,
eroding all shapes. Annika and Lotta fumbled for their sunglasses.

‘Where do I go?’ Lotta said, braking.

Annika squinted through the windscreen. Either Avis used an entirely different
salida
from Helle Hollis or the building work had proceeded at such a pace that her earlier frame of reference had gone. The only thing that was the same was the chaos of cars and people, trucks and cement-mixers. Temporary signs in yellow and red shouted directions from gantries and pillars. ‘Do you want me to drive?’ Annika said.

‘Just tell me where to go!’

‘Aim for Málaga,’ Annika said, turning on the air-conditioning. ‘Try to get up onto the A7, northbound. It should be the first or second exit.’

The driver of the car behind them sounded his horn. Stressed, Lotta found the wrong gear and the engine stalled. Annika shut her eyes and gritted her teeth.

The Palacio de Ferias y Congresos de Málaga turned out to be smaller than Annika had expected from the pictures on the website. The building had been thrown up in a rundown industrial area and was a futuristic affair in glass, steel and aluminium. The roof was shaped like a wave, and the walls resembled the folds of a concertina. Annika remembered the virtual tour and aimed for the smaller hall where the press conference was due to take place.

‘What a clichéd building,’ Lotta said, behind her. ‘It strikes me that it personifies some sort of Mediterranean macho idea, with an excess of style and elaborate construction methods …’

‘There’s plenty of that down here,’ Annika said, as she walked under the series of multi-coloured pipe-work hanging above the entrance. Lotta was right, she
thought, as she entered the building. It was overblown, all cladding and lamps and orange pillars. She had to stand in a disorganized queue, then identify herself and undergo airport-style security checks.

The conference hall was on the floor above. She heard Lotta’s footsteps slowing, and by the time she reached the doors the other woman had stopped.

‘What is it?’ Annika said, turning.

‘Press conferences are never very photogenic,’ she said. ‘I’ll go outside and try to capture the soul of the building.’

Annika looked into the hall. Blue chairs. Irregular walls of cherry-coloured wood, sharp angles, a blue podium with four chairs. The ceiling was heavily ornamented. Would anything from inside the press conference ever be published? Men in suits sitting in a row? Hardly. A picture would only be useful if anything unforeseen happened – if something caught fire or the participants started fighting.

She checked that she had her mobile handy. If anything did happen, it would probably do the job. ‘Okay,’ she said, taking a copy of the press release from a pile and walking into the hall.

She took a seat right at the back, switched off her mobile, and watched a sea of people file into the rows of seats. There were media representatives from all over Europe, but the order of precedence seemed to be the same as at press conferences in Stockholm.

The television teams installed themselves at the front with the unquestioning authority of those who knew they were most important. The radio journalists buzzed about in the row behind them, making a huge song and dance of putting their microphones on the podium and adjusting their digital recorders to get the sound-levels right. The newspaper photographers hung around
in the gangways between the seats. Behind the radio journalists sat the newspaper editors, who wanted to be seen, she knew from their studiously relaxed posture and self-important expressions. Their purpose in life was to demonstrate to their colleagues how important they were, perhaps by shouting muddled and uninteresting questions at the podium once the radio lot had finished.

She looked for Thomas but saw no sign of him.

Four men walked up behind the table on the podium: an EU commissioner, a Spanish lawyer, a Dutch lawyer and a moderator.

She groaned inwardly. Lotta had made the right decision.

The press conference was long-winded, and at one point Annika nodded off for a minute or so. It was about the co-ordination of legislation covering financial crimes throughout EU member states, everything from accounting offences to tax evasion, VAT fraud, credit-card fraud, and a duty of disclosure for banks and bureaux de change. The various countries involved first had to compare their existing legislation, work out what the differences were, then discuss who was going to change what so the bad guys couldn’t go on doing as they liked by moving from one country into the next.

There must be a way of expressing that more simply, Annika thought, as she stood up with everyone else. There was still no sign of Thomas.

Then she felt a hand at the base of her spine.

‘Hello,’ Niklas Linde said in her ear. ‘Would you mind accompanying me?’

‘Am I under arrest?’ Annika asked.

‘Definitely,’ the police officer said.

