Field Note: Echoes of Malmö
It was February, and the kind of dark that settles in by mid-afternoon and doesn’t let go. I’d been to Sweden before, back when I was still with the Bureau. Same time of year. Same cold that crawls up through your boots and stays there. That trip was down in Malmö, working with Swedish security services. We had a source who was supposed to testify in a trial tied to a weapons procurement case. High stakes. We lost him for twelve hours. Just disappeared. Phones dead. No trail. It nearly blew the whole operation. We found him eventually, but that feeling of watching something slip through your fingers like that never leaves you.
When the GC of a Florida-based biotech company called, and mentioned Sweden, I paid attention. One of their executives was heading to Stockholm to testify in a closed arbitration tied to a joint research agreement with a Scandinavian partner. The case wasn’t criminal, but it was sensitive. A dispute with a former partner, some old business coming back to the surface. The kind of thing that dredges up names people would rather stay buried. She didn’t say the word protection, but she talked around it; odd encounters back home in Florida, someone following too close in traffic, a scratch on a rental car that didn’t match any curbs. Not enough to raise alarms, but enough to make the air feel different.
The executive was staying near Humlegården, a quiet part of the city with a lot of glass and not a lot of cover. The hotel was modern, full of people coming and going, most of them just tired travelers. I got a room two floors above hers. I wasn’t there to introduce myself. She didn’t need to know I was nearby.
She kept a routine. Mornings in the gym. Hearings through the day. A quiet dinner or two with her legal team. I didn’t follow her every step, but I stayed close enough. I spent time in the lobby, watched the people who came through, tried to get a sense of who belonged and who didn’t. One man stood out, tall, maybe Eastern European, always in the café area but never with a drink, never on a laptop. Just watching. I saw him three times in three days, never moving far from her general orbit.
I caught his plate number the second day. Swedish rental. Took some digging, but I was able to trace a string of past rentals to the same contact number. That tied back to a now-defunct security firm out of Riga. No smoking gun, but I’ve seen enough to know when someone’s playing tourist and when they’re not.
She gave her testimony on the third day. It was a long session, closed room. She came out quiet, collected, and walked back to the hotel like she was done carrying something heavy. She flew home the next morning. No incident. No direct threat. No one knew I was there.
That’s the job sometimes. You keep things straight by not being part of the story. You watch the threads and make sure none of them start to pull. And even if nothing happens, the weight of what almost could have is still there. That week reminded me of Malmö. Not the danger, exactly, but the feeling. The edge of something you hope never becomes more than tension. But still, you stay close. Just in case.
