Free Last Will by Liza Marklund Page A

stem-cell research. Right up to the end, Reeve had hoped that the new technique could help him walk again.
    Annika clicked on through the mass of information on the Internet. How on earth had she ever found out anything before it existed?
    She found a feature article about a book entitled Ethics and Genetic Technology: Philosophical and Religious Perspectives on Genetic Technology, Stem-Cell Research and Cloning, which clarified that the most obstinate resistance to the research came from Catholic and Protestant groups. Western culture had become so individualized that embryos were regarded as having human rights.
    Judaism, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any great problem with the modification of human embryos. The possibility of saving lives was seen as more important than the embryo’s human rights. Human beings acted as God’s assistants in order to improve creation; our duty was to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and tosubordinate it. And if genetic research could help us do that, so much the better.
    Even Islam seemed to think that stem-cell research was entirely reasonable. Most religious experts would permit such research if it benefited humanity. In their world, the embryo only becomes a complete human being when it gains a soul, which happens 120 days after conception.
    So if al Qaeda was involved, the motivation wasn’t what Wiesel had in his test tubes, Annika thought, going back to Caroline von Behring.
    The dead woman was in the telephone directory, with three different numbers. She was listed alongside her husband, Knut Hjalmarsson. Their home address was in Lärkstan, in the Östermalm district of Stockholm. A pretty smart part of town.
    Annika tried all three numbers. The first one redirected her to a switched off cell phone with the Telia network’s anonymous message service. The second one reached a fax machine. The third one rang twenty times without anyone answering.
    She put the phone down and sighed; she wasn’t going to get an article out of this. She looked at her watch: twelve thirty. She was due to pick the children up by five o’clock, at the latest. And she had to go shopping, it was her turn to cook. And it was Friday, which meant that everything had to be a bit more special than on other days. She sighed again, picked up the phone and ordered a taxi.
    It had gotten colder. The snow didn’t seem to be falling as heavily because the flakes had broken up a bit. Instead they swirled around on the increasing wind, making the people on the sidewalks shiver and turn up their collars and hoods. Like a gray-black mass, they slid onward through the slush. Annika leaned back in her seat and shut her eyes to avoid seeing them.
    She could feel reality fading and she let it slip away; she even dozed off with her head against the headrest of the seat, as the car zigzagged its way through the city traffic. She slept, mouth open, all the way along Sankt Eriksgatan and Torsgatan, out to the Karolinska Institute in Solna, just beyond the city boundary.
    The sharp turn into the university campus made her tumble overonto the backseat, and she woke with a start. She paid, slightly groggy, and found herself standing outside a squat two-story building of brownish-red bricks with oblong windows.
    The Nobel Forum, at number one, Nobels väg.
    She walked over and pressed the button on the intercom.
    The building seemed cool and deserted, as if it were in mourning. Annika made her way to the Nobel office and was about to knock when a disheveled woman, red-faced from crying, pulled the door open.
    “What do you want?”
    She was short and round, her hair henna-red, dressed in a white blouse and pale trousers.
    Annika had the same uncomfortable feeling she always had when approaching the relatives and colleagues of people who had met an untimely death.
    “I’d like to ask some questions about Caroline von Behring,” she said, suddenly not sure what to do with her hands.
    The woman sniffed