They stepped out into the vestibule outside the hall. Linde put his hands on either side of her neck and kissed
her, first on one cheek, then the other. ‘Welcome back,’ he said.

She laid her right palm over his fingertips. ‘Is Knut here as well?’ she asked.

‘He’s at the tapas bar.’

‘Annika?’

The voice came from behind her. She took a deep breath. Linde let go of her. She turned. ‘Hi, Thomas,’ she said. He was wearing one of the new suits he had bought after the fire, dark, a bit shiny, Italian. Red tie, Rimowa briefcase, freshly polished shoes. She smiled at his tousled hair and blue eyes, but he didn’t see. He was staring at the policeman beside her.

‘Have you met Niklas Linde?’ she said. ‘He’s a narcotics police officer and works down here.’

The policeman took a step forward and said, ‘Good to meet you.’ They shook hands and Thomas’s eyes flickered back to Annika.

‘Thomas is representing the Swedish Ministry of Justice,’ Annika said. ‘We used to be married. We have two children.’

‘Well, well,’ the policeman said. ‘Was he the one who didn’t like playing?’

Annika felt like jabbing him in the ribs with her elbow.

‘Good to see you,’ she said to Thomas, then, to Linde, ‘Shall we go and sit down?’

Linde put a hand on her shoulder, not taking his eyes off Thomas. ‘One floor down,’ he said, moving his fingers to her neck and gesturing along a panelled corridor. They turned round. His palm ended up on her waist. She could feel contentment burning through her body and Thomas’s stare on the back of her head.

‘Recently divorced?’ Linde asked, standing close to her on the escalator.

‘Not particularly,’ Annika said, not moving away.

Knut Garen had installed himself at a table with some chicken wings, fried baby octopus and prawns in a strong garlic sauce. He greeted her warmly.

‘It’s brilliant that we can do this straight away,’ Annika said, sitting down opposite him, Linde beside her.

She put her pen and notepad on the table, ordered
agua con gas
and a
tortilla
with
albondigas
from the waitress.

‘You know why I’m here?’ she said, and the officers nodded. ‘Why have drug-smuggling and money-laundering become blurred on the Costa del Sol?’

‘Look at a map,’ Garen said. ‘An hour by boat to Morocco, Europe’s very own hash plantation. Three-quarters of an hour to the Atlantic coast, where the ships turn up from South America with their cargoes of cocaine. And slap bang in the middle of it all is Gibraltar, a tax haven with no intrusive restrictions.’ He popped a baby octopus into his mouth. ‘It’s all here,’ he said. ‘The raw materials, the transport network, the distributors, the tax haven, serious corruption and customers.’

‘Customers?’ Annika said.

‘Spain has overtaken the USA as the biggest user of cocaine,’ Linde said. ‘One in four Spaniards over fifteen has tried it.’

‘But hash is still the main drug of choice,’ Garen said. ‘It’s estimated that a hundred and twenty thousand families in Morocco derive the whole of their income from growing hemp and producing cannabis. Do you know how they go about it?’

She shook her head. The police officer wiped his greasy octopus fingers on a napkin and picked up her pen and notepad. ‘They plant the seed in the spring and the plants grow through the summer,’ he said, drawing a plant with deeply lobed leaves. ‘Here, right at the top,
are the seeds, hidden in little pods. Between the pods and the seeds there’s a fine yellow powder, a form of pollen. When the plants are harvested in the autumn they’re laid out on finely woven cloths on the floor and covered with plastic. Then they’re beaten with sticks to crush the seed-heads. The pollen filters through the cloth and gets collected underneath.’

The seed-head he had drawn reminded Annika of a fried egg.

Garen looked towards the entrance hall with an almost dreamy expression. ‘In October and November, nights in Morocco echo to the sound of sticks beating the ground, da-dunk, da-dunk. That’s the hundred and twenty thousand families crushing the seed-heads of their hemp plants. Obviously, outsiders have no idea what’s making the sound.’ He drummed his fingers on the table. ‘It goes on all night long,’ he said, ‘until the plants have been beaten three times. Then they’re done, and that’s when the buyers show up.’

He took his fingers from the table. ‘The gangs who deal in cannabis handle about twenty hash farmers each. The pollen and plants are taken to the coast where they’re dried and packed into hard blocks. It’s been going on like that for as long as anyone can remember.’ He drank the last of his beer. ‘What do you know about hashish?’

Annika took a sip of her mineral water. They used to meet up for a smoke behind the snowdrifts next to the sports ground in Hälleforsnäs. Sven always provided the hash, Sylvia Hagtorn brought the tobacco to roll it with, and Roland Larsson his grandfather’s pipe. Annika always thought the pipe was a bit disgusting, with the remnants of the old man’s saliva. And she didn’t think much of the effect either – it just made her feel sluggish and a bit silly. She’d be giggly and desperate for sweets.
‘Well, I know you smoke it,’ she said, looking down at her pad.

‘The pollen from the first beating is made into top-grade hash, the highest quality. We hardly ever get that in Sweden. The hash that reaches us is category three, the worst sort, the remnants from the last beating.’

Maybe that’s why it never really worked for me, Annika thought. ‘How does it get to Europe?’ she asked.

Linde shifted on his chair. Now his leg was pressed against hers.

‘It’s shipped out of two small coastal towns, Nador and Asilah, in February and March,’ he said.

She nodded and suddenly noticed how dry her mouth was. She didn’t move her leg.

‘The latest development is the so-called go-fast boats.’

She was gulping the mineral water.

‘Go-fast boats are really just big barges with somewhere between three and five 225-horsepower Yamaha motors on the back. Half the boat is full of fuel, the other half drugs. They go so fast that they can outrun helicopters. They dock out at sea with ships that refill their fuel tanks, then carry on, sometimes as far up as Barcelona.’

Linde held his mobile towards her with one hand. He rested the other on her knee. The phone’s screen was showing a shaky film of a cheerful dark-skinned man standing in the middle of a load of shipping pallets, holding onto a wheel. The wind was pulling hard at his hair. The cameraman, whoever he was, moved the camera away from the man and did a 360-degree turn. The film had been taken on board a huge barge that was crossing the sea at very high speed. The prow was full of countless square pallets, while the stern contained several hundred cylindrical drums of fuel. Then the film returned to the man and the screen went dark.

‘He doesn’t look so happy now,’ Linde said, pocketing his mobile. ‘What you saw in the prow was three tons of hash. He and the cameraman are in prison in Granada.’ He let go of her knee.

She laughed.

‘The EU have done a deal with the Moroccan government,’ Garen said. ‘The state has marched in and destroyed millions of hectares of cannabis plants. What do you think that means for the families who depend on growing it? No bread on the table. So what do they do?’

Annika waited for the answer.

‘Their plants are gone,’ he said, ‘but everything else is still there – staff, buyers, sellers, boats, vehicles, ships, containers, the network of contacts and distributors. So what do they do?’

‘Transport and sell something else,’ Annika said.

‘They transport and sell cocaine,’ the police officer said. ‘Morocco and the Western Sahara have taken over as the transit countries for the cocaine trade, and this is the doorway to their customers. All the cocaine comes from the coca plantations in South America, and almost all of it comes through here on its way to the European market.’

‘How much gets seized?’

‘About ten per cent, an average of ninety kilos a day. It’s estimated that a ton of cocaine reaches Europe via Spain every day.’ Garen leaned towards Annika. ‘And do you know what the drug gangs’ biggest problem is?’ he said.

‘Bribing Customs officials? Finding runners? Creating new markets?’

He shook his head. ‘All that’s easy. The hardest thing is knowing what to do with all the cash.’

Annika looked sceptically at him. ‘Hard?’ she said. ‘Just using notes?’

‘Money-laundering is the most complicated thing they do. And we’re making it harder. That’s why we have seminars like this one.’

Garen ate the last of the garlic prawns. ‘I have to get off to Granada,’ he said. ‘Are you okay with that?’

Annika looked through her notes. There were several things she was wondering about, but he had to leave and she felt terribly tired. She smiled at him. ‘Thanks very much,’ she said. ‘This has been a huge help. I’m just wondering if you’ve got ideas about people I could interview. For instance, I’d like to get in touch with Jocke Martinez’s lawyer …’

‘I’ve looked into that,’ Linde said.

‘Excellent,’ Garen said, getting up. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it.’ He kissed Annika on both cheeks and headed for the exit.

‘I guess I’m picking up the tab,’ she said